Abstract
This article contributes to growing research about the emergence of the rule of law, or horizontal accountability, still a salient difference between Western institutionalized democracies and the new democracies in post-communist Eurasia. Recent research has theorized “social accountability” as a possible mechanism linking public campaigning by civic associations with the activation of institutions of horizontal accountability. By reviewing the recent public campaigns of various associations in post-Soviet Ukraine, this article “turns the lens” of such research by focusing less on the characteristics of the civil society actors mobilizing to bring about accountability and more on the state itself. It argues that the prospects for horizontal accountability have to be judged against a wide range of containment measures that states attempt in order to demobilize public opposition to their policies. Such measures operate through “twisted legality,” a set of measures policing protests through means that are largely legal but specifically target protesters in ways that could not function were state powers indeed separated (for instance, if the police apparatus were to operate on the basis of legal mandates issued by independent courts). Furthermore, the goal of policing actions is to push protesters “out of legality,” in ways that I describe below.
Introduction: The Contours of Accountability Problems
In February 2012, a teacher employed by a foreign language school in Kyiv received a letter inviting him to “give explanations” (nadannya poyasnen) at the offices of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU). A Ukrainian newspaper (UP) called the number indicated on the invitation and recorded the following conversation:
Hello! I received an invitation from the SBU. I would like to know on what grounds. I’m from the [foreign languages school]. I would like to know why I am invited to the SBU.
You are invited on the grounds of your involvement with the [language school].
The invitation says that I am invited to give explanations, “Explanations” concerning what?
I cannot tell you this at this time. Come [to our offices], I will explain everything to you.
The invitation cites article 25 of the Security Service law, but in that law the SBU has no right to invite someone to give explanations.
It’s up to you it is your right. I have invited you, and you can come or not, as you wish.
So [the invitation] is not mandatory?
As you wish. It is mandatory. But you do as you wish. But afterwards, you will be invited by other organs.
What other organs? Please explain, so that I understand what I can do.
As I said, do come, and I will explain everything to you.
Following the invitation, the teacher found that the SBU’s inquiry regarded the courses offered by the school to public employees in the framework of a European Union–sponsored Twinning-TAIX program. The program took place under the previous administration (when Yuliya Tymoshenko held the job of prime minister), and the SBU asked the teacher to identify participants and inform on “course contents”. 1
The excerpt from a journalistic investigation reproduced above is indicative of the type of problem that besets many of the world’s new democracies: A democratic, self-restraining state, often captured under formulas such as rule of law or extended accountability, is widely seen as a key difference between the institutionalized democracies in Western Europe and North America and the states that began democratization in the second half of the twentieth century, mainly in Latin America and in the post-communist countries of Eurasia, and partially also in Southern Europe. Most of these late democratizing countries made important gains in the 1980s and 1990s in terms of democracy, such as, most importantly, allowing citizens political rights of previously unseen scope. Yet, as noted by Guilliermo O’Donnell, most of these countries have problems setting up a “democratic state,” that is, a system consisting of “a legal system that guarantees the effectiveness and guarantees that individuals and groups can uphold against the rulers, the state apparatus, and others at the top of the existing social or political hierarchy. 2 The polity might have democratized, in the sense that elections are largely and formally free, but states remain marked by authoritarianism. State authorities, particularly those falling under the label of the “executive,” arbitrarily engage citizens in their operations the same way as the secret service officer above, without any state authorities restraining their capacity to do so.
In many Western European societies, the rule of law emerged long before the expansion of political rights to the population’s majority and the enactment of contemporary democracy, or poliarchy. Horizontal accountability, or rule of law, the system of separated state powers keeping each other in check, preceded vertical accountability, the responsibility of rulers to citizens ensured through regular elections. This is problematic, since vertical accountability, if understood narrowly as elections only, functions badly in the absence of horizontal accountability: elections might be the tool of excellence for ensuring the democratic appointment of leaders, but they are highly unsuited as a mechanism of control. 3
The problem for the rest of the world (so other than what O’Donnell refers to as the “institutionalized democracies of the North-West”) is that we know very little about how to bring about rule of law. The intention behind this article is to contribute to growing research about the emergence of rule of law, by building on research on “social accountability.” 4 This is an ambitious concept aiming to identify a mechanism linking the concepts of horizontal and vertical accountability by showing how citizens can influence the state in the sense of making it more accountable.
