Catching up with 'Europe'? Constitutional Debates on the Territorial-Administrative Model in Independent Ukraine

Abstract

At first sight, Ukraine is custom-made for far-reaching regionalization or even federalism. Endowed by history with well-accentuated regional divisions, it also has an indigenous reservoir of political ideas on federalism and decentralization dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet upon emerging as an independent state from the break-up of the Soviet federation in 1991, Ukraine became haunted by the spectre of centrifugal forces. This experience was formative for the new polity, putting a premium on unity and territorial cohesion. After several years of debate on Ukraine’s geopolitical orientation and model of statehood, the 1996 constitution marked a victory for the proponents of the ‘return to Europe’. However, being European entailed, first of all, forging a sovereign nation-state out of the disparate regions. As far as the Ukrainian elites were concerned, ‘returning to Europe’ did not imply any shortcuts. Ukraine still needed to replicate the Western trajectory of state-building to achieve integration and unification by means of a centralized, unitary territorial-administrative model that would impose uniform policies across the territory, and subordinate sub-state, regional interests to those of the centre. This meant that Ukraine did not draw from the reservoir of its own indigenous, pre-Soviet traditions. This essay examines the constitutional deliberations on models of statehood. We begin with an outline of the historical, political and regional context. The next section traces the constitutional debates over the choice between the unitary or federal models of the state, the position of Crimea, and the form and competences of local and regional self-governing bodies. The final section analyses the outcome, that is the territorialadministrative model that Ukraine adopted in the constitution and postconstitutional legislation.