School of Political Studies

[modified from thesis' version - Sept 5th, 2010]
This thesis explores the notion of betrayal through a sustained examination of two politically abject types – ‘the corpse/body’ and ‘the dilettante’. By expounding on what is here termed an ‘antipathology’, it performs a phenomenology of these types, not so much enclosing them as totalities - consistent concepts/essences - as taking them in their discursive-affective import, “at their word”. The argument unfolds via readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Lévinas – both serving as each other’s readers and interpreters – taken to share the project of critiquing (a prdominantly Christian-Thomistic) morality. This "antipathology of treason" aims its epokhe at evoking the mechanisms of (political) ‘abjection’ – a concept borrowed from Julia Kristeva – employed in the automatic expulsion of the 'traitor' from the political as such, and the unique and specific forms that this expulsion takes. I will aim toward the ethical implications of this expulsion, insofar as this expulsion is taken here to be inscribed deep within prevalent ethico-political discourses and hermeneutic structures, part-and-parcel of their sustaining inertia. This is how the author of this thesis understands and works the Lévinasian term of 'ethical responsibility.'

The basic idea is to connect the philosophical "this is" to a political discourse. Thus I try to embody this gesture of identification by using the figure of the finger (that, among many other things, points), which has a context and a history, a "weight" and a threat of contamination, and also a volume that always compromises its pointing/aim (hence refusing the dimensionless "point" as a "point of departure"). The finger touches, is touched, contaminates and is contaminated, thus implicating it in its objects in an inescapable ethico-political way. It carries with it a blindness, a stupidity, that still calls for responsibility (rather than mere "reduction-to-minimum," systematic ignoring, or persecution). The finger, like stupidity, involves powers of contagion and abjection, and these are the materials with which I suggest to encounter "experience." This is an initial, not very good, attempt at what Gilles Deleuze called for when he coined the phrase "transcendental stupidity."

When ‘History’ is called to represent silence, its metaphysical position is symptomatically felt. Tracing what Fasolt calls “the historian’s revolt”, this paper identifies the political impetus behind it as the symptom dictating Foucault’s own silences/silencings (regarding Derrida’s intervention in his History of Madness). In naming such a symptom/silence – in taking “Derrida’s position” – this paper performs its own violence/decision by, both “justifying,” and betraying, this position; by installing itself in, instead of “above,” this curious “debate”. ‘The last refuge of the scoundrel’ appears then as the reflective exteriority of a political antagonism that’s based on a metaphysical difference with regards to the legitimate “seat” of authority (in Fasolt, an antagonism between the historian and the Catholic Church). Finally, this trajectory is installed within a wider – metaphysical and historical – context, where Hegel’s famous saying, that the University is the Protestant’s Church, might yet echo that distant metaphysical decision – still looming, like a “genealogical specter,” over Academia and its Social Sciences.

Nutshell:
I engage in supplying a remainder of Hegel's appropriation of Greek tragedy, as part of a larger project that seeks to carve "a position to complain" to victims of what Lyotard called 'wrong' (tort); a crime that specifically effaces the victims legitimacy to complain about it. Cassandra's true but empty speech provides, in this sense, a glimpse into this problematic as a sovereign problem of justice and justification. The vain (Eitel) difference that Hegel loved to hate so much, the difference that remains by definition unworkable/unreal (unwirkliche), is owed an ethical responsibility, one that Hegel's Sittlichkeit and its conception(s) of 'Right' is arguably centered around its system(at)ic denial.

Homo Perfidus: An Antipathology of the Coward’s Betrayal identifies and speaks to an ethical and methodological lacuna in western metaphysics with regards to betrayal. Following Levinas’ call for an ‘Ethics as first philosophy,’ my research question is: ‘How can I think of betrayal responsibly?’ I offer to approach betrayal as an accusation, one that comports an excessive hatred towards the identified ‘traitor.’ Suspending its moral vilification, I construct a broadly phenomenological method – which I call ‘antipathology’ – that proposes to take this hatred seriously; not as the sign of a lack to be filled or purloined with shame, but of a communication to respond-to. Tracking western thought’s metaphysical engagements – mainly via Kant, Hegel and Heidegger – my antipathology witnesses an exceedingly systematic muting of this hatred. Such a principled effacement of hatred’s signs is the very mechanism by which western thought “de-problematizes” betrayal, appropriating its otherness for its own metaphysical ends. To those ends, betrayal ceases to be an event and becomes its ‘prefiguration,’ a twist on an assumed temporal and causal progression. 

I focus here on the coward’s betrayal, broadly defined as secession from a principle – seen to give cohesion and legitimacy to a ‘Whole’ – of which this traitor was nevertheless an integral part until the event of her betrayal. Antipathology follows young Hegel’s ‘antisemitic’ association of the “Jewish spirit” with a principle of alienation and secession, a vain and hateful self-assertion that only “Christian spirit” can successfully negate, turning this drive for hateful dissociation to one of loving association (with progressively diminishing “remainders”). Reading modern philosophy’s treatment of the skeptic I show how her doubt can be appropriated and turned to ‘Truth’ in the same way that the Jews’ hateful and cowardly betrayal can be turned to absolute faith/love; what Hegel calls “negating the negation.” Both ‘Jew’ and ‘Skeptic’ here become antibodies in a process through which a ‘Whole’ slowly becomes immune, or insensitive to, the threat of future interruptions: outside of this process – offering no ‘Whole’ of their own – their respective interruptions are seen as expressions of vanity, of a ‘self’ that breaks-away from the bonds of belonging and love in a fit of gratuitous hatred and doubt; all in the name of a “who knows what” that for Hegel, as well as for Kant and Heidegger, amounts to precisely ‘Nothing.’ 

I conclude by a performative ‘antipathological’ reading of Dante’s Inferno alongside Kafka’s In the Penal Colony: while Dante, as a faithful ‘Christian’ witness to Divine Justice (Hell), desires to internalize the Truth of God, progressively renouncing the vain resistances of a ‘self’ not yet fully reconciled to God’s Being (the theological ‘Pleroma’ of the ‘Whole’), Kafka’s nameless traveler, as a skeptical ‘coward-witness,’ not only remains “unconverted” but also causes the violence that is implicit in the Dante-esque ‘progression’ to show itself. ‘Faith’ is here shown as progression from one betrayal-event to another, all of which require the believer to sacrifice another part of their resistance to the demands of the ‘Whole’ until no such resistance remains (or, at least, felt/expressed). Similarly, the Dante that begins his journey weeping for the suffering of Hell’s sinners, ends up kicking one of them in the face; deliberately, yet without hatred, as if it were a mere rock on the road.

The coward’s betrayal consists in her ‘vain witness’ to time as rupture, as event, as the opening that puts her previous beliefs and attachments in radical question. The hatred towards the coward and the accusation of ‘traitor’ mark this question as a threat to the ‘Whole;’ a mark that, approached antipathologically, can open a discourse concerning the violence (and self-violence) that was and is necessary to keep the ‘Whole,’ through a narrated causal-historical time, from breaking apart. Painful and dangerous, this approach is, nonetheless, the only way to keep a system that abolished all ‘positions to complain’ from being equated with a ‘wholly just’ system; or to keep a knowledge-machine that successfully tames all doubts from being absolved.

This entry explores the dialectic between the global and the international. It specifically focuses on the stakes involved in making global politics into an ideal, and does this by appealing to a specific methodology: thinking from a position of shit. Engaging a thick description of the shit-disposal practice at NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) will foreground the political presuppositions, not to say impetus, of its meta-state, following from the fact that its shit is the only ‘thing’ that this new International – rallied under the flag of humanity – cannot contain. This will lead to a more theoretical meditation about the dream of unifying the inter-national, and proceed by analogizing the assumptions conditioning the physical existence and position of this international-cum-station, and those conditioning the conceptual ones of an international-cum-globe.

The dramatic increase in the use of the World Wide Web and the Internet in government may foreshadow important changes in the nature of governance. A number of theorists have posited that the adoption of networked information systems is accompanied by inevitable shifts toward democratic government. Others argue that technologies are secondary factors in changes in levels of democracy or types of governance. Our article examines the openness of cabinet-level websites in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and post-communist countries as a measure of an important aspect of governance that has only recently been operationalized. It provides a brief review of other studies in this field and the directions in which they are heading. The article analyzes the effects of political, cultural, economic, and technical factors on openness of cabinet-level websites in OECD and post-communist countries. The question is whether the level of democracy and cultural legacies affect openness of electronic governments. The study employs statistical analysis of a comparative database of national-level public agency websites that is produced by the Cyberspace Policy Research Group (CyPRG). The dependent variable is based on transparency and interactivity scores and availability of cabinet-level websites. The independent variables include Freedom House and Polity indexes of democracy, historical legacy, religious tradition, and the GDP per capita and number of Internet users per 1,000 people. Regression analysis shows that democracy, historical legacies, level of economic development, and religious tradition affect openness of cabinet-level websites in OECD and post-communist countries. This study demonstrates need to distinguish between cyberdemocracy and “Potemkin e-villages,” that is, window-dressing, in electronic governments.

This article examines differing political orientations of Crimean Tatars and the Gagauz, two main Turkic minorities in Ukraine and Moldova. Crimean Tatars in Ukraine expressed anti-Communist and anti-Russian political preferences, while the Gagauz in Moldova showed strong support for pro-Communist and pro-Russian parties and politicians. This study analyses the role of cultural factors in political attitudes and behavior of Crimean Tatars and the Gagauz and uses data from surveys, elections and referendums. The analysis shows that distinct historical experiences of Crimean Tatars and the Gagauz in the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and Romania led to the emergence of distinct political cultures of these ethnic groups and affected their political behavior and attitudes in post-communist Ukraine and Moldova.

Have there been changes in political institutions, parties, leaders, and regional political orientations in Ukraine after the "Orange Revolution"? If so, are the changes revolutionary or evolutionary? Most previous studies refer to the 2004 presidential elections and mass protest actions as a revolution. To test this claim, this article analyzes political changes in Ukraine. Survey data are used to compare changes in pro-Russian and pro-Western orientation, support for major parties in the 2002, 2006, and 2007 parliamentary elections, and support for leading presidential candidates since the 2004 presidential elections. The implications of these changes for development of democracy in Ukraine are also considered.

Statistical analyses of the voting results from all national parliamentary and presidential elections held between 1991 and 2006 and survey data concerning attitudes towards major historical issues confirm the existence of strong and persistent regional cleavages in post-Soviet Ukraine. Western Ukrainian regions, which differ significantly in terms of their historical legacies
from regions in Eastern Ukraine, are much more supportive, compared to Eastern Ukraine, of pro-nationalist and pro-Western parties and politicians, and they are much less supportive of pro-Communist and pro-Russian parties and politicians.
        Similarly, Eastern Ukrainians, compared to Western Ukrainians, express much more favorable attitudes towards the incorporation of Eastern Ukraine by Russia in the seventeenth century, the Bolshevik Revolution, the whole period of Ukraine’s inclusion in the Soviet Union, the past Communist political system, Russian tsars, and Soviet political leaders. People from Western Ukraine are much more likely than the residents of other regions to
regard the artificial famine of 1932/1933 as a result of deliberate Soviet policy directed against ethnic Ukrainians. Western Ukrainians demonstrate much more favorable views than their Eastern Ukrainian counterparts towards the UPA and historical Ukrainian nationalist and pro-independence leaders.
        Regression analysis shows that historical legacies, linked to different historical experiences before Soviet unification, have the largest effect, compared to other factors, on electoral behavior and on attitudes towards historical issues. Keeping other factors, such as ethnicity and the level of economic development constant, the history of Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule is the biggest determinant of the regional pro-nationalist/pro-Western vote index, the pro-Communist/pro-Russian vote index,  and individual attitudes towards the past Soviet political system. Catholic religion and Ukrainian ethnicity also affect the regional electoral behavior indexes but to a lesser extent and less consistently than the historical legacy does. Age, education, Catholic religion, and gender are significant
determinants of attitudes towards the Soviet political system. However, their effects are weaker compared to the effects of historical legacy variables.
    This study concludes that the regional political cleavages in post-Communist Ukraine reflect primarily cultural differences that emerged as a result of distinct historical experiences in Ukrainian regions in the periods before World War I and World War II. These findings imply that the regional differences in electoral behavior and attitudes towards major historical issues will not disappear in Ukraine in the near future.