Social accountability refers to a mechanism that “can oversee the procedures followed by politicians and public officials while making policy” and “relies on interested, organized sectors of civil society and media institutions that are able to exert influence on the political system and public bureaucracies.” 5 Similarly, David Stark and Laszlo Bruszt formulated the concept of “extended accountability,” including in the “networks of accountability” not only the intrastate organizations involved in horizontal accountability but also “other organized societal actors.” 6 Generally, accountability refers to “the ability to ensure that public officials are answerable for their behavior—forced to justify and inform the citizenry about their decisions and possibly eventually be sanctioned for them,” either electorally or by an active system of checks and balances. 7
In this article, I “turn the lens” of research on social accountability by focusing less on the characteristics of the civil society actors mobilizing to bring about accountability, and more on the state itself. The article argues that the prospects for “social accountability” have to be judged against a wide range of containment measures that states attempt in order to demobilize public opposition to its policies. I will focus on the case of the post-communist Ukrainian state. This represents an important case for building a theory about the rule of law and social accountability: unlike the countries in Central Eastern Europe, the case of the Ukrainian state allows insights about the development of horizontal accountability independently of processes of European integration, insights that can therefore be relevant also to other states that have stayed outside of the EU.
Post-communist Europe’s “Lonely Reformers”
Arguably the most important process to shape states after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe has been the type of capitalist project the respective societies embarked upon. The group of countries geographically closest to the West followed a project dedicated to building functioning free markets, under the guidance of, and with the prospect of joining, the European Union. Partly, this was a choice of the elites that brought about the fall of communism (in Poland, Hungary, or the Czech Republic 8 ). The functioning market project insisted on creating impartial institutions for the enforcement of contracts and property rights and extensively monitored the creation and the strengthening of these institutions. These countries seem to be closer to the “democratic state” than the countries of the former Soviet Union. At the same time, the market-building project took place in a fairly top–down manner, highly suspicious of influence from below, leading an observer to depict the project as characterized by a “syndrome of the lonely economic reformer,” 9 and another one to call it a project of “building capitalism with communist tools.” 10 This is deeply problematic for these countries’ potential to foster horizontal accountability. One important theoretical argument about how horizontal accountability works in Western democracies is that it functions through the active participation of citizens and citizen groups in exposing and denouncing the wrongdoing of states, which then allow institutions of horizontal accountability to prosecute the respective offences. 11 Thus, weak civil society means weak or fragile horizontal accountability; nevertheless, the functioning market project functions like an anchor for the Rechtsstaat and offers citizens and civil groups additional institutional levels at which they can direct their complaints and campaigns.
This latter point about weak civil society and low horizontal accountability is equally true for the many post-communist countries that have stayed outside of the EU and are less committed to a project of building functioning market economies. Weak civil society meant an additional difficulty to ensure horizontal accountability; furthermore, since these countries are not bound to the European market project, the impetus among political elites to ensure any measure of horizontal accountability was far less important, particularly in the 1990s. These countries—most notably, Russia and Ukraine—followed a different capitalist path, one in which political leaders postponed setting up the institutions effectively guaranteeing market competition. This is an important difference, because what it means for social accountability is that in these more Eastern countries the sources of accountability are even fewer than in the Central-Eastern European cases.
Table 1 shows in summary form how various countries fare in terms of the different dimensions of accountability, and also whether they successfully engaged in a project of state-led market building. Most of the country groups in Table 1 have vertical accountability, in the sense that their political regime is democratic (citizens possess the most important political rights), but all fail to fully ensure horizontal accountability, the “legal system” described by O’Donnell. There are of course important differences between the country groups in rows 2 to 4, but the point is that there is a lag in relation to Western institutionalized democracies, and the post-communist countries have failed to catch up. Using data from the World Bank’s governance indicators, Figure 1 depicts the same difference as Table 1 but with more fine-grained data, allowing differentiating among post-communist countries. These data show that although CEE states do better than other post-communist countries in terms of horizontal accountability, they still have not closed the gap with Western Europe.
Accountability Dimensions and State-Building Projects East and West.
Note: CEE = Central-Eastern Europe; Ru = Russia; Ukr = Ukraine; Md = Moldova.
Rule of law, percentile range, 1996–2010, various country groups.
