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Weak language norm(s) versus domestic interests: Why Ukraine behaves the way it does

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2015

EGOR FEDOTOV
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Abstract

Many analyses of the role of international norms in world politics study those particular norms that can be classified as relatively robust. Furthermore, such analyses critique alternative theories which foreground the role of domestic interests in affecting the behaviour of state elites, by calling into question the presumed objectivity of interests. The present article takes a different tack to the largely similar challenge. Specifically, it shows – on the example of Russian speakers in Ukraine – that even weak and contested international norms, like the norm of language rights for national minorities, can have independent effects on the behaviour and policy of state elites. The latter holds, in demonstrable terms, if state elites act in ways that militate against their most salient apparent interests. In the Ukraine case, this article argues, such ‘interests’ are the protection of the Ukrainian language as the country’s sole official language. So the cause of the (variable) behaviour of elites in Ukraine lay in a weak and contested norm, namely the norm of language rights for national minorities.

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Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 739 - 755
Copyright
© 2015 British International Studies Association 

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Footnotes

*

For comments I thank Samuel Bernofsky, Brent Commerer, Chris Donoghue, Dennis Galvan, Pavel Mardilovich, Ronald Mitchell, Vanessa Mousavizadeh, Misha Myagkov, Craig Parsons, Hans Peter Schmitz, and three anonymous reviewers. The support for the research was generously provided by the Gilchrist Educational Trust and the University Association for Contemporary European Studies in conjunction with the European Commission. The remaining errors are mine.

References

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4 It bears notice that Ukraine’s state policy, in the issue-area of the protection of the Ukrainian language, aims to protect it not least in its written form.

5 For select few works which stress the explanatory role of state interests, see Garrett, Geoffrey and Weingast, Barry R., ‘Ideas, interests, and institutions: Constructing the European community’s internal market’, in Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane (eds), Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 173–206Google Scholar; Moravcsik, Andrew, ‘The origins of human rights regimes: Democratic delegation in postwar Europe’, International Organization, 54:2 (2000), pp. 217–252 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vachudova, Milada Anna, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration After Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 According to Article 10 of the Ukrainian Constitution, the Ukrainian language has the status of the sole official language in Ukraine. Further, according to Article 10, ‘Free Development, Use, and Protection of Russian and Other Languages of National Minorities of Ukraine Shall be Guaranteed in Ukraine’, available at: {http://www.legislationline.org/documents/action/popup/id/16258/preview} accessed 3 October 2014.

7 Theories that stress the explanatory role of systemic variables (like the Waltzian theory of International Relations) fall outside the scope of this article. See Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1979)Google Scholar; and Mearsheimer, John J., ‘Back to the future: Instability in Europe after the Cold War’, International Security, 15:1 (1990), pp. 5–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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9 Tannenwald, Nina, ‘The nuclear taboo: the United States and the normative basis of nuclear non-use’, International Organization, 53:3 (1999), pp. 433–468 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 434.

10 Krasner, Stephen D., ‘Abiding sovereignty’, International Political Science Review, 22:3 (2001), pp. 229–251 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For an interesting twist in the debate amongst scholars who share the view of state elites as utility-maximising agents – about the explanatory status of realism in IR – see Legro, Jeffrey W. and Moravcsik, Andrew, ‘Is anybody still a Realist?’, International Security, 24:2 (1999), pp. 5–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 For a seminal work on the logics of consequences and appropriateness, see March, James G. and Olsen, Johan P., Rediscovering Institutions: The Organizational Basis of Politics (New York: Free Press, 1989)Google Scholar. (In the Ukraine case, a logic of appropriateness states that, if Ukraine wants to integrate in Europe, she is expected to abide by European norms.)

13 The interviews were recorded by the author. (The interviews were conducted in the Russian language.) The interview sample includes two dozens of interviews (including high-ranking officials, such as the head of state and the parliament speaker). There had been two rounds of interviews, in 2010 and 2011. All interview subjects are anonymous.