This paper analyzes the role of political factors, such as the level of democracy and relations with the US, compared to other factors, such as religious, racial, and economic differences, as determinants of attitudes towards “Russians” and Poles in the United States. This is one of the first studies which use survey data to examine attitudes towards “Russians” and Poles in the United States after the end of the Cold War. The paper employs statistical and comparative analysis of the 2001 Parrillo/Donoghue survey of 2,916 students in 22 colleges and universities in the US. This survey determines perceptions of the social distance towards 30 major nationalities and selected racial and religious groups. The social distance is measured by the Bogardus scale, which ranges from willingness to marry representatives of a group to unwillingness to allow members of the group into the United States. The paper also uses analysis of major dissertation databases, such as Proquest, and search of the Internet to determine proportions of Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian recipients of Ph.D.s from American universities in tenure track positions in the US, compared to their counterparts from Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. Such an analysis provides a way to determine effects of relative social distance towards people from these two groups of countries. The sample includes more than 200 Ph.D.s, who received their doctorates in the fields of economics, education, international relations, political science, and sociology from 1992 to 2007 and whose dissertations dealt with post-communist countries.

The comparative analysis reveals that Americans, especially female respondents, perceive “Russians” as much more distant than Poles, other European nations, Africans, and many Latin American and Asian nations. The level of democracy and relations of Poland and the Soviet Union with the US cannot account for similar social distances towards Poles and “Russians” in the 1926 Bogardus survey and the 1946 Bogardus survey and the divergence in the relative distance towards Poles and “Russians” in similar surveys conducted in 1956 and 1977. Cross-national regression analysis predicts similar levels of social distance towards Poles and “Russians.” The analysis shows that male recipients of US Ph.D.s in economics, education, international relations, political science, and sociology from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine are significantly less likely to obtain tenure-track positions in the US compared to their female counterparts from these post-Soviet countries and their male counterparts from Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia. The paper discusses implications of these findings and need for further research on determinants of American attitudes towards Russians, Poles, and other nations from post-Communist countries.

This study examines images of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine in American movies. The question is whether political factors affect cinematic representation of these ethnically, politically, culturally, religiously, linguistically, and economically different post-Soviet countries. A related question is how the portrayal of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine in Hollywood films affects Americans’ perceptions of these countries. This paper analyzes more than 100 movies and TV films from the Internet Movie Database and conducts a content analysis of principal motion pictures, such as Air Force One (1997), Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), GoldenEye (1995), Everything is Illuminated (2004), The Peacemaker (1997), The Saint (1997), The Sum of All Fears (2002), and Lord of War (2004), to identify main Kazakh, Russian, and Ukrainian-related themes and heroes. Analysis of the movies shows that they often overlook significant political, ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic differences among these countries. Their comparison with academic studies shows that most of the movies, incorrectly present Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine as economically and technologically backward, extremely anti-American and anti-Semitic countries, which have pervasive “Russian mafia” and widespread female prostitution. In spite of such incorrectness, most of these movies are regarded as politically correct by American filmmakers, movie-goers, and film critics. This study attributes the politically correct incorrectness in Hollywood portrayals of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine to such factors as US internal politics, which confines political and cultural sensitivity to racial and religious minorities, relatively small and politically non-influential Kazakh, Russian, and Ukrainian communities in the United States, and the fact that these countries are not regarded as major US allies. In conclusion, the study discusses a negative effect that distorted portrayals of Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine in Hollywood movies, which are one of principal sources of information about these countries for Americans, have on their perceptions of the post-Soviet states.

