Perhaps, among the “reformer’s standard toolkit”—economic liberalization, transparency of power, judicial reform, and so on—“local self-government reform” is the least understood and the most neglected.
Generally speaking, this is not surprising. Let’s start with the fact that the very problem of “local self-government” as a necessary component of “democracy” was recognized relatively recently. No one seriously thought about this problem within the framework of political theories. I suspect that the relevance of this topic became apparent after the Second World War, when the question arose: what is totalitarianism, how is it organized, and how does the totalitarian structure differ from the structure of normally developing countries. It was then that, along with a liberal economy, human rights, etc., local self-government came to light as a necessary part of a democratic social structure. This position became especially relevant after the collapse of the USSR and the “socialist camp,” when discussions moved into a practical plane.
At the same time, note that the problems that would now be attributed to “local self-government” have always existed and were often the cause of wars and conflicts. For example, the American Civil War was largely related to the question of the federal government’s competence—not only in relation to the states, but also in relation to local self-government. Our state-centric history in most cases sides with central power in such conflicts, implying that centralization is always better than “fragmentation.” Most still devoutly believe in these foolish ideas. It is sad that, along with other bad habits instilled by school, these ideas are passed on to new generations.
Finally, the third, and main, circumstance is very simple. We have never lived “under local self-government.” Our address is not a house or a street, our address is the Soviet Union. “Nationalists” usually quote these lines, pointing to the absence of national characteristics in the Soviet person, although the song is about the absence of a home and a street. And this is very telling. Unlike other countries, where people live in such-and-such a house on such-and-such a street in such-and-such a city, the Soviet person lived directly in the USSR. And now the Ukrainian person continues to live in Ukraine, bypassing all intermediate stages.
It is therefore not surprising that the discussion on local self-government proceeds sluggishly, and most projects for its organization suffer from a lack of understanding of the subject. We simply do not know what exactly is being discussed.
Let’s try to highlight several important points that it would be good to keep in mind when you hear about local self-government.
There is no universal “formula” for local self-government. If, say, the state in its organizational-political aspect can somehow be described by the formats of a “presidential” or “parliamentary” model, then local self-government cannot. Local self-government is older than any state—it is simply people united on some territory to solve their local problems. With the emergence of the state, part of the functions of the local community passed to it, and what resulted is quite unique for each country.
Local self-government is not the state. This is where the greatest difficulties in understanding arise. Almost everyone whose opinion I have heard believes that local self-government is some kind of branch of the state, some local authority that the central authority has slightly “allowed” to govern, usually in order to make its own work easier. Very often the idea of local self-government is presented precisely from this angle—from the side of “optimizing” the work of the central authority. They say there would be nothing bad if the government “delegated some powers to the localities” (this is how it is usually formulated). Local self-government has nothing to do with this idea. Nor does it have anything to do with the formation of the state budget. Local self-government should not “share” with the state budget and should not act as an agent of the government in collecting taxes. If this happens—you are dealing not with local self-government, but with something else.
By the way, here a rather difficult question arises that confuses many people. Should the constitution somehow describe self-government? After all, the constitution is the founding document of the state. Ideally, it has nothing to do with local self-government.
There is no “boss” over local self-government. This conclusion, again, is very unusual for us. The Soviet practice that we inherited could not do without a boss. Even councils had the appearance of nested dolls, with “higher” and “lower” councils. Local self-governments very often exist in the form of unions and associations. However, these structures are built on the principle of delegation of powers. For example, in American cities, many services often exist through “pooling resources” of local municipalities, of which there can be up to a hundred in a city. The structures that serve this “pooling” are not “managing” in relation to the municipalities.
Local self-government is not a part or element of “state structure,” some “unit” of territorial management. On the contrary, historically it was often the case that local communities formed larger entities, such as, for example, the first states of the USA or Swiss cantons.
Thus, in “discussions on the matter,” first of all, one needs to distinguish between the administrative-territorial structure of the state and local self-government. I note that in our country these concepts are very often confused, and in projects supposedly devoted to local self-government, what is being discussed is the administrative-territorial structure.
The administrative-territorial structure of the state is a minor problem, so we will not discuss it here. Local self-government, on the contrary, is a key link in improving the lives of our fellow citizens. Local self-government is one of the foundations of civil society, a way through which citizens directly solve problems arising from their cohabitation.
And here we come to an important point. The question arises: does anything exist in Ukraine today that, in essence, is some form of local self-government? Here an interesting discovery awaits us. Despite all the abundance of talk about local self-government, in reality it practically does not exist. After all, it is obvious that the so-called “local authorities” are integrated into the state management system and cannot be considered local self-government. What remain are perhaps condominiums.
