On the eve of a festive date, the tenth anniversary of Ukrainian independence, we try over and over again to spot the sources of our failures in building our state. What is preventing us from standing shoulder to shoulder with the world’s civilized countries? Could it be the lack of an idea? What about the national rebirth, we can be asked in turn, now being touted as almost a panacea for our nation and state to take on its own personality? But Ukraine’s gut rehab seems to have been drawing out a bit long. In the first of a series of related articles, Volodymyr Shkoda, Ph.D. in philosophy, and professor at the Kharkiv National University, reflects on the liberal values, so often misunderstood in Ukrainian society but which are an indispensable prerequisite for building a really strong state (with the predictable behavior of those in power), and on the lessons of a 10-year-long transformation in Ukraine. The Day thus opens a debate on the topic — Ukraine: Ten Years of Transformation — and hopes this will elicit a lively response from our compatriots. Many of them call the 1990s as years of lost opportunities. Was they really? We suggest that readers, authors and The Day‘s experts describe briefly (whenever possible) and argumentatively their vision of Ukraine’s involvement in the process of world civilization.
What do we have new? In other words, what have we achieved over the past decade? I will be told that there are many new things: look around. Asked in a straw poll about achievements, many might note the new Constitution. But the old one was also good. In general, all constitutions are nice. They also say the 1936 constitution was wonderful. But as for me, the most impressive new thing is the private individual. Almost everything else is old and just given a little facelift. By all accounts, there are more new things in our real life than in our heads. It only seems to us that we first think of something and then make it happen, as the phrase goes. But no, we try to do one thing and then find with a not always pleasant surprise that we’ve done something different. For example, no one has ever built liberalism here. They have even come up with a theory that liberalism cannot be built in one (Slavic) country: the soil is wrong, they say. But in reality, liberalism is the only thing that has evolved here in the past ten years. A thought even exists that liberalism can only be observed, not built. This thought needs to be explained, for it seems like a paradox against the overall bleak picture painted by some media outlets. Let us touch a bit on history and theory.
LIBERATION BY LIBERALISM
The metaphor of a list. Where do we belong? Only in one country, the USA, did liberalism emerge from scratch, so that the bulk of the people there do not know what it is. In all other countries liberal rule stemmed from feudalism. Private life gradually expanded its domain, slowly but surely revealing the figure of a free individual. The idea of law also underwent change. Law began to be associated not only with injunctions issued by the authorities to the common people but also with the rules by which private persons play the great game of life. Did we have something else? Let us perform a simple operation. Put the list of prohibitions set on the individual under feudalism (referred to as developed socialism here) on the left side of the sheet and the list of prohibitions still valid in a certain modern liberal democracies on the right. Obviously, our own list will be somewhere in between. We still have a long way to go to the right column but have already come away from the left one. This so far modest shift represents our ten year history. Only those on the lowest rungs of life and those who have fallen into ideological idiocy cannot see this. Liberalism does mean talking of freedom or having a liberal party, nor is it merely a theoretical doctrine. Liberalism is the practice of liberation. It is a practice that has no clear standards or rules. Still, if you ask a liberal to formulate something like a theoretical credo, one might answer in the words of Friedrich von Hayek, “In ordering our affairs we should make as much use as possible of the spontaneous forces of society and resort as little as possible to coercion.”
Who started this? Oddly enough, the state had to. In general, this is an aberration. By its spirit, the state is an utterly illiberal phenomenon and, as they say, the most inefficient enterprise in the country. If you disagree, come into any state-run store. But the paradox is that only the state can without a revolution (thank God!) change the regime, i.e., itself. When you are on the very bottom of a pit, any step you make will be upward. This is why whoever comes to power after socialism inevitably shifts the list to the right. I will also note that all parties, no matter how many they are, that emerge after the CPSU will present not only various political nonsense but also a constructive ideology containing, overtly or covertly, only liberal slogans.
In purely theoretic terms, liberals coming to power is the best option. They take the helm of the state and begin painstaking work to limit the sphere of its domination. Liberals, if you will, force the state to combat itself. They thus trigger the great separation of various human activities from the state and expansion of the space occupied by private life. This will gradually form a civil society, which then shows the state its proper place in no uncertain terms. This is in theory. But this will not happen in practice. For where will you find liberals who, having been born and raised under socialism, know liberalism except from books? The epoch of Yegor Gaidar in Russia clearly showed what happens when bookish liberals are in power. This means that the best option is power wielded by people who combine experience in public administration with the liberal idea. There will be no reforms without such people in power, no matter how many liberals might roam the streets.