This study analyzes policies and public attitudes concerning the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) after the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine. The issue of the political rehabilitation of these nationalist organizations, which relied on terrorism and were involved in Nazi genocide and ethnic cleansing of Poles during World War Two, became one of central political issues in this post-Soviet state. The question is which factors determine attitudes towards the OUN and the UPA in contemporary Ukraine. The hypothesis is that regional factors are the main determinants of the public opinion concerning these organizations. This paper uses analysis of historical studies and archival data to examine policies and controversies concerning the OUN and the UPA. It employs comparative and regression analyses of the 2009 Kyiv International Institute of Sociology survey to determine effects of regional factors, compared to other factors, such as ethnicity, language, and age, on attitudes towards the Stepan Bandera faction of the OUN and the UPA. The paper shows that that regional factors and perceptions of the involvement of the Bandera faction of the OUN and the UPA in mass murder are strongest predictors of views concerning these nationalist organizations.

This paper analyzes the coverage of major post-communist countries, particularly their politics, by main television networks in the United States. The question is whether there are significant qualitative and quantitative differences in the representation of East-Central European and post-Soviet countries on U.S. television programming. The related question is whether political factors, such as relations with the United States and national phobias, affect the television coverage of the post-communist countries. Although the question of political biases in coverage of post-communist nations by mass communications media in the United States has been raised by a growing number of politicians and journalists, there is a lack of academic studies on this issue. This paper uses quantitative and content analyses of transcripts of news programs from the most-watched U.S. TV networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC from 1998-2008. The following news programs are examined: World News, Nightline, and 20/20 on ABC, CBS Evening News, CBS Sunday Night News, 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes II, and 48 Hours on CBS, and NBC Nightly News, and Dateline on NBC. A keyword search of transcripts in the Lexis-Nexis database is employed to identify specific broadcasts and news stories that focused on major post-communist countries, such as Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Georgia. The analysis shows significant differences in quantity, the proportion of political content, and quality of American television coverage of the post-communist countries. Such political issues and events as U.S.-Russia relations, the war between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia, major terrorist acts in Russia, the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko (a former Russian secret service employee) in the United Kingdom, Chechen Islamic terrorism, the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko (the future president of Ukraine), the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine, and the deployment of the U.S. missile system in the Czech Republic and Poland, were among top stories dealing with post-communist countries in 2004-2008. Other leading topics included the following: Russian crime, Chernobyl (Chornobyl) disaster and its effects in Ukraine and Belarus, child pornography in Belarus, Borat movie about Kazakhstan, Polish Pope John Paul II, the Holocaust and World War Two in the Czech Republic, Bulgarian and Hungarian immigrants, and Dracula and sex slaves and sex slavery in Romania. The analysis produces evidence of systematic biases in representation of some post-communist countries, particularly, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia. The study presents results of the analysis regarding the role of such political factors as relations of post-communist states with the United States on their coverage by the U.S. TV networks.

This article examines policies and public attitudes concerning the issue of Soviet and Nazi genocides in Ukraine after the 'Orange Revolution'. The central question is whether such factors as regional political culture affect contemporary policies and public attitudes towards these important historical issues. The article uses a 2008 survey conducted for this study by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology to analyse determinants of public attitudes concerning the question of whether Soviet and the Nazi policies were genocidal. It finds that regional political culture is the most significant factor affecting policies and attitudes towards the Soviet genocide in Ukraine.

