The Development of Liberalism in Ukraine.

• Author: Krasnozhon, Leonid A.

In the aftermath of Ukraine's declaration of independence on August 24, 1991, the Yeltsin administration issued a statement claiming Russia's right to raise territorial issues with ex-Soviet countries with substantial Russian minorities, including southern Ukraine, eastern Ukraine, and northern Kazakhstan (Solchanyk 1996; Subtelny 2009; Plokhy 2017). That statement started the first serious political conflict between Ukraine and Russia in the post-Soviet period. The Russian parliament dispatched a delegation to Kyiv, chaired by Vice President Aleksandr Rutskoi. The Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada) rejected the delegation's offer to join a new union of ex-Soviet states by asserting the right of self-determination for the people of Ukraine.

On December 1, 1991, Ukraine's declaration of independence received 90 percent of the votes in the national referendum. On December 12, 1991, the Russian parliament ratified the Commonwealth of Independent States agreement to preserve the political, economic, and legal partnership among ex-Soviet nations. On December 20, 1991, the Ukrainian parliament issued a statement that "opposed the transformation of the Commonwealth of Independent States into a state formation with its own ruling and administrative bodies" (Plokhy 2017, 324). The Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Russo-Ukrainian Treaty of 1997 settled the border and territorial issues with Russia (Laruelle 2016). (1)

Since the early 1990s, ex-Soviet countries have followed different political and economic development paths. While Russia consolidated autocracy and increased state control of the economy, Ukraine defended democratization in two revolutions, implemented de-Communization reform, decentralized the government, and opened a market for almost 30 percent of the world reserves of black soil. The literature on political economy and new institutional economics demonstrates that ideas, ideology, ethics, and rhetoric alter a course of institutional development (Higgs 1987, 2008; Denzau and North 1994; Boettke, Coyne, and Leeson 2008; McCloskey and Carden, 2020; Shughart, Thomas, and Thomas, 2020). Decentralized spontaneous change in ideology, ethics, and social consensus creates political action and institutional transformation (McCloskey and Carden 2020). Top-down reconfiguration of an ideology imposed by elites on the citizenry changes social order (Higgs 2008). Moreover, historical events such as wars, economic depression, or modernization influence the course of ideological change by altering the social structure and changing the rhetoric of great thinkers.

This paper contributes to the literature on political economy and the literature on the new institutional economics. We examine the development of Ukrainian liberalism from the nineteenth century to modern times. For the past two centuries, historical events have characterized Ukraine as a captive stateless borderland between Russia and Europe. However, we conjecture that history does not determine identity. Ukrainian liberalism emerged as an indigenous endogenous system of beliefs that brought comfort and fellowship to a nation over a long period of its struggle for liberty and dignity. We describe how and why liberalism as a social arrangement has driven democratization and market-oriented reforms in Ukraine. The next section of this paper discusses liberalism in nineteenth-century Ukraine. After this, we examine Ukrainian liberalism in the post-Soviet period. The final section contains concluding remarks.

Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Ukraine

Higgs writes that "ideologies are somewhat coherent, rather comprehensive belief systems about social relations, each such system having cognitive, moral, programmatic, and solidary aspects. Such belief systems have played a critical role in determining the nature of the economic order and the size of government, among other things" (Higgs 2008, 547). The idea of Ukraine as a European nation had long circulated in the writings of Ukrainian intellectuals, including the nineteenth-century classical liberal thinker Mykhailo Drahomanov and the 1920s advocate of national communism Mykola Khvyliovy (Plokhy 2017, 325). The nineteenth-century Ukrainian intellectuals such as Drahomanov, Franko, Kistyakivsky, and Tugan-Baranovsky demonstrated ideological unity. They opposed imperialism, rejected Marxist socialism, and promulgated ideas of liberalism, democracy, and nation building grounded in the European system of beliefs (Bunyk and Krasnozhon 2018).

Between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ukraine developed economically, politically, and intellectually under the reign of two empires, the Habsburgs and the Romanovs (Subtelny 2009; Plokhy 2017). The gap in belief systems about social relations between the two empires was tremendous. Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, the Habsburgs abolished serfdom, implemented mass land reform, and transitioned to a constitutional monarchy. The Russian monarchy abolished serfdom only in the 1860s, and a constitutional monarchy was established only after the "Bloody Sunday" Revolution of 1905 (Subtelny 2009; Krasnozhon and Bunyk 2019). (2)

Drahomanov (1841-1895) was a leader of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian liberal movement (Rudnytsky 1952, 71; Tomenko 1996, 74). He was employed as a professor of ancient history at Kyiv University until he was dismissed in 1876 for political activity and forced to leave the Russian Empire. During his years in Geneva (1876-1889), he founded the first Ukrainian-language sociopolitical journal, Hromada [Community] (1878-1882), which was popular in both the Austrian and Russian Empires. He spent his last years as a professor of history at Sofia University in Bulgaria.

Drahomanov's political thought revolved around the distinction between government as an institution of coercion and civil society as a spontaneously emergent system of voluntary associations of individuals. He rejected the dialectical method of history and criticized Marxist political philosophy and cultural determinism. Influenced by Aristotle's idea of corporatism, he envisioned a federation of European nations living in a social order of a decentralized union of language-based voluntary associations. To him, Pan-European federalism was the means of peaceful liberalization and self-determination for stateless captive nations, such as Ukraine, Poland, or Lithuania. In the Address to the Community (1878), Drahomanov wrote that the goal of the European federation was "to reduce the power of the government and to make it subservient to individual and community and to lay down the living rule of law of anarchy, and to free the rule of law from aristocracy and state."

Two disciples of Drahomanov, Ivan Franko (1856-1916) and Bohdan Kistyakivsky (1868-1920), were the leading representatives of the Ukrainian liberal tradition until the beginning of the Soviet period. They dissented from Drahomanov's Pan-European anarchism under the Socialpolitik trend in Europe. (3) In 1893, Franko received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Vienna. In 1899, Kistyakivsky earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Strasbourg, where he studied under the supervision of a German historicist, Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915). Kistyakivsky's writings were widely popular among Ukrainian liberals, and Franko was well-known among Polish, German, and Austrian liberals. He was on the editorial board of the Polish newspaper Kurjer Lwowski [The Lviv Post] (Rudnytsky 1967, 143). Moreover, he was a regular correspondent for the Viennese democratic weekly, Die Zeit, reporting about western Ukraine.

In State and Individual (1899), Kistyakivsky advocated for a limited role of government in protecting life, liberty, and property under the rule of law. He distinguished the rule of law from the police state. The rule of law was a natural outcome of social development as the highest form of government that served individual interests and protected...