14 Another, legally nonbinding international document on protection of language rights for national minorities is the (1998) Oslo Recommendations regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities, of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

15 Those international norms that may be considered relatively robust may not elicit norm compliance by state elites, either. At the same time, however, relatively robust norms – in contrast to ‘weaker’ ones – likely have the so-called tipping point at which compliance by states with particular norms, is more or less automatic and taken for granted. See, for example, Kelley, ‘Assessing the complex evolution of norms’.

16 See, for example, Thornberry, Patrick, ‘Self-determination, minorities, human rights: a review of international instruments’, The International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 38:4 (1989), pp. 867–889CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Council of Europe, European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Document ETS No. 148 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1992), p. 2. It may be relevant to note, at this stage, that, in Ukraine, laws on the ratification of international treaties take precedence over state ones. See Council of Europe, First Periodic Report of Ukraine on Implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Document MIN-LANG/PR (2007) 6 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2007), p. 3.

18 In part, the issue-areas of education and government had been selected due to the fact that there is a lack of data, in the first periodic report of Ukraine on the ECRML ratification, in the other ones.

19 Council of Europe, European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: Application of the Charter in Ukraine, Document ECRML (2010) 6 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2010), esp. paras 186, 260, and 282.

20 Ibid., esp. paras 214, 243, and 259.

21 Ibid., esp. paras 186, 217, and 252.

22 Council of Europe, First Periodic Report of Ukraine, p. 49.

23 Council of Europe, Application of the Charter in Ukraine, p. 95.

24 Ibid., para. 79.

25 Wilson, Andrew, Ukrainian Nationalism in the 1990s: A Minority Faith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, p. 151.

26 Smith, Graham, Vivien, Law, Andrew, Wilson, Annette, Bohr, and Edward, Allworth, Nation-Building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Identities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, p. 133, transliteration omitted.

27 Available at: {http://2001.ukrcensus.gov.ua/eng/} accessed 4 October 2014.

28 I do not mean to suggest that the Ukrainophone elite at large is homogeneous with respect to the salient apparent interests of this elite. Nonetheless, it is the case that all Ukrainophone elites view affirmative policy for the Ukrainian language through the prism of the latter’s integration or assimilation in the Russian-speaking environment in Soviet Ukraine. Compare fn. 32 below.

29 At the same time, I argue that the intensification of the language dispute was not unpredictable.

30 So, in the Ukraine case, the rejection of the ECRML ratification as such is commensurate to the belying of what the Ukrainian ethnic (or political) identity stands for.

31 So, the Russophone elites in Ukraine were quick to point out that the norm of language rights for national minorities is after all the European norm. Thus the Russophone elite at large threw down the gauntlet to its Ukrainophone counterpart. See, for example, Vladimir Alekseev, Begom ot Evropy? Kto i kak protivodeistvuiet v Ukraine realizatsii Evropeiskoi khartii regional’nykh iazykov ili iazykov men’shinstv [We’re Forsaking Europe, Aren’t We? The ‘Who’ and the ‘How’ of Attempts, in Ukraine, to Forestall the Implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages] (Kharkiv: Fakt, 2008).

32 On the level of speech act, the justificationist argument takes the following form: because the Ukrainian state discriminated against the use of the Ukrainian language during Communism, the new democratic Ukrainian state is justified to pursue affirmative policy for the Ukrainian language. See, for example, Council of Europe, Second Periodic Report of Ukraine on Implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Document MIN-LANG/PR (2012) 2 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2012), pp. 6–7.

33 For a classical discussion and treatment of power in international politics, see Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (7th edn, Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2006).

34 Sceptics may legitimately observe that the Ukrainophone elites rejected the substantive change in Ukraine’s language policy toward Russian speakers out of concerns over sovereignty. Yet, from this vantage point, it remains unclear why the Ukrainophone elites allowed this situation to surface, in which these elites had to go for rejection.

