Reform is the political watchword of Ukraine and the current generation has been hearing it for a year and a half. Its magic helped Leonid Kuchma be reelected as he managed to convince the electorate that his first term was enough for him to “grow up” to carry out real revolutionary reforms in Ukraine.
Yet the Revolution of 2000 (as Volodymyr Chemerys, second-in-command at the Forward Ukraine Party described his recent acts) appears to come down to reform in just the second branch of power where the process of growing up is taking too long. Of course, there are the presidential edicts enforcing reform in the agrarian and administrative domains. And reform sounded like a refrain (or incantation?) in the President’s message to Parliament.
However, reform does not seem be going anywhere. The media, of course, tries to find absolutely objective reasons, explaining why there is positive change in the economy, state administration, or countryside is being blocked.
Physicists in such cases say that a systemic error was made when building a model. Something does not register and this something proves of crucial importance for the system under study. But could the decrees and messages have been modeled not for today’s real Ukraine but for some simplified or even virtual polity, with virtual people being prescribed parameters securing the desired results?
The problem, however, is whether our citizens conform to the parameters and whether the situation in Ukraine depends solely on Ukraine. Roughly speaking, whether our current polity is a self-sufficient system, to an extent where the President’s and Cabinet’s economic models can be effectively applied.
The twenty-first century will be an age of the dominance of the intellectual factor in the life of the international community. Accordingly, its structure will transform, just as the level of its collective consciousness is sure to rise. Due to the technological revolution in communications and information sciences, the world is becoming a single whole. These two factors — the intellectualization and globalization of social space — fundamentally change the situation in Ukraine as well, regardless of how far we lag behind other countries or where our foreign policy vector is directed.
In practice, this could mean that the classical patterns and regularities of political, economic, and cultural progress have stopped working. Thus, one can hardly expect the “new Ukrainians” — or, using the political economic parlance, the new owners of redistributed former “all-people” property — to become aware of the need to legitimize their wealth. Historically, it was precisely the case with all those polities functioning as economically closed systems, where money showed little movement. In such cases a step in this direction was simply inevitable.
Today, under conditions new in principle for the accumulation and dynamics of capital of new Ukrainian owners and showing dynamism, these people can hardly be considered citizens of Ukrainian society; rather, they think of themselves as citizens of some considerably broader society. There are practically no technical obstacles to this.
There could be a certain analogy here with the American Indians when being colonized by zealots from Western Europe. Western European civilization, being technologically higher by an order of magnitude, simply “covered” the geospace of the North American autochthonous civilization which had long lost its own dynamism and was in a state of homeostatic balance with the environment. In the aftermath of direct encounter with a superior civilization, cardinal and irreversible processes commenced within the Indian society, precisely as a result of this encounter, not inner evolution. After all, the Indians were not likely to have any stimuli for carrying out economic reform in their own economic basis or social structure. As a separate civilization or as one of the options of world society development, they had exhausted themselves in that world. Dynamism was shown by another civilization with prerequisites for the future transfer to a higher level of the entire human society. It was only natural for that dynamic civilization to “embrace” also those peoples whose social structures had lost their ability to evolve.
It was a cruel process, certainly. But our human definitions of good and bad, humane or otherwise cannot be applied here. Such processes have simply to be registered and proceeding from this we must plan our actions and accordingly calculate our resources.
How the specifics of certain historical conditions will be taken into account decisively depends on the level and rank-and-file carriers of the collective consciousness, as well as on those to whom they delegate their right to decide government matters.
As a result of the collision of the Western European and autochthonous North American civilizations, the Indians begot their own nouveaux riches — new Iroquois, Hurons, and Delawares. The shamans assured, on behalf of their god Manitu, that the buffalo would return, with the chiefs never considering it a sin to use the conqueror’s weapons to resist, because from the military point of view the conqueror was ahead of them by a whole epoch, yet the level of that civilization was never raised. But the buffalo never returned. In the meantime the most dynamic of the Indians chose a different road, selling their tribal wealth (land and gold), actually falling out of the membership of their society and merging with new society.
