Exporting Democracy
Charles Wise and the Parliamentary Development Project for Ukraine
 Postcards from a revolution: Orange-clad protesters crowding into
Kiev’s Independence Square by the tens of thousands. The
dioxin-ravaged face of opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko. Banners
emblazoned with the campaign’s simple slogan: “Tak!
(Yes!) Yushchenko!” The joyful celebration of a people
who had accomplished the unimaginable, ousting a deeply entrenched
oligarchy in the face of massive corruption, voter intimidation,
and blatant election fraud.
That was then, this—the real work of the Orange Revolution—is
now. It isn’t exactly picture postcard material, but
the work is just as critical—indeed, it’s indispensable—to
democracy in Ukraine. Here is where the policy wonks step in to
create the country’s vital bureaucratic infrastructure,
and they’re creating it quite literally from scratch. New
laws. New procedures. New committees and new commissions.
You might say that Charles Wise waited over ten years for this
moment.
Tall and lanky with silver hair and chiseled features, Wise is
a professor at SPEA, the School of Public and Environmental Affairs
at Indiana University, and director of the Parliamentary Development
Project (PDP) for Ukraine. The PDP was established over a decade
ago to assist the Ukrainian parliament, Verkhovna Rada, in developing
its legislative processes.
With offices in Bloomington and Kiev and funded by a multi-million
dollar grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development,
the PDP was officially launched in April 1994 to help strengthen
five key areas: legislative and executive relations, legislative
committee structures and operations, legislative process, budget
and appropriations activities, and representation and citizen
relations.
Ukraine is, in essence, recreating its constitution, transferring
many of the powers from the president to the parliament. Human
rights, trade laws, monetary policy, judicial powers, local government
structure—all these basics of democracy and many more are
being articulated for the first time and the PDP is on hand to
help.
While the notion of a free state may be inherently appealing to
Ukraine’s new leader, another incentive for democratization
looms large: entrée to the European Union. To be a card-carrying
member, Ukraine must satisfy EU’s comprehensive requirements,
particularly those regarding local self-government, local democracies,
and decentralization. Helping Ukraine fulfill those requirements
is a priority for Wise and his PDP staff. “Once Ukraine
starts down this road, there will be lots of deadlines and milestones.
I suspect that Ukraine will be involved in this process for a
significant period of time.” Fresh from a trip to Kiev where
he conferred with EU officials, Wise is pleased to report that
the European Union is familiar with his project and endorses it.
“They’re excited about us getting involved,”
he says, beaming with boyish enthusiasm. “They know about
us. They want to work with us. That’s just incredible to
me.”
What a difference a year makes. Rewind to the fall of 2004. As
Ukraine’s October 23 elections approached, Leonid Kuchma
was ending his ten-year presidential term amid accusations of
corruption and scandal, including allegations that he was involved
in the 2000 murder of an investigative journalist. Meanwhile,
Kuchma’s anointed successor, Viktor Yanukovich, had served
two prison sentences for violent crime and was the hand-picked
choice of Vladimir Putin and the oligarch clans. Contender Yushchenko,
the pro-Western leader of the Our Ukraine movement, was hospitalized
in Vienna, claiming that he had survived a government-inspired
attempt to poison him. Mayoral elections in Mukachiv were marred
by the theft of ballot boxes, assaults on members of parliament,
voter intimidation, and vote tampering. Two-thirds of Ukrainians
thought that the presidential election would be falsified and
they were right, despite the EU’s urging for a free and
fair election.
The future of democracy itself was at stake, says Wise. “Some
years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski said that without Ukraine it would
be impossible to reconstitute anything like the former Soviet
Union, but with Ukraine, it would be entirely possible. Ukraine
had both material and symbolic importance within the collection
of states that comprised the former Soviet Union. Besides Russia,
by population Ukraine is the largest republic of the former Soviet
Union and is the most culturally and ethnically aligned with Russia.
Without Ukraine, you simply cannot have a unified bloc of nations
that means anything strategically.”