The difference can also be expressed with the help of the World Bank’s indicators of governance. I selected from this indicator the variable “rule of law,” “[capturing] perceptions of the extent to which agents have confidence in and abide by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of contract enforcement, property rights, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence” (http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/pdf/rl.pdf; accessed 17 March 2012).
Social science offers very few answers about how countries in the lower rows could reach the level of horizontal accountability in the top row; nevertheless, the answers it offers point in the direction of “civil society” as the actor expected to ensure that state institutions of control provide the appropriate checks and balances on political power. 12 The problem for post-communist Europe is that its civil society hardly has the capacity to successfully support the establishment of horizontal accountability. In this article I show how hard this is, using the example of Ukraine, a country in which throughout the last ten years important mobilizations took place that did run along the lines of the social accountability argument. So far, only little has been achieved (although far more than in other countries east of the EU), partly because the state disposes of efficient means through which it can prevent people from initiating or joining protests and also with which it can prevent protests from spreading once they take place. It is on these means that we need to focus if we want to understand why horizontal accountability is so difficult to achieve.
In the next section, I discuss briefly the three following protests: market vendors against the Tax Code and the protests against pension cuts by organizations of retirees of former military personnel, of Afghanistan War veterans, and of those involved in cleaning up Chernobyl after the 1986 nuclear disaster. The goal of the discussion is to show how the state pushed back these groups after initially giving in to some of their demands, that is, after an initial and very short-lived moment of social accountability. As short-lived as it was, it created an important precedent (redefining the boundaries of what is achievable in a polity, as Sidney Tarrow would have noted 13 ). As to the state response to protests, the article proposes the concept of twisted legality for describing how state authorities attempt to limit or prevent participation in protests: the authorities’ actions are legal but discretionary, attempting to discredit protesters and divide and take over protesting organizations.
Mobilizing for Accountability in Ukraine: Background and Outcomes
The course of transition in Ukraine differed from that of the post-communist countries to its West as the capitalist project that Ukraine pursued was one very different from the “functioning market economy” that other countries built under EU monitoring. In Ukraine, as in Russia, political groupings around the President used economic policies as a means to strengthen their grip on power. The agendas of these groups did not feature any “institutional agenda,” such as the European Union’s agenda to build institutions supporting competition and free markets. 14 Areas such as the enforcement of contracts or property rights became a sphere of business in itself, one in which only those politically and financially privileged could afford the consistent legal protection and enforcement of their rights. 15 The so-called Orange Revolution of 2004 and subsequent change in government did not change much in this respect, now being regarded by critical observers as nothing more than a rotation in ruling elites with little relevance for the democratization of the state. 16 In this context, the Ukrainian government attempted in 2010 a tax increase for small business as well as cutbacks in social spending. These “austerity” measures spurred several instances of nationwide protests, with many of the protesting organizations depicting the actions of the government as deeply unfair and contradicting the basic rule of law principle of equality before the law. Specifically, the organizations of small business claimed that the tax increase is an attempt to squeeze them out from their markets in favor of large retail chains owned by big business. They also accused the government of failing to justify to and consult with the citizens about the planned tax reforms, while on the other hand it had led extensive consultations with big business groups. 17
The largest protests occurred in November 2010 against the tax increases stipulated in the new Tax Code, organized by the self-employed “entrepreneurs,” in fact largely marketplace vendors for the first time organizing in large associations and participating in countrywide collective action. The involvement of two organizations was particularly strong. The first is the Assembly of Civil Organizations of Small and Medium Business of Ukraine (to be further referred to as the Assembly), in fact a loose network of several hundred of regional-territorial and professional organizations of mostly self-employed citizens, first established in 2008. The second organization is far older, established in 1990, the Federation of Trade Unions of Workers of Small and Medium Enterprises of Ukraine (further referred to as the Federation). Although it is difficult to find out what kind of grievance actually played the biggest part in mobilizing the protesters, the flyers circulated among them and banners they carried expressed anger about the “real” intention behind the government’s Tax Code, the intention—as alleged in the leaflets—to shield off the consumer goods market for large corporate importers and producers, while punishing market vendors living on selling food, electronics, secondhand clothing, cars, etc. Officially, the main demand of the organizers was to force the government to take back its New Tax Code, or significantly revise it, and with this in mind they had prepared around 5,000 amendments to the initial text. In particular, they protested against a provision nullifying the special tax category that had granted small business a low, simplified and unified tax. But the list of demands quickly developed into demands to reform public life and, most radically, the demand for the dissolution of Parliament and new elections.
