Tetiana Derkach, Religious Publicist

This is the paper delivered by religious publicist and Editor-in-Chief of Religion in Ukraine, Tetiana Derkach, at the scientific and practical conference “The Common Good: Values and Meanings Around Which the Reconstruction of Ukraine Is Possible” on 2 June 2026. The conference inaugurated the nationwide project “Youth for the Future of Ukraine: Dialogue, Research, and Creative Media Work for the Consolidation of Ukrainian Society and Orthodoxy”—a seven-month programme for young leaders and activists from small towns and rural communities across Ukraine, implemented by the NGO Sofiyske Brotherhood and the State University “Kyiv Aviation Institute” with the support of the German Federal Foreign Office through the ifa/zivik programme.

I would like to begin with an epigraph – a quotation from a desperate text that I came across on social media: “Ukrainian patriotism is the cheapest in the world. Because only here can people tell you that life is priceless while at the same time expecting you to give it away for free and in silence. Don’t spoil the beautiful legend.”

Behind this epigraph lies a certain sociological diagnosis that I would like to discuss today. There is an uncomfortable question that people today often ask themselves privately, but rarely aloud: why, in a country that is fighting for freedom and dignity, are people afraid of their own state? This question is not rhetorical but diagnostic. The answer we give to it, and the way we reflect on the phenomena that have, at least, caught my attention, will determine the substance and the context of creating the common good as the point of departure for our post-war unity.

My colleagues have spoken extensively today about the common good as a goal, as a matter of values and concepts. But I want to speak about the obstacle, about the gap between concept and reality. More precisely, about one very specific obstacle that makes any goal unattainable.

I will begin with a simple question: why does society need an agreed conception of the common good at all? What does it provide? The answer is simple, yet fundamental. Society is a group (or rather, groups) of people who must live together regardless of whether they want to or not. They compete for the same resources, their decisions affect one another, and when conflict arises, they cannot simply walk away from each other. This creates one central problem: how can the actions of people with different interests be coordinated without constant violence?

An agreed conception of the common good is the answer to this problem. It provides coordination without coercion. It gives legitimacy to decisions – even to those who lose in a particular situation. It provides a horizon for long-term planning. And it answers the question “Who are we together?” – which is fundamentally different from the question “Who am I individually?”

But there is an important nuance here – and it is crucial for everything that follows. The American philosopher John Rawls, the author of the theory of justice as the first virtue of social institutions (A Theory of Justice), proposed the idea that the minimal common good is not a shared dream. It is a shared procedure that protects each person from having someone else’s dream destroy their own. In other words, the common good begins not with values, but with rules of the game that are fair to everyone.

And it is precisely here – in these rules, in their fairness and predictability – that the problem I want to discuss today lies.

PART I: Phenomenology. HOW PEOPLE EXPERIENCE THE STATE

When we speak about the state, we usually mean an abstraction – the Constitution, institutions, sovereignty, laws. But for an ordinary person, the state is not an abstraction. It is a feeling.

In other words, the phenomenology of the state is an attempt to understand the state not only as a legal mechanism or political institution, but as an experience, an encounter, or a point of contact: how people perceive the state, how it is present in their consciousness, trust, fear, loyalty, identity, and everyday practice. In other words, not “what the state is according to the law,” but “how the state appears to a person in lived experience.”

One of the most important observations for understanding post-Soviet societies is that, for the individual, the state exists not as a system of institutions but as the sum of bodily and emotional encounters with its representatives. The anthropologist Akhil Gupta (Red Tape), speaking about the phenomenology of the state through encounters with bureaucracy, demonstrated that what a person experiences through their own body remains with them more deeply and for much longer than any rhetoric. The body remembers an encounter with a military recruitment officer longer than the mind remembers a powerful or grand presidential address.

This is the phenomenology of the state in the literal sense: not what the state is, but how it is experienced by a person when they come face to face with it.

Two Levels of Reality

Ukrainian society today exists simultaneously on two levels of reality, and the tension between them is, in my view, the central problem that will shape the country’s post-war future.

The first is the level of the grand narrative: “independence that has endured,” “a people that has not been broken,” “an army that defends,” “a nation that has proven its agency.” This level is real – it is sustained by genuine sacrifice and genuine heroism.

The second is the level of everyday profane practice. Military recruitment officers who stop a person on the street treat them not as a human being, but as a recruitment resource. The same public procurement schemes enrich a narrow circle close to the political elites while soldiers raise money for drones through Monobank fundraising campaigns.

As long as these two levels do not openly collide, they coexist in people’s consciousness in parallel. One can simultaneously believe in the grand narrative and hate a particular military recruitment officer or a corrupt official. But this equilibrium is fragile. Sooner or later, a cognitive dissonance emerges between the belief that “Ukraine is a great idea” and the feeling that “the state is a threat.” This is precisely the structural dissociation of the citizen from the state: a person continues to identify with Ukraine as an idea while becoming alienated from the state as an institution. One can simultaneously fight for Ukraine and dislike the state because the objects of identification are different.

In other words, there is a risk of a rupture between:

• The symbolic state (“patriotism,” “duty,” “the pricelessness of life”)
• The material state (underpayment, self-provision, humiliation),

which inevitably leads to public frustration and disillusionment.

“Evil” Institutional Design

Here it is important to dwell on one fundamental point – the kind of institutional design* with which we have lived throughout all the years of Ukraine’s independence (and the kind we would like to see after the war).

*Institutional design is the deliberate construction of rules, procedures, and structures that determine how organisations and systems function. Put simply, it is the answer to the question: “How should a system be organised so that it does what it is supposed to do?”

The term is well established in political science and institutional economics. It was developed by Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons) and Douglass North (Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance).

When we speak about institutional dysfunction, it is very easy to slip into a personal explanation: bad people, corrupt officials, unscrupulous military recruitment officers, and so on. Remove them – and everything will become different.

But in 1980 the sociologist Michael Lipsky (Street-Level Bureaucracy) described the phenomenon of “street-level bureaucracy,” which destroys this simple logic. He demonstrated that public policy does not truly exist in laws but in the everyday decisions of frontline officials. And these people – regardless of their personal qualities – inevitably drift toward certain practices when they find themselves under pressure to fulfil impossible targets, or are guided by vague instructions that provide no clear direction, or operate in conditions where there is no real oversight and complete impunity.

This is not a justification; it is a structural diagnosis. Institutional design that creates perverse incentives reproduces perverse behaviour regardless of who the individual official may be. Replacing people under such a design simply means obtaining new people exhibiting the same behaviour. Institutions are the rules of the game, while organisations are the players. You may replace all the players, but if the rules remain unchanged, the players will reproduce the same behaviour.

This leads to the first key conclusion: the dysfunction is structural, not personal. Consequently, the solution must also be structural rather than personal. Corruption is a symptom. The system that generates corruption is the disease. And if one treats only the symptom, the disease will reproduce a new symptom with a new face.

Why does the system reproduce itself even when the people in power change?

Here it is necessary to discuss what the political scientist Henry Hale (Patronal Politics) called “patronal networks” – systems in which power is organised not around rules and institutions but around personal loyalty and the distribution of resources. Within such systems, institutional reform is structurally undesirable because opacity and unpredictability themselves are the source of rents for those who hold power.

Ukraine has a specific variation of this system: not a single centralised network as in Russia, but several competing ones. This has produced greater freedom and pluralism – hence the Maidan movements that Russia never experienced. But it has also made systemic reform impossible because each network has possessed sufficient resources to block changes that threatened its position. Anti-corruption reforms after the Maidans changed the individuals, but not the institutional logic.

As a result, we have a state that is simultaneously formally functional and structurally dysfunctional. Institutions exist, laws are adopted, and procedures are clearly prescribed. Yet the actual logic by which the system functions is different – and unfortunately, that logic is far more resilient than any reformist impulse.

