by D.J. Webb

Lustration is, in most contexts, a rare and pretty useless word. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “the performance of an expiatory sacrifice or a purificatory rite”. The word is, however, useful when it comes to discussion of the purges of government officials conducted by some post-Communist states in Eastern Europe. For example, in 1991, Czechoslovakia, then trading under the name of the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic, passed a lustration law barring from office anyone associated with the Communist-era secret police, thus “lustrating”, or cleansing, the government. Ironically, while the Western élite supports the Western tilt of the new Ukraine, they are not so keen on the lustration of Ukrainian officials, which underlines to me that the issue is quite important, as the self-interest of bureaucrats and their instinct to defend other bureaucrats comes to the fore.

The issue is relevant to libertarians as it is clear that any attempt by a libertarian government to reduce the size of the state would face disruptive opposition from within the government itself. How many civil servants would be keen to implement laws limiting maximum public-sector salaries to around £60,000 in local government and £100,000 in central government? Such laws would set the stage for a showdown with the civil service. It could end badly, with judges (on inflated publicly funded salaries) choosing to side with the civil servants. As Dr Gabb argued in his book on the need for a Cultural Revolution, the essential thing would be to immediately shut down large parts of the state straightaway.

This would be done, not just because those organs of state were scheduled for deletion anyway, or even just to save money—although those would be good reasons too—but as a political imperative, to reduce the ability of the state to organise against a government committed to savagely reducing the size of the state. There would be those arguing that a reduction in state spending would need to be done in small bites, to avoid a negative effect on domestic demand, etc, but the political priority of destroying the ability of the state to organise opposition would override all else.

There would clearly be difficulties: with people dependent on many state schemes, it could be awkward to suddenly close them down—or politically destructive to do so—but in any case the most senior and well-paid ranks of the state would need to be the target. All of the judges should go. All of the police chiefs should go. The foreign office, the department of education, the department of international aid, the culture department, senior officials in the department of health (quoted recently in the media arguing the National Health Service is underfunded, as if political campaigning for an enlargement of the state were at all within their remit) should go.

We are, however, nowhere near the point of being able to destroy the hypertrophied state in the UK. To lustrate a whole generation of officials would be a revolutionary act and this becomes all the clearer when we look at the situation in the Ukraine. While the Ukrainian coup was masterminded by the Western powers, it could not have been so successfully accomplished were there not large numbers of angry people willing to bring down the former regime of Viktor Yanukovych. While I don’t feel we should be sympathetic to the Western élite and their attempts to destabilise the Ukraine, we should feel sympathy with the ordinary people of the Ukraine, including both those on the Maidan who sought to overthrow a corrupt government and the much smaller numbers of local activists in the eastern regions who opposed the toppling of Yanukovych for their own political/cultural reasons. Just as people like Pavel Gubarev, the local man who initially spearheaded the separatist movement in Donetsk before finding himself sidelined in favour of Moscow’s handpicked men, must realise by now they have been used, the people who attended the Maidan rallies are about to find out that the government of Arseniy Yatsenyuk installed in February is one that aims to serve the Western powers and not the people of the Ukraine. That much is already clear from the way in which a former official in the US embassy in Kiev has been granted Ukrainian citizenship and installed as finance minister, to the anger of many in the Ukrainian parliament.

Consequently, it is unlikely that the demands of the Maidan activists for lustration of officials will be fully and adequately met, although some officials have already been shown the door. The Maidan activists have called for civil servants who worked for Yanukovych to be excluded from office, as well as those who were active in the Communist Party before 1991. Such a broad definition would “catch” many officials: anyone who’s anyone over a certain age would fall within the definition. Even the Lithuanian president, Dalia Grybauskaite, who is now a passionate opponent of Russia geopolitically, was in the Communist Party before 1991. This is, of course, not a reason to oppose lustration, but all the more reason to support it. Yatsenyuk argues that one million officials will need to be investigated, but those who support a small state will not object to a broad-brush lustration.

The process of verifying civil servants has two years to run in the Ukraine—this is an illustration of how hard such things are when not done immediately. Two years is more than enough time to scupper the whole thing. Absurdly, senior judges will not be lustrated. Neither will parliamentarians. It seems clear that the numbers who are dismissed will be quite small overall, and that corruption will remain a prominent feature of the way in which Ukrainian society operates.

Interestingly, Vitaly Yarema, general prosecutor of the Ukraine, has argued that the lustration law is against the constitution and against “international law”—a nebulous concept, as there is no “international sovereign”. The constitution was overlooked when ejecting Yanukovych from power, but all of a sudden it is produced, like a rabbit from a hat, in defence of officialdom. Human-rights groups in the Ukraine also argue that lustration is against human rights. Others argue that too many people could potentially be affected by lustration and that many of them would be hard to replace (which is a disguised argument for privatisation of services once delivered by the government). Finally, the West, in the form of the Council of Europe, chimed in on December 12th that the law on lustration has serious shortcomings and does not comply with European principles. The Council of Europe’s ruling on this states:

Applying lustration measures in respect of the recent period during which Mr Yanukovych was president of Ukraine would ultimately amount to questioning the actual functioning of the constitutional and legal framework of Ukraine as a democratic state governed by the rule of law.

This is quite a problem for the Maidan activists, as they thought they were both trying to lustrate the government and join Europe. It turns out that the European institutions, including the EU and the Council of Europe, are just technocracies that are crying out for lustration themselves, and so, unsurprisingly, the constitution and the rule of law are trotted out to defend the Ukrainian bureaucracy.

We should be clear that a well-paid public-sector job is not a human right, and there is no genuine human-rights principle that would oppose the defenestration of officials. Some argue that the case of each official should be addressed in a separate court case, and that there should not be a general defenestration of officials who meet some broad criterion, including working for the Communists before 1991. But given the libertarian support for proposals including shutting down the BBC within minutes of a free government coming to power, there is no reason why we should agree that even lustration according to broad and non-specific principles should be objected to. Lustration is not a punishment in the way that being sent to prison is. Those who have sucked at the state’s teat for years cannot plead a human right to continue to do so.

The only problem with lustration plans is that they aim to tackle a generation of officials—but not to prevent the emergence of a new technocracy. Surely it is better to just close down whole agencies and not employ new officials to staff the same agencies? It is become clearer by the day that the Ukrainian revolution, such as it was, has been hijacked—and that the Western technocratic élite is running the show. The gains of the Maidan are likely to be few and far between in a few years’ time, leaving people in the Ukraine to wonder what they accomplished, other than territorial and economic contraction, the piling up of external debt to the IMF and other agencies, and possibly even, eventually, the freezing of the Ukraine out of international financial markets following a sovereign default. Through all that, most of the same people who have been in power all along will still be there. As for the oligarchs, they never went away.