Majoritarianism lets Ukraine down

VILLAGEApril/May 

INTERNATIONAL UKRAINE

HE story started in . Mikhail

Gorbachev came to power. The Cold War

was now over (and Northern Ireland no

longer had any “strategic importance” – to

quote the then NI Secretary of State, Peter

Brooke). Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, per-

estroika reform involved many changes: good,

dubious, and atrocious.

The ﬁrst inter-ethnic conﬂict occurred in

 in Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijan;

the headline in Moscow’s daily, Pravda, ran,

“This is our Northern Ireland”. By this time,

some of the ﬁfteen republics were campaigning

for independence, most especially those in the

Caucasus and the Baltic states. For the moment

at least, apart from Chernobyl in , Ukraine

was still fairly quiet. By , however, an

organisation called RUKH, Ukrainian Popular

Movement for Perestroika, was demonstrating

in tents on the main street of Kiev.

One of the dubious consequences concerns

democratisation. Many ‘experts’ rushed over

to Moscow to advise the new leader, who after

all was still a communist, on a western model:

an adversarial electoral system – the French

two-round model – and, in decision-mak-

ing, the ubiquitous majority vote; in a word,

majoritarianism. Mikhail Sergeyevich, how-

ever, did not understand English, so they

used the Russian word instead: ‘bolshevism’.

(It comes from bolshinstvo, a majority, while

the Mensheviks were the minority, menshin-

stvo. Embarrassed, they have now coined a new

word, majoritarnost.)

Because, then, everything was da or nyet,

the newly elected Congress of  split into

two: the government, led by the Nobel peace

prize winner, Gorbachev; and the opposition,

fronted by a second laureate, Andrei Sakharov.

The West still supported the maintenance of

the Soviet Union, (not least because of Russia’s

– or Siberia’s – oil). But things fell apart. There

was violence in Georgia, next in Azerbaijan,

and in January , Lithuania. So the West

decided to support Gorbachev’s rival, Boris

Yeltsin, and by implication, the break-up of

the USSR. Accordingly, in Yugoslavia (the

land of southern slavs), the West also chose

to ditch Serbia’s Slobodan Milošević in favour

of that other nasty fascist, Croatia’s Franjo

Tudjman.

Then came the attempted coup: August

. Yeltsin stood on a tank, the USSR fell

apart and, as noted above, Ukraine voted for

independence. The latter also adopted a west-

ern adversarial democracy: the two-round

election system and a winner-takes-all-loser-

gets-nothing, majority rule government.

Ukraine was not divided. From the

Carpathian mountains in the West to the

open steppes of the East, the land is ﬂat,

except in Crimea. The people are nearly all

Slav, nearly all Christian. (In contrast, Russia

is very divided; there are Slavs of course, but

also Finno-Hungarian Maris and Udmurts in

European Russia, Chechens and Dagestanis in

the Northern Caucasus, let alone Evenks and

Buryats and Chukchis, etc., of Siberia.)

Back to ‘the borderland’. Russian and

Ukrainian are both Slav languages, and after

many miles, dialectical diﬀerences eventually

became a linguistic one. Of religions, there

are at least three: Orthodoxy has now divided

into two, one Russian the other Ukrainian, but

both accept the one religion, founded in Kiev in

the year ; and then there are the Uniates, a

branch of Orthodoxy that recognises neither

Patriarch but the Pope in Rome.

In , the second-round election was

Yushchenko or Yanukovich: as it were West

versus East, pro-EU or pro-Moscow, pro-NATO

or no; everything was either/or;  – %,

so Yanukovich lost. In , the scenario

was equally divisive – Timoshenko versus

Yanukovich – but the result was reversed; 

– %, he won.

If instead of adopting the western demo-

cratic system, Ukraine had chosen a form of

power-sharing – such as was belatedly nego-

tiated by the EU just before Yanukovich ran

into exile – then, according to Sergei Markov,

a Kremlin analyst, such a compromise might

h ave sav ed th e d ay (The Guardian, t h M a rc h).

If Ukraine’s interim government had involved

a coalition of all political forces, “Crimea”, he

said, “would still be part of Ukraine.”

So what happens now? Ukraine’s economy

will weaken and the country may thus become

unstable; Russia would like that. Meanwhile,

Russia’s economy may also weaken – oligarchs

do not make good patriots – and maybe dissent

will grow in some regions of what is, after all, a

Federation (in name only). So, as in Ukraine, so

too in Russia, regions might want to opt out, by

referendum again. It is Russia’s great fear: like

those Russian dolls, in every majority there

is another minority, trying to opt out – they

call it ‘matryoshka nationalism’. Hence those

two horrible wars in Chechnya. There may

well be more. Sadly, no-one in the West – nei-

ther politician nor lawyer –questions majority

voting. •

Majoritarianism

lets Ukraine down

Da or nyet doesn’t do it, anywhere. By Peter Emerson

Russian militiamen beat an unidentied man as Russian soldiers

stormed a Ukrainian military air base in Belbek near the Crimean

city of Sevastopol, March 22, 2014

Ukraine was not divided. From the

Carpathian mountains to the West

to the open steppes on the East,

the land is ﬂat, except in Crimea.

The people are nearly all Slav,

nearly all Christian. In contrast,

Russia is very divided

“