In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Matthias Schwartz about his article “Servants of the People: Populism, Nationalism, State-Building, and Virtual Reality in Contemporary Ukraine” from Telos 195 (Summer 2021). An excerpt of the article appears below. In their conversation they talked about the history of the Euromaidan and how it contributed to nationalism in Ukraine; the election of President Volodymyr Zelensky, who previously portrayed the president of Ukraine in the hit TV show Servant of the People; the way that Zelensky’s presidency undercut the nationalist form of politics by decoupling nationalism from populism; and the changes that Zelensky has (or has not) brought to Ukrainian politics. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 195 are available for purchase in our online store.
Servants of the People: Populism, Nationalism, State-Building, and Virtual Reality in Contemporary Ukraine
Matthias Schwartz
In the European Union and the United States, but also in many other countries, populist and nationalist movements are often seen as one of the greatest threats to the state’s democratic constitution and its politics. From Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro to Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States and the authoritarian governments initiated by Jarosław Kaczyński and Viktor Orbán in the young democracies of Poland and Hungary, what they all have in common is a nationalist rhetoric that, in the name of the people, rails against enemies inside and outside the country and seeks to delegitimize the liberal social order and the rule of law.[1] In reality, however, if one takes a closer look at the individual cases, the supposed dichotomy of liberalism and democracy on the one hand and nationalism and populism on the other is not that clear. Instead, the interaction between new digital communication, entertainment media, and neoliberal economic systems can give rise to different kinds of constellations, depending on cultural, historical, and sociopolitical factors. A prominent example of this is the comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelensky, who was elected president of Ukraine in spring 2019 after having previously played that very role in the highly successful television series Servant of the People. Here, a new relationship between digital reality and the political public sphere has emerged. But it also points to a new form of populism that does not rely on nationalist discourses and reactionary thought patterns. It rather combines anti-state and neoliberal affects.
1. “Army, Language, Faith”: Nationalism in Ukraine after the Euromaidan
On April 21, 2019, in a run-off election against the incumbent Petro Poroshenko, comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelensky was elected president of Ukraine with an overwhelming majority of 73 percent of the vote. In the subsequent parliamentary elections in July, his party, Sluha Narodu (The Servant of the People), named after the well-known TV series, won an absolute majority.[2] This double election victory was a sensation in several respects. Historically, there have in fact been several actors and comedians who have made political careers, such as Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump. It has also occurred that artistic works have foreseen or even shaped social reality with their conceptions of the world. Contemporary online and television series, in particular, derive their popularity from their promise to offer deep insights into the obscured political interrelationships and mechanisms of an increasingly complex and confusing globalized world, whether they are called House of Cards, Borgen, or The West Wing.[3] However, a TV series determining a party’s ultimate win and, what is more, having its lead actor elected president because of this role was a novelty.
Politically, too, Zelensky’s victory was sensational. He was running against Petro Poroshenko, the president who represented the hope that the country would finally break away from its Soviet legacy and from its overpowering Russian neighbor to turn toward the “European values” of freedom and democracy. Poroshenko had come to power five years earlier, after president Viktor Yanukovych and his government had been violently hounded out of office. The immediate cause was Yanukovych’s unexpected refusal to sign an association agreement with the European Union in November 2013. Since the subsequent protest at the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), the central site in Kyiv, was linked to the hope for a closer integration into the European Union, a hope that was also expressed with numerous European flags, the protest was soon referred to as “Euromaidan.”[4] However, even before his fall, Yanukovych was already extremely unpopular due to rampant corruption. Thus, the protests in the center of the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, continued over the course of the icy winter weeks, escalating in mid-February 2014 and leaving over a hundred dead before Yanukovych’s flight. Moscow, which saw its geopolitical interests endangered, then entered Crimea—without any resistance or bloodshed—and supported the “people’s republics” of Luhansk and Donetsk in the southeast of the country that had been proclaimed by separatists with the help of unofficial mercenaries, volunteers, and heavy war equipment.
As a result, the reform agenda, which was accompanied by high hopes and euphoria and promised rapid rapprochement with the EU as well as the implementation of rule-of-law standards, was increasingly overshadowed by the violent military conflict in the Donbass, which has to date claimed more than 13,000 lives. Although the government under Poroshenko introduced a number of reforms, not least because of massive pressure from the EU and IMF donors, the influence of powerful oligarchs remained intact. In fact, due to the decentralization reforms, they were able to expand their regional power. Due to war and corruption, the continued liberalization of the market further impoverished large sections of society and led to millions of workers migrating to both Russia and the EU. Despite the creation of an anti-corruption agency, the fight against patronage was not a very successful one.
In this tense political situation, national symbolic policy became all the more important. The aim was to outlaw anything Russian or Soviet as totalitarian and evil. Controversial decommunization laws, aimed at banishing Soviet legacies from public space, were installed. At the same time, films and television programs from Russia were also banned. Even classical Russian literature, popular crime literature, and other writings could be censored if the book was suspected of carrying out “anti-Ukrainian propaganda.” Air traffic to and from the neighboring country was stopped, and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine was detached from the Moscow Patriarchate.[5] The state apparatus underwent an extensive linguistic Ukrainization, while the fighters of the so-called Anti-Terrorist Operation (ATO) in the east of the country were hailed as heroes. The nationalist groups especially, which attracted greater attention for the first time in 2014 as the “Right Sector” on the Euromaidan, became increasingly influential.[6] Many of them, after all, had been deployed in various volunteer battalions at the front during the ATO, but they also exuded confidence elsewhere in public affairs.[7] Thus, as Kateryna Mishchenko writes, the emancipatory patriotism of the Euromaidan turned into a reactionary counterrevolution in which nationalist resentment took on ever greater proportions.[8]
This nationalism reached its peak during the presidential election campaign at the beginning of 2019, when Poroshenko staged himself as the savior of Ukraine and its sole defender against the Russian enemy, sporting the slogan of “Army, Language, Faith” (“Armiya, Mova, Vira”). To put it bluntly, all the identitarian nationalist categories that populists in the West commonly use to fight globalization, the “fake news” of mainstream media, the political establishment, and international capital became part of the rhetoric with which Poroshenko’s government sought both to justify its orientation toward the West as well as its ties to the European Union and to cover up its failures to build a state based on the rule of law.[9]
It is this nationalist rhetoric that Zelensky, who comes from the Russian-speaking south of the country and who only officially announced his candidacy on New Year’s Eve 2019, was able to assert himself against impressively. He joined the presidential race without a political program, without demagogic speeches against the Russian aggressor, but also almost entirely without a campaign rally, press conferences, or interviews. Instead, he offered a smart, fashionably designed internet presence that renounced any nationalistic, religious, militaristic, or otherwise exclusionary rhetoric and promised to somehow do everything differently and better—in the service of the people. His only qualification for the presidency was his role as a successful actor in a popular television series.
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* My thanks go to Anna Simon-Stickley and Max Kaplan for editing this article and polishing my English as well as to the anonymous reviewer for her/his encouraging suggestions.
1. See, for example, Gregor Fitzi, Jürgen Mackert, Bryan S. Turner, eds., Populism and the Crisis of Democracy, vol. 1, Concepts and Theory (New York: Routledge, 2019); Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2019).
2. See Sophie Pinkham, “Ukraine’s New Leading Man,” New York Review of Books, June 27, 2019, pp. 8–10.
3. See Niko Switek, ed., Politik in Fernsehserien: Analysen und Fallstudien zu House of Cards, Borgen & Co. (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018); Roman Dubasevych and Matthias Schwartz, “Einleitung,” in Sirenen des Krieges: Diskursive und affektive Dimensionen des Ukraine-Konflikts, ed. Roman Dubasevych and Matthias Schwartz (Berlin: Kadmos, 2020), pp. 7–46.
4. Only later did today’s common designation within Ukraine, “Revolution of Dignity,” emerge to give the riots a more national and dignified dimension.
5. In addition to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, which emerged from the union of two churches at the end of 2018, there is also the smaller Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which continues to be subordinate to the Moscow Patriarchate and is predominantly spread among the Russian-speaking parts of the population.
6. See Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Uchast’ krainikh pravykh u protestakh Maidanu—sproba systematychnoii ocinky,” Spil’ne, January 19, 2015; Serhiy Kudelia, “Domestic Sources of the Donbas Insurgency,” Ponars Eurasia, September 29, 2014.
7. For more details, see Viktor Stepanenko and Yaroslav Pylynskyi, eds., Ukraine after the Euromaidan: Challenges and Hopes (Bern: Peter Lang, 2015).
8. Cf. Kateryna Mishchenko, “Sencovs Camera,” in Dubasevych and Schwartz, Sirenen des Krieges, pp. 293–304; here, p. 299.
9. This Ukrainian nationalism has led to many controversies. Not only its rigor in terms of language and identity policy, which only partially reaches or even excludes the population of the predominantly Russian-speaking southeast, but also its unclear relationship to anti-Semitism and the collaboration of Ukrainian nationalists with the National Socialists have brought a lot of criticism. Cf. the contributions by Andrii Portnov and Wilfried Jilge in the volume Gefährdete Nachbarschaften—Ukraine, Russland, Europäische Union, ed. Katharina Raabe (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2015).