The result, without doubt, was tragic for the indigenous peoples. Could it have been otherwise? How? Can anyone today picture the Iroquois evolving and reaching the US level by the end of the twentieth century? Quite to the contrary; they would still be hunting their buffalo, and lest the number of hungry mouths increase (they would have never thought of breeding buffalo) every Indian wanting to have a family and children would have to go, openly or secretly, at night, to get a license (i.e., scalp) as proof of a fresh vacancy in the living space. That this other option would be more likely is corroborated, among other things, by those 30,000 Iroquois living on the reservation and remaining at the tribal level despite all the benefits of civilization made available to them; they had simply fallen out of the general human evolution.
Thus when civilizations clash, when a higher-order social organism is organized, the first and foremost problem by no means consists in local reforms within one’s own social space (such reforms produce the desired effect only within a closed system), but in integrating into a new, broader world which more often than not has altogether different laws, principally different views on man’s place in a given social system, and on the means of securing one’s own welfare.
Integration comes before everything else, in order not to be assimilated. And our own reforms have to actually be regional reforms in a new space, of course, retaining in mind the fact that in the new space we are a provincials or a farmstead bumpkins. But we are bumpkins today. We must think of tomorrow, lest the same tragedy as that which befell the American Indians take place in Eastern European society as a whole. History knows also milder consequences of civilizations colliding.
The interpenetration or even incorporation of civilizations is an inevitable process in the globalization of human society at all historical stages. The rapprochement of local societies requires a basis for communication, military support, and afterward a common ideology, religion, and cultural values. No local civilizations can provide all these components simultaneously; one contributes one thing and others something else. When history made the challenge of unifying the Mediterranean geospace and Middle East first Alexander the Great and Roman emperors provided the required military basis to conquer numerous peoples and unite them into a single social whole; after that Greek philosophers provided the basis for Hellenization, and finally the world religion came from Judea. For centuries afterward all this merged, was shaped and reshaped, finally producing that on the basis of which what we know as Western civilization emerged.
Perhaps the impassioned impulse at the time of conquest turned out too strong, because subsequently the conquered geospace could not be kept together and the Christian split in two. Now all indications point to a reverse process; the rapprochement of peoples whose mentalities and social structures are based on common Christian values, Hellenistic sources of culture, and Roman law.
The process is certainly complex, and unexpected for some; painful and even unwelcome for many. Thanks to the revolution in information technologies, a strange civilization has burst into our life left and right like a torrent from a dam swept away by a flood. What is now happening in Ukrainian society is dictated first of all by this torrent, its might. For this reason, the reforms we hear about every day in Ukraine resemble proposals to set sail this way or that in our boat.
But our economy does not need sails now that we are encountered by a higher civilization, nor does it need heated discussions about which bank, right or left, we should steer to. Now the point on the agenda is able management, so our boat does not capsize but sails on, reaching the open sea where all the great rivers of different civilizations will sooner or later merge. Also, lest we get lost in that sea, we must think hard what are we going to bring with us when we cast anchor in that new and wider world.
Articles such as this one traditionally end with something like recommendations about what is to be done, addressed to the President, Prime Minister, or some anonymous person who, in the author’s opinion, can change the situation in Ukraine one way or the other and who only lacks the best advice. Over half a century ago, German philosopher Martin Heidegger said that there is no problem of what to do, there is the problem of how to start thinking.
The twenty-first century will rely on thought and intellect. Ukraine, if it wants to integrate into the new geospace, rather than become a Big Reservation in the heart of Europe, also must bank on human intellect, on thinking people. Hence the best test to determine the activities of those in power: whether their actions help raise the intellectual level of Ukrainian society or whether they contribute further to the process of the de-intellectualization of our people.
But this is also the personal matter of every citizen: heed the words of the German sage or brand him as an alien pseudo-philosopher and continue to rely traditionally on the state.