PART II: WHAT LEGITIMACY IS AND WHY IT MATTERS

Now let us turn to legitimacy. Because it is precisely legitimacy that forms the bridge between a person’s phenomenological experience and the possibility of the common good.

Max Weber (Economy and Society) distinguished three types of legitimacy. Traditional legitimacy – authority is accepted because “it has always been this way.” Charismatic legitimacy – authority is accepted because of the personal qualities of the leader. And rational-legal legitimacy – authority is accepted because it is based on rules that are equal for everyone.

It is this third type that forms the foundation of the modern state. And it is precisely this type that is the most vulnerable – and the most difficult to restore.

Legitimacy as an Invisible Resource

The economist Margaret Levi described a phenomenon that I consider one of the most important for understanding statehood: quasi-voluntary compliance*. It is the willingness of citizens to comply with the state’s demands not out of fear of punishment, but because they perceive the rules as fair.

*The concept of quasi-voluntary compliance, described by Margaret Levi in Of Rule and Revenue, rests upon three pillars:

• the social (fiscal) contract: the state fulfils its obligations (providing security, infrastructure, and justice).
• reasonable fairness: the rules of the game (for example, taxation) are perceived by society as honest and impartial.
• the threat of punishment for free-riders: citizens agree to pay taxes and comply with the rules only when they are confident that those who evade their obligations will be identified and punished by the state.

A state that is grounded in legitimacy can ask people to make sacrifices – and receive them. A state that has lost legitimacy can only compel. Yet coercion is a more costly, less effective, and structurally less stable instrument than the voluntary willingness to cooperate.

This naturally brings us to the phenomenon of trust. The Polish sociologist Piotr Sztompka (Sociology: Analysis of Society) proposed a typology of trust:

• there is trust in a particular individual;
• there is trust in a category of people;
• and there is systemic trust – trust in institutions and rules as such, regardless of the particular individuals who occupy positions within them.

It is precisely systemic trust that constitutes the greatest deficit of post-Soviet societies. Volunteer networks, comradeship at the front, and civic self-organisation are all manifestations of personal and categorical trust. And they function remarkably well. But without systemic trust they remain fragile, and because they depend upon particular individuals, they disintegrate when those individuals are gone.

PART III: LEGITIMACY AS A PRECONDITION FOR THE COMMON GOOD

Now let us consider the relationship between legitimacy and the common good. We must not forget the concept of the social contract.

The social contract and the common good are not the same thing. The social contract consists of the minimum rules of the game that reconcile groups with different interests and different values. It does not require a shared dream. It requires only a shared fear of losing more than others.

Adam Przeworski (Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America) studied how societies emerge from profound crises and discovered something counterintuitive: successful social contracts do not precede a shared conception of the common good – they produce it. Spain in 1977, after forty years of dictatorship, was deeply polarised and lacked any shared vision of the future. Yet it possessed a shared fear of another civil war. That alone proved sufficient for Communists and Francoists to sit down together and agree upon a set of minimum rules.

For Ukraine, this means that we should not search for one great unifying idea. Instead, we should identify minimal shared interests. A veteran, an entrepreneur, a displaced woman, and a schoolteacher from eastern Ukraine have different values and different visions of the future. But they all share one common interest: that the rules of the game should be predictable and the same for everyone. This is the minimal foundation of the common good. Not a grand idea – but a predictable state.

The common good is the next step – a positive conception of what society seeks to achieve. But it can arise only from the social contract, not before it.

At this point, however, we encounter the trap that the sociologist Claus Offe (Capitalism by Democratic Design?) described as the “simultaneity dilemma”: systemic trust cannot emerge without the experience that institutions actually work, yet institutions cannot begin to function without prior trust. This is a vicious circle from which it is extremely difficult to escape.

For Ukraine, this means that when the legitimacy of the state has been undermined, any discussion of the common good takes place in a vacuum. Every social group perceives the “common good” primarily as a threat to its own interests because there is no trust that the rules of the game are fair and equal for everyone.

