Escape from Geography: Why Democratization Does Not Work in the Post-Soviet Space

After the USSR collapsed, several young independent states or as they were called in Western studies “new democracies” appeared on its territory. Some of them wished to distance themselves as far as possible from the Soviet legacy and chose the path of strengthening ties with Washington and Brussels. However, at the same time, management regimes in some post-Soviet countries can hardly be called democratic as it is meant in the West. Moreover, such a myth leads to dangerous distortions in the real situation. Escape from geography, rhetoric or pragmatism? On August 17, Armenia celebrated a hundred days from the moment when Nikol Pashinyan became head of the national government of this country. The new cabinet defined ambitious goals – fight against corruption, economic growth and strengthening of the country’s independence in the foreign policy arena. All this causes considerable interest in Russia, primarily because Yerevan has positioned itself as a strategic ally of Moscow throughout the post-Soviet period. And today Armenia is the only country in Transcaucasia that participates in two Eurasian integration projects – the CSTO and the EAEU. For today it is almost impossible to build an accurate trajectory for the development of the “new course” of Nikol Pashinyan. There are too many variables in this political equation. Two early election campaigns lay ahead. There are a lot of risks and unpredictability around the unsettled Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, not to mention “background factors”, such as relations between Moscow and Washington, Iran and the West, the situation in the Middle East. Anyway, the current events in Armenia once again fueled the discussion of how the democracy factor and the policy of values are significant in relations between Russia and its post-Soviet partners. The authorities in Armenia were replaced as a result of mass popular protests. Meanwhile, in American and European studies it has already become a kind of conventional wisdom to talk about the RF foreign policy as protective, conservative, which in its essence opposes free spirit of nations of the former USSR republics. Often, US and EU universities and research institutes call post-Soviet states “new democracies”, they create the same-name centers for their study. Back during “color revolutions”, the desire of the former Soviet republics to “escape from geography” by building ties with Washington and Brussels was seen by a significant part of Western experts as an important background for their democratization. Specialists from Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, and other post-Soviet states echoed them. At the same time, strategic cooperation with Russia was seen as a synonym for preservation of authoritarianism and the archaic management system. But is it possible today to say that this scheme is applicable to post-Soviet political processes? Equating of the choice of foreign policy priorities with a value choice is based on the notion that the diplomacy of leading international players is built on the basis of ideological priorities. No doubt that the market and democracy take the leading place in the rhetoric of the US and EU representatives, while Russian politicians prefer to talk about stability, the conservatism of international law and the primacy of national sovereignty over external interference. But in practice, rhetoric and national interest do not always overlap. The Azerbaijan’s Contract of the Century concluded with leading western oil companies in 1994, as well as participation of the Caspian republic in Western-backed energy projects such as Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, did not make it the leader in terms of democracy. This is the only country among the republics of the former USSR, where power passed from father to son. At the same time, Azerbaijan was not part of the CSTO and is not going to join the Eurasian Union, where Moscow plays a leading role. This, however, does not prevent Baku from intensively developing relations with the West, as evidenced by the recent visit to the Caspian region by the German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel. The international human rights structures, including the American ones, repeatedly reported on authoritarian culture in Turkmenistan. However, this does not prevent the EU and the US from actively developing an energy partnership with Ashgabat. Since 1995, Turkmenistan has a neutral status. However, hardly anyone will risk comparing its level of democracy with Switzerland’s. The West similarly assessed Uzbekistan in the times of Islam Karimov. Despite some contradictions between him and the West after mass demonstrations in Andijon in 2005, Tashkent was repeatedly awarded the unofficial title of ‘NATO’s valuable partner’ in the Afghan operation. By the way, in 2012 this republic suspended its membership in the CSTO. Today after another leader – Shavkat Mirziyoyev – came to power, there is a certain liberalization. But not so much it, but the geopolitical position of Uzbekistan makes both Moscow and the West seek its friendship. Failed beacons For a long time, Georgia was called “the beacon of democracy” in the Western media. However, after scandalous stories with the dispersal of mass actions in Tbilisi in 2007 and in 2011, as well as publications on violence in the prison system, the image of Mikheil Saakashvili as a progressive democrat in the territory of the former Soviet Union has faded. It should be noted that Georgia does not have diplomatic relations with Russia since 2008, and before that Tbilisi for many years was one of Moscow’s most problematic partners. Since then, much has changed in the state. For six years, the country is actually ruled not by the party and not by formal premiers and presidents, but by the oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili. He has the final say in any personnel decision. Over a period of less than two years, the ruling Georgian Dream Party has twice amended the country’s Constitution without any coordination with the opposition forces. Many things have changed in Georgia. But one thing remained unchanged. Each new leader creates around him a “party of power” (Union of Citizens of Georgia in the period of Eduard Shevardnadze, United National Movement during the presidency of Mikheil Saakashvili and Georgian Dream as the political vanguard of Bidzina Ivanishvili), which de facto dominates politics. After Ukraine and Moldova signed the Association Agreement with the European Union in 2014, they were added to the list of countries that are regarded in the West as states which chose the “path of reform and democracy”. Indeed, technically, elections are held in both states, there is a certain competition and there is no monopolization of power by one leader. But in fact the government is severely separated from society. In the Moldovan case, the oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc has a crucial role in making decisions. He initiated reform of the electoral legislation, which will allow his own Democratic Party to get the majority using a “mixed election system”. Otherwise, without the support of deputies for single-seat districts, this task is unmanageable. This means that the task of formalizing actual influence of the main Moldova’s politician is unmanageable. In the case of Ukraine, we see a ‘sanation’ model, when politicians who do not share the values of the ‘second Maidan’ are actually out of the game, and the left forces do not have adequate representation for talking about “decommunization” and “lustration”. As the southeast do not have it to the right degree. The Opposition Bloc presenting it is forced to regularly face accusations of being the fifth column and a traitor to the national interests of the country. The Ukrainian political spectrum looks like a gum-boil, swollen from the right side. What we see today in Armenia also has little to do with democratic procedures, as we understand them in the countries of the European Union. The ideas of direct appeal to the area over the institutions (government, parliament) are more like the concepts of the New State of Antonio Salazar. It is hard to talk about democracy, when the initiatives on forming “justice of the transitional period” and the actual sanation of representatives of the old authorities come to the fore. Democracy in Hand with Nationalism? All these logical inconsistencies could be avoided if those who turned to the analysis of the situation in the post-Soviet space adequately viewed the goals of those who are trying to build relations with Western countries. In many respects this interest is due not to abstract values, but to the protection of those national interests that are defined by the elites of the newly independent states. And in many respects, mass protests, ‘revolutions’ that cause so much excitement in the political and expert circles of the United States and the EU, are not generated by the desire for democracy and a set of values, but for a strengthened state, creating a more rigid and qualitative model of governance or identity free from “problematic elements”. I remember how, in 2004, as part of a group of Russian experts, I was in Tbilisi, where the then Speaker of the National Parliament, Nino Burjanadze, commenting on our question about the results of the first anniversary of the Rose Revolution exclaimed: “Our soldiers finally managed to get dressed properly and stopped starving”. She said not a word on human rights or ethnic minorities. It was enough just to hear the anti-vatnik pathos aimed against the inhabitants of the Donbass and Crimea in Kyiv in 2013-2014 to understand: the story with the change of the Crimea’s status and the conflict in the southeast of the country were not spontaneous. It would be naive to think that the coming to power of the ‘democrat’ Pashinyan will make Yerevan’s position on Karabakh milder than it was in the times of ‘autocrats’ Sargsyan and Kocharyan. Speaking at a rally on August 17, dedicated to the hundred days of his stay in power, he said: “I will not sign a single paper secretly for you. If there is an option, I will come here, I will tell you, and you decide, we should take this option or not”. If this is democracy, it is based on national mobilization. And in the post-Soviet countries, it goes hand in hand with nationalism, since after the collapse of a common union state, new entities are building their identity. Mass movements or protests in this process are often directed not to a compromise, but to aggravation of the conflict, to ‘sharpen’ their truth. So, an appeal to the West or to Russia is nothing more than a tool to pursue their goals and tasks. In this context, Moscow is not afraid of some kind of ‘breakthrough democracy’, but of nationalist populism, with which some neighbors are trying to push it out of those spheres that are of interest to it. It should also be noted that the development of contacts with NATO or the European Union does not at all mean a guarantee either of admission to the ranks of these structures or the fact that Western integration associations will build democratic institutions instead of the newly independent states themselves. In general, a strange hope – to live in anticipation that some external benefactor will do all the hard work instead of you. Alas, many post-Soviet leaders replaced this image of the generous and just Central Committee of the CPSU by the equally luminous notion of the all-merciful role of Brussels and Washington. But real life is not a scheme. To understand complex geopolitical processes in the former Soviet Union, it is hardly necessary to replace one linear-progressive scheme from the arsenal of ‘scientific communism’ to ‘scientific democracy’, which builds the artificial dependence of national interests on a supposedly valuable and almost existential choice. Yes, today Eurasia is completely different from the near abroad of the early 1990s. There are many new players besides Russia, and the former union republics are diverging in their interests further. Even the three Caucasian republics gave three different answers to the choice between European and Eurasian integration. But this choice is much more complicated than following a rhetorical scheme. The earlier experts and practitioners realize this, the easier it will be to refrain from unnecessary exaggerated expectations, which are inevitably fraught with strong disappointment. Sergey Markedonov, Associate Professor, Department of Regional Studies and Foreign Policy, Russian State University for the Humanities Source: Eurasia Expert