This article analyzes the issues of civil society in post-communist Ukraine. These issues were actualized during the Orange Revolution at the end of 2004. The “outdated” point (as it might look now) on the lack of “the civil society argument” still provides a major explanation for the difficulties of democratic and market reforms in post-Soviet countries. The article is focused upon two aspects of the formation of post-Soviet, particularly Ukrainian, civil society: the peculiarities of its discourse and the issues an of emerging civic ethos. A one-dimensional concept on post-Soviet civil society, reducing it to the NGOs network, is reconceptualized. It is concluded that optimistic perspectives for the Ukrainian civil society can be related to the recent trends in the transformation of personal identity toward the more self-reliable pattern of social activity.
Marc Howard, Free Not to Participate: The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Glasgow, UK: University of Strathclyde Press, 2000).
2.
Michael Walzer, “The Civil Society Argument,” In Chantal Mouffe, ed., Dimensions of Radical Democracy: Pluralism, Citizenship, Community (New York: Verso, 1992), 89-107.
3.
Alexander Domrin, “Ten Years Later: Society, ‘Civil Society,’ and the Russian State,”Russian Review62 (2003): 193-193.
4.
As an example of such a manipulation, see Volodymyr Lytvyn, “Hromadianske suspilstvo: mify ta realnist” [Civil Society: Myths and Reality], Dzerkalo tyzhnia, 26 January-1 February 2002.
5.
In this respect, the recent Ukrainian Orange Revolution was the second historical phase of the Eastern European revolutions of the beginning of the 1990s. It aimed at accomplishing the delayed and unfinished tasks of the political transformation in Ukraine, as the formation of market and transparent economy, democratization of political life, and the affirmation of the rule of law. However, it was not just the Eastern European de ja viu. The Orange Revolution had its own national and political idiom; that is, however, the subject for a special study.
6.
The data of the all-national representative survey (1,220 respondents) conducted by the Center of Intellectual Perspective at the Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in 2001. See Tamila Vojtenko, Olexander Goncharuk, and Yurij Pryvalov, Hromadianske suspilstvo v Ukrayini: Analiz sotsial’nogo konstruyuvannia [Civil Society in Ukraine: The Experience of Social Construction] (Kyiv, Ukraine: Stilos, 2002), 13-14.
7.
Ibid.
8.
Ina Pidluskaet al., eds., Koreni travy. Hromadianske suspilstvo v Ukrayini: Stan ta perspectyvy rozvytku [The Grass Roots. Civil Society in Ukraine: The State and Perspectives of the Development] (Kyiv, Ukraine: Foundation Europe XXI, 2003), 3-3.
9.
Liza Peattie, “Urban Research in the 1990s,” In Michael Cohenet al., eds., Preparing for the Future. Global Pressure and Local Forces (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996), 382-382.
10.
Christopher Bryant, “Economic Utopianism and Sociological Realism. Strategies for Transformation in East-Central Europe,” In Christopher Bryant and Edmund Mokrzycki, eds., The New Great Transformation? Change and Continuity in East-Central Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 58-78.
11.
Howard, Free Not to Participate, 2-2.
12.
Ibid.
13.
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone, 2000).
14.
See Scott L. McLean, David A. Scultz, and Manfred B. Steger, eds., Social Capital: Critical Perspectives on Community and “Bowling Alone” (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
15.
Pidluska et al., Koreni travy, 2.
16.
See Rob Jenkins, “Mistaking ‘Governance’ for ‘Politics’: Foreign Aid, Democracy, and the Construction of Civil Society,” In Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani, eds., Civil Society. History and Possibilities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 255-255.
17.
See Michael A. McFaul, “Introduction to the Russian Civil Society Issue,”Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization10:2 (2002): 111-111.
18.
World Bank, Hromadianske suspilstvo v Ukrayini. Analitychnyi zvit 2003 [Civil Society in Ukraine. Analytical Report 2003] (Washington, DC: World Bank), 6-6.
Edward Banfield, Moral Basis for a Backward Society (New York: Free Press, 1958).
21.
Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
22.
Ibid.
23.
Ibid.
24.
Golovakha, “Vysnovky,” 108.
25.
More private owners, employers, and self-employed individuals and less unemployed are concentrated in the group of more socially active respondents in comparison with their noninvolved counterparts.
26.
The data of an all-national representative opinion poll conducted by the Democratic Initiatives Fund and the Kyiv International Sociology Institute between 23 January and 1 February 2004.
27.
See Viktor Stepanenko, “Ethnos, Demos, Polis: Ethnopilitychni problemy sotsietal’noyi transformatsii v Ukrayini” [Ethnos-Demos-Polis: Ethnopolitical Issues of Societal Transformation in Ukraine], Sotsiologiya: teoriya, metody, marketyng2 (2002): 102-121.
28.
Grigorii Golosov, Rootless Grass: Party Politics in the Regions of Russia (Research Project at the International Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, 2002-2003).
29.
Anatoliy Hritsenko, Utoma metaly [Tiredness of Metal], Dzerkalo tyzhnia, 28 September-5 October 2002.
30.
Pidluska et al., Koreni travy, 112.
31.
Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,”Journal of Democracy13:1 (2002): 18-18.
