Category Archives: Ukraine

bottom-up struggles against corruption: a frontier of democracy

(En route to Storrs, CT) Corruption is no minor issue, nor is it mainly a concern for fastidious bourgeois reformers in rich countries. Consider, just for instance, that one quarter of India’s teachers are missing from school on any given day but are still being paid. Few investments in the world benefit human beings more than educating Indian children, yet a quarter of the available teacher/time is being lost because of that one form of corruption–not to mention bribery in school construction, college admissions, and hiring, from primary schools to graduate programs.

In countries like Ukraine, which I visited briefly this summer, corruption is a primary obstacle not only to economic development but also to fairness, good government, and reconciliation. And here in the United States, perfectly legal transactions–ones that politicians even brag about, such as collecting private money for judicial elections–easily meet my definition of “corrupt.”

It seems surprisingly hard to find trends in levels of corruption over time, so that we would be able to see which anti-corruption strategies are effective. Experimental programs are often evaluated, but even when they work, they are typically too small to make a difference at the scale of a nation. It is not clear that a true victory over corruption would come from assembling lots of specific programs, such as websites that disclose government contracts or increased pay for bureaucrats. By the way, a major reason for the lack of trendlines is the difficulty of measuring corruption even at a given moment–in part because corrupt acts are typically secret.

I start with the assumption that there are two basic categories of human problems: sometimes we want or value the wrong things; and sometimes, even though we want good things, we can’t get them because of the ways we interact. Corruption may involve both categories.

Corruption is a problem of what we want or value to the extent that people do not distinguish properly between legitimate transactions and illegitimate ones, or between public and private interests. Following Zephyr Teachout, I think that the US Supreme Court’s decisions regarding lobbying reveal the degeneration of fundamental republican virtues in this country. In 1870, confronted with a situation involving a paid lobbyist for an economic interest, the Court assumed that his job must be “steeped in corruption” and “infamous” and proposed that if such “instances were numerous, open, and tolerated, they would be regarded as measuring the decay of the public morals and the degeneracy of the times.” The Court voided the lobbyist’s contract. By Citizens United v. FEC (2010), the Court was no longer able to detect any difference between a citizen speaking up in a republic and a donor pursuing an economic interest for money.

On the other hand, it has been possible to forge such distinctions. In 1621, Sir Francis Bacon was impeached for acts that had been widespread and unchallenged a few years earlier. Elizabethan judges had openly accepted payments from litigants, and ambassadors had received huge cash gifts from the monarchs of their host countries. Bacon was made a scapegoat and brought down by his political enemies. But it was also true that a new concept of public offices and of public versus private goods was emerging, and it ultimately served Britain well. That is an example of a positive shift in values.

More generally, corruption is a failure to value the commons: that which we own collectively or which is not owned at all. The commons is not an idea for leftists alone, for even radical libertarians view the government and the law as public property and the atmosphere and oceans as un-owned. Attitudes toward the commons vary, and I suspect that a valuable way to reduce corruption is to raise people’s sense of concern for the various commons around them.

But corruption also exemplifies a collective-action problem. If everyone else is paying bribes, you won’t make the system any better by refraining, but you may hurt yourself (or your children, or your employees). So even when everyone thinks that bribery is bad and the commons is precious, almost everyone may still pay bribes.

One type of solution to collective action problems is an external monitor/enforcer that protects the common interest. Singapore has “gone from being one of the more corrupt countries on the planet to one of the least.” Its success depends upon an authoritarian state that happens to be genuinely opposed to financial corruption. I wouldn’t want to generalize the Singapore example, for two reasons: an authoritarian solution denies people the right to govern themselves, and benign authoritarians are strikingly scarce. Most dictators who jail or shoot people for taking bribes are perfectly happy to accept bribes themselves. In fact, by investigating corruption, a state learns who is corrupt and can use selective prosecution or the threat of it to extract additional benefits. That temptation dooms almost all top-down solutions.

A different type of response to collective action problems is a movement from the bottom up. For instance, people can make mutual pledges not to give bribes and can hold each other accountable. They can also vote en masse for anti-corruption candidates. I am convinced that making government information transparent is valuable just to the degree that people organize themselves to use the data effectively and constructively; on its own, transparency accomplishes nothing.

Bottom-up efforts are difficult: it is always easy to cheat, to lose momentum, or to encounter disabling divisions within a popular movement. But I think that if popular movements are worth anything in the 21st century, they must take on corruption. And unless corruption is addressed from the bottom-up, it will continue to block social justice around the world.

why I stand with Ukraine

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(This was written in Lviv, but posted in Cambridge, MA).

