A New Social Contract for Ukraine and for the World?

Some 80 years have passed since the fall of Nazi Germany and the end of the Second World War. As we commemorate these events, militarized fascism strides the global scene once again. As the multipolarity drive away from post-1945 universalism intensifies, the question is why is this happening and how many people in fact can exercise the universal human rights of individual and national self-determination. For the world’s majority, these unfortunately did not materialize beyond declarations. Wars and genocide keep happening because attackers get away without suffering the consequences while victims suffer from systemic violence, odious debts, exclusion from social security guarantees, and climate catastrophes they did not produce nor deserve.

Militarized competition and productivist economic systems generate ecocidal effects and hurry us toward a future on an uninhabitable planet. The post-1945 mass consumption/mass production approach to global economic development brought a better quality of life for some while cannibalizing many, made climate change an immediate threat to the survival of the world’s ecosystems, and intensified competition pressures. Socioeconomic destitution drives people toward fascism and conflict; therefore, global inequalities must be eradicated in order to reduce the possibility of future wars.

Social classes and modes of extraction of value from humans and nature are organized transnationally in today’s global political economy. They function simultaneously through and in circumvention of the institution of the state, as well as through state-created extra-jurisdictional mechanisms and spaces such as “offshore” and special economic zones. The imperialist logic of poorly regulated capitalism pushes the limits of the possible in the everyday, across time and space, making intersectionally experienced inequalities more sharply manifest each day across the globe. This means that the solutions to the problems emerging as a result of militarized capitalist competition and predatory-lending geopolitics too must be global in reach and facilitated by international institutions—modernized and democratized versions of the Bretton Woods and United Nations systems.

Ukraine has changed drastically through ten years of war. As an economic situation already damaged by numerous previous crises has deteriorated, so has the state of the social contract enshrined in the constitution yet never quite fully experienced by the majority. The erosion of social security combined with the emboldening of capital at the expense of labor and nature, as well as the state’s inability to serve as the guarantor of constitutional rights and freedoms, largely conditioned the Revolution of Dignity and necessitated the emergence of a thriving civil society. The latter, embodied in thousands of nongovernmental organizations and individual volunteers, began to perform the function of the state and the market in the provision of goods and services where needed, often “free of charge”—that is, financed through donations of goods, money, skills, and time. This concrete state failure is interpreted by the ruling Servant of the People party, paradoxically, as a reason to further dismantle the state, including its ability to oversee the function of capital. In 2022, the Lugano Principles for postwar reconstruction were announced at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano, which has been followed by similar meetings in London in 2023 and Berlin in 2024. In delivering the principles, civil society’s responsibility is to be the “watchdog and the sledge dog” of postwar recovery, while private investor capital is entrusted to carry out the rebuilding of the economy and the state is further shrunk and digitized.

It is crucial to note here that the state is a complex institution of a polity whose apparatuses mediate and regulate the relationship between society and capital, with nature as a font of resources and a waste sink for that relationship’s proceeds. The discourse around the Lugano Principles is focused on the protection of private investment and property rights while the social security of the citizens is dismantled—they are expected to cater for themselves where public services used to be. The social contract that has been eroding for years is at risk of completely falling apart. In this context, what incentive do citizens have to consent to the rule of the sovereign if the sovereign does not reciprocate by providing security and services? And who gets an exemption when inequalities leave basic needs unmet and determine who gets sent to the front?

Public investment and infrastructure ownership, the full deployment of state-funded public services and scaffolding of labor in private and public economic initiatives instead of neoliberalism amid the war are key elements for the success of recovery. We learned this from two world wars whose destruction was remedied through government spending on infrastructure, education, the welfare state, public services, housing programs, business subsidies, research and development (R&D), and the facilitation of trade. A recovery that reflects Ukraine’s EU membership aspirations and decarbonization commitments calls for green and low-carbon job creation; that is, in the care economy, the arts, education, environmental preservation and regeneration, and sustainability R&D. These can be spearheaded through the faster integration of the country in European Green Deal initiatives and the NextGenerationEU program. A just transition and energy democracy are crucial for economic self-sufficiency and reduced import dependence in key sectors. This would look like a post-Keynesian vision of state-led domestic investment and expansionary fiscal policy, with local enterprises having priority over their foreign rivals. Job and conditions creation are key for displaced Ukrainians so they have somewhere and something to return to—some 6.5 million of them without whom the most sophisticated reconstruction plans will be just that: plans.

Promising new developments of the Lugano framework state that the “whole of society” approach is key alongside the principles of sustainability and justice, with Ukrainians leading the process. For that to materialize, a foundational legal framework needs to be established and enforced. It would solidify a fair social contract that secures Ukraine as a sovereign and independent, democratic, social, law-based state, with its constitution enshrining the foundations of the social contract as the highest legal force. This would be a document that guarantees social security for all human beings and holds their life and health, honour and dignity, inviolability and security as the highest social values. For Ukrainians to lead the process and retain the product of it, they must own the land, subsoil, atmosphere, water, and other natural resources within Ukraine’s territory, as well as the natural resources of its continental shelf and its exclusive maritime economic zone. For recovery to be sustainable, the use of property must not cause harm to the rights, freedoms, and dignity of citizens as well as the interests of society, or aggravate the ecological situation and the natural qualities of the land. In fact, all these positions are already in the current constitution. Ahead lies the reinstatement of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, the enforcement of the constitution through reforms that would finally deliver the materialization of the rights and social guarantees for and by those who perform the function of the state and who constitute it—all those who call Ukraine home.

I really hope that this happens for Ukrainians and for all humans and ecosystems. I hope that the next year’s May Day is a celebration of labor in a world without fascism and that Victory Day is meaningful again. I want to sit under my mother’s blooming cherry, apple, and pear trees, with the only sound in the fragrant air being the returning bees and June bugs.

Yuliya Yurchenko is senior lecturer in political economy at the University of Greenwich. She was a visiting fellow at the IWM in 2024.