Protests took the form of an occupation of Kyiv’s main square, the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square, to be further referred to as the Maidan), similarly to the actions of antigovernment protesters in 2001 and 2004. Protests also took place in many other large cities in the country, most dramatically in Zhytomir, where protesters occupied the main government building by force. Participation in the Kyiv occupation reached 10,000–25,000 before the Government agreed to negotiate and undertook an important revision of the Code. Around 1,000 protesters continued the occupation, and were evicted forcefully by police troops. Opposition leader Y. Tymoshenko, who had joined the protests, was arrested, charged (on charges that had nothing to do with the protests), and imprisoned one year later.
The market vendors were not alone in their protests. Other groups that protested against austerity were students in October 2010 (about 20,000 protested for a day in several cities, in L’viv even violently, but there were no significant results, such as government concessions or the creation of organizations to support the continuity of protests), school teachers in March 2011, and veterans of Chernobyl cleaning operations and of the Afghan War in autumn–winter 2011. All these protests were countrywide; they were organized by groups covering a large part of the country, their protests usually occurred in several cities or they brought people from many provincial cities to demonstrations in Kyiv. The protests of the veterans turned violent (four attempts to break into the Parliament building by force), dramatic (many wounded, one dead), and obtained concessions from the government, in the form that their groups were temporarily excluded from pension cuts. The largest protests took place in September 2011, when veterans of the war in Afghanistan and of the Chernobyl cleaning operations gathered in central Kyiv and attempted to storm the Parliament building. In an attempt to negotiate with these groups, parliamentarians promised to cancel the respective pension cuts. As the streets cleared, police fenced off the square in front of the Parliament building, and the government passed the law in the form of a trimmed down budget for 2012. Deeming this action illegal and in violation of the country’s pension laws, Chernobyl veterans staged one more protest in November (with similar tactics, attempting to break into the Parliament building), and in Donets’k a group of several tens of Chernobyl veterans occupied the central square and organized a hunger strike. The state reacted with force and cleared the square, leaving one hunger striker dead and many injured; it did however make substantial concessions in the form of paying back due pensions for the last months to the participants in the hunger strike. Veteran representatives saw this as a tactical move on the part of the government, seeking to isolate protests and “strangle them in isolation,” as several of them stated. Indeed, after the initial concessions, veteran protests lost impetus. In response, leaders launched various initiatives to reach out to other groups, and formulate demands and establish organizations that are representative of a wider set of grievances. Only at this moment did protesters formulate demands that would fit as instances of “social accountability,” explicitly demanding the increased “legality” of state legislative actions in the sense that the government respects its law on pensions. In the same way as the “entrepreneurs,” the veterans also demanded that Parliament resign.
The impact of these protests in terms of social accountability can be assessed in the following terms. As I list in detail in the following section, many government actions took the form of tactical concessions, that is, concessions made only in order to buy time and that were retrieved as soon as the policing of protests cleared the streets and markets. This was, for instance, the case of the “gains” made by the veterans, the exclusion of only their professional groups from budget cuts (which represented two of seventeen groups scheduled for pension cuts), an exclusion that was cancelled when drafting the new budget for January 2012. In a judgment released in January 2012, the Constitutional Court confirmed the government’s right to pay fewer pensions even at the cost of violating the law, if the budget does not allow the payment of legal pension levels. The case of the “small entrepreneurs” is similar to the veterans, as Parliament reenacted parts of the criticized Tax Code, initially withdrawn following the protests.
The protest of the self-employed, partly in combination with the veterans, made also more enduring gains. If accountability means that the government responds to citizens for its actions, then the protests actually achieved accountability in its vertical form as government, possibly fearing the social tensions it might cause, indefinitely postponed the introduction of a new Labor Code (the Labor Code was another bone of contention, equally feared by small entrepreneur organizations for increasing red tape and sanctions for Labor Code violations). Furthermore, the state set up a Committee of Entrepreneurs, to be consulted about the Tax Code, even though later on Parliament passed significant parts of the Tax Code under a different law, specifically nullifying the special tax category that had granted small business a low, simplified, and unified tax. These gains are however hardly cases that can be easily classified as instances of accountability; state authorities still seem to have found their way to pass the parts of the Tax Code that probably interested them most, while at the same time keeping busy the small entrepreneur organizations in the Committee.
