Promoting Democracy in Postcommunist Ukraine: The Contradictory Outcomes of US Aid to Women's NGOs

Abstract

seemed evident but, surprisingly, had not been raised before: Why do these organizations have to register as "public organizations;" what are those "grants" they receive; how are they different from salaries or profit; who grants them and for what?Knowledge of English vocabulary was important for understanding the answers I received.However, those answers raised new questions.It turned out that the correct name of "public organizations" was "non-governmental organizations" or NGOs, that they had to be supported in the name of "civil society," and that "grants" were a part of the "assistance" that Ukraine was receiving to an unprecedented extent from various "donors" after it became officially independent in 1991.I was discovering a whole new world, in which the enchantment with the concept of "civil society" was as striking as the skepticism towards "public organizations" that I encountered in Ukraine.The "projects" and "grants" given to Ukrainian organizations were described by the donors as the most effective means to facilitate democracy in Ukraine, to ensure that the democratic change would be truly encompassing and long-lasting, and to make Ukrainian people more democratically minded.In Ukraine, however, these initiatives were mostly perceived as a peculiar money flow that was going to a small group of people on obscure terms.These initiatives were believed to be short-term, insufficient, and ineffective.The two sides of the story clearly did not match, and yet both foreign donors and "public organizations"/NGOs were speaking about the same "projects" and accountable for the same money.The discrepancy was so obvious that both sides must have been aware of it as well.This has brought me to the main puzzle of the book: Are the donors blind or do they just not care?Are the locals wicked or just plain stupid?How is it that both sides continue to do what they are doing?What are the mechanisms that enable the meaningful functioning of a civil society assistance discourse in Ukraine despite negative outcomes and wide-spread criticisms?This book takes seriously the theoretical assumptions of interpretative-constructivist approach.It holds that there is a mutually constitutive relationship between discursive and material realities or, to put it differently, between words and deeds.This book shows that the way Ukrainians and foreign donors talk about foreign assistance to civil society has an impact on what form foreign assistance as well as civil society supported by foreign donors take.Therefore, by looking at the language in use or discourse 2 as it is usually called in the constructivist literature, one can elicit a number of significant social and political processes and understand their nature.I tackle these questions by making a detailed inquiry into foreign assistance to women's NGOs in Ukraine by the United States Agency During my fieldwork in one Ukrainian city, I went to interview the head of a women's NGO.The NGO was based in her flat and when I entered, I discovered a living room, in which among the usual furniture and some personal things a computer and a fax machine stood.What was the meaning of those objects?They were there not as mere signs of the increasing use of modern technology by the Ukrainian population but had been purchased with a grant that was -according to the donor's definition -part of the "technical assistance to promote democracy in Ukraine."For the head of the NGO herself, these objects were an integral part of creating an NGO.Such an understanding of a computer and a fax machine in somebody's living room was not obvious.However, if officials from the donor agency that provided such "assistance" had come to visit in order to see how it "was promoting democracy in Ukraine," they would not have been surprised to see a computer and a fax machine.They would not have been expecting to find a peaceful demonstration of human rights activists in that living room as a sign of "democracy in Ukraine."To them a computer and a fax machine would have made sense.It is these kinds of observations that lead me to argue that things do not just make sense as such; they are made to make sense.The goal of this book is to find out how exactly this happens with respect to foreign assistance to civil society.My core assumption is that foreign assistance to civil society cannot be seen simply as yet another imperialistic project, a means to impose American or Western hegemony onto the world.In order to understand what really makes such assistance function over extended periods of time in highly dynamic contexts, one has to adopt a more interactive model, in which the voices of both foreign and local actors are recognized.Misplaced names, foreign words, clumsy phrases, unintelligible adaptations of English words in written and spoken Russian and Ukrainian are not just alien creatures flown in by foreign guests.They are also actively employed by local actors to make sense of new and old realities, and even to create realities.Building on several theoretical premises of discourse analysis, 6 this book focuses on different meanings of foreign assistance to civil society that are created, translated or (re)enacted in different contexts where donors and aid recipients interact, directly or indirectly.Different meanings of foreign assistance to civil society are seen as both constituted by social and political practices and at the same time constitutive of political activities in that they enable certain forms of social and political action and constrain others.In other words there would be no civil society specialists and centers within the donor agencies without the civil society discourse; at the same time, these Notes 1 Samizdat is a Russian word for "self-published;" it is commonly used to refer to informal home-made publications of writers and essayists who were banned from being published in official state controlled publishing houses during socialism.2 Following Hajer, I define discourse as "an ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categories through which meaning is given to social and physical phenomena, and which is produced and reproduced through an identifiable set of practices." 2 See Maarten Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 30 "The Russia Project: Whatever Happened to the Soviet Dissidents," Reese Ehrlich, [cited April 29,

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