We broke activism

In the former Soviet Union, the deeper activists are inside foreign-funded ecosystems, the less they know about how democracy and politics work in the real world. And it's our fault.

I recently wrote a short piece for OpenDemocracy about how the process of integrating into the EU affects democracy (short version: it leaves it frayed and atrophied, because it essentially suspends it for years or even decades). Using the case study of the Istanbul Convention (on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence), I argued that Ukraine ratified it not because domestic majorities and political elites genuinely want to do something about violence against women, but because the European Commission made it one of the conditions of acquiring final candidate status. And how this undermines women’s rights movements, because an achievement that drops into your lap through outside intervention can just as easily vanish again.

I started looking into this dysfunctional dynamic, in which ostensible policy progress is made only because the EU demands it, because of what women’s rights activists in Ukraine and later in Moldova, Georgia, Armenia etc told me. So I asked Ukrainian feminist activists for their input on my article, too. Some of the cleverest, most up-and-coming, accomplished enough to easily move between some of the most desirable consultancies with UN agencies, but at the same time passionate, critically-thinking true activists, very much in touch with the grass roots.

They didn’t like my argument. They didn’t agree with it, but it also made them uncomfortable.

They believe Ukraine ratified the convention primarily because of all their hard work and years of advocacy. One of them thought that post-ratification, the convention would surely be implemented efficiently, because previously they had collected 25,000 signatures (in a country of 40 million!) for its ratification. I would qualify those 25,000 as “boutique”; it has as much to do with real political mobilization as the model UN with the UN. Activists like them have little grasp of how much power, influence and bargaining savvy it would take to force this kind of policy change in Ukraine’s political reality, or in any more or less democratic system. They spend much of their time in boutique safe spaces with like-minded activists, playing with post-it notes (hence the picture).

But they are also highly aware of EU conditionality as a central factor in their ecosystem -“we can continue to use EU conditionality as leverage, to make sure our government actually implements the convention”. The use of the term “leverage” is revealing. They understand very well that the EU is an outside player, an intruder in the Ukrainian body politic, a deus ex machina that happily happened to fall into their side of the scale, like the unearned windfall profit of energy companies this year,

There is a fundamental difference between how activists in countries like Ukraine think about making change and how activists in more sovereign democracies think about it. Explaining this difference and creating projects and entire organizations out of those explanations has been the foundation of many a brilliant career among expat experts.

Here’s my explanation (no worries, I’m not turning it into a project): organized civil society in much of the world has been captured and colonized by foreign money and not infrequently by third countries’ foreign policy agendas. Nowhere more so than in the former Soviet Union, especially those states that have embarked on integration processes with the EU. Among the agonizing dysfunctions this spawns, there are the “boutique” and the “leverage” problems.

The boutique problem describes the tendency to define success as results of projects rather than the fundamental social and political change activism should pursue. This analysis is hardly novel or niche. But just because the myopic focus on neatly measurable micro-results has been critiqued doesn’t mean it has been ditched. Working at the boutique level can be emotionally satisfying, intellectually stimulating and rewarding in professional terms, too. That’s what makes it so distracting. You lose sight of the greater goals, you fail to grasp the inherently political nature of activism, how it is about power and struggle.

I don’t blame the activists, I blame the grant-makers and the government agencies behind them. In any case, I don’t think the solution is “grant-makers should just give us money for open-ended work, so we can do what we think is best” (that’s a thing, and I will do a separate post about it). The solution, I imagine, will no longer have foreign money in it.

The leverage problem normalizes and even celebrates activists being joined at the hip to foreign actors. After all, they think they leverage the EU for their ends, which seems like a really cool trick when you’re comparatively poor, obscure, plain and little. In reality. they have made themselves dependent on mercurial, powerful external entities, over which they have no control, which are not accountable to anyone. Not to the activists, not to the public, not to local political elites. This leaves activists unmoored, disempowered, easily sidelined.

There is also a nagging ethical concern: if we’re all about democracy (and we are, right?), how do we feel about making policy in backrooms deals, with foreigners providing the leverage?

Uncomfortable yet?