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Notes -
A justification ritual.
Only someone who believes in the metaphysical claim that votes can reveal the will of the people feels bound by them. Since I understand the mechanics of democracy, I believe no such thing. People can be made to vote for anything.
Voting is a justification ritual. The question is if that's only what it is.
What, in your world, does it mean Ukrainians to overwhelmingly vote in favor independence? Is the concept incoherent because Ukrainians, like all others, are not collectively anything?
What it means is that Ukrainian nationalists, a small organized minority with preexisting goals that had existed in various forms and been trying to get independence by any means since the later 1910s finally managed, without the imminent threat of Soviet retaliation looming anymore, to hold enough of the levers of power to enact it and arranged for a ritual to announce that they could do it. Since they were ideologically democrats, this took the form of a vote.
I do not see the vote as instrumental to their ability to enact their agenda, only as a form of triumph.
In this sense it it wrong to see the voters (be they or be they not the "people") as significant actors. Had the nationalists obtained their nation through other means, such as through previously favored fascist vanguardism, they would have simply organized a different form of triumph than a vote.
But Ukraine didn't become independent because people voted on it. People voted on it because independence had been secured.
How do you square "small organized minority" with the overwhelming numbers on the independence side of the vote?
Because I don't believe casting a vote once the deed is done is the same as doing the difficult political maneuvers to make it happen in the first place. Not every Ukrainian was Leonid Kravchuk, who specifically convinced the communist parliament and refused to go the way of Soviet reforms.
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