Simply put: it is impossible to agree on building a common house if people do not believe that the rules of construction will be the same for everyone.

PART IV: “NOT BUGS BUT FEATURES” – HOW THE EROSION OF LEGITIMACY TAKES PLACE

Now let us turn to the concrete mechanisms through which legitimacy is eroded in wartime Ukraine. And here we must be honest: most of them are not accidental malfunctions but structural products of the system that has developed over several decades.

The Dichotomy of “Checkerboard or Destination”

Recently, the work of our anti-corruption institutions has been at the centre of public attention and has raised many questions. The well-known journalist Pavlo Kazarin wrote a very interesting Facebook post that can be regarded as a diagnosis of the structural conflict that has existed in Ukraine over the past twelve years: “checkerboard or destination.” The logic of anti-corruption versus the logic of national security, when the work of anti-corruption agencies paralyses weapons production.

The former measures processes by procedural purity and transparency. The latter measures them by results and timeliness. Both possess their own internal consistency. And both can be instrumentalised against their declared purpose and transformed into their very opposite.

There is a temptation to strike a bargain, to compromise between efficiency and legitimacy* (“efficiency-legitimacy trade-off”). The popular meme “The Constitution is on pause” is precisely about this.

*The efficiency-legitimacy trade-off is a governance dilemma in which actions taken to increase operational speed and economic efficiency (effectiveness) reduce public trust, accountability, or procedural fairness (legitimacy). Conversely, highly efficient systems often centralise power in order to reduce coordination difficulties, whereas highly legitimate systems favour slower, more inclusive negotiations involving multiple stakeholders.

The “logic of national security,” which justifies selective exemptions from the rules – even when it is sincere and pragmatically justified—undermines the very principle of equality before the rules. Every such justification creates a precedent: under exceptional circumstances, the rules do not apply. And exceptional circumstances can always be found.

The economists Daron Acemoglu and Thierry Verdier (The Choice between Market Failures and Corruption) demonstrated that corruption can be locally and temporarily efficient. But in the medium term it is systematically destructive because it destroys the very foundation upon which the state rests: citizens’ willingness to comply with its demands voluntarily (bringing us back to the phenomenon of quasi-voluntary compliance).

In other words, the short-term efficiency of a corrupt sector is achieved at the expense of the long-term efficiency of the state itself. This is the true price of the compromise—we are taking an enormous loan against our own future. This is how the legitimacy of the state is eroded, making it impossible to construct a social contract and, consequently, to formulate the common good.

Institutional Amnesia and the Ritual Scapegoat

There is another mechanism of erosion – or dimension of dysfunction – that receives far less attention, yet I consider it perhaps the most important for understanding why Ukraine remains trapped in the cycle in which it finds itself. Ukraine is a state without institutional memory.

Not in the sense that people do not remember the past – they do, and very well indeed (we even have an Institute of National Remembrance, which I call the Institute of National Traumas). Rather, the state as an institution does not accumulate the experience of its own decisions and their consequences in such a way that subsequent decisions become wiser and more effective.

The American political scientist Thomas Carothers (The End of the Transition Paradigm) described this as “permanent transition”: Ukraine has become trapped in an endless cycle of proclaimed transformations without genuine change precisely because institutional memory is absent – acknowledging continuity would mean acknowledging responsibility.

Every new government in Ukraine performs a ritual that the anthropologist René Girard (Violence and the Sacred) described as the “scapegoat mechanism” – one of the oldest ways of restoring social unity. A symbolic victim is identified – a representative of the previous government upon whom responsibility for everything that went wrong is placed. That person is publicly punished or excluded (cancelled). The community is “purified” and receives the opportunity to begin “with a clean slate.” But behind this ritual there is no real change in practices. For acknowledging the systemic continuity of problems would mean acknowledging one’s own responsibility for solving them.

The problem is not that this is unfair (although it often is unfair as well). The problem is that it is structurally counterproductive.

