210060 SE BAK15 SE Central and Eastern Europe: politics, economies, societies (2014W)

Ukraine, which emerged as an independent state from the collapse of the USSR in 1991, appeared in the early post-Soviet period to be firmly on the path to democracy. The peaceful transfer of power from Leonid Kravchuk to Leonid Kuchma in the election of 1994, followed by the adoption of a western-style democratic constitution in 1996 justified for a good start. But the rising corruption of the late Kuchma regime and the electoral fraud during the 2004 presidential elections led to a full-fledged political crisis which ended with the Orange Revolution. The resulting new democratic coalition was however soon splintered and the moment for political reforms was missed. Disillusionment and apathy opened the way to the increasingly authoritarian rule of Viktor Yanukovych. His refusal to sign the Association Agreement with the EU sparked mass protests developing into the most serious crisis in contemporary Ukrainian history, caused the rise of pro-Russian separatism and provoked Russian military aggression.
This introduction to Ukrainian politics looks beyond these dramatic events and seeks to explain them by analysing deficits and contradictions of the Ukrainian political system, difficulties of nation and state building in a heterogeneous, culturally diverse country, political conflicts and sources of elite consensus/dissent. The course addresses a broad range of issues, from national identity, historical memory and language politics to constitutional reform, politicized justice, party and electoral system. The Ukrainian case will be explored in a comparative post-Soviet and European perspective, using such concepts as “hybrid regimes”, “competitive authoritarianism” and “informal politics”.