An uncanny division of powers: a "parallel society" and double political representation in present-day Ukraine

The theoretical premises of the research are twofold. Deviations from the Western democratic model discovered in Eastern Europe are interpreted not as deficiencies of lop-sided transition but as alternative configurations that might provide useful takes against the ongoing "degeneration of democracy" (Calhoun, Gaonkar, & Taylor 2022). In the era of convergence of the parties across the ideological spectrum into the technocratic bureaucracy failing to "interpellate" the population, mutual checks between society and the state form the main mechanism of democratic check-and-balances (Acemoglu & Robinson 2019). Reverting the Foucauldian take on the micro-politics of power, I argue that political power can be not only exercised on the capillary level by the state, it could also be generated there by non-state actors, bypassing top-down institutional solutions or their lack thereof. The Ukrainian experience of mass protests that, to a certain extent, replicates the strategies of anti-Soviet dissent in Central Europe in the 1980s, provides useful illustrations herewith. While the social base of protests in Ukraine eventually grew from a narrow circle of political activists in the early 2000s to a more numerous civil society in 2004 and especially in 2013-14, its manifestations became more tangible: from sporadic dissent to parallel institutions compensating for the lack of state performance (Korablyova 2022). Importantly, those emergent agencies got recognized internationally as sovereign political actors – first, horizontally, by the non-profit sector in the EU, and eventually in the official bodies in Brussels (the so-called "sandwich model" of reforms). However, this civic awakening never engulfed the entire Ukrainian society: sociological data registers roughly a quarter of the population being eager for maximal political participation; the rest engages intermittently and predominantly demands accountability. A peculiar structure of double political representation is formed, where official authorities and broadly conceived civil society claim the right to represent the population. Unlike the recent rise of populism elsewhere, this tension does not result in the increasing polarization but in further democratization of Ukrainian society. The pre-existing "pluralism by default", provided by political competition of regional clans (Way 2016), changed to the competition between power-holders and civil society played out in the public domain simultaneously for domestic and international audiences. The full-scale Russian invasion mitigated the tension, yet, around the 2-year mark, it resurfaces again posing the question of the viability of this combination of radical/direct and audience democracy.