Officials discussing the problems of local self-government often claim that people do not want to unite into local self-government. And this is indeed true. For people to unite, participation in local self-government must provide obvious advantages, and today it does not. For example, many know the problem of condominiums. By participating in a condominium, you will pay less than without it, but then everyone will have to pay. Without a condominium, you can simply not pay at all. The advantage clearly lies with the old system. It is clear that the housing office will in any case receive its money from the budget, “non-payments” will be compensated many times over, and for each “unpaid” hryvnia to the housing office, the multi-layered bureaucratic system will extract ten. It’s just that these “earned” costs will be spread “thinly” over everyone. No one in particular will noticeably lose in this case, everyone will lose a little. True, it is from such “little bits” that the unbearable burden of existence in our country accumulates, which is felt literally physically.
In general, our system of mutual parasitism is nowhere manifested as brightly as in matters of communal life.
I will say more—it is precisely here, in my opinion, that its weakest point lies, the thread that, if pulled, can finally unravel the tangle of Ukrainian contradictions. But that is a different topic.
Dictatorship Without a Dictator, or “Oh, If Only We Had Such a Muamarchy”
The killing of Gaddafi once again drew attention to the phenomenon of dictatorship and, as is customary to say, became a “landmark event.” The Ukrainian internet was flooded with comments (about which more later) about what happened, and it was precisely these comments that prompted the author to write this note. Actually, my goal is to set out some accents in relation to dictatorships in general and Ukrainian society in particular.
Like practically any definition connected with politics, “dictatorship” blurs upon closer examination. Was this or that figure a dictator, and was he “good” or “bad”? Answers to such everyday questions are impossible without an attempt at definition. After all, it is true that far from all monarchs were simultaneously dictators. Likewise, some “undemocratic leaders” cannot be considered dictators because they rule “according to the laws and customs of that land.” And, again, many “presidents” who supposedly go through election procedures are in reality dictators. Therefore, a dictator is not someone who has large “formal powers.” Rather, it is someone who has large real powers and is little dependent on formal and informal rules, having the ability to act at their own discretion.
Dictatorship is the most voluntarist form of power. Therefore, we always associate dictatorship with a specific person, we consider it simply some regime existing under one dictator or another. Since dictatorships are usually established during times of all kinds of troubles, the appearance of a dictator is considered almost a function of the historical process, some phenomenon objective for the given conditions. Hence the legends about the benefit and even necessity of dictatorships. For example, Comrade Stalin is credited with an efficient model of modernization and industrialization. At the same time, somehow they forget that the Bolsheviks until almost the disappearance of the USSR compared production volumes with the 1913 figure. That is, even if we abstract from the price of “industrialization” (although that alone would be enough in a healthy society to stop all talks about the “efficiency” of Stalin’s activities), it must be acknowledged that nothing came of this venture.
Interestingly, this obvious argument (like many others) does not convince the supporters of “decisive methods,” and this once again says that we greatly overestimate dictators and underestimate dictatorships as such. Dictatorship should be called not so much a political regime of single-person rule (even if we ignore the questions arising in this definition), but rather a form or state of society as a whole.
Dictatorship is a society whose inhabitants agree that certain persons should have unlimited powers over their life and property and not be bound by any rules mandatory for everyone else.
Now let’s talk about the properties of dictatorships that usually go unnoticed. Let’s leave aside obvious problems such as violence, repression, and succession of power, which always causes upheavals in dictatorships, and talk a bit about other, less noticeable, but perhaps more important properties. The first and main property, as well as the root cause of the inefficiency of dictatorships, is that the dictator knows less than everyone else. The more spheres of activity the dictator attempts to regulate, the less knowledge of real events he receives. In this sense, if we are to believe the legend, then such figures as Pinochet are not dictators in the strict sense, since they (if this is indeed the case) did not interfere in the natural process of self-management of the economy.
It is clear that we are not talking about a lack of some abstract information, which, as it happens, the dictator always has in abundance. Dictatorships always have a special weakness for creating numerous intelligence services, statistics, state planning, modeling, and the like, up to a fascination with occultism at the state level. We are talking precisely about knowledge that is inseparable from specific circumstances arising in the activities of specific people. It cannot be replaced by any “information,” since knowledge consists in the individual interpretation of information in a given specific place. That is, the state, giving orders, tries to replace other people, who will nevertheless act as they see fit. The more “dictatorial” the state, the more destructive the consequences of this activity.
The second property of dictatorships is that dictatorships appear as a choice of society. In fact, dictators are chosen; one cannot become a dictator if society does not want to be a dictatorship. Usually the desire to become a dictatorship appears when society is unable to cope with changes in the conditions in which it exists. Here it is very important to understand that it is precisely changes, that is, a dynamic process, that give rise to dictatorships. A poor society will not necessarily produce a dictatorship, but a society that unexpectedly and inexplicably to itself is getting poorer will much more likely produce a dictatorship.
