For the time being, Ukraine’s transition to democracy is over. Less than a decade after the Orange Revolution, the country arrived in a grey zone between the EU and Russia. It may stay there for a while. The grey zone is not about geopolitical choices but about the absence of rules for the country’s leadership which controls all other branches of power; flawed elections; harassment of media and NGOs; and wealth being accumulated by the greedy president and his “family” members.
Yet, Yanukovych is not the main cause of Ukraine’s democracy downturn. He is a symptom of the state of Ukraine’s society. He is the product of his time and environment, one of many. Even new forces in Ukrainian politics offer little to get the country out of the grey zone. While the eyes of all major political players are now set on the 2015 presidential elections, there is little hope for the revival of Ukraine’s democracy just through a change of leadership.
So is the grey zone irreversible? Not at all. However, the change would not come fast and its source would be beyond the political elite—old or new. Ukraine is definitely not the Poland of the 1990s. It lacks both the elite and the population which would want to go back home, to Europe, and for which painful reforms would be a way of breaking away from the Soviet past. Also, there is little hope for another revolution—Ukrainians did undertake it once and did not enjoy the outcome. They are pretty skeptical about the protests in Russia, Egypt, and Turkey.
What may work here is an evolutionary path, which means that “daily democracy” will matter, and not just an electoral one. This is where the EU could help. While the western democratic model may suffer elsewhere in the world, its attractiveness in the EU’s Eastern neighborhood is a safe bet. The EU hardly needs to work hard “to demonstrate its capacity to build happier society” as Dmitri Trenin suggests. According to the recent poll of the Kyiv-based Razumkov centre, more than half of Ukrainians expect bigger benefits for governance, democracy, and economy from the EU—Ukraine Association Agreement (which does not even offer a membership perspective) than from the membership in the Eurasian Customs Union.
Still struggling to impose change from the top with the Association Agreement in Ukraine, the EU should complement it with reaching out to the Ukrainian population beyond the small group of pro-European NGOs. And if the EU really feels the need to compete with Russia, the first rule will be to use its own weapon, and not to borrow from Moscow. Helping change the mindset of the Ukrainian population through sharing experience of countries that went through difficult democratic transitions (Spain, Portugal, and Finland) will thus be key. This could be done through opening borders for ordinary citizens and a drastic increase of exchange programs and scholarships for Ukrainian students.