Rallying Around the Flag: War Challenges and Civic Mobilization in Ukraine. (original) (raw)

2023, LISD Working Paper #3

Ukraine’s resilience in the first months of Russian aggression came as a great surprise to both its Moscow adversaries and Western partners. Very few experts expected Ukraine to withstand the all-out military assault of the allegedly ‘second best army’ in the world and virtually nobody believed that it would be able to fight back. An overblown image of Russian strength and military prowess might be one reason for that, but probably more significant was a protracted neglect and depreciation of Ukraine in both Western media and political circles. Of a sudden, it appeared that neither the state, broadly described as a ‘weak’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘dysfunctional’, did collapse under tremendous military assault, nor the society, broadly stereotyped as divided, conflicted and balancing arguably at the verge of a civil war, broke down for the proverbial two parts. One may presume that either some negative features and tendencies of Ukraine’s development were exaggerated, or some positive tendencies were neglected or undermined, – or both. To elucidate the issue, I intend to proceed in three steps. First, to outline briefly the real curses that plagued Ukrainian state and society after the fall of communism and provided some reason for international skepticism in regard of the new-born country. Secondly, I would argue that very important and mostly positive, though incoherent and sluggish changes occurred in Ukraine in the past thirty years, so that the Russian aggression neither established any new pattern of Ukraine’s development nor shifted it into a new direction but rather accelerated the prior processes and solidified the existing tendencies. And thirdly, I shall examine the ongoing civic mobilization in Ukraine as a way of accumulation of social capital that may play a crucial role in Ukraine’s pots-war reconstruction and modernization.