It is a thankless task to attempt to assess the stability of any country during a period when even liberal democracies are facing a crisis of governability.1 And the task is made more difficult when one is dealing with a country like Ukraine that is in the throes of a prolonged and difficult post-Communist transition. Nevertheless, an analysis that can shed some light on the complex factors affecting stability in Ukraine would be a useful, albeit modest, step forward.
The issue of stability in Soviet successor states has attracted a great deal of attention in the West because of a continuing preoccupation with the Soviet legacy and fears that the region will remain a zone of unrest that may eventually require some form of significant Western intervention. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the most immediate concern was the fate of its nuclear weapons and accompanying production facilities. Ukraine attracted special attention because of fears that its leaders might attempt to gain operational control of the large number of nuclear weapons on its territory in 1991.
That anxiety has now abated, but concerns remain that the deterioration of the physical and human infrastructure of the nuclear energy industry in Ukraine could lead to more Chernobyl-type accidents or the proliferation of nuclear weapons materials and technology. In the meantime, other concerns have arisen, including the prospect of continued economic decline and the spread of civil conflicts in Ukraine, either of which could lead to an influx of refugees into Western Europe or the need for greater Western involvement in the region. An American National Intelligence report (reflecting the views of the American intelligence community and the State Department), the details of which were leaked to the press at the end of January 1994, supports this concern, mentioning that Ukraine was the most likely former Soviet republic to precipitate a major continentwide crisis.2
Western commentaries frequently refer to a number of actual or potential threats to Ukraine stability. These include continuing economic decline, which has led to growing social distress and great dissatisfaction among the population; an increase in ethnic tensions and their potential transformation into communal conflict; centrifugal trends, sometimes linked to ethnic grievances, resulting in autonomist or separatist movements; weak and discredited political institutions and widespread political apathy, which could leave the country open to the rise of authoritarian rulers or outside interference in its internal affairs; and a growth in tensions between Ukraine and Russia.3 An examination of the factors influencing Ukraine's stability should also devote some attention to the behavior of institutions, such as the military and security forces, that can play an important role in deterring attempts to destabilize the situation in Ukraine or can themselves become destabilizing forces in certain circumstances.
Assessments of the significance of these threats to Ukraine stability have been hampered because Ukraine remains an unpredictable terra incognita for most statesmen and scholars, as well as the public at large, in North America and Western Europe. Whatever the negative images associated with Russia, this country and its people traditionally had a prominent profile in the West, largely because popular treatments of the Soviet Union frequently equated this state with Russia. This facile equation was broadly accepted, even if only at a subconscious level, in many political and academic circles in the West. After the USSR's disintegration, the great majority of the officials and scholars who had followed developments in the USSR switched their attention, without much difficulty, to Russia. Interest in other regions of the former Soviet Union has grown rapidly in recent years, but the inertia inherent in traditional Moscow-centered, Russocentric views of developments in the Soviet Union means that many scholars and analysts have had great difficulty adjusting to the new post-Soviet circumstances. As a result, the amount of analytical literature dealing with Ukraine and other Soviet successor states (with the exception of Russia) is still limited, and the situation in Ukraine has often been viewed through the prism of developments in Moscow.4 In this context Ukraine has sometimes been viewed as a "problem," complicating the West's relations with Russia, which in many respects regards itself (and has, on the whole, been regarded in the West) as the "legitimate" successor to the Soviet Union.
This is not to deny that there have been good reasons to be concerned about Ukraine's stability. However, in spite of numerous predictions of civil war, the country's breakup, the rapid establishment of Russian hegemony over Ukraine, and other dire outcomes, to date these scenarios have not materialized. Further, any discussion of the sources of instability in Ukraine must also address the reasons for its relative stability to date and the prospects for the maintenance of this stability.
Even the term stability is ambiguous. At one extreme one can talk of a certain "minimal" stability--the absence of civil war and other forms of open armed conflict on a state's territory. If a given state exists in a very turbulent environment, maintaining this minimal level of stability is of crucial importance. In the rapidly changing setting of the Former Soviet Union (FSU), characterized by widespread violence in Tadzhikistan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and now Russia (Chechnya), the absence of large-scale civil strife certainly establishes an important "bottom line" of stability.
In such a turbulent environment stability is often achieved through means far from democratic, and the need to preserve domestic stability in a hostile setting is often used as a ready excuse to maintain dictatorial forms of rule. However, where this minimal stability has been achieved through inflexible authoritarianism, by maintaining the old status quo or by addressing serious internal problems only when they can no longer be safely ignored, it can quickly and easily break down.
At the other extreme one could argue that a state is most stable when the structures that maintain the state and the personnel occupying these structures are very flexible and capable of quickly and creatively responding to ever-present internal and external pressures for change. It is sometimes argued that only powerful and highly skilled elites can properly manage a society facing such pressures. However, there is a general consensus that a political system will be healthier and more stable the more a population as a whole, and its politically active representatives in particular, are drawn into a democratic political process and influence this process through their activity in a wide range of public organizations independent of government control ("civil society").
Some of the states of the FSU (e.g., Estonia) have shown that they are capable of rising above the challenge of simply avoiding civil war. To the surprise of many observers even Ukraine has been marked by an absence of violent domestic strife. During most of the post-independence period, however, there were numerous indications that destabilizing trends were pushing Ukraine toward a crisis situation, and pessimism concerning Ukraine's future was widespread both inside and outside Ukraine.
Certainly, at present Ukraine can only aim at a middle ground between the two poles of stability noted above. It is still far from effectively satisfying even the basic needs of a large part of its population, and many structures in Ukraine are fully preoccupied with simply maintaining the status quo. In fact, in many respects Ukraine continues to exist in a profound state of disequilibrium.
Thus in 1995 the challenge facing Ukraine's leaders is not to forge ahead rapidly in creating a model, market-based, liberal democracy. Rather, the challenge is to combat effectively a number of destructive forces undermining the basis for a legitimate, law-governed, and economically viable state, and to promote a reform process that would begin to slow and then gradually reverse Ukraine's socioeconomic decline.
Given the numerous difficulties involved in assessing a country's stability, no attempt will be made in this paper to engage in facile predictions about the direction of long-term future developments in Ukraine. Rather, this is an attempt to assess the validity of current concerns regarding this country's stability and to analyze the factors that have influenced and will continue to influence the domestic political and socioeconomic situation in Ukraine. Special emphasis will be placed on evaluating how the current reform process may contribute to the country's success or failure in achieving "mid-range" stability. Some of the strategic implications of recent developments in Ukraine for regional security will also be discussed briefly.
In the end, any observations are inevitably based on a subjective evaluations of a very complex and constantly changing set of circumstances. They are informed evaluation, however, made by numerous visits to Ukraine and extensive research on political and security-related issues in Ukraine.