Starry Aspirant

I thought I saw Luke Skywalker check into our beach hotel for a winter break. Older now, but still with poise and assurance, he strides through the automatic doors, wheeling a squeaky travel case in his wake. At the reception, he dashes off his signature with a flourish as if to please the concierge, then turns gracefully towards the lift, swishing behind him his coco-powder cape. And I thought I saw him out on the bluffs next morning early, muttering incantations under his breath. Who set fire to the natural log? What is East Grinstead? Why is the sun? The cold rain drizzles, but his cape is good for all weathers. In the bay, a shark is doing backstroke, pretending to be a surfboard. The sparrow-hawk stuck on the air current above one shoulder is Luke’s mind: it's just one more Jedi party trick. His girl, who is too young for him, is dressed in a silky lilac two piece and she wears pristine lilac boots. At nights they sing like crickets on the dancefloor. The disco ball accentuate...

A review of Marko Bojcun’s Towards a Political Economy of Ukraine: Selected Essays, 1990-2015; Ukrainian Voices, vol 3; Ibidem-Press, Stuttgart. A. The history of post-Soviet Ukraine could be written as that of a succession of self-serving political leaderships, and of inspiring but failed popular protests, resulting in chronic economic underperformance that has left the country’s dwindling population among the poorest in Europe. A glance at IMF data, for example, shows the country vying for bottom place in the European income rankings with Moldova. In these essays, written close on the events they analyse, Marko Bojcun reminds us that this need not have been the case, and that other trajectories at times seemed possible. One example is to be found in an article from 2001, in which the prospect of Russia’s European integration is still in the air, just about, whereas from the vantage point of today, this is almost unthinkable. B. The collection covers key waypoints in the politic...

In her book, Margarita Balmaceda offers a detailed comparative account of how post-Soviet political elites dealt with the political consequences of their dependence on energy imports from Russia in the first decades after the Soviet collapse, focusing on the cases of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. Although described as “energy poor”, Ukraine’s reliance on Russia for a large share of its energy deliveries (excluding nuclear fuel) was considerably lower than for Belarus or Lithuania (Balmaceda, 2013, pp. 93, 317). Nevertheless, the relationship led periodically to serious bilateral strains, especially over issues around natural gas. Rather than straightforward energy dependence, however, Ukraine’s basic energy relation with Russia is better understood as one of “asymmetric interdependence”, Balmaceda contends. By this she means that post-Soviet Ukraine had significant energy assets with which it could have mitigated the effects of its reliance on energy supplies from Russia. Chief among...

Institutionalism as an approach to economic analysis has made a rather vigorous comeback in recent decades. Originally associated with the economic sociology of Thorstein Veblen, whose work focuses on the consumption patterns of the US nouveaux riche and the distortion by the profit motive of the potential of industrial society, a strong institutionalist tradition developed in North America in the early decades of the twentieth century (Stilwell, 2013, pp xxx). With the mathematisation of the subject after the second world war, however, driven by the practical emphasis of Keynesianism on the development of national income accounting for practical policy purposes on the macroeconomic side and by the emphasis on marginalist techniques of neo-classical microeconomics (Blackmore, History of Economic Thought), this institutional economic tradition of institutionalism lost ground. For the earlier version of institutionalism, we may take as representative Walton Hamilton’s definition of insti...

Remarkable features of Belarus revolt incl: i) decentralisation in Minsk & country; ii) immediate resort of the authorities to extreme, large-scale violence, unprecedented even for Belarus; spontaneous self-organisation & unity of disparate social groups. 2/14 Most striking is concertinaed sequence of “post-ignition” events: from rigged result to the onset of regime defections (mostly low level so far) in less than a week. Last Saturday, the regime appeared impregnable; today, it looks dazed & shaken. To paraphrase Bertolt Brecht badly, from memory: & after 12 years, the 1,000-year regime was swept away. Could still go pear-shaped: Luka regime could lash out again, or play some trick to divide opposition & deal with them one by one. “Dialogue” could give regime time to regroup & rethink strategy. But so far it most looks like a "democratising" revolution rather than Colour or Maidan—perhaps most similar to Solidarity in Poland or Czech Velvet? Belarus’...