Nevertheless, the government has not faced similar opposition to its actions since 1993, nor has it had to make such concessions since the large miner strikes that year, and possibly since the threat of strikes in 1997. 18 In order to understand the prospects for social accountability, it is important to establish what the state does to contain protests and whether protester organizations can find ways to overcome state containment. We need to understand how states that are still far from the “democratic state” ideal react to these protests, by focusing on the state and distilling from its reactions to antiausterity protests the following pattern of actions: state authorities do not return to the amount of repression of economic protests witnessed during the Soviet Union; instead, they operate through what I call “twisted legality,” a set of measures policing protests through means that are largely legal but specifically target protesters in ways that could not function were state powers indeed separated (for instance, if the police apparatus were to operate on the basis of legal mandates issued by independent courts). Furthermore, the goal of policing actions is to push protesters “out of legality,” in ways that I describe below.
State Reactions
State authorities did not simply allow the protests of small entrepreneurs and veterans to unfold. They actively tried to prevent protests and, once they occurred, to stop them from spreading and continuing, the latter with significant success. It is on these actions that I want to focus, since they explain to a large extent the limits of what various protesting groups can achieve. It also shows that states have many ways in which to respond to demands from below and actually taking actions that encourage accountability seems to feature very low among them.
I present in Table 2 a list of the main state actions in reaction to the protests of “small entrepreneurs” and veterans. There are more or less four actions that recur in all three countrywide protests included below, starting with repression in the form of the forceful ending of a demonstration through police intervention. Second, “selective law enforcement” 19 mainly took the form of tax inspections of associations organizing the small entrepreneurs, and the Afghanistan War veterans, even though in the latter case the veterans blocked access to their association’s offices. Third, state organs attempted to discredit protest organizers; for instance they arrested marginal protesters with extremist views (anti-Semitism), describing them as key instigators of the small entrepreneurs’ protest. Finally, the most extreme and effective containment action that I discuss below is the attempt to take over the protesters’ organizations in order to prevent them from registering notifications of public protests and thus facilitate policing them. I dedicate most space below to discussing the latter two types of actions, since selective law enforcement is somewhat better known in the literature on post-Soviet states.
State Reactions to Austerity Protests.
Sources: Takeover of the association of Chernobyl veterans: http://www.unian.net/news/475019-provlastnyie-chernobyiltsyi-govoryat-vsyo-horosho.html (accessed 27 November 2012); takeover of organization that initiated the small entrepreneurs’ protests: http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2011/11/16/6760480/ (accessed 28 November 2012).
Note: Maidan refers to the central square in Kyiv, the place of choice for organizing public rallies by civil organizations ever since the country’s independence.
Explained later.
What is evident from the table above is that most of the time the authorities did not do anything illegal in reaction to the protests. Their actions were always more or less within the boundaries of what the state allows. Even in the case of the most offensive action—arresting organizers of the entrepreneurial protests and leaving them far outside Kyiv—the state’s actions were not illegal. But it is a twisted legality, one that twists the law to transform it into an instrument that can be discretionarily deployed for political goals. This type of twisted legality rests not so much on bad laws but on a strong vertical control of the entire state apparatus, a state in which the executive controls the legislative and the judiciary: a state that lacks horizontal accountability. The goal of twisting legality appears in this case first of all to physically prevent various civil organizations from organizing protests; for example, city councils issue decisions to start public works in central squares, sealing off for works the entire area where protesters would have organized their actions. Or there are the instances of what Ledeneva in the Russian context called “selective law enforcement”: 20 In Ukraine too, in order to prevent further mobilization following the entrepreneurs’ and veterans’ protests, police selectively stopped buses with protest participants and checked the buses’ licenses for public transportation, delaying or even stopping protesters from attending protests; invited protest organizers for talks, keeping them busy so that they could not attend protests; or, in response to protests, visited organizational headquarters the day after to requisition the organizations’ books for fiscal controls. These “selective law enforcement” actions per se are not specific to authoritarian states; they are mentioned also in accounts of how the democratic United Kingdom countered the miners’ strikes in the 1980s. 21 The actions in the following subsection appear however more specific to authoritarian states, since they do not simply try to stop participation in protests or discourage it but try to destroy or take over the associations organizing the protests.
