Civil Society In Post Euromaidan Ukraine PDF Download

The fact that the politicians brought to power by the Ukrainian Maidan revolutions turned out to be clearly anti-democratic, fully reliant on advantages of the moment stolen from opponents on the square, and not ready to compromise or stick to agreements made with opponents, is both the fault and a generic trait of the Maidan revolutions. It is this fact that eventually became the key factor in the collapse of the Ukrainian state. Indeed, if we imagine that the February 21 agreements between the opposition and Yanukovich had been implemented, there would not have been the referendum in Crimea, nor the Odessa massacre, nor the referendum in the Donbass, nor the bloody civil war, and most likely somebody other than Yanukovich would have become President of Ukraine. However, given the logic of ochlocracy, it is just as clear that this was impossible. For the leaders of opposition are through and through square-dwelling provocateurs, pushed from behind by a similar, though far more radical, breed. While elections tend to have a low turnout, with the procedures usually well defined, the turnout at referendums tends to be high, although there are often procedural questions. These are the realities one has to learn to evaluate correctly. The institution of representative democracy attracts less and less the attention of the citizens of different countries. If there is still some interest in elections for the head of state (although fatigue builds up because all politicians are the same), people rarely understand who to vote for and why, when it comes to parliamentary elections. The shows put on, or the intensified controversies between politicians before elections, only show that national leadership does everything possible to attract people's attention to a voting procedure that has become uninteresting or meaningless for them. On the other hand, the instruments of direct democracy, such as referendums that decide truly life-changing questions for a country or a region, draw more and more people. The answer to the question of why this is happening is obvious - people show their civic-mindedness when something is vital, when their voice defines the fate of their country, but they do not want to take part in meaningless games imposed on them. On the other hand, this suggests the more profound conclusion that the public conscience, the proverbial civil society is a real, sizeable phenomenon, rather than a "Frondesque" narrow circle of party activists. And the position of the true civil society, i.e. people who perceive themselves as citizens of their country who care about its future, has long since outgrown the meaningless formalism of liberal democracy.