A comedy actor will be the next president of Ukraine, but he will have trouble following through on his anti-corruption promises (for The Chartist, April 2019) In Ukraine’s presidential election in April, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a politically inexperienced comic actor, easily beat the country’s incumbent leader with 73% of the vote. In the first round Zelenskiy had taken over 30% of the vote in a crowded field. His nearest rival, Petro Poroshenko, a veteran of the Ukrainian political scene, won just below 16% of the national vote. Third placed Yuliya Tymoshenko, receiving 13.4% of support in the first round, complained about manipulation of the vote, although most credible observers reckoned the mechanics of the election itself were broadly free and fair. In the parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions not held by Russian-backed separatists, the “eastern” vote was split between Yuriy Boyko (with 11.6% of the national vote) and Oleksandr Vilkul (4.2%), both of the Opposition Bloc, the succ...

Review of Is Socialism Feasible? Towards an Alternative Future by Geoffrey M. Hodgson It’s not that surprising, with so many major Western economies in mothballs in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the Bank of England warning of Britain’s deepest recession in 300 years, that lockdown has begun to encourage a rethink of how we live, prompting a plethora articles in the press on how the virus is going to change the world. In this context, Geoffrey Hodgson’s new book, Is Socialism Feasible? Towards an Alternative Future , is timely. In it, he makes a renewed case for the mixed economy and for liberal (or social) democracy, as well as for cautious, experimental reform. Against the small state, laissez-faire liberalism resurgent from the 1970s, he attempts to develop a strand of politics from within the liberal tradition that is more socially conscious. At the same time, he musters a strong case against “big” socialism, or systems in which state ownership and central planning ar...

The financial political practices of the Yanukovych era… In 2016 a series of articles appeared in the Ukrainian press offering a glimpse into the operation of a wide-ranging and expensive system of political payments run by the Party of Regions (PoR), the political organisation of Viktor Yanukovych, in the years leading up to and during his presidency in 2010-14. Originating in the “black ledger” (off-book accounts) of Yanukovych and his circle, the documents on which these articles were based had been handed to the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) by Viktor Trepak, a former deputy head of the Ukrainian Security Service, allegedly in response to the blocking of his investigation into the financial crimes of the Yanukovych era (Kuznetsov, 2017; Sukhov, 2016). Supporting these accounts, in an interview from 2017, Taras Chornovil, who ran the presidential election campaign of Yanukovych in 2004, recounts that PoR practice of “paying for deputies from other parliamentary...

Factions rise dominance from the late 1990s but remain institutionally weak In her book, Sarah Whitmore outlines the constitutive role of the Rada in the formation of the post-Soviet Ukrainian state, and the slow process of its institutionalisation in a wider political context in the course of the 1990s and early 2000s. By institutionalisation, she means the creation and observation of procedural norms that enhance organisational coherence and autonomy. In particular, Whitmore details the emergence of parliamentary standing committees and political factions—which are central to the investigation of this chapter—as the main organisational subdivisions for the allocation of parliamentary work. During this period, the parliamentary committees, dealing with the preparation, review and implementation of specialist legislation, were able to enhance authority as their expertise grew, as they became more representative of the composition of parliament, as well as locations for legislative deb...

Hobbes  The desire for self-preservation drives rational human selfishness: freedom leads to unending war. Social survival requires popular disarmament: authority should be contracted out to a ruler able to impose law & order. Burke  Government arbitrates between competing wants to prevent social chaos. Evolutionary governmental norms are embodied in culture & tradition, which can't be grasped by reason. Aristocrats' property offers them power & incentive to check the monarchy, + they are imbued with the habits of rule. Schmitt The rule of law depends on application of precedents, but to uphold constitutional continuity in a state crisis, a political guarantor of the legal system, who is himself above the law, is required. See Hobbes. Rand Selfishness is rational & right. State regulation restrains the self-interested creativity of the businessmen on whom production & civilisation depend.  Hayek I Individual economic choice is politic...