Negative liberalism is a term that can be used to designate liberal measures, which the state grudgingly takes after a left column period or developed socialism. Everything is rather simple here, for these measures boil down to lifting bans. All the authorities have to do is not do what they have hitherto done. Then what was unthinkable only yesterday becomes possible today. A private individual can now go abroad without a Communist Party committee’s permission, open a private college, beauty shop, or retail store, have a five story house built for himself, become candidate for president, start a newspaper, publish books without some censor’s seal of approval, etc. (today’s young people do not even know, fortunately, what a Party committee or censorship board is). The state no longer has to rack its brains over how to keep the people well-fed. By force of some mysterious law of social alchemy, the country is literally snowed under with food and other goods. The word shortage sinks into oblivion. Yet, as it should be the case in a normal society, one thing — money — is in acute shortage. This performs the function of a powerful motive force for the individual to work. Seeing and being unable to explain all this in the language of economic categories, you search every way for an adequate figure of speech. And you find one: the prison gates have swung open and the convicts have taken to the neighboring woods and glades in search of food. This is what we call negative liberalism.
Positive liberalism is something else. During perestroika political journalists liked to recall the biblical story of Moses leading his people in the desert for forty years. That was a hint about the long duration of the transformation process, which cannot go smoothly as long as slavery remains fixed in society’s memory. It is now time to expand this story by remembering that after the Hebrews finally got out of Egyptian captivity God bestowed the Torah on them. What is the idea of freedom? What should be done with it? These are the questions the Torah answers. The first step is liberation from oppression, the second is obtaining the Law. This is why Jews celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, the giving of the Torah, after Passover. It is the same with us. The people prowling for food need to gather under the wing of the Law. Yet, God helps only those who help themselves. This raises the question: what is essentially required for such a gathering and what kind of Law is it?
WHAT THE STATE CAN DO
The liberal answer to these questions contains, among other things, two fundamental ideas: civil society and the state. This is precisely what is to be built. If you imagine that we can start from scratch, then we first have to form civil society as a social entity consisting of private individuals who own private property and govern their relations on the basis of private law. The state, which cares only about common things, comes to this ideal model later, as the common things arise. And liberals believe that it is clear to every unbiased person this really occurs later. For a normal man will put his own above what is ours. But in real life it is impossible to start with a clean slate. For this reason civil society will never form in a post- Soviet country without the intervention of a real, not theoretical, state. This means in turn, I repeat, that all talk of freedom, the market, reforms and prosperity will remain only verbiage until liberally minded people come to power at all levels. Positive liberalism means a slow, step-by-step, inch-by- inch, but irreversible, transformation of life in the direction of greater individual freedom. Another equally important factor of forming civil society, this time in terms of ideology, is the efforts of intellectuals, not only domestic but also, so to speak, cosmopolitan.
One can also start by building, as they say, a strong state. But, in the absence of civil society and any kind of checks and balances, this could lead to a very successful construction a state stronger than any apologist of totalitarianism ever dreamed of. In this state there would be a host of mindless and grandiose investments, staggering number of bureaucrats, first-class accountancy and control, perfect order, plenty of talk about the happy life, and other all-too- familiar niceties. But it would also have the inevitable shortages of soap, matches, cigarettes, butter, etc. Surprisingly, there are currently many advocates of this kind of state. You can see efforts and even some progress in this direction with the naked eye. The only thing that so far checks this process is the foreign political factor in the form of membership in prestigious international organizations and linking financial aid to carrying out at least some liberal reforms.
Still, we need a strong state. The point is that its strength should mean, above all, the ability to ensure the rule of law and, what is more, the fulfillment of the agreements private individuals conclude among themselves in the bustle of life. It should be understood that these agreements are laws set by private individuals for and by themselves. To quote Immanuel Kant, “an individual abides only by the laws he (himself or together with others) establishes for himself.” Thus in a law-governed society, laws are born not only in offices but primarily in the places where individuals come together to solve their problems. For this reason, to have lawful behavior and a law-governed state, it is now crucial to ensure the fulfillment of private agreements above all else. This is by far the most important function of the contemporary state, which here pays the role of a creative, rather than punitive power pushing society toward the rule of law. For the ultimate purpose of law is to ensure predictability. Just as the law of nature indicates the interconnection of phenomena, as if asserting the natural order, so juridical law in its broad sense establishes the social order.