Attempts to Take Over Protester Organizations
One goal of the discretionary actions of twisted legality is to deny legality to protesters and their actions. This is the goal behind the actions listed below as “takeover of protester organization.” In its most extreme version, events proceed as in the following description. Following antiausterity protests, state authorities or politicians of the ruling party make a tactical concession to the protesters, such as exempting their group—and only theirs—from budget cuts. Within the protesters’ organization, a rift appears between moderates inclined to take the offer and the “extremists” inclined to continue struggling on together with other groups; state authorities or politicians close to them approach the moderates and promise them support to take over the organization and safeguard it against “irresponsible extremists.” The moderates call for elections within the organization, and when these are organized, the police physically prevent enough members of the “extremist” faction from joining elections so as to allow the moderates to win, who then take the organization on a more pro-state course. In this way, there is no more organization to file a request for the authorization of public protests, and therefore also no more legally organized public protest. The entire sequence described here took place successfully against the Chernobyl Union of Ukraine (SChU), the main organization of retired personnel involved in the cleaning operations following the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. The same action took place without success against one of the organizers of the small entrepreneurs’ protests, the Federation of Trade Unions of Workers of Small and Medium Enterprises. The federation’s leader was able to organize his supporters so as to prevent alternative elections from taking place.
The same type of action could be observed on a far larger scale against the organizations of entrepreneurs that launched the 2010 occupation of the Maidan (the Assembly). This action was less extreme; it did not involve selective law enforcement and it did not attempt to facilitate the formal takeover of an organization. Instead, it consisted of a diversion, an action consisting of setting up a parallel umbrella organization reuniting the myriad of territorial and professional associations of small entrepreneurs under the banner of fighting together against the state; but in fact, the umbrella organization did nothing but sign a memorandum with the government and postponed any street actions. The success of this action explains why the entrepreneurs did not stage similar protests as in November–December 2010 against the government’s “trick” of passing crucial Tax Code provisions as a separate law. It bought the government valuable time, allowing the state to present the small entrepreneurs with a fait accompli, a done deal, and allowing the reform to “sink in,” to take place without much noise and facilitate entrepreneurs to start acting along with the new tax regulations, without protesting against them first. I explain below what happened.
During the initial protests of November 2010, a member of the Parliament, MP Natalia Korolevskaya, joined the protesters and helped them gain access to negotiations with government. In their name, she signed a memorandum with Prime Minister Nikolay Azarov, one that promised protesters an extensive revision of the Tax Code, and convinced most protesters to return to their homes. The rest were removed from the square forcefully by the police. Protest organizers, the leaders of the Assembly and the Federation of Trade Unions, were initially enthusiastic about the MP’s participation and the gains she obtained for them; her credentials were convincing, being a member of the opposition “Yulia Tymoshenko Block” (BYUT), and a colleague of soon-to-be-imprisoned Tymoshenko. In the spring, small entrepreneurs launched another massive protest action against the government’s “trick”: a “March on Kyiv” consisting of small entrepreneurs approaching the capital in their cars in two massive processions, one from the East and one from West. MP Korolevskaya showed up again and united the multiple organizing associations under one umbrella—the Civic Movement Vpered (“Forward”)—and signed another deal in their name with the government. As with the 2010 Maidan protest, the government pursued its own agenda without paying attention to the memorandum, and without Korolevskaya undertaking any actions to demand that the government accounts for its actions. Instead, together with her staff, she toured the country and expanded Vpered to reunite some 250 different organizations, including many territorial organizations of the Assembly.
Around fall, Assembly leaders developed the conviction that Vpered had been a successful diversion and withdrew from the umbrella organization; in the meantime, they have set up their own, together with veterans and other groups of protesters. They had two sources of evidence that Vpered has been a state project meant to buy the government time. First, from among their own ranks, trade unions of miners from Korolevskaya’s hometown Luhansk revealed her involvement in various business deals of the same business clan, tightly connected to the economic interest group protecting President Yanukovich (the group around Ukraine’s richest businessman, Rinat Akhmetov). Second, although a late addition to BYUT, Korolevskaya made it to a top position in Parliament when Tymoshenko was still in power, yet while the entire BYUT party has undergone significant pressures and its politicians have been removed from all posts, Korolevskaya is the only member of BYUT to have kept her position, Head of the Council of Entrepreneurs in Parliament. The Vpered diversion was enough to give the state the opportunity to pass key reforms without the public protests of November 2010; it bought it valuable time, allowing it to present the small entrepreneurs with a fait accompli, a done deal. It allowed the reform to “sink in,” facilitating that rather than opposing reform; small entrepreneurs began to act by, and comply with, the new rules, fragmenting any initial drive to protest into a myriad of everyday decisions and actions to live by the new tax regulations.