By appointing an individual culprit, the system avoids systemic analysis. “Everything would have been fine if it had not been for him” is the exact opposite of asking, “What needs to be changed so that this does not happen again?” The first narrative is psychologically comfortable and politically advantageous. The second is painful and dangerous for those who came to power afterwards.

The result is that the state does not learn from its own mistakes. Not because the people in power are incapable of learning. Rather, because the system possesses no mechanisms of institutional memory. Every new government begins with a clean slate – and reproduces the very same failures under new slogans.

The Asymmetry of Sacrifice and Privilege. Is the Sacrifice Worth Its Price, or the Moral Economy of War

Let us return to my epigraph: “Ukrainian patriotism is the cheapest in the world.”

A particular moral construction has emerged in Ukraine during the war, one that is at once both necessary and dangerous.

Patriotism as a “special religion,” to use the metaphor from the text with which we began. Patriotism has become obligatory and unquestionable. Any attempt to discuss the conditions or limits of this obligation is immediately classified as betrayal. Merely asking “Why should I?” is already treated as a crime. The sociologist Jeffrey Alexander, in his theory of cultural sociology (The Civil Sphere), describes this as the “civil sacred” – a set of symbols and values that function like religion within a secular society and are equally protected from criticism.

A similar idea can be found in the sociologist Émile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life). Every society possesses a sphere of the “sacred” – things removed from rational exchange and protected from criticism. The sacred is not discussed – it is performed. One cannot ask, “How much does it cost?”, “What do I receive in return?”, or “Is it fair?” because such questions are regarded as sacrilege. Patriotic sacrifice in Ukraine today functions in precisely this way. A person is obliged to sacrifice, and is obliged to do so with the proper expression on their face.

There is a simple principle of “skin in the game,” formulated by Nassim Taleb (Skin in the Game): those who make decisions must bear their consequences. If you send someone to their death, you must risk something yourself. If you procure weapons, you must bear responsibility for their quality. When decisions and the consequences of those decisions are borne by different people, the system cannot correct itself – it simply begins to rot. In Ukraine, this symmetry has been profoundly violated. Those who demand sacrifice often do not make it themselves. And those who bear the greatest risks have the least voice in determining the conditions under which they do so. Sooner or later, this will lead to a crisis of legitimacy. Which, as I have already said, is a direct obstacle to any discussion of the common good.

PART V: WHAT ALL OF THIS MEANS FOR THE POST-WAR FUTURE

Now we move to the consequences. Everyone needs to understand that the value system of survival does not function after the war.

The anthropologist Victor Turner (The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure) demonstrated that the state of extraordinary solidarity that emerges during a crisis is real, but temporary. The values that mobilise people during an existential threat – self-sacrifice, the subordination of the individual to the collective, unquestioned unity – do not constitute a sustainable foundation for a peaceful social contract.

The Perfect Storm

Many scholars suggest that after the war we may face a “perfect storm,” a social crisis resulting from the convergence of several breaking points.

The political scientist Jack Goldstone (Revolution and Rebellion) demonstrated that major social crises arise not from a single factor but from the convergence of several independent lines of tension that reinforce one another.

For post-war Ukraine, these lines are already visible.

The economic dimension: large-scale external funding is not permanent. The moment when the state must function on its own resources is approaching, and for many this will come as a shock.

The social dimension: the mass demobilisation of people who have undergone experiences that radically transform a human being. What happens to veterans after the war is one of the most important questions facing society. Those who have passed through hell and returned can become the builders of a new future. But if they return to a society where their sacrifice has been devalued and injustice remains unchanged, that wound and trauma will seek an outlet. Robert Gerwarth (The Vanquished) demonstrated through the example of post-Versailles Europe that people who return with a sense of recognition become builders. Those who return with a sense of betrayal seek justice. The only question is by what means.

The institutional dimension: a state with eroded legitimacy that has failed to restore trust during the years of the great war.

And the moral dimension: the accumulated asymmetry between what is demanded of people and what they receive in return.

None of these lines, taken separately, is fatal. Together – at a moment of post-war exhaustion and in the absence of institutional mechanisms for the controlled release of social tension – they constitute a configuration of risk.

How This Affects the Quality of the Discussion on the Common Good

Arend Lijphart (Democracy in Plural Societies) studied deeply divided societies where cleavages are based not on interests but on identity. Such societies cannot reach agreement on the common good through ordinary compromise because every concession is perceived as an existential threat. What will it mean to be Ukrainian after the war? There is a concept of nationalizing nationalism, introduced by the political scientist Rogers Brubaker in Nationalism Reframed (1996). It refers to a form of nationalism that continually narrows and redefines the boundaries of the “true” nation by determining who is sufficiently one’s own and who is not.

The problem is not that a nation has an identity. The problem is that this identity becomes a norm that is constantly tested: one must prove that one is sufficiently Ukrainian – through language, region of origin, cultural markers, the correct historical memory, and so forth.

The result is that “others” emerge within the nation—people whose Ukrainianness is called into question. Not enemies from outside, but fellow citizens who have failed the test. This becomes a direct obstacle to the social contract: it is difficult to negotiate the common good with people who must first prove that they have the right to sit at the negotiating table.

WHAT CAN CHANGE THE TRAJECTORY

At this point I would like to move from diagnosis to possibility. It is difficult to offer ready-made solutions, but everything I have described is not immutable. Ukraine possesses something that many post-war societies did not have: living horizontal social capital that emerged under fire. This is a genuine foundation for a conversation about the common good. And precisely because we understand the mechanisms of the erosion of state legitimacy as a precondition for the formation of the common good, we can also speak about the conditions for restoring it. There are several principles that can change the trajectory.

The first and most important principle.

Change the rules – not the people. Durable change occurs not through replacing the people in power but through changing the rules and incentives that shape behaviour. This is the logic of institutional design: to construct a system that reproduces the desired behaviour regardless of the individuals involved.

For post-war Ukraine, the essential question is not “Who will be in power after the war?” but “What will the rules of the game be after the war?” Those rules must begin to be designed now, because the post-war moment is a window of opportunity that closes very quickly.

The social contract as the first step. As Adam Przeworski has already shown, there is no need to search for one great unifying idea. Instead, we must identify the minimum shared interests that exist among different groups despite their differing values. A veteran, an entrepreneur, a displaced woman, and a schoolteacher have different values and different visions of the future. But they all share one common interest: that the rules of the game should be predictable and the same for everyone. That “efficient corruption” should not become an officially justified model. That the sacrifice of some should not finance the privileges of others.

This is the minimum foundation. Not a grand idea – but a predictable state.

Three Minimum Conditions

Symmetry of risk and demands: those who demand sacrifice must share it. A state that demands the maximum from its citizens while providing only minimal protection for their interests undermines the very foundation of its own legitimacy.

Accountability without the ritual scapegoat: responsibility for systemic failures must itself be systemic rather than personal. As long as every new government appoints yet another individual culprit, the system itself will remain unchanged.

Protection of the right to speak the truth: a public space in which people can honestly speak about the dysfunctions of the state is not a luxury but an essential infrastructure of the social contract. Without it, tension does not disappear – it accumulates and eventually finds a destructive outlet.

And finally, let us speak about what already exists.

Ukraine’s greatest resource, as I have already said, is the horizontal trust that emerged under fire. But this resource is fragile without institutional embodiment. It depends on particular people and becomes exhausted over time. This resource will either become the foundation for new rules of the game – or the fuel for destructive disappointment. Transforming living horizontal trust into institutions and rules is a task that cannot be postponed until after the war.

What will determine which path is taken is something rather prosaic: whether the state becomes predictable in its actions, accountable in its decisions, and symmetrical in its demands. Not perfect – but simply a state from which people do not feel the need to hide.

Thank you.