35 Schools of thought that belong to realism and rationalism of course need not explain everything. Yet it is argued that the above can shed light on those events or happenings that are of major political importance to state elites. The latter is the case, for instance, when Krasner forcefully argues that ‘[i]n the international environment, logics of consequences dominate logics of appropriateness.’ Krasner, Sovereignty, p. 51. But, given that the Ukrainophone elites act in ways that militate against their declared interests, the consequentialist thesis fails, at least in the Ukraine case. On this score, political scientist Ronald Rogowski aptly notes: ‘A powerful, deductive, internally consistent theory can be seriously undermined … by even one wildly discordant observation …’. Rogowski, Ronald, ‘Review: the role of theory and anomaly in social-scientific inference’, American Political Science Review, 89:2 (1995), pp. 467–470 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 470.

36 Anonymous interviews.

37 See, for example, Daily News Bulletin – Interfax, ‘Ukrainian delegates to PACE urge Kuchma to accelerate implementation of commitments before Council of Europe’ (15 May 2001).

38 Koshiw, Jaroslav, ‘Ukraine about to be shut out of Europe’, Kyiv Post (18 December 1998)Google Scholar, available at: {http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/ukraine-about-to-be-shut-out-of-europe-1534.html} accessed 5 October 2014.

39 See Alekseev, , Begom ot Evropy, pp. 58–60 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Ibid., p. 60.

41 Ibid., p. 68.

42 See Arel, Dominique, ‘Interpreting “nationality” and “language” in the 2001 Ukrainian Census’, Post-Soviet Affairs, 18:3 (2002), pp. 213–249CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 233, fn. 33; and Alekseev, , Begom ot Evropy, p. 70 Google Scholar.

43 Alekseev, , Begom ot Evropy, p. 71 Google Scholar.

44 See Arel, ‘Interpreting “nationality” and “language”’, p. 233; and Alekseev, , Begom ot Evropy, pp. 75–81 Google Scholar.

45 Confidential source.

46 What is more, none of the interview subjects proposed that the ECRML ought to be rejected as such.

47 On the political legacy of Kuchma, see Shulman, Stephen, ‘Ukrainian nation-building under Kuchma’, Problems of Post-Communism, 52:5 (2005), pp. 32–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 See Arel, Dominique, ‘Ukraine: the temptation of the nationalizing state’, in Vladimir Tismaneanu (ed.), Political Culture and Civil Society in Russia and the New States of Eurasia (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 157–188Google Scholar, 172.

49 See Stepanenko, Viktor, ‘Identities and language politics in Ukraine: the challenges of nation-state building’, in Farimah Daftary and François Grin (eds), Nation-Building, Ethnicity and Language Politics in Transition Countries (Budapest: Open Society Institute, 2003), pp. 109–135Google Scholar, 122.

50 Confidential source.

51 ECRI (European Commission against Racism and Intolerance), Second Report on Ukraine, Document CRI (2002) 23 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2002), para. 2.

52 Agence France Presse, ‘Ukraine, assailed on rights, faces ejection from European body’ (6 April 2001).

53 Alekseev, , Begom ot Evropy, p. 85 Google Scholar.

54 Ibid., p. 83.

55 Babych, Mykola, ‘Narodny Rukh of Ukraine condemns attempts to give Russian status of second state language’, Ukrainian News (6 November 2002)Google Scholar.

56 Alekseev, , Begom ot Evropy, p. 85 Google Scholar.

57 Rita Mishneva, ‘Russians deemed an ethnic minority’, The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, 55:23 (2003).

58 Horshkov, Dmytro, ‘MP Yavorivskyi urges Kuchma to veto charter of regional languages’, Ukrainian News (3 June 2003)Google Scholar.

59 Confidential source.

60 BBC Monitoring International Reports, ‘Ukrainian leader boasts economic growth, dwells on politics’ (28 May 2003).

61 The norm of language rights for national minorities is obviously the necessary condition for the ECRML adoption in Ukraine. At the same time it is likely not a sufficient condition for the treaty’s ratification in Ukraine. (That is, absent constant attention to the ECRML in politics in Ukraine, the urgency for this treaty’s adoption, in the eyes of the Ukrainophone elite at large, would be less pronounced.)

62 See Alekseev, Begom ot Evropy. It is perhaps ironic that, stepping outside the line of ‘attack’ by the Russophone elites, meant, for the Ukrainophone elites, to embrace the norm of language rights for national minorities in toto.

63 Ibid., p. 93.

64 ‘Statement by the President of the Parliamentary Assembly Mr Rene van der Linden in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine’ (7 July 2005), available at: {http://assembly.coe.int/Communication/PresidentSpeeches/2005/Verkhovna_Rada_Ukraine070705E.htm} accessed 6 October 2014.

65 Council of Europe, Honouring of Obligations and Commitments by Ukraine, Document 10676 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 2005), para. 333.

66 Confidential source.

67 The town/region councils’ resolutions had been adopted in the following towns and/or regions: Kharkiv, Luhansk, Sevastopol, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Mykolaiv, Yalta, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhya, Alushta, Odesa, and Kherson.

68 Pavel Anokhin, ‘Brzezinski doesn’t understand Russian’, The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, 58:21 (2006).

69 Daria Hluschenko, ‘Yuschenko calls on Donetsk authorities to promote tolerance and implement policy of unity’, Ukrainian News (30 May 2006).

70 Itar-Tass Weekly News, ‘Ukrainian nationalists urge pres [sic] to defend Ukrainian language’ (6 May 2006).

71 BBC Monitoring Ukraine & Baltics, ‘Ukrainian opposition leader vows “comfortable conditions” for Russian language’ (5 September 2009).

72 Confidential source.

73 RIA Novosti, ‘Ukraine would be split by referendum on Russian language – MP’ (23 February 2010).

74 ‘Devyat Ukraintsev obyavili golodovku protiv zakona o yazykakh’ (9 July 2012), available at: {http://www.km.ru/ukraina/2012/07/09/viktor-yanukovich/devyat-ukraintsev-obyavili-golodovku-protiv-zakona-o-yazykakh} accessed 6 October 2014.

75 Luhn, Alec and Grytsenko, Oksana, ‘Ukraine fails to break stalemate with pro-Russian protesters in East’, The Guardian (11 April 2014)Google Scholar, available at: {http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/11/ukraine-interim-prime-minister-fail-break-stalemate-east} accessed 7 October 2014.

76 Ibid.

77 The Crimea crisis subsequently metamorphosed into the larger regional conflict. It is impossible to evaluate this larger conflict on its own terms here. I thank one of the reviewers for this hint.

78 See, for example, Hans Peter Schmitz, Transnational Mobilization and Domestic Regime Change: Africa in Comparative Perspective (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

79 It might be counter-argued that compliance by some Ukrainian elites with the ECRML – on the strictly minimal and formal level – was ‘cheap talk’ par excellence. At the same time, however, although it might have been cheap talk in regards to a particular version of the ECRML, it is clear that some elites risked much in terms of policy implications by engaging in it. Moreover, not only did these elites engage in cheap talk, they also went to great lengths in order to ‘sell it’ for norm-compliant behaviour with regard to the implementation of the norm of language rights for national minorities. For instance, some Ukrainophone elites created the myth – that had been widely circulated in the Ukrainian mass media – according to which the raison d’être of the ECRML was to protect solely those languages, which were on the brink of extinction. Confidential source; see also Daria Hluschenko, ‘Yuschenko to preside at NSDC meeting on language problems’, Ukrainian News (19 May 2006).

80 For select key works in the constructivist tradition of inquiry, see Onuf, Nicholas Greenwood, World of Our Making: Rules and Rule in Social Theory and International Relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Adler, Emanuel, ‘Seizing the middle ground: constructivism in world politics’, European Journal of International Relations, 3:3 (1997), pp. 319–363CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wendt, Alexander, Social Theory of International Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention.