9 Majdan: Presence and Political Representation in Post-Communist Ukraine

Max Weber distinguished three ideal typical forms of authority and legitimacy. In their crudest form these three – charismatic, traditional, and legal-rational leadership – are typically construed as a sequence of progress toward modern liberal democracy.1 More realistically, all individual and institutional authority is grounded in a specific amalgamate of these three types, even in the present era of popular sovereignty, professionalised bureaucracies, and universal suffrage. Having said that, in the twentieth century, authority without a representative claim referring to the people has become next to unthinkable.2 Representative claims may differ widely, from representatives who considered themselves the democratically elected political voice of the legitimate interests of a specific part of the electorate, to righteous advocates of a common good, or to populists as mystic spokesmen of “the people” in singular. Similarly, for some, “politics” as the contest of representative claims should take place exclusively in the confines of the democratic institutions of parliament and government. For others, street politics is an acceptable complementary form of representation or even a superior form of democracy. Recent debates on direct democracy set out to re-introduce the polis ideal of the citizen expressing his interests without recourse to representatives or middlemen.3 The extraordinary case study of this chapter introduces, among others, citizens who take to the streets, rejecting any form of political representation and leadership, be it populist or not. Their claim is not to represent (part of) the people, but to be the people – a matter of presence instead of representation. The case study exemplifies two key issues of democratic contestation. First, the observation that today the principle of democracy in the widest sense (dimokratia – ‘the rule of the common people’), is an integral part of any claim to political authority. Second, the observation that deciding what forms of