We all receive moral and political inheritances. Although the stories of our ancestors are not equally attractive, we all have exactly the same responsibility: to recognize our whole birthright, to address the shameful parts, and to use the best aspects of our histories to improve the human condition. I observe influential Ukrainians doing that very well right now, while the leaders and dominant voices in Russia do it very badly. And that is why I believe it is essential that Ukraine prevails.

Seamus Heaney’s narrator seeks admission to the “Republic of Conscience.”

At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

Note: the immigration clerk does not show a picture of the would-be entrant, but rather of her or his grandfather. The photo symbolizes the past that we each must carry–both for good and ill. We cannot shed that inheritance without also renouncing all the other ways that our past has shaped us, including even the language with which we think.

The past also gives each of us gifts, and conscience demands that we offer them to humanity:

The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

It is tempting for an outsider to evaluate the inheritance of a given people and to draw comparative moral judgments about them as a whole group. Canadians born a few miles north of the US border are dealt a hand without the cards for slavery and genocidal settlement that I carry because I was born not far south of that same border. In that sense, at least, the Canadian inheritance is better.

I am not a relativist; I would insist that some political histories and cultures are superior to others. But there are two reasons not to focus on comparative judgments of this kind. If the inheritance of a people is largely evil (which I would not say of the US, by the way), it is too easy to ignore that people’s potential for doing good in the future. And if their inheritance happens to be largely innocent, it is naïve to assume that they will continue to act well once they obtain power.

I have been visiting a country at war. To the east are people who call themselves “Russians.” They carry a thick book of history. One way to make sense of it is to say that the story began in the late 800s in Kiev. That does not imply that Kiev rightly belongs to Moscow today (the reverse would actually be more logical), but some Russian nationalists have drawn that inference. In any case, what followed after Kievan Rus has been–in this version–a long story of patriotism, suffering, military valor, victory under strong rulers, defense of Orthodoxy and other orthodoxies, and resistance to the decadence of the west and south. This is Putin’s way of playing the mixed deck that history handed him.

But it is not the only way. One could tell a story in which the diverse peoples who live within Russia are constantly being oppressed by bloodthirsty rulers from the capital, yet they show a special gift for turning their suffering into witness, resistance, and empathy. Then the best cards in the hand show Decembrists, Turgenev and Pushkin, and Akhmatova and Sakharov, and the worst show Stalin or the Tsars.

Ukrainians have also been dealt a vast and varied deck. One would have to give a different list for any Ukrainian city, but Lviv has been part of at least the Halych-Volyn Principality, the Kingdom of Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg, Austrian and Austro-Hungarian Empire, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Republic of Poland, the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and the Republic of Ukraine. Lviv can count among its famous citizens the Polish saint Józef Bilczewski, the German-Jewish-Israeli philosopher Martin Buber, the Austrian-American economist Ludwig von Mises, the Ukrainian national poet Ivan Franko, and Muhammad Assad, born Leopold Weiss, who translated the Koran into English and played a role in the founding of Pakistan.

A modern Ukrainian can play these and many more inherited cards in many ways—and can even decide whether or not to identify as a Ukrainian in the first place.

One important and influential group of modern Ukrainians views their inheritance thus: They are a pluralistic people, drawing from many roots. All of the residents of Lviv named above are part of the Ukrainian story. Ukrainians of all backgrounds have flourished best under governments that have been explicitly pluralistic, even when the center of gravity has lain far away, in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth or in Austria. That is one reason the European Union seems so attractive to Ukrainian protesters that some carried the EU flag into fatal conflicts with the police.

They also have a tradition of republican self-government that began in Kievan Rus, when the people held assemblies called veches to elect their leaders. The tradition reemerged in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth, the Cossack states, the late Austrian empire (when there was a Galician parliament in Lviv) and the two Maidan uprisings, when the impromptu meetings were again called veches.

Yes, some Ukrainians were complicit or even aggressively active in pogroms, slave raids, oppressions of serfs, the Shoah, and communist atrocities; but these are inheritances that the modern republic can explicitly acknowledge and mourn.

Meanwhile, I do not currently observe an influential movement of the same type in Russia, one that tries to make the liberal, pluralistic, and humane traditions of that country central while treating militaristic machismo as a threat to the Russian people and peace. A fine article by Karine Clément gives some insight into brave Russian organizers who are creating valuable spaces for democratic engagement; but the date of that article is 2008, and the subsequent seven years have been hard ones.

The reason that liberals are influential in Ukraine and vanishingly marginal in Russia is not that Ukrainians are superior to Russians. No people is superior, and in any case, the differences in their current situations can probably be traced to local and recent contingencies, such as the greater efficiency of the Russian security and media agencies and the flood of petrodollars that fund them. But the fact remains that Ukrainians who are cosmopolitan, liberal, and republican hold considerable power in their country, and there is nothing similar right now in Russia.

It is a deep disappointment that, seven decades after the Second World War, so much of the world is dominated by regimes that are militaristic, authoritarian, and nationalist, devoted to the cult of the strong (male) leader, and content to combine kleptocratic crony capitalism with state repression. One could mention Xi Jinping, Nerendra Modi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and many more along with Putin–and American voters are not immune to similar attractions. But Ukraine is a place where civil society has confronted the authoritarian wave and now has a chance to prevail.

And that is why I stand with the Ukrainian people and believe that their country is a front line in our era’s struggle for democracy and human rights.

heading to Ukraine

the Civic Studies Institute spreads to Ukraine

propaganda in Russia and in the USA

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(Washington, DC) Russian media serves a steady diet of stories about how the crashed Malaysian airplane was filled with already-dead bodies; definitive proof that Ukraine shot it down to frame the Russian separatists; and even evidence that it’s the same Malaysian jet that vanished in March in the southern hemisphere, stored secretly and deployed now in a plot to hurt Russia. (For a sample of this coverage—I don’t know how representative—see the English version of Pravda today.) Maria Snegovaya reports that the Russian media generates very strong domestic popular support for Putin’s policies.

Western writers like Julia Ioffe criticize Russian propaganda. Russians write back in the comment fields to denounce such criticism. Many make tu quoque arguments: America does all of this, too (i.e., the propaganda, the killing, or both). They are correct that the following problems are not limited to Russia but are also prevalent in countries like the USA:

Deliberate manipulation of public opinion by governments and media companies;
Macho, militaristic nationalism and its reliable appeal to mass publics;
Confirmation bias, or the preference for information that reinforces one’s existing views and interests; and
Valuing the lives of one’s own countrymen far above the lives of foreigners.

Without these phenomena, it would be hard to explain why the US invaded Iraq after 9/11, how most Americans can forget US involvement in Central American genocide when the victims’ children try to migrate across our borders, or how we can tolerate assassinations by drone missile.

On the other hand, making the tu quoque argument is not good for Russia or for Russians. The United States and other democracies have mechanisms for error-correction and accountability that may be badly flawed and frayed today, but that are still hard-won and worth fighting to defend. They are absent in Putin’s Russia. Russians are the primary victims of that lack.

One mechanism is partisan competition. George W. Bush dominated American public opinion at the onset of the Iraq War. But a little-known Illinois state senator was one of those who strongly criticized the invasion. Six years and a few months later, that state senator succeeded Bush in the White House, having benefited politically from his opposition to the war. I am not satisfied by the Schumpeterian justification for elections—that they allow us to vote the incumbent idiots out when their performance becomes intolerable. But a Schumperian democracy is better than none at all. Incumbents are vulnerable; the opposition has powerful incentives to criticize them. Those protections are missing in Putin’s Russia.

Additional protections come from a genuinely independent civil society and press. I realize it is hard to demonstrate that the press and civil society are more effective in the US than in Russia, since they are not working all that well here. Mark Kleiman writes:

Russian mass media is now dominated by an extreme-nationalist lunatic fringe, built up by Putin and his cronies but no longer under their detailed control. … It’s a scary picture. What’s scarier is that, if you change the names, it applies to the relationships among the plutocrats, the GOP apparatchiki, and the world of the Murdochized press, the Koch-driven think-tanks, and Red Blogistan.

That is a claim of equivalence. I heard a similar argument in June from a Russian delegation of academics who visited me in my office. They insisted that they have more NGOs (millions!) than we do and that Putin funds them to ensure their independence from Western influence. I had no crisp refutation to offer, nor was I interested in asserting our system’s superiority. The worthwhile question is not which country has a better public sphere. But I am highly skeptical that Russians are, in fact, being served by an independent press or a robust civil society. If my skepticism is correct, then they and their neighbors (not Americans) are the ones who will suffer.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal