The Regional Diversity of Ukraine: Can Federalization Be Achieved?

Why is Ukraine’s evident regional diversity not reflected in its multilevel set-up? Despite the still-ongoing decentralization reforms, Ukraine has retained a unitary system which only partially reflects its underlying ethno-linguistic diversity. Implicit in the concept of ‘federal society’ is the belief that societies characterized by diversity will gradually adapt their institutional make-up so as to achieve congruence between the societal and the political structures. In the current Ukrainian debate, however, a unitary understanding of national statehood remains dominant, further reinforced as a response to Russia’s use of culture, language and history in its policies towards Ukraine. This study discusses obstacles to the introduction of federal institutions in Ukraine—such as the fact that the party system does not peripheralize politics, the striking securitization of federalism as a contested issue, the complicated geopolitical situation with Russia as ‘motherland’ interfering with ‘nested’ identities, and that there is little to indicate a path-dependent federal development in the case of Ukraine. Analysis of the Ukrainian discourse on federalism and unitarianism reveals that most political actors regard these concepts as mutually exclusive. Conceiving federalization as a dynamic and often unfinished process, however, this chapter concludes that individual quasi-federal elements may nevertheless evolve.