ANTIPLANNING
Are the liberals far from the people? The idea that liberalism is an exceptionally Western thing unable to sprout in our soil is as old as the very word, liberalism, in Slavic culture. That this idea has been stubbornly brought home from generation to generation is a symptom. This, first of all, plays into the hands of the powers-that-be, for the more liberalism we have, the fewer all the king’s men we need. That these men will not give in has been eloquently shown by the absence of progress on administrative reform. And even if we let alone the proverbial group or class interests and the characteristics of our people, who can indeed display more individualism or, on the contrary, collectivism, we can claim that this idea rests on certain anthropological foundations. It appeals to people disposed to what might be called extended control. Controlling one’s behavior and immediate environment is the chief property of Homo sapiens. But the point is not this but in the inclination to control existence on an unlimited scale. When this is called the will to power, it is clear to one and all. But only few understand that a scientist’s innocent pursuit is a similar phenomenon. Friedrich von Hayek showed a clearly pronounced correlation between a high level of intellect and rationality, on the one hand, and etatist persuasions, on the other. This is why intellectuals, those who feed off knowledge, as a rule favor total control and the centralized planning of life. In short, the prestige of science and scholarship always worked against liberalism in the twentieth century.
A liberal is not one who likes to reason about freedom and not necessarily the member of a liberal party. Liberal thinking is a way of explaining the world. If you are convinced that there really are some ironclad laws of existence, that it is possible to centrally accumulate and thoroughly process all information on economic performance, and then make a huge mass of exclusively correct decisions reach each and every point of the economic sphere, you are not a liberal. But this is precisely the way diehard learned rationalists think, as do many economists. They call it the scientific management of society. Conversely, a practical person displays situational thinking. This kind of a person solves his problems here and now. So this inclination to local and concrete things and what is known as the philosophy of little things are the distinguishing features of liberal thinking. In general, liberalism is the triumph of small forms. This is why von Hayek calls liberalism the people’s pursuit and socialism “the invention of philosophers.” Scholars and philosophers are spellbound with globalism and universalism or, as Karl Popper put it, utopian social technologies, while working people are busy solving their own small problems. Perhaps this will help make it possible to do big things as well. Incidentally, the small things people are doing are only small in the assessment of those in official posts. The people themselves treat such things a quite big.
A GOOD STATE IS A MILD STATE
To paraphrase a wise man, we can say that liberalism is what people do when left alone. Liberals keep insisting: leave alone those who work. It tell the powers that be and ideologists who feel off them, if you want the hen to lay eggs, don’t hamper her from looking for grain to peck. But for some reason liberalism is often associated with quite different things. Even such a clever writer as Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin somewhat misunderstood or, given the time he lived in, pretended to misunderstand this. He wrote a story called “The Liberal.” It portrays a certain spineless intellectual who never demands anything but only proceeds “from what is possible, stepping on his own throat.” Because of this “from what is possible” the liberal’s efforts are confined to talk that never reaches deeds. But the same writer also has another story in which the word liberal is altogether absent but there is a wise governor who utters exclusively liberal ideas. The story is titled “Idle Talk” perhaps because no one but the governor talks liberal. This governor once began to discuss “for what reason the office of governor was instituted” with the local marshal of the nobility. This led to the conclusion that this office only brings trouble and hindrances to all who work.
For example, what do people say about a good governor?
“He’s just sitting quietly, doesn’t touch anybody, while life goes on.”
“Rugs are woven in one place, scythes and sickles forged in another. Why? What for?”
Nobody knows. And no one should know this as long as these goods are available. No one except the governor, of course. For he will occasionally be asked by his bosses: “What is the situation with gardening in your region?”
Since he is also unaware of the situation, he answers, to be on the safe side: “Leaves much to be desired.” But in reality they have very good cabbages. Who raised them, the governor? No. A peasant happened to be in Rostov and saw the way they grow cabbage seedlings. So he came back and did the same. Looking at him, other got down to business. The same thing in all other businesses.
The story ends with the paymaster coming into the governor’s office to give him his salary. The governor receives and counts the money without haste, and puts his signature in a proper place. The marshal points to the banknotes and asks jokingly: “Well, and this? What does ‘this’ mean?”
The governor answers, as if coming to: “Well... ‘This?’.. This is... the reward!”
“For what?,” the modern reader will cry out.
The liberal will reply: “For sitting quietly and not touching anybody.” For this is why the region grows such fine cabbage.
