Diplomacy & Crisis News

Michelle Bachelet has just been tapped as the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights—but her predecessor’s experience should make her wary.

The decision of the Thai Government to grant citizenship to three of the boys recently rescued after being trapped in a flooded cave, along with their football coach, has been welcomed by UN Refugee Agency, UNHCR.

The country's pioneering surveillance and response system is entirely Chinese-built and funded.

 

With the decline of the old colonial powers such as Great Britain and France after World War II, the Soviet Union stepped into the stage of the Middle East as the major superpower. The process was hastened through the advent of various forms of movements and revolutions for independence in the Middle East during the 1950s and 1960s. The Soviets, who previously had hardly any chance for colonizing the region, found their propitious moment to present themselves as champions of the cause of “anti-colonialism” and “anti-imperialism”, and by that to embark upon their own full-fledged project of expansionism in the Middle East.

In the meantime, the emergence of the Jewish State in the former British colony of Palestine precipitated the Russian intervention in the Middle East. Contrary to what might be popularly believed, during the initial phases of the life of modern Israel, the Soviet Union assumed a favorable stance towards it. Though the Communists were suspicious of the Zionist movement lest it provoke the Jewish Russians and Ukrainians, the Soviet Union voted in favor of the UN partition plan for Palestine in 1947. In addition, when the first all-out war broke out between Jews and Arabs in 1948, the Soviet Union stepped in again to supply the Jews with much-needed arms.

Whatever the reason for this initial assistance to Israel, the Soviet Union eventually found its main allies in the Middle East not in the Jews but in the Arabs who, as it happened, were partly provoked to a high-pitched revolutionary nationalist mood as a consequence of the rise of a highly nationalist-conscious Jewish State in their neighborhood. Indeed it can be said that Stalin’s gambit with Israel paid off with pulling the Arabs towards the Soviet pole in the long run.

In that climate, the Tsarist “civilizing mission” that, as a principal part of the Communist ideology in the Soviet Union, had now become couched in the pompous claim of “historical responsibility” of “liberating the oppressed nations”, would appeal to many Arabs and would most significantly turn into a constant of the Arab revolutions and the states that emerged from them. By then, the Ba’ath ideology, which mingled a highly distilled Arab Nationalism with a somewhat diluted Soviet Communism, became the most apparent manifestation of Russophilia in the Middle East.

The roots of the Ba’ath go back to the early 1940s when two Syrian Communist intellectuals, namely Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, in their desire to make an “Arab Renaissance” after the dismantling of the ancient colonial empires, started to draw the contours of an eclectic Arab revival. Ba’ath itself means “renaissance” in Arabic. Ba’athism promoted as its most basic principles anti-imperialism, anti-Israelism, Pan-Arabism, Arab unity, Arab Nationalism, and Arab Socialism. In a traditional culture where old family and tribal ties played the most significant part in power politics, as a result of which the majority of the population would have to stay out of politics and only watch their betters act, the Ba’ath ideology promised a new hope for social justice.

Syria and Egypt were the first Arab states to embrace modified forms of Arab Socialism/Ba’thism, and later Iraq, Yemen and Libya would follow suit. Riding the popular waves of revolutions and coups against obsolete and corrupt monarchies, the socialist military rose to power in those countries. That is why the backbone of Arab Socialism was – and still is – militarism. While the ancien régime would prop itself up on the support of the land-owners and propertied middle class, Arab Socialism would find its most vocal proponents among the ranks of the poor and the working class as well as the intellectuals.

However, despite its profession to socialism, in reality Arab Socialism would mostly depend on populism, charismatic rule, and militarism. Already nurturing the seeds of despotism, from the early 1960s all kinds of Arab Socialism, including Ba’athism, drifted towards ruthless dictatorships. The bloody 1958 coup in Iraq that brought to power General Abd al-Karim Qasim and then the 1966 coup in Syria that laid the foundations of the future Assad autocracy manifested such developments in the Ba’ath ideology towards a more authoritarian form of government, which in distinction to Ba’athism proper is usually called “Neo-Ba’athism.”

The civil war in Yemen that was sparked as a result of a Communist takeover was another major trend towards the rise of the more authoritarian form of Arab Socialism. When the Communist army officers deposed Imam Muhammad al-Badr, the king of Yemen, and established a revolutionary government in the Republic of North Yemen, Badr sought the assistance of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the two foremost Arab monarchies at that time, to make war on the revolutionaries. Naturally, Egypt would militarily intervene on behalf of the revolutionary government while the Soviet Union would provide strategic and technical assistance. The proxy war between the old-guard Arab Monarchists and the vanguard Arab Socialists continued up to the late 1960s when the Arabs’ confrontation with Israel would put a necessary stop to the conflict among themselves.

Egypt’s dramatic change of policy towards Israel and the Soviet Union, which effectively terminated the project of Russian expansionism in the Middle East, had dire consequences for Ba’thism. Thenceforward, with the gradual decline of the Ba’ath ideology and the fall of most of the Ba’athist despots and dictators like Saddam Hussein, the Soviet cultural hegemony would also recede from the region. As a result, the last bulwark of that trend of Russophilia in today’s Middle East proves to be the Assad regime in Syria, where Russians have a stake: their last Middle Eastern naval facility in the Syrian port of Tarsus. It’s no wonder why President Putin of Russia is intent upon keeping the genocidal Assad in power at any cost.

Cette recension a été publiée dans le numéro d’été de Politique étrangère (n° 2/2018). Norbert Gaillard propose une analyse de l’ouvrage dirigé par Roger E. Backhouse, Bradley W. Bateman, Tamotsu Nishizawa et Dieter Plehwe, Liberalism and the Welfare State: Economists & Arguments for the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2017, 264 pages).

Ce brillant ouvrage collectif analyse les liens – plus complexes qu’il n’y paraît – entre libéralisme et État-providence dans trois grands pays développés : Royaume-Uni, Allemagne et Japon.

Le premier chapitre, consacré au Royaume-Uni, rappelle que ce sont les gouvernements libéraux de Henry Campbell-Bannerman et Herbert Asquith (1905-1916) qui lancent les grandes mesures en faveur des retraités, des travailleurs et des chômeurs. À partir de l’entre-deux-guerres cependant, la tradition libérale se scinde en deux grands courants intellectuels irréconciliables.

D’un côté, le « New Liberalism » et l’économiste Arthur Pigou s’attachent à défendre l’idée de bien-être, qui servira de base à l’organisation de l’État-providence par William Beveridge en 1942. De l’autre côté, un certain nombre de libéraux comme Robbins s’opposent à cet interventionnisme croissant : c’est l’émergence du néolibéralisme, porté sur les fonts baptismaux en 1947 lors de la création de la Société du Mont-Pèlerin (SMP) par Friedrich Hayek et Ludwig von Mises. Durant les trois décennies d’après-guerre, conservateurs comme travaillistes – qui ont supplanté le parti libéral – poursuivent des politiques d’inspiration keynésienne et approfondissent l’État-providence.

Outre-Rhin, le panorama est bien différent. L’économie sociale de marché des années 1950-1960 se présente comme le fruit de l’« ordolibéralisme » et de la « compensation sociale ». Concrètement, l’État adopte de multiples mesures d’assurance sociale (en accord avec les syndicats), tout en garantissant la stabilité monétaire, le respect de la propriété privée, la libre concurrence et les grands équilibres budgétaires. La doxa keynésienne ne sera véritablement suivie qu’en 1967-1974, sous la houlette des socio-démocrates Willy Brandt et Karl Schiller.

Le cas japonais est singulier. L’essor de l’après-guerre s’est accompli selon des modalités éloignées des principes keynésiens, et plus encore des théories libérales. Le Japon a en fait suivi un modèle développementaliste, où les politiques industrielles visent à maximiser le taux de croissance du PIB en stimulant les exportations. En parallèle, un système universel de sécurité sociale et un salaire minimum sont institués sous les gouvernements Kishi et Ikeda (1957-1964). Le néolibéral Katsuichi Yamamoto craignait qu’une telle politique n’alimente l’inflation, et ne sape la solidarité intergénérationnelle.

La crise économique des années 1970 conduit à une remise en cause progressive de l’État-providence. Au Royaume-Uni, les relais de la SMP et le Tory Keith Joseph convainquent Margaret Thatcher d’épouser les thèses néo­libérales qui triompheront durant la décennie 1980. Le chapitre sur le New Labour montre que le gouvernement de Tony Blair (1997-2007), loin de démanteler l’État-providence, l’a au contraire réorganisé. En Allemagne, le principal vecteur du néolibéralisme est l’Initiative Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft. Créée en 2000, elle milite surtout en faveur de la flexibilisation du marché du travail, estimant que les lois Hartz vont dans la bonne direction mais demeurent insuffisantes. Le tournant néolibéral au Japon, impulsé par le gouvernement Koizumi (2001-2006), est à la fois tardif et timide.

Norbert Gaillard

S’abonner à Politique étrangère

With elections approaching in October, Russia has ramped up its support for Bosnia's Serb separatists.

Réfugié en Biélorussie au terme du soulèvement populaire qui l'a renversé, M. Kourmanbek Bakiev affirme être toujours le président du Kirghizstan. Le gouvernement intérimaire, lui, annonce une réforme politique ainsi que la tenue d'élections présidentielle et législatives pour stabiliser le pays. / Asie, (...) / Asie, Asie centrale, Kirghizstan - 2010/05

In 2014, the Islamic State’s massacre of the Northern Iraqi Sinjar District changed thousands of Yazidi – as well as Christian, Shia, and other non-Sunni – lives.  Though many were able to flee quickly, those left behind would unknowingly be subject to the Islamic State’s pre-planned objectives of mass genocide and abduction. While this massacre – now years old – has captured global attention, the situation for the majority of the Yazidis has not improved.  With this article, I want to call attention to the new, ongoing struggle the Yazidi – particularly Yazidi women – are facing, and what I hope will be done for the sake of these survivors.

 

Background: The 2014 Massacre 

The Yazidi are a Kurdish-speaking religious sect – though distinctly different from Kurds – who are indigenous to Northern Mesopotamia, part of contemporary Northern Iraq. While their faith combines several elements from monotheistic religions like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism, the Yazidis have faced discrimination from fundamentalists like the Islamic State (Daesh), whose view of Yazidis as devil-worshipping infidels made the religious sect a prime target for genocide.

Two months before the 2014 summer massacre, the third division of the Iraqi army, which included many Yazidis, based around Sinjar fell to Daesh, making the entire district vulnerable. That August, Daesh launched an attack on the Sinjar district. An estimated 50,000 to 250,000 people were able to flee, but those who could not get out in time faced inexplicable horrors. The Yazidi were separated by age and gender and, as a report explains,

Women and children under the age of seven were transferred to holding sites. The women were sold as sexual slaves to Daesh fighters in Iraq and Syria, often with their young children. Males above the age of 12 who would not renounce their faith were summarily executed… [while] men who were forcibly converted to Islam were sent to various territories in Iraq and Syria to perform manual labor. Boys between the ages of 7 and 12 were sent to Daesh indoctrination and training camps to become fighters themselves. Girls above the age of 9 were separated from their mother and sold as slaves. (Canadian Department of Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship).

In a matter of days, an estimated 10,000 Yazidis were killed or kidnapped during the massacre. While the true number of casualties may never be known, an estimated 3,000 were executed – thrown into pits, beheaded, burned alive – while others died of dehydration or other injuries; additionally, 6,000-7,000 women and children were taken as sex slaves and rewards for militants. This mass abduction of Yazidi women and girls, as well as the torturing and sexual abuse, by Daesh militants went initially unnoticed amid the chaos and destruction of the August massacre.

Once taken, Yazidi captives – unmarried women and girls over the age of nine – were relocated to prearranged locations in Iraq and first given to militants who attacked Sinjar, then sold on makeshift slave markets where they were raped by, married off to, and/or passed around between militants. To avoid this fate, some girls killed themselves, disfigured or smeared themselves with ash or blood to seem unattractive to potential buyers, pretended to be mute or deaf, or cut younger girls’ hair to make them look like boys.

 

Since then, what’s been going on?

Since the 2014 massacre, some progress has been made against Daesh: Iraqi forces drove the Islamic State out of Mosul and other parts of Northern Iraq in 2016, Kurdish and Iraqi forces liberated millions throughout 2017, and internationally unified coalitions have committed to and have made progress taking away Daesh territory.

Despite these noteworthy and merited advances against Daesh-occupied territory, international interest in the Yazidi has faded, while initiatives for stability and healing leave much to be desired for these survivors. Though 3,000 women and children still remain in captivity and the pace of rescues remains slow and sporadic, those who have managed to escape still struggle to survive. Left without income, identity papers, and most of their families, Yazidi women have to fight for their futures while facing the burden of deep psychological and physical trauma.

Living conditions for surviving Yazidis who remain in Iraq and Syria only complicate their daily struggles further. Most have been living in displaced persons camps and temporary shelters in northern Iraq for the past four years, though the UN had made a statement that temporary living for the Yazidi would only last a year. The temporary shelters many Yazidis find themselves in are, frankly, deplorable. Their makeshift homes – tents or abandoned construction sites – have no electricity or running water and have proven unsafe, with reports of fire and flooding destroying many of the tents. Further, lack of state institutions – as well as the recent economic crisis – in Iraq has left many of the Yazidi population without means to bring in income, rebuild their homes, seek help for trauma, and live free from fear of future violence.

 

What needs to be done in the future?

Responses that promote and aid in the Yazidi community’s recovery are necessary. Not only should past and present perpetrators of violence against the Yazidi be brought to justice, but the physical and emotional needs of the surviving populace must also be addressed.

For starters, the overburdened Iraqi courts have tried thousands of suspected Daesh members and collaborators, delivering verdicts for around 2,800 suspected members of the Islamic State in 2017 alone. While many more still await prosecution, most trials only last a few minutes and leave little-to-no room for victim participation or opportunity for perpetrators to confess and repent. Further, Daesh collaborators and militants are mostly convicted for membership in a terrorist organization rather than for genocide. This delivers hardly any justice to the Yazidi or other victims and survivors of genocide, especially as the investigations into crimes committed against them are slow-moving. Though the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) and the Commission for Investigation and Gathering Evidence (CIGE) in Iraq signed an agreement in February of this year to collaborate on missing persons investigations, these investigations will likely take years. Part of effective recovery for the Yazidi, particularly female victims or sexual slavery and violence, will be seeing perpetrators brought to justice, which makes the investigations into Daesh’s crimes all the more pressing.

Additionally, the physical and emotional state of many Yazidis – perhaps the most crucial to their recovery – is problematic and obviously needs to be attended to. Camp conditions discussed above are clearly inadequate and unsafe for Yazidi refugees, most of whom are likely to have limited access to formal education, health services, and psychological support. The lack of services is likely due to insufficient funding and attention to refugee camps and temporary shelters, which only prolongs the situation for the Yazidi. Some programs, like the trauma healing therapy program conducted by the Emma Organization and the photojournalism workshop conducted by UNICIEF, have shown to provide opportunities for healing and progress for the Yazidi community, but much more needs to be done. Besides providing funding and accessible, vital resources, Yazidism must be recognized in different religious communities as legitimate, as it would help in destigmatizing Yazidis and taking away excuses to attack their community.

 

The Yazidi are a community of survivors and, having faced indescribable and harrowing atrocities, they continue to persevere in the fight for a better quality of life. With continuing help from exceptional organizations and people who are working to support and advocate for the Yazidi, increased international attention to the Yazidi’s needs would expedite and facilitate their recovery.

The trade war is a sign of a global system gone badly wrong.

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The United States should respond to Beijing's aggression by upholding freedom of navigation.

The government’s crackdown proves that the ruling party will hold on to power by any means necessary.

>> Retrouvez l’article dont est extraite cette citation : « L’Inde de Modi : un développement pour tous écorné », écrit par Isabelle Saint-Mézard, chercheur associé au Centre Asie, dans le numéro d’été 2018 de Politique étrangère (n° 2/2018). <<

Trump officials can secure large reductions in Iran’s oil exports. But doing so requires the administration to navigate both complex global oil markets and a multilevel diplomatic game.

Saudi Arabia has started a crisis with Canada because it doesn't want to admit its own failings.

The U.S. administration is reluctant to help with Syrian recovery.

Realists need to get a lot more realistic about the global legal system.

The United Nations and foreign powers claim they are dedicated to building up the Somali National Army. Instead, they have become complicit in its dysfunction.

Dans son ouvrage « L'Argent et les Mots », le directeur de la maison d'édition The New Press (New York) montre comment un pays de petite taille et plutôt isolé — la Norvège — a su préserver des médias indépendants, protéger l'édition et le secteur culturel, tout en encourageant la créativité. / Europe, (...) / Europe, Cinéma, Culture, État, Industrie culturelle, Information, Littérature, Livre, Médias, Presse, Norvège - 2010/03

Four years after Russia annexed Crimea and Russia-backed separatists revolted against the Ukrainian government in 2014, new clashes in the prolonged conflict have caused a spike in casualties. While Ukraine continues to counter the military challenge in the east of its territory, Kyiv has simultaneously undertaken unprecedented and ever-new attempts at reform. As Ukraine nears its 2019 presidential election, hot topics include a possible future UN peacekeeping mission in the Donbas, massive reforms to the country’s public healthcare system, resetting Ukraine’s electoral system, and countering oligarchic power by ending parliamentarian immunity or creating a specialized anti-corruption court. Among the lesser discussed, yet equally important issues for the future of Ukraine, in terms of both governance and its struggle with Russia, is establishing and codifying the proper balance between central and sub-national governance. This means both the decentralization of certain powers from the national government and the amalgamation of small communities into more-easily administered, geographically larger units. Ukraine’s steps towards “right-sizing” the state and codifying the balance of local, regional, and national governance powers through constitutional reform would also contribute to resolving its most pressing security challenges.

 

Ukraine’s Success with Decentralization

Despite the war in the Donets Basin (Donbas) and the severe economic downturn that accompanied it, Ukraine’s central government has not recentralized the country’s public finances. Subnational governments continue to receive about 40 percent of public revenue. This underappreciated fact has been the case since the 1990s and makes Ukraine – at least on paper – one of the most decentralized countries in Europe. Countries at war and in economic distress typically centralize public finances. The opposite has happened in Ukraine: the share of total public revenue going to subnational governmental levels has increased from about 38 percent in 2014 to about 41 percent in 2017, even though total public revenues have declined because of the deep recession triggered by Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in the Donbas. In short, the national government has remained impressively committed to decentralization, despite considerable pressure to recentralize public finances.

This is commendable because Ukraine’s success in comprehensive local governance reform is essential for creating accountable and transparent public administration. It also plays a key role in bolstering Ukrainian national security. Russia exploited Ukraine’s regional diversity and considerable subnational dissatisfaction with its new government in Kyiv in 2014 when provoking, supplying, supporting, and leading armed separatism on Crimea and in the Donbas. Russia’s success in these regions underscored the importance of better organized national-subnational relations in Ukraine going forward.

Accordingly, many Ukrainian politicians see decentralization as a bulwark against Russia’s hybrid warfare in Ukraine. As, for instance, the Speaker of the national parliament, Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council), Andriy Parubiy, argued during the 2nd All-Ukrainian Forum of United Territorial Communities in Kyiv in December 2017, “The path of decentralization was an asymmetrical response to the aggressor [i.e. Russia]. In fact, the process of capable communities formation was a kind of sewing of the Ukrainian space.” The country’s fate depends greatly on whether it can consolidate the national state while restructuring the composition, roles, responsibilities, and finances of regional and local governments.

 

Stitching Communities Together

Ukraine’s key governance-balancing reforms at the local level over the last three years has centered on uniting smaller local communities (singular: hromada, plural: hromady) into larger “united territorial communities,” or UTCs (Ukrainian: ob’’ednani terytorial’ni hromady). The logic behind Ukraine’s efforts in consolidating small hromady into larger self-governing entities is that many of the old communities – with an average population of about 1,500 – were (or still are) too small to organize, finance, and/or deliver public services to their residents efficiently.

Beginning in 2015, the process of government-encouraged amalgamation of small communities into larger organizational entities started. Kyiv has facilitated this voluntary process by giving UTCs a significant share of national tax revenue, as well as delegating new governance and administrative functions to them, including greater control of local land use planning and permitting, local fees, and administering local schools. The national government has also stimulated the UTCs by providing them with significant new investment grants and giving them access to the State Regional Development Fund (SRDF).

By May 10th, 2018, this policy had resulted in 3,399 smaller communities or 31.1% of all of the old basic units consolidating into 731 larger UTCs. Today, approximately 6.4 million people or approximately 18 percent of Ukraine’s population live in these new UTCs. For the first time, local communities have the legal authority and, increasingly, the human capital to design, build, run, and own larger infrastructural projects. The SRDF provides grants to help finance them.

UTCs have also started undertaking initiatives for cross-community cooperation also made possible through recent governance reforms. These cooperation agreements delegate particular tasks and respective resources from one community to another, combine resources to implement common projects, jointly finance common infrastructure, and create common executive bodies for realizing common tasks. By May 2018, 753 communities had concluded 180 cooperation agreements between each other in areas such as communal services, fire protection or infrastructure development, to name a few.

But as promising as the formation of UTCs has been, the voluntary nature of the unification process also has its problems. The slow pace of small community unification has delayed the process of redistributing administrative and executive control over basic public services to entities large enough to provide such services. As a result, in areas where small hromady have not yet amalgamated, they remain under the administrative and financial supervision of rayons (sub-regional administrative districts) and oblasts (regions), whose executive bodies are not democratically elected.

Moreover, the voluntary and unregulated process of amalgamation has frequently led to the creation of new communities with uncertain futures. In some cases, extremely rural hromady, worried about political domination if they merged with a nearby small local town, only agreed to combine with other rural units. In others, small towns with strong employment levels have discouraged rural hromady from merging with them, because those small towns do not want to divert their share of national taxes on their poorer neighbors. Reform experts in Kyiv and in the regions hotly debate the effects and effectiveness of amalgamation for the wide range of different communities.

As local hromady continue to form UTCs, these new jurisdictions still lack proper legal foundation. The national parliament has yet to pass additional legislation fully defining conditions for amalgamation. The central authorities have not yet clearly determined the exact role of the new communities in the country’s overall system of governance. Existing legislation concerning local government does not always refer to UTCs. Without a new comprehensive legal regime that extensively codifies how UTCs will eventually constitute the basic administrative division of the Ukrainian state, it is impossible to determine what function the old rayons (sub-regional governmental districts) will have once the majority of their functions are fully transferred to UTCs. This lack of clarity about the future structure of Ukraine’s territorial administration has only also slowed efforts to reform the education system and to restructure the country’s healthcare system.

 

Consequences for Public Services

Determining the exact responsibilities of democratically elected local governments at the municipal level (so-called “Cities of Regional Significance”) and community level (UTCs) in the fields of secondary education and healthcare represent two of the most important domains of Ukraine’s governance reforms. By May 2018, first tier, local governments were managing 37.3 percent (5,679) of all Ukrainian schools. The vast majority of the remaining, mostly rural schools are run by Kyiv-subordinate rayon administrations. As of March 2018, 519 schools have been upgraded to so-called “foundation” or “hub schools” (oporni shkoly). The new hub-schools in regional urban centers possess special equipment, prerogatives, expertise, and funds. The hub-schools are tasked with guiding and supervising 976 branch schools in nearby smaller communities.

Moving forward, the core challenge remains improving the quality of education – particularly in rural areas, where a shortage of human capital coincides with an over-abundance of tiny schools with very small classes, often with less than 10 pupils per classroom. Consolidating schools, like amalgamating rural localities, would pool resources, teaching talent, and students into more effective and efficient educational institutions. Control of around 63 percent of schools has yet to be transferred to UTCs from rayon-level (i.e. central governmental) administration. Less than half of newly amalgamated communities have taken full responsibility for their respective school systems. To date, the overall process and success of “right-sizing” educational services has been limited and fragmentary. Consolidating and widening these reforms’ impact requires inter alia the involvement of more amalgamated communities, a strengthening of the respective institutional capacity of the UTCs, as well as the equitable and adequate transfer of funds and resources for secondary education to the local level.

Ukraine’s healthcare system likewise stands to benefit from local administrative and governance reforms. Following the Verkhovna Rada’s (Supreme Council – Ukraine’s national parliament) October 20, 2017 approval of fundamental reforms to Ukraine’s healthcare system, the national government has begun taking steps to decentralize control over the provision of medical services to independent public and private healthcare facilities. These reforms, somewhat counterintuitively, simultaneously require the recentralization of monies currently given to large cities, oblasts, and rayons to run hospitals.

Moreover, the reforms will require consolidating existing hospital networks and reformulating local governments’ role within the healthcare system. The creation of new hospital districts are expected to result in a more rational division of primary and secondary healthcare services across facilities, leading to higher-quality healthcare. The new hospital districts are seen as the result and instrument of cooperation among different communities, as a framework for the long-term development of local hospitals, as well as capacity building in public health. The adopted reforms enable communities to choose different paths for ensuring provision of adequate healthcare services to citizens, ranging from the creation of their own communal hospitals to the conclusion of agreements with private healthcare providers to providing support for individual health practitioners. As it stands, the new plans for the healthcare sector mean that, while local governments may retain or acquire new hospitals and healthcare facilities, funding for the operational costs of those institutions will come directly from the national health care agency, not from local government budgets.

There are three additional challenges to establishing an accountable and transparent system of public service in Ukraine that respects the principles of participation and equality. First, is for Ukraine to determine whether oblasts and rayons are to be democratically-elected local governments or territorial arms of the national government. At the moment they are neither, because while they have democratically-elected councils, their executive authorities are still appointed by the higher levels of the national government.

Second, the current plans for decentralization controversially envision the creation of presidentially controlled regional prefects, whose primary function will be to ensure that local governments act in line with the constitution and national law. The constitutional amendment authorizing these prefects, however, has yet to pass. Oversight of the legality of local government decisions therefore remains in the hands of state-appointed executive authorities at the oblast level – a substandard system that duplicates regional and national functions at a single level of subnational government. Ukraine still needs an oversight mechanism for local government behavior that is functional, but does not concentrate unnecessary powers in its presidency.

The third, more systemic problem is that the success of administrative reform – especially the democratization of public services – greatly depends on the availability of capable human capital, which is in particularly short supply in rural areas. Practitioners of decentralization such as former Rava Ruska mayor, Iryna Vereshchuk, or coordinator of the Kherson Reform Support Office, Oksana Silukova, have recently reiterated that the lack of qualified staff members remains a – if not the – key challenge to the success of reforms. It will be impossible to realize the comprehensive societal transformations envisioned in these reforms without substantial external support for capacity building. Currently this support come in large part from several foreign development agencies.

 

Changes to Ukraine’s Fiscal Decentralization

As mentioned previously, Ukraine has opted not to recentralize public finances, despite the conflict in the Donbas. Such unusual behavior, during wartime, is an indicator of the depth of the social roots of, and political demand for, decentralization in Ukraine. The Ukrainian central government’s commitment to fiscal decentralization does not mean, however, that the various subnational layers of government have continued to receive their previous shares of the overall budgetary pie. Instead, oblasts (regions) and rayons (districts) have been receiving relatively less money, while big cities and UTCs now receive substantially more. The revenue shift from oblasts, rayons, and non-amalgamated hromady towards so-called “cities of regional significance” and UTCs has been the most important aspect of financial decentralization thus far. It signals Kyiv’s intention to create an administrative order in which cities and UTCs are the most important actors in the country’s system of sub-national government.  Nonetheless, Ukraine’s efforts at “municipalizing” its subnational system of local governance are still far from complete. Kyiv has yet to formally reapportion many of the administrative responsibilities of the country’s oblasts and rayon to “cities of regional significance” and UTCs. As a result, it remains unclear what exact roles oblasts and rayons will play in the new system, and, by extension, which functions and funds should be regularly assigned to “cities of regional significance” and UTCs.

 

Constitutional Reform and the Minsk Agreements

Despite several challenges, Ukraine continues moving forward relatively quickly with its governance reform efforts. Unlike other reform efforts since the Euromaidan Revolution, subnational governance restructuring has already produced real changes in how Ukraine is governed and has led to substantial changes in people’s daily lives – especially for Ukrainians living and working in the new UTCs. That said, Ukraine’s reforms still have fundamental problems. Most importantly, there is no clear vision of Ukraine’s overall system of public administration – including the exact division of powers across all levels and sectors of government – that is reflected in the text of Ukraine’s constitution and national legislation. Parliament has failed to adopt a variety of constitutional amendments related to governance “right-sizing” because the government has been unable to muster the super majority necessary for their passage. On some occasions, the government has lacked even the simple majority needed to pass ordinary laws related to local self-government.

The major reason that efforts to amend the constitution have failed is because the summer 2015 local governance-related reforms were, in accordance with the Minsk Agreements between Russia and Ukraine earlier that year, bundled together with a new constitutional clause about the special status of the eastern Donbas areas currently not under Kyiv’s control. The sentence in question contained little more than scant reference to certain peculiarities in governance in the temporarily occupied territories—the clause did not go so far as to establish a special status for those areas, as Russia demanded. Nevertheless, even this cautious formulation sparked violent protests in front of Ukraine’s parliament in August 2015, resulting in the deaths of four Ukrainian National Guardsmen. Ukraine must find a way to deal with both of these politically important, but controversial, issues.

The fact that Ukraine’s constitution does not yet reflect the reality of governance throughout the country is troubling. The amalgamation of communities, their cooperation agreements, as well as other decentralization-related novelties in Ukrainian political and social life, have brought real, positive changes to millions of Ukrainian’s lives. Yet, the nation’s fundamental legal document, so far, fails to recognize and regulate that progress. This omission introduces an unstable balance between the different layers of government and contributes to institutional instability. A simple future majority of 226 votes in the Verkhovna Rada could undo the considerable successes already achieved by these reforms to date. The Euromaidan Revolution promised Ukrainians a new era of responsible and responsive government, and the right-sizing is now starting to deliver on those promises. By failing, so far, to properly lock in the successful reforms on the legislative level, Ukraine risks failing the promises of Euromaidan.

 

This article was first published as a “Kennan Cable” by The Wilson Center in Washington, DC and written in collaboration between Maryna Rabinovych, Anthony Levitas, and Andreas Umland. 

Maryna Rabinovych is a PhD candidate at the National I.I. Mechnikov University of Odesa and the Global Community Manager of the Ukraine Democracy Initiative.

Anthony Levitas is Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, and an advisor to the SIDA-funded Support to Decentralization Project in Ukraine.