Attempts to Discredit Protesters
Discretionary action also underlies the attempts to discredit protesters. This is the final type of state action in response to protests discussed here, and also the least effective in containing protests. I identified two instances, one in the case of the small entrepreneurs’ protests and one in the context of the Chernobyl veterans’ hunger strike and city center occupation in Donets’k. In the first case, police arrested, under the charge of organizing the protests, a participant from Kharkiv, the leader of a minuscule far-right party, embracing Russian nationalist and anti-Semitic positions. Leaders of the associations organizing the protests quickly issued statements that the arrested individual was in no way involved at any stage of organizing the demonstrations, but meanwhile television stations were broadly disseminating images and news about the arrested far-right protester. One can only speculate about the authorities’ motivations behind this arrest, but organizers believed that the goal of the authorities’ actions of arresting a marginal but extremist participant and presenting him as a key organizer was to undermine the unity of the participants. Indeed, as many observers noted, the uniqueness of the November 2010 protests consisted in being the first protests in Ukraine’s history that united the ethnolinguistically divided western and eastern parts of the country. Allegations of pro-Russian far-right involvement could have limited the motivation of western Ukrainians to join the protests. The effectiveness of the arrest was limited, sparking little or no outrage among western Ukrainian protesters about their alleged leaders’ pro-Russian links.
Another attempt to discredit protests had the role of limiting participation in the Chernobyl veterans’ protests in Ukraine’s Eastern city of Donets’k, after police intervention to stop hunger strikers from occupying the city’s center left one veteran dead. The autopsy, carried out by doctors of the Ministry of Emergency Control revealed heart failure during the protests as the cause of death. One state authority, the state administration of the Donets’k region, immediately issued a statement citing the Ministry that the hunger striker had a serious medical condition and had contacted medical services to attend to his heart problems only one day before the forceful eviction. This was to give the impression that the hunger striker should not have been there anyway. Furthermore, the authorities published information that the autopsy had revealed the remains of food in the protester’s stomach, so as to discredit the hunger striker, casting doubt over the other protesters. The Ministry responded that the administration had cited a nonexistent document, that it had never made public the more detailed results of the autopsy and accused it of misinforming the public. Protest organizers saw the Ministry’s statement as a proof of the state’s attempt to discredit hunger strikers, and circulated it widely (according to the press agency Unian, 28 November 2012, http://www.unian.net/rus/news/471014-Donets’kaya-oga-podstavila-mchs.html, accessed 27 February 2012).
Conclusion
The stories of protest campaigns and the state response to them reveal that social accountability does not simply ensure horizontal accountability, but the former requires some minimal level of horizontal accountability, some minimal autonomy of law enforcement organs from the executive. When, as in the case of Ukraine, such a minimum is missing, civil associations face the immense task of pressuring the state to abide by the law, but the state can decide by which laws to abide and can use the law against the protesters selectively and at their discretion. Thus, it is important to grasp the full range of options available to the state in order to understand the prospects for accountability, and why accountability (whether “social” or “horizontal”) is so difficult to actually bring about.
The aim of this article was to move closer to understanding the options at the state’s disposal. It started by mapping the protests against austerity in Ukraine and then argued that once protests took place, the state has at its disposal a set of tools capable of effectively containing protests and implementing its policies without threatening opposition. These tools are more or less effective: some, such as attempts to discredit protest organizers and selective law enforcement, did not stop protests but do tell us about the issue of the lack of horizontal accountability being both an important goal protesters want to address, and the main obstacle in their way. One method, however, is far more effective: by gaining formal hold of the protesters’ organizations, the state can restrict their actions and gain time to pursue its policies. By evading protests, the state achieves the unfolding of its policies, giving citizens the possibility of getting used to changes without protesting. It thus fragments what initially could have been a unitary opposition to its policies into a myriad of individual decisions and actions about how to deal with the practical consequences of the policies, and undermines the prospects for future protests. The implications for accountability are that civil groups and associations need to become more informed about the state’s containment of protests (in itself, a very difficult task, given their short life spans) and identify and circulate best practices about how to overcome containment before it actually takes place.