The third property of dictatorships is that dictatorship is always the dictatorship of the majority. As soon as the balance is disturbed and a significantly organized minority appears, dictatorships end (often simply to replace one dictator with another). Democracies in this sense are no better, as they are also a dictatorship of the majority (within the framework of the adopted procedure).
The fourth property is that dictatorship is a society of militant egoists. Dictatorship is actually the triumph of the “little man,” who fears the dictator less than his neighbor. Note that most arguments against dictatorship concern “society as a whole.” They speak of slow development, absence of feedback, conservation of elites—well, what does the little man care? He doesn’t care about “society,” he supports the dictator because he needs faith that there exists a force capable of protecting him from an unpredictable world (and from his neighbor). At the same time, he does not view this force as a potential threat to himself; he is confident that they will not “come for him,” because he “does nothing bad.” Dictatorships, although most of them are based on collectivist slogans, are actually destructively selfish at their core. Collectivism, usually accompanying dictatorship, calls for sacrifices for the “common good,” but in reality always destroys, first of all, this very “common good,” cultivates fear and distrust between people, and leads to that very “atomization” of society that it so often condemns.
The fifth property. Dictatorship is maximally vulnerable to external influence. If someone from the outside seriously wants to influence the policy of one regime or another, they will achieve their goals much faster if dealing with a dictatorship. The reason is obvious—the concentration of political power makes the content of that power’s policy vulnerable to manipulation. Spies, “agents of influence,” conspiracies and coups are ordinary tools in working with dictatorships. And if a dictatorship becomes completely unliked by the “powers that be” beyond its borders, it is much easier to get rid of it than of regimes of other types.
The last two properties relate directly to dictators. Often the salvation of a dictatorship is the change of dictator. And this is one of the most unpleasant properties of dictatorship. Internal and external opposition excessively concentrates on the dictator’s person (“if we just kill all the whites, then we’ll live well”). As a result, after a coup or civil war, the dictatorship mimics ideologically (which is clearly visible in the example of Latin America, where “left-wing” dictatorships were regularly replaced by “right-wing” ones, and vice versa), but does not change its essence.
And, finally, the seventh property is that a full-fledged dictatorship is based on love. By a full-fledged dictatorship, obviously, one should understand a state when the people love their dictator, which ensures the regime’s stability. This is most clearly evidenced by the comments of Ukrainians regarding Gaddafi’s death, which, as I already said, prompted me to write this note. Honestly, I could not have imagined that Ukrainians would be so concerned about the fate of the Libyan dictator. And I could not have imagined that, it turns out, the overwhelming majority of them genuinely feel sorry for the fallen tyrant. The content of the comments and the fact that most commenters simultaneously very much dislike Viktor Fyodorovych Yanukovych put everything in its place.
The content of Ukrainians’ comments goes far beyond common sense and logic. In this sense, the comments resemble lovesick ravings. Many, for example, genuinely resent Gaddafi’s elimination, telling that “there was cheap gasoline in Libya.” It turns out that it was Muammar Batkovich, not Mother Nature, who endowed Libya with oil reserves. Others don’t like the rebels—they, they say, are no better than Gaddafi. Of course, but that doesn’t mean Gaddafi is “good”; the very existence of rebels who may indeed be much worse than Muammar is a direct result of Gaddafi’s rule. And so on. I am not even mentioning the glorification of the dictator’s “heroism,” “who accepted death as a warrior should.”
In general, all this hysteria and all wails contain approximately the following message: “Oh, if only ours was capable of that! If only we had such a Muamarchy!”
Thus, modern Ukraine is a dictatorship without a dictator. No one loves Viktor Fyodorovych and no one perceives him as a father of the nation.
On the one hand, this inspires hope. Unloved dictators do not last long. Leonid Danylych (who acquired the patronymic “Davnych” by the end of his second term) barely finished his two terms, and even then, frankly dictatorial habits appeared in him only toward the end of his first term. When in 2004 people felt that the play might get an unexpected continuation, they said “well no, you know” and took to the Maidan.
On the other hand, the wails and groans filling the internet speak of the fact that the “people” desire a real, beloved dictator capable of shooting back with a peashooter at the minions of the world bourgeoisie. Our society has long been a dictatorship. The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians absolutely agree that among them there should be people who have the opportunity to act as they please in relation to the property and lives of other (bad) Ukrainians. And if a truly suitable candidate of heroic appearance is found for this position, then little Ukrainians will finally merge with him in ecstasy, and on Ukraine one can put a fat cross on the coming decades.