Projects like the PDP are not without their critics. How does
Wise respond to cultural relativists who insist that endeavors
like his foist democracy upon unwilling or, at the very least,
unprepared populations? “It is impossible to force feed
democracy to a society that does not desire it,” says Wise.
“That’s not what the United States has been doing
in Ukraine. The society has to want it. Sure, there may be segments
within a society that don’t want democracy. And people may
have different conceptions of what democracy really is, especially
if they’ve never experienced it. But I don’t think
that the West has been trying to force countries to take a democratic
path. The West targets societies that want democracy and request
assistance in attaining it. Once the request is made, Western
governments are there assisting opposition groups in their demand
for human rights and a say in their government.”
Wise makes no excuses for promoting democracy. “Most Western
countries are not in the mood to apologize for promoting democracy,”
he says, with enough edge in his voice to suggest this isn’t
the first time he has confronted this argument. “Western
countries believe philosophically and politically that democracy
is a good thing. We believe that citizens under all level of society
will be better off under democracy versus an oligarchy, theocracy,
dictatorship, or any other system.”
Wise hastens to add, however, that groups like the PDP never try
to lead other countries into duplicating America’s brand
of democracy. “Different cultures will perform better under
their own tailored form of democratic institutions,” he
says. “Yes, there are some basic requisites involved, like
free elections, but there is also tremendous variety among Western
European democratic systems. Some have presidencies, some don’t.
Some are parliamentary, others aren’t. Some have two houses
of legislature, some have one. We’re not pushing any particular
form of democracy.
“Our approach in Ukraine is that we provide options. If
we get a particular committee in the parliament working on, say,
military justice, we might show them eight or nine different alternatives
currently in use by other countries. It’s not up to us to
say which alternative is best for them, but to expose them to
the range of possibilities so there can be a democratic debate
over which alternative is best for them. We don’t have a
stake in which model to choose, as long as they are choosing among
democratic models.”
But democracy comes at a price: Most citizens under Soviet rule
didn’t know the perils of poverty—hunger, disease,
homelessness, prostitution—until the collapse of communism.
Do champions of democracy feel responsible when newly democratized
nations suffer?
“You have to understand that in Eastern Europe and the former
Soviet Union there were three mega-transformations underway at
once,” explains Wise. “They were transforming their
government, their economy, and their civil society. That’s
a magnitude of change across countries that the world has never
seen before. They don’t have a blueprint for that kind of
massive change. But there’s no way any given country would
say, ‘Let’s put the brakes on this and wait so we
can plan everything out first.’
“It’s true that there was a built-up expectation that
if they adopted democracy they would immediately get Western prosperity,
and when they didn’t, sizeable segments of society were
disappointed,” Wise continues. “But those expectations
were never realistic. The fact that there were drops in the economy
didn’t have anything to do with adopting democracy and everything
to do with the fact that dislocation of a communist system manifested
itself in massive change. That magnitude of change has real cost
associated with it. There is no huge Soviet bank to tap into to
subsidize the transition. The Soviets were out of money and that’s
why the system blew up. Even if all those countries just threw
themselves into the arms of Russia they weren’t going to
have the old system again. Hankering for the old system may be
nostalgic, but that’s all it is.”
Perhaps the greatest challenge to democracy in a country like
Ukraine is the absence of cultural antecedents. How to you introduce
a new political theory—and a new way of life—to a
people who have no frame of reference? “Part of what underwrites
our commitment to democracy is the belief that people can learn,”
says Wise. “Our own country had some fits and starts associated
with democracy. The original Constitution was the Articles of
Confederation. They worked with that for ten years. The people
of the United States decided that it wasn’t working and
adopted a new system of government, a new constitution.”
In the end, says Wise, when it comes to designing a new rulebook
for a newly democratized nation, “there are no hard and
fast rules. It’s not something you have to get exactly right
from the beginning. It’s a process you initiate, and people
learn, and institutions evolve. People engaged in democratic decisionmaking
seem to get better at it as they go along.”
—Debra Kent
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