The Ukrainian society will soon have to find answers to difficult questions. Not only questions of what Ukraine will look like after the war is over and what constitutes a victory for Ukraine. But also to the question of what we did wrong in the past three decades that led us to today’s situation. What should we do differently in the future if we aspire to continue to exist as a distinct political community and to preserve our statehood? This, in my opinion, will be our greatest victory.
When I ask, “What will Ukraine look like?” I do not mean rebuilding. After all, any discussion about rebuilding in the current conditions and historical context seems too much like an attempt to substitute concepts. What exactly are we being asked to rebuild? A massive and archaic material infrastructure designed immediately after the Second World War and built on our land by the totalitarian regime in the interests of the metropolis without considering the aspirations of territorial communities and the nation as a whole? Will this give donors, recipients, investors and creditors an opportunity to make money? Undoubtedly, yes. But does it have anything to do with Ukraine’s desired future? That is questionable.
But what cannot be rebuilt, even if someone wanted to, are full-fledged political institutions: independent ideological political parties, professional civil service, and fair justice. Because you cannot rebuild something that was never properly created in the past thirty years. While these are the fundamentals. The foundations of a sustainable, long-term, and secure political community. We have yet to find the fundamentals upon which we can firmly base our further development.
Indeed, Fundamentals is the name of the first of six negotiation clusters guiding Ukraine’s accession talks with the European Union. It is this cluster that is linked to the functioning of democratic institutions, public administration reform, and economic criteria for EU membership.
Speaking about public administration reform, to which I had the honour of dedicating ten years of my life, it is worth recalling how and by whom it began.
On 4 March 1992, the Institute of Public Administration and Self-Government was established by a decree of the first President of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk. The initiator and first director was Bohdan Kravchenko, a Canadian of Ukrainian descent who had earned a doctorate at Oxford and joined the cohort of state-builders following Ukraine’s declaration of independence.
This Institute, modelled after France’s École Nationale d’Administration, became the leading think tank that initiated, developed and successfully advocated for the adoption of Ukraine’s first Law, “On Civil Service”, passed by the Verkhovna Rada on 16 December 1993.
Exactly one year before that, on December 16 1992, Bohdan Kravchenko and Solomiia Pavlychko, a literary critic and translator, founded Osnovy Publishing House, which for the first time made a vast body of classical texts on which Western civilisation is based available in Ukrainian, ranging from Aristotle and Cicero to Foucault and Derrida, from Locke and Mill to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.
Also, for the first time, essential academic textbooks used in top global universities were also translated: Mankiw’s “Economics”, Giddens’s “Sociology”, and Feinberg & Coleman’s anthology on the philosophy of law. This was a direct contribution to the development of the young Ukrainian state and its new intellectual elite, which at the time was concentrated mainly within the walls of the newly revived Mohyla Academy and two or three other universities. Some might argue that humanity is experiencing a crisis of liberalism and the Western world in general. This may be true, but does this mean that the texts on which Western civilisation was founded have lost their relevance? The Roman Empire fell, but we still refer to Titus Livy’s and Marcus Aurelius’s texts.
Three months ago, Osnovy Publishing, which I recently had the honour of joining, republished for the first time in two decades the seminal work of its founder, Solomiia Pavlychko — Discourse of Modernism in Ukrainian Literature. When this monograph was first published in 1997, it sparked intense debate and passion far beyond the literary circles.
As the author herself writes in the preface to the second edition, the book “touched upon […] a profound and comprehensive process of modernisation that our society is experiencing today. It is about economic, political, military, and cultural modernization — about the modernization of the entire Ukrainian society, which will affect its identity and future destiny”.
This prophecy will be especially true when we recall the causes of the Revolution on Granite, the Orange Revolution and the Revolution of Dignity. These reasons have always been linked to attempts to stop social modernisation. Back in the mid-nineties, Solomiia Pavlychko linked Ukraine’s modernisation to its European choice. While in the case of the Revolution of Dignity, this choice was manifested by society in the most explicit way possible.
Each time — in 1990, 2004, 2014, and again in 2022, during Russia’s full-scale invasion — the Ukrainian political community demonstrated agency, forcing the world to hear its voice. Yet, every time, the initial wave that swiftly carried us to the top of the mountain later plunged us backwards into chaos and stagnation, preventing society from securing the achievements it had reached.
Although certain political institutions occasionally stepped in during the most critical moments of modern history to save the state from collapse — such as the Supreme Court in 2004, the Parliament in 2014, or the military in 2022 — these were exceptions rather than the rule.
Each time, we felt a lack of mechanisms — missing gears and levers — that could transform a short-term passionate impulse into a routine practice of social modernisation, daily work on developing and implementing public policy, nation-building and state-building. These mechanisms, gears and levers are the sum of all political institutions, i.e. the Fundamentals (Osnovy).
Democracy combined with weak bureaucracy, justice and political parties — that is, democracy built on a weak institutional foundation — has led us, in the end, to kakistocracy, a state where the worst govern, along with its inevitable companion, meritocide, the deliberate discrediting and marginalisation of the best forces in society.
Why is this happening, and why have we not been able to build effective and sustainable political institutions for more than three decades? Even though we seem to be aware of our European choice and have even enshrined it in the Constitution. Because without appropriate cultural changes, without building a new cultural identity, the political and economic European choice risks remaining a declaration, an empty dream.
What should this new identity look like? It cannot exist without the same trends and changes that the discourse of modernism carried in its struggle against the discourse of populism in our literature from the end of the nineteenth century and throughout most of the twentieth century.
Thus, the first trend is, in fact, anti-populism. Next, Europeanism, or Westernism, as opposed to Eurasianism, which has quietly evolved into the concept of “Russian world”. It is modernity versus archaism. Decanonisation. Intellectualism as opposed to ignorance and prejudice. Individualism as opposed to collectivism and devaluation of the individual. This is feminism against patriarchy. Minimalist beauty as a counter to kitsch. This is the removal of cultural taboos, including in the realm of sexuality. Ultimately, it’s about breaking the boundaries.
Based on this, it is not difficult to formulate a simple programme of action to make these changes a reality:
to get rid of the eternal isolation and the fears and complexes it has caused; to abandon our cultural narcissism; to learn to be self-critical and self-ironic; to learn to be tolerant; to learn to see and distinguish shades, subtleties, and nuances.
This programme is currently being implemented incredibly slowly. At times, it seems that we are moving in the opposite direction. However, even under the most unfavourable conditions, much can be done. Let’s start, for example, with smart and aesthetic books. To read and publish. To publish and read. To work on oneself, to help others grow, and to continue serving a higher social purpose.
*The word “Osnovy” in Ukrainian means “Fundamentals”.
