The reality of politics knocks the Orange Revolution for a loop.

Orange Turmoil
Is Yushchenko’s Democratic dream hopeless?
By Nikolas K. Gvosdev of National Review Online

The political crisis in Ukraine is a stark wake-up call for those politicians and pundits who were so quick last winter to laud what they viewed as the inevitable, quick triumph of democracy. It is also a reminder that there is no substitute for determined investment if the United States is to secure the benefits of “regime change.”

Paul Saunders and I drew a good deal of criticism for an essay (“On Liberty”) we penned earlier this year when we wrote, “Some act as if the emergence of democracy in a country were solely a matter of protests in a capital city’s main square … and they downplay the very real challenges needed to make democracies functional. Others, anxious to prove that the number of ‘democracies’ in the world is growing, seem more eager to color in new countries on the map as ‘democratic’ than to establish sustainable democracies that genuinely provide freedom, justice and a better quality of life to their citizens.” But in the aftermath of recent events in Kiev, I think our cautionary perspective has been vindicated. I’d also like to echo a point raised by John Mearsheimer, author of The Tragedy of Great Power Politics: “Realists are often accused of disliking democracy and even of being anti-democratic. This is a bogus charge. … Realists, however, are well aware of the difficulty of spreading democracy …”

Alright, enough theoretical posturing, and on to the question at hand: What’s happening in Ukraine?

Fulfilling the promises of the “Orange Revolution” — after all, Ukrainians (and Georgians and Kyrgyz, for their part) did not risk life and limb to protest electoral violations last November to dispossess one group of oligarchs in favor of empowering another group — was always going to be difficult. But Ukraine (like Serbia in 2000, or even Boris Yeltsin’s Russia in 1991) had two particular hurdles to overcome.

The first challenge was for Viktor Yushchenko to transform an umbrella opposition movement into a governing coalition. Up to the presidential elections, it was very clear what the various members of the opposition were against — they were against the authoritarian, crony-capitalism regime of outgoing president Leonid Kuchma; they were against the efforts of then prime-minister Viktor Yanukovych to fix the elections in his favor; they wanted Ukraine to join the Euro-Atlantic community. But the politicians, intellectuals, and tycoons who clustered together under Yushchenko’s banner had no common political agenda. Some wanted to pursue radical-free market reforms while others hankered for a kinder, gentler version of Soviet socialism. And while some were committed to ending the practice of using state power to apportion out the country’s economy, others were more than happy to retain Ukrainian crony-capitalism if they could be the beneficiaries. (And like the Clintons in the United States, a number of Ukrainian political figures who had applauded the media’s efforts to uncover corruption and malfeasance when it was directed against their opponents didn’t particularly care for any sort of in-depth investigative journalism into their own affairs.) Up to this week, Yushchenko tried to balance his populist-oligarch prime minister Yuliya Tymoshenko — whose exuberance and fiery rhetoric and popularity with the crowds many credit for the success of the Orange Revolution with Petro Poroshenko, a close ally whom he appointed as chairman of the security and defense council. But the exodus of several key officials — including Yushchenko’s own chief of staff — as well as increasingly bitter battles over the fate of a number of key Ukrainian assets (with different business groups lining up behind Tymoshenko and Poroshenko) ended this arrangement. Yushchenko has nominated a technocratic governor, Yuri Yekhanurov, as the new prime minister, but cannot bequeath his choice a majority in the Rada, Ukraine’s parliament. Whether the country can move ahead and whether the government can demonstrate a renewed commitment to fighting corruption and forging ahead with reform remains to be seen.

But the West can’t salve its own conscience by blaming this solely on the Ukrainians. Many of us today have a curious lapse of memory when talking about the transitions to democracy in Eastern Europe after 1989. We put forward a heroic tale about how Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, or Hungarians transformed dysfunctional communist regimes into flourishing democracies (and assume therefore that Ukrainians, Georgians, Iraqis, or Lebanese should do the same). But as John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven pointed out in the summer issue of The National Interest, it was the prospect of eventual membership in NATO and the European Union which forced discipline on the political and economic elites of Eastern Europe, enabling them to make the hard choices necessary to reform their societies.

Ahhh...democracy. The magic word.