US-Präsident Joe Biden hatte seinem ukrainischen Kollegen Wolodymyr Selenskyj am Freitag versichert, er könne auf die »unerschütterliche Unterstützung« Amerikas für die Souveränität und Integrität des Landes zählen.
Several aspects of this sentence strike me as really funny.
The myth of democracy goes hand in hand with the myth of transition as, according to neoliberal orthodoxy, where there are markets, there is democracy and freedom of enterprise and individuals. The feasibility of democratic rule in a polity where private interests come before public ones is one of the more insidious yet resilient myths that allows for authoritarian neoliberalism to survive and spread. The political institutions that emerge as a result of transition are essentially undemocratic as not only is their shape imposed on societies externally but also that shape, that is, the transnational state, itself presupposes the loss of democratic control over its functioning. In such conditions, talking of democracy even hypothetically can be equalled to fictitious speculation.
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The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine that may appear ideological, ethnic or linguistic are often ideational/political, effective and manipulated rather than causal, and can be interpreted as structural ruptures necessitated by shifts in the balance of power within and between social blocs, classes and their fractions, which I have documented in the previous section. The true conflicts are class formation and accumulation struggles between foreign and domestic capital, that is, oligarchs, the EU, the USA and Russian business and their indirect engagement in Ukraine’s policy making via various forms of advisory and financial ‘support’ organisations. The Maidan protests, also, were not ideological but counter-ideological, reactionary movements.
—Yuliya Yurchenko, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict, (London: Pluto Press, 2018).
