NATOSource
Featured Publications
Kazakhstan and the United States: Twenty Years of Ambiguous Partnership
The Five Futures of Cyber Conflict and Cooperation
US Lessons for the Eurozone Restoring Confidence through Transparency
Prospects and Challenges for Increasing India-Pakistan Trade
A US-EU Action Plan for Supporting Democratization: Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia
Council News
Jonathan Paris Discusses Syrian Crisis with France 24
Jonathan Paris, nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's South Asia Center, appeared on France 24 to discuss Russia's support for the Assad regime and what it means for a possible UN resolution against Syria.
Damon Wilson US Senate Testimony: Ukraine at a Crossroads
On February 1, Atlantic Council executive vice president Damon Wilson testified at a hearing of the US Senate Committe on Foreign Relations on the topic: "Ukraine at a Crossroads: What's at Stake for the US and Europe?"
Michele Dunne on US-Egypt Relations for NPR's Morning Edition
Relations between the US and Egypt have taken a downturn since Egyptian authorities raided the offices of seventeen nongovernmental organizations in December - three of them US-funded. Michele Dunne, director of the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East, spoke on NPR's Morning Edition about the situation and what it means for US aid to Egypt.
FEATURED ISSUE
The South Asia Center receives guidance and support from many experts throughout the world. Our senior fellows, guest-speakers, Center patrons, and visitors contribute heavily to the Center’s mission to “wage peace,” and engage the international community in the region. The Center asked our contributors the simple, but key question, “What you do expect in 2012?”
REGISTER
No Sympathy for Yanukovych
Oxana Shevel | August 24, 2010
Oxana Shevel, professor of political science at Tufts University and researcher on nation-building and citizenship in post-Communist Europe, provides her take on Alexander Motyl and Adrian Karatnycky's exchange on the state of democracy in Ukraine.
This is a very stimulating and thought-provoking exchange. I will be assigning both articles to my students.
As for the question of Yanukovych's regime democratic credentials, I too no longer believe that he deserves the benefit of the doubt. My question to Adrian and others who may still do would be what exactly would have to happen before you can stop calling the actions of the government democratic. Banning demonstrations all together is not ok but blocking demonstrators by police in a side street is ok? Firing professors not ok but having rectors sign promises to SBU that they would mind their students' political activities is ok? It is easy to take any one instance in isolation (be it TV channel licensing, SBU visit to rectors, obstruction of demonstrators, detainment of Lange, blogger harassment, you name it) and try to convince yourself that this is just an isolated incident, just the overzealous lower level actors, while good democrat Yanukovych says how he's angered by it, etc. In other words, is your belief in Yanukovych's democratic credential even falsifiable, and if so how exactly?
I catch myself doing thought experiments: could something like this happen in the US? In Poland? In Ukraine under Yushchenko? Sadly, the answer is often no. To my mind, the fact that Yanukovych says that he supports democracy is meaningless. All autocrats claim to be democrats.
Oxana Shevel is professor of political science at Tufts University in Medford, MA. She has conducted research on citizenship policies in post-Communist states; an article on this project was recently published in the Comparative Politics journal. Oxana holds a BA from Kiev University in Kiev, Ukraine, M.Phil from Cambridge University England, and a Ph.D from Harvard University. Photo credit: Nationmaster.com
This article is part of the series Ukraine Under Yanukovych: An Analytical Debate. To find a series description and links to related articles, please click here.