This study analyzes the television coverage of post-communist countries in Canada. It is one of the first academic studies of this issue which has policy-relevance since media coverage affects foreign policy agendas and public attitudes towards other countries. The research question is whether there are significant differences in the extent and the content of coverage of post-communist countries on television news programs in Canada. The hypothesis is that post-Soviet countries, with the exception of Russia, receive a smaller amount of coverage than comparable post-communist countries in East Central Europe. Another question is whether political factors affect the coverage of these countries. The hypothesis is that Canadian allies are likely to receive more positive coverage than its adversaries and non-allies not only in the areas of relations between these countries and Canada, but also on non-political issues. The final question is whether there are significant differences in the content of the coverage of post-communist countries by American and Canadian television. The hypothesis states that Canadian television offers more balanced reporting concerning, respectively, Canadian allies and non-allies and post-Soviet and East Central European nations, and that political topics occupy a greater proportion of Canadian television reports concerning post-communist countries compared to American television reports. A keyword search of transcripts in the Lexis-Nexis database was employed to identify specific evening news programs that dealt with post-communist countries and were broadcast by leading private television networks in Canada (CTV) and the US (ABC, CBS, and NBC) from 1998-2009. This paper uses comparative and content analyses of these programs. The analysis shows importance of political factors in the representation of post-communist countries by Canadian television and differences and similarities in the television coverage of these countries in Canada and the United States.

This study provides an empirical assessment of the prisoner’s dilemma model. It examines political prosecution and behavior of intellectuals during the Great Terror in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. This paper analyzes whether political prisoners confessed voluntarily as the prisoner’s dilemma model predicts. It focuses on the prosecution of Mykhailo Krawtchouk, an internationally renowned Ukrainian mathematician, and more than 100 other political prisoners, who were connected to his case. Krawtchouk’s case is selected because of its unintended effects on the invention of the electronic computer in the United States and the development of rocket technology in the Soviet Union. This study shows that only a small fraction of political prisoners confessed voluntarily. However, rational choice theory, on which the prisoner’s dilemma model is based, is helpful in solving a puzzle pertaining to the electronic computer invention and patent.

""During the "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, the second largest country in Europe came close to a violent break-up similar to that in neighboring Moldova, which witnessed a violent secession of the Transdniestria region. Numerous elections, including the hotly contested 2004 presidential elections in Ukraine, and surveys of public opinion showed significant regional divisions in these post-Soviet countries. Western parts of Ukraine and Moldova, as well as the Muslim Crimean Tatars, were vocal supporters of independence, nationalist, and pro-Western parties and politicians. In contrast, Eastern regions, as well as the Orthodox Turkic-speaking Gagauz, consistently expressed pro-Russian and pro-Communist political orientations. Which factors ? historical legacies, religion, economy, ethnicity, or political leadership ? could explain these divisions? Why was Ukraine able to avoid a violent break-up, in contrast to Moldova?
This is the first book to offer a systematic and comparative analysis of the regional political divisions in post-Soviet Ukraine and Moldova. The study examines voting behavior and political attitudes in two groups of regions: those which were under Russian, Ottoman, and Soviet rule; and those which were under Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, and Czechoslovak rule until World War I or World War II. This book attributes the regional political divisions to the differences in historical experience. This study helps us to better understand regional cleavages and conflicts, not only in Ukraine and Moldova, but also in other cleft countries.""

"Why have Americans, who by a clear majority approve of unions, been joining them in smaller numbers than ever before? This book answers that question by comparing the American experience with that of Canada, where approval for unions is significantly lower than in the United States, but where since the mid-1960s workers have joined organized labor to a much greater extent. Given that the two countries are outwardly so similar, what explains this paradox? This book provides a detailed comparative analysis of both countries using, among other things, a detailed survey conducted in the United States and Canada by the Ipsos-Reid polling group.

The authors explain that the relative reluctance of employees in the United States to join unions, compared with those in Canada, is rooted less in their attitudes toward unions than in the former country's deep-seated tradition of individualism and laissez-faire economic values. Canada has a more statist, social democratic tradition, which is in turn attributable to its Tory and European conservative lineage. Canadian values are therefore more supportive of unionism, making unions more powerful and thus, paradoxically, lowering public approval of unions. Public approval is higher in the United States, where unions exert less of an influence over politics and the economy."