Occasionally, I receive apologies from my international friends for their government’s statements, steps or policies vis-à-vis Ukraine. Most often these friends are Hungarians, sometimes Poles or Slovaks. Once it was even a Swiss and a Japanese – because, as I have learned, their government preferred to destroy their outdated weapons rather than pass them on to Ukraine. And lately, I began to receive such statements from Americans.
I feel bewildered because I am not in any position to accept or demand such apologies. Nor are my colleagues and friends obliged to apologize since none of them, I am confident, cast their ballots for the incumbents and therefore hold barely any responsibility for their unremarkable deeds. Responsibility, however, does not amount to accountability; an exemption from the former does not give us a waiver from the latter.
I happened to feel this acutely some time ago when my fellow Ukrainians used free and quite fair (by Ukrainian standards) elections to bring to power a former convict with a proven criminal record and unprove, but manifest ties with a regional mafia. Ironically, he won even though he received half a million votes fewer than he received in the previous elections, in 2005, when he lost to his pro-European (“orange”) opponent Viktor Yushchenko 44% to 53%. Five years later, in 2010, he won (50% to 46%) against his new “orange” rival Yulia Tymoshenko because this time two million “orange” voters simply did not show up at the polling stations. Or came just to cross off both candidates – protesting thereby against the inefficiency of the “orange” team that had initially raised such high expectations.
I was not responsible at the time for Yanukovych’s victory but I was accountable – as both a citizen and an author. Had I done enough in the previous five years to discipline the “orange” government, to temper their internal bickering and make them finally work? Could I have done more to persuade my fellow-Ukrainians that the “no vote” is not a solution, especially in the hybrid regimes that vacillate between unconsolidated democracy and unconsolidated authoritarianism, and the stakes therefore are high and the balance is very shaky?
Human agency and failed institutions
It might be too simple and self-indulging to say “I did everything I could.” In fact, we do not know. We can assess more or less objectively our capacity for action but not capacity for cognition: “everything” is too nebulous because we cannot know with due clarity and precision what else could have been done and which option chosen from the long list of possibilities. It might be even easier to say (after Montesquieu) that people usually have the government they deserve but again, the devil is in the detail. The seemingly wise, quasi-philosophical formula generalizes too much, ignoring the simple fact that people are very different: some of them may “deserve” a better government while others may deserve much worse.
Luckily, most of us live in democracies, however imperfect, which makes our voices meaningful far beyond the voting booths. The right implies duty, the possibility entails responsibility. All governments tend to misuse power and resources if they are not properly checked. They allow themselves to overstep the rules as much as people allow them. For thirty years I observed the postcommunist transformations in Eastern Europe, teaching a course on that topic and writing a book that was ultimately published in Warsaw in 2021. Two things impressed me from the very beginning: how the communist system was installed in the region after WWII, how within a few years all the sprouts of nascent democracy, rule of law, civic rights and liberties were gradually extinguished by coercion, blackmail, and covert operations by the Soviet security services and their local allies. And, secondly, how the same system very differently penetrated local societies, and was ultimately uprooted with very different speed and depth.
“Path dependence” had obviously played a role: countries with some democratic traditions or at least some traditions of statehood and rule of law appeared to be more successful at transformations. Civil society was key to changes but the agency of government actors also played a part – this largely explains, for example, much higher Polish resilience against authoritarian tendencies if compared with Hungary, even though both countries (along with Czechoslovakia) featured prominently in anti-Soviet resistance and the much-vaunted “return to Europe”. The post-Soviet trajectories of Ukraine and Moldova vis-à-vis Russia and Belarus might also be exemplary in this regard.
A few days ago, I attended a panel discussion at the German Historical Institute in Washington, where a Polish, a Hungarian, and two American experts discussed the topic “Resilience and Resistance in Fragile Democracies”, with the subtitle “Historical Perspectives from Germany, Hungary, and Poland”. The main focus of the debate, however, was on the United States. The sympathy of the new American president for authoritarian rulers, including Hungarian Viktor Orban, is well-known; his attacks on the American institutions, the judiciary in particular, resemble in the eyes of many the infamous German Gleichschaltung of the 1930s, even though carried out on a different scale, in a different country and under different circumstances. Within this context, Karolina Wigura maintained, the Polish experience of resistance against similar tendencies might be helpful for both the Americans and the Europeans who reject authoritarianism.
Michael Brenner, professor of history and chair in Israel studies at the American University in Washington, pinpointed five institutional failures that facilitated state capture and the consolidation of dictatorship in Germany: business was rather compliant with national socialists or even supportive of them; the same could be said of the German judiciary, traditionally inclined to favor conservatives, and biased against leftists and liberals; conservative parties tacitly accepted Hitler’s advance, believing they would be able to find a modus vivendi with him; leftists were divided and preoccupied with the internecine struggle, also projecting their hostility onto trade unions; and the Church was not only divided parochially but also focused almost exclusively on parishes rather than on the broader picture.
The analogies with today’s America might be far-fetched but anxiety is in the air, fueled recurrently by highly dubious presidential orders and especially by his extraordinary brutal attacks on disobedient courts and judges. Brenner’s speech largely replicated, consciously or incidentally, Prof; Jeffrey Herf’s article “We Are Uncomfortably Close to 1933” published earlier in March in Persuasion. “The evolution of the executive power in Germany under the Hitler dictatorship”, Prof. Herf contended, “remains the most famous case in modern history of the use of the mechanisms of democracy to destroy a democracy. The relationship between Hitler and the conservative political parties was at the core of that history of democratic failure. The events of the past six weeks raise the issue of similarities and differences between the erosion of the power of parliament in Germany then and the response of Republican Senators to Donald Trump in power in the United States today.”
Missed warnings
Eighteen months ago, the Washington Post contributing editor Robert Kagan published a gloomy article with a clear, unambiguous message in its very headline: “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” He argued that the signs of a forthcoming disaster have been increasingly obvious since 2015 but that Americans drift along passively, conducting their business as usual, taking no dramatic action to change course: “Like people on a riverboat, we have long known there is a waterfall ahead but assume we will somehow find our way to shore before we go over the edge… We are closer to that point today than we have ever been, yet we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy”.
The main problem with Trump as the president with enormous power, in Kagan’s view, is that he “will not be contained by the courts or the rule of law… Trump’s power comes from his following, not from the institutions of American government, and his devoted voters love him precisely because he crosses lines and ignores the old boundaries… A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual [in the past] is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances, and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has? … Like Caesar, Trump wields a clout that transcends the laws and institutions of government, based on the unswerving personal loyalty of his army of followers.”
Senator Mitt Romney, one of the Republicans who voted to convict Trump during the 2021 impeachment trial, recognized in a conversation with his biographer McKay Coppins that “physical threats from Trump’s base were a factor in the decision of some of his colleagues to vote to acquit.” Quite a few politicians, in his words, worried not only about their careers but also about the physical security of themselves and their families. He confessed that he was spending $5,000 a day(!) on security services for himself and his family – a sum hardly all party dissenters could afford. Bullying and blackmail seem to increasingly become an instrument of Trump’s loyalists against would-be defectors from their camp.
The critics of Trump and Trumpism do not claim that they are not carbon copies of Hitler and the Nazis but they question today’s conservatives, primarily Republicans, by analogy to the German conservatives of the 1930s “whether they will serve as enablers of, or a bulwark against the danger of an authoritarian government.” Both then and now, two worrisome developments are observable: “the willingness of elected representatives to abandon their prerogatives in the face of invented emergencies and an authoritarian leader with a base of loyal supporters”; and “the absence of a political firewall against the authoritarian right.”
Trump’s portended dictatorship, as Robert Kagan predicts, will certainly not be “a communist tyranny, where almost everyone feels the oppression and has their lives shaped by it. In conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies, ordinary people face all kinds of limitations on their freedoms, but it is a problem for them only to the degree that they value those freedoms, and many people do not. The fact that this tyranny will depend entirely on the whims of one man will mean that Americans’ rights will be conditional rather than guaranteed. But if most Americans can go about their daily business, they might not care, just as many Russians and Hungarians do not care.” But the prospects of such developments in the world’s leading democracy are quite disheartening.
Silver lining
In this gloomy context, however, one may be encouraged by the news from Kyiv about the resignation of a few officials in the U.S. Embassy, including Ambassador Bridget Brink who served for nearly 30 years under five presidents, starting her career in the last years of Bill Clinton. In her statement, published in the Detroit Free Press, she recognized that it was a very difficult decision: for three months she tried to adjust to the new political line until she gave up for both political and moral reasons.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “the policy since the beginning of the Trump administration has been to put pressure on the victim, Ukraine, rather than on the aggressor, Russia. As such, I could no longer in good faith carry out the administration’s policy… For three years I heard the stories, saw the brutality, and felt the pain of families whose sons and daughters were killed and wounded by Russian missiles and drones that hit playgrounds, churches, and schools. Over a career spent in conflict zones, I’ve seen mass atrocities and wanton destruction first-hand but we have never seen violence so systematic, so widespread and so horrifying… I cannot stand by while a country is invaded, a democracy bombarded, and children killed with impunity. I believe that the only way to secure U.S. interests is to stand up for democracies and to stand against autocrats. Peace at any price is not peace at all ― it is appeasement”.
A week later, in an interview with PBS News, she added several new points, diplomatically avoiding a direct answer to the question about the “other people in the Embassy in Ukraine, other people in the Foreign Service who share your concerns, who talk to you about this.” “I think,” she said, “right now, especially after a lot of the cuts in government and the way in which those have gone about, it’s made debate less, and it’s made people afraid to speak out. To me, that’s very dangerous. I haven’t seen this kind of atmosphere in our country in my professional lifetime. I have seen it a lot overseas… But I think to have that happen in our country, a democracy, the biggest, strongest, in my view, best democracy in the world, is quite disconcerting”.
She also clarified an important issue that is often misunderstood in the West and elsewhere – that the Russian war in Ukraine is not a war of territory but a war of identity: Russia strives to change the very fabric of Ukrainian culture and identity. And even worse than that – “I think, horrifyingly, that Vladimir Putin wants to wipe Ukraine off the map as a country, as a people, as a culture. And, to me, this really harkens back to some of the darkest periods of Europe. And this is why I never thought I’d be in a position to resign and then speak out publicly. But I think the stakes are so high, not just for Ukraine, not just for Europe, but for the United States. And we must be on the right side of history”.
Sure, one swallow does not a summer make, as Ukrainians say. And Ambassador Brink’s demarche will neither change the narcissist course of Trump’s international politics nor entice many other civil servants and politicians to follow suit. But it has demonstrated at least two things. First, that it is not necessary to rely on a geopolitical guru equipped with ‘realist’ theories to understand developments in Ukraine. It is enough to approach them first-hand, on the ground. Secondly, that the U.S. political system is not thoroughly petrified but there are (and will always be probably) honest and courageous people within, able to speak, to act and maybe ultimately to “make a summer.”
This was in fact the conclusion that Polish speaker Karolina Wigura made at the end of the panel discussino at the German Historical Institute. She essentially drew on Robert Kagan’s description of “conservative, anti-liberal tyrannies” – soft dictatorships that employ corruption and cooptation rather than coercion, manipulation and disinformation rather than censorship. Relative softness is their advantage, a mimicry that makes dictatorial tendencies almost undiscernible. But it is also their weak point because they cannot apply large-scale repression and persecute opponents openly. They have to operate in the shadows, in the aisles, to exert their pressure covertly and silently. So, the recipe for resistance is basically the same as it was long ago under the late (and largely “soft”) communism: switch on the light, turn on the sound, avoid any informal talks with “them”, make public all their overtures, all their attempts at bribery and blackmail. Just say “no” to them, as our mentors, the old Soviet dissidents, taught us, when we were students.
And, crucially, try to overcome partisan divides and unify the opposition for the common cause.
The resilience and resistance associated with democracy is a good thing. But it might be useful to also bear in mind another of its qualities, assertiveness.
Mykola Ryabchuk is a research director at the Institute of Political and Nationality Studies of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and a lecturer at the George Washington University. He has written extensively on civil society, nation-state building, national identity, and post-communist transition. One of his books has been translated into French: De la 'Petite-Russie' à l'Ukraine, published in Paris by L'Harmattan in 2003.