In 1941, with much of the world already at war and the United States preparing to enter it, the political scientist Harold Lasswell imagined a future dominated by what he called the “garrison state”.
This was not simply a country with a large army or an unusually bellicose government. It was a society in which the “specialists on violence” had become the most powerful group, reorganising economic production, political authority, public education, and collective life around the anticipation of permanent danger.
The garrison state did not necessarily abolish civilian institutions; it colonised them, teaching every institution to understand itself as an appendage of national security.
Ukraine did not choose this path.
Russia invaded Ukraine, first by annexing Crimea and occupying parts of the Donbas in 2014, then by launching its full-scale war in 2022.
Ukrainians are not fighting because NATO hypnotised them, because American arms manufacturers required a new market, or because Western liberals wished to decorate another geopolitical struggle with the colours of democracy.
Ukrainians are fighting because another state invaded their country, seized their territory, destroyed their cities, deported their children, and denied the legitimacy of their national existence.
If Ukraine looks more and more like a garrison state, the blame lies with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Whatever criticisms you want to make of the Western exploitation of the war, they do not change the character of the aggression itself.
Yet the right of Ukraine to resist Russia does not answer the question of what kind of Ukraine is being created through that resistance.
It does not tell us who will own the country’s reconstructed industries, what rights its workers will possess, whether emergency powers will be relinquished, or whether the political influence acquired by military and security institutions will survive the war. Still less does it explain the social content of Ukraine’s projected membership in the European Union.
A country can liberate itself from foreign domination while allowing new structures of domination to congeal behind the lines.
This distinction has largely disappeared from conversations in the West. Liberal Atlanticists have treated Ukraine as the bodily incarnation of “our values,” a democratic talisman whose internal contradictions become impolite to mention. At the opposite extreme, parts of the anti-imperialist left have treated every Ukrainian political defect as proof that the country possesses no authentic political existence at all.
For one side, Ukrainians are miniature Europeans defending civilisation; for the other, they are NATO auxiliaries inhabiting an artificial country. Both positions make Ukraine disappear into someone else’s strategic purposes.
The more crucial question is not whether Ukraine possesses sufficient “political value” to merit support. That way of putting things already imagines the country as an asset whose performance must be periodically assessed by its investors. The question is what freedom from Russian rule is coming to mean inside Ukraine.
Is national independence becoming the foundation of democratic self-government and social reconstruction, or is it being reduced to the freedom of a heavily militarised state to enter Western markets, attract foreign capital, and serve as a glacis for Europe, its buffer state in the East?
Ukraine under martial law cannot reasonably be expected to resemble Sweden on a quiet afternoon.
National elections have been suspended, political activity restricted, broadcasting consolidated, and executive authority enlarged. At the same time, millions of people are displaced, and substantial portions of the country remain occupied or under attack.
Some of these measures may be unavoidable in a war for national survival. But wartime necessity is also the oldest enemy of republican government. Institutions created during an emergency inevitably discover new emergencies requiring their preservation.
This is why it’s insufficient to discover whether Volodymyr Zelenskyy is personally a democrat or an autocrat.
The Ukrainian government has prohibited several political parties accused of Russian connections, centralised much television news in the state-coordinated United News marathon, placed pressure on journalists and opponents, and repeatedly tested the independence of institutions created to restrain executive power.
In July 2025, legislation subordinating the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the Specialised Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office produced the country’s largest protests since the full-scale invasion. Zelenskyy’s government reversed course and restored their independence after public and European pressure. That episode revealed both an executive appetite for consolidation and a civil society still capable of stopping it.
Ukraine is consequently neither the pristine liberal democracy advertised at NATO conferences nor the fascist dictatorship depicted in Russian propaganda. It is a contested political order labouring under extreme conditions.
Its future will be determined not only by Zelenskyy, generals, oligarchs, and foreign creditors, but also by journalists, unions, municipal governments, veterans, refugees, activists, and citizens who have repeatedly demonstrated that they do not regard electoral mandates as blank checks. The essential democratic question is whether these groups will retain the power to contest the postwar settlement once appeals to national unity no longer serve an obvious military necessity.
That problem is inseparable from reconstruction. The latest joint assessment by the Ukrainian government, World Bank, European Commission, and United Nations estimates that rebuilding the country will require almost $588 billion over the next decade—nearly three times Ukraine’s estimated 2025 gross domestic product. Transport, energy, and housing alone account for nearly half of the projected need.
Figures of this magnitude are not merely budgetary problems. They announce a struggle over who will own the future.
“Reconstruction” sounds reassuringly technical. It conjures images of bridges repaired, apartment blocks rebuilt, electrical grids restored, and unexploded ordnance cleared from farmland. But every act of reconstruction distributes property and power.
Whether a railway is rebuilt as a public service or a commercial concession, whether housing is treated as a social right or an investment opportunity, and whether energy infrastructure belongs to citizens or foreign shareholders will shape Ukrainian society long after the last military communiqués have become material for historians.
The institutions coordinating reconstruction have already developed a recognisable vocabulary. The state must improve the investment climate, expand competition, mobilise private capital, modernise labour relations, and reduce obstacles to enterprise.
The World Bank estimates that the private sector could finance up to 40 per cent of Ukraine’s reconstruction if the appropriate reforms are enacted. Private investment will certainly be necessary, but the language conceals a constitutional project: the disaster that destroyed an enormous portion of Ukraine’s public wealth is becoming the occasion to rewrite the rules governing the rest.
Ukraine’s labour movement has warned about this process since the first year of the full-scale war. Wartime legislation substantially enlarged employers’ power to suspend contracts and alter working conditions. At the same time, current reform proposals have continued to provoke accusations that unions and collective bargaining are being marginalised.
It makes sense for workers to worry that rights relinquished in wartime will prove unexpectedly difficult to recover during an investor-managed reconstruction. Ukrainian unions are already demanding a guaranteed place in decisions over industrial, energy, and social reconstruction.
The danger is not that Ukraine will become “capitalist,” a verdict that would arrive several decades late. It is that reconstruction will transfer the country’s remaining public assets into private hands while the people who sustained the country through the war are thanked ceremonially and excluded materially.
Veterans may receive medals while their benefits are subjected to means testing. Refugees may be encouraged to return home to rebuilt cities that have been made unaffordable to them. Workers who kept the railways and electrical systems operating under bombardment may discover that their reward is having those systems sold to investors with better connections to decision-makers.
To be sure, joining the EU might prevent these outcomes. The Union’s legal order includes real labour protections, environmental standards, anti-discrimination requirements, and institutional checks. Accession can give Ukrainian journalists, unions, anti-corruption organisations, and minority groups leverage against domestic concentrations of power.
The European Commission’s 2025 enlargement assessment acknowledged Ukraine’s substantial progress in public administration, rule-of-law planning, and institutional reform while insisting that anti-corruption commitments remain fundamental. Europe is not simply a neoliberal contraption wearing Beethoven’s Ninth as a hat.
But “Europe” also functions as a disciplinary incantation. Privatisation becomes European, fiscal restraint becomes European, market flexibility becomes European, and the subordination of politics to investors’ expectations becomes the painful price of returning to Europe. Measures that might otherwise be an impetus for deliberation are presented as necessities.
Ukraine’s entry into Europe could become an enormous low-wage reconstruction zone protected by one of the continent’s largest and most battle-hardened militaries. Such a country would be invaluable to a European Union increasingly reimagining itself as a military bloc. Ukrainian technical innovation, combat experience, arms production, and strategic position would give Kyiv substantial influence, but influence of a peculiar kind. Ukraine would be welcomed not simply as a republic of citizens but as a garrison for Europe.
This is where Lasswell’s diagnosis proves most useful. A garrison state need not be governed directly by generals, and its inhabitants need not delight in militarism. It emerges when permanent insecurity supplies the organising principle of society and when institutions derive authority from their proximity to danger.
The fear is that Ukraine could turn out like Israel, using self-defence as a pretext for prophylactic aggression.
This analogy fails to account for Israel’s domination of Palestine, which has no parallel for Ukraine. But Ukraine could certainly develop a similar relationship with its patrons, becoming a permanently armed frontier state whose strategic usefulness insulates its internal arrangements from ordinary criticism. Western governments might come to regard domestic Ukrainian abuses as unfortunate complications, while Ukrainian leaders might learn that indispensability is a more reliable source of protection than democratic accountability.
Ukraine’s transformation is also part of the transformation of Europe itself. Defence expenditure by EU member states reached €418 billion in 2025 and is expected to rise to €454 billion in 2026, an increase of more than 75 per cent since 2021. The Union that once justified itself through commerce, regulation, and the transcendence of continental warfare is rapidly acquiring a new identity centred upon rearmament, strategic autonomy, weapons production, and frontier defence.
It would be wrong, however, to argue that Ukraine is dismantling the European welfare state. Russia created the immediate security emergency by invading; European governments decide how its costs will be distributed.
Nothing in the laws of economics requires higher military expenditures to be financed by reductions in pensions, health care, infrastructure, or climate investment. Europe contains immense concentrations of private wealth that might be taxed. The choice to preserve fiscal discipline for social provision while discovering boundless flexibility for armaments belongs to Europe’s governing class, not to the Ukrainians sheltering from missiles.
Ukraine nevertheless supplies an emergency through which that class can impose its priorities.
Public borrowing that was supposedly ruinous when proposed for housing becomes prudent when directed toward arms manufacturers. Industrial policy, dismissed as antiquated when workers demanded it, returns wearing camouflage. Governments that could not contemplate national planning to decarbonise the economy suddenly acquire enthusiasm for coordinating steel, electronics, chemicals, and advanced manufacturing when the final product explodes.
In short, Keynesianism has been exhumed, but issued a security clearance.
The West is offering Ukraine a curiously impoverished conception of freedom: military sovereignty combined with market integration. Missing is collective control over the institutions governing everyday life.
A Ukraine whose territory is secure but whose workers are powerless, whose infrastructure belongs to foreign investors, whose media defer to executive authority, and whose economic policy is written by creditors would still be freer than a Ukraine subordinated to Moscow. But it would also be a lot less free than the sacrifices of its people deserve.
Solidarity with Ukraine should therefore mean more than ensuring the brute survival of the Ukrainian state. It should mean defending the capacity of Ukrainians to decide the social content of their independence.
That means demanding the restoration of normal constitutional limits and competitive elections when conditions genuinely permit them. And it means advocating for independent media, durable anti-corruption institutions, strong unions, public control of essential infrastructure, social guarantees for veterans and displaced people, and reconstruction governed by democratic need rather than investor appetite.
Ukrainians are fighting for the right to have a future. Whether that future belongs to a republic or a garrison remains, in every important sense, a political choice.
Photograph courtesy of the President of Ukraine. Published under a Creative Commons license.
