voting against freedom - wilson quarterly

7/30/2019 Voting Against Freedom - Wilson Quarterly

1/14

THE WILSON QUARTERLYWINTER 2013

VOTING AGAINSTFREEDOMRecent history in the countries of the former Soviet Union suggests thatthe appetite for freedom may not be as strong everywhere as we assume.

BY JOSHUA KUCERA

YURI KOCHETKOV / EPA / CORBISEnough votes: Kazakhstans president Nursultan Nazarbayev greets supportersin 2011 after being reelected with 96 percent of the vote.


2/14


ITH ITS INSPIRING IMAGES OF CIT-

izens around the Middle East

taking to the streets to demandan end to dictatorship, the Arab Springrekindled our faith in democracy. Asthe dramatic events unfolded on television, it was impossible not to believethat however tightly autocrats may try to hold on to power, and however messy

transitions may be, in the end, despo-tism must yield to the will of the people.

But a look to the east and north, toward the former Soviet Union, providesa sobering reminder that democracy isnot the inevitable result after dictator-ships fall. e 15 former Soviet republics

have seen dictatorial regimes ousted innot one but two distinct wavesthe rstafter the collapse of the Soviet Union in1991, and the second a dozen or more years later in the so-called color revo-lutions that brought down autocrats inGeorgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. Yet

no real bene ts have accrued to politicaland civil rights in the region; indeed, they are more limited than before. ( e threeBaltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lith-uania, are exceptions; not absorbed intothe Soviet Union until 1940, all threehave become democracies and mem-

bers of the European Union.) Freedom

By JOSHUA KUCER A

House, an American organization thatpromotes the advancement of democra-

cy worldwide, produces annual measuresof political and civil freedoms in everycountry. According to its data, only two of the ex-Soviet republics outsideof the BalticsGeorgia and Moldo- vahave better scores today than theydid when they gained independence

in 1991. Armenias have not changed. e scores of the other nine states havegone backward.

Two leading scholars on democrati-zation, Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, of Harvard and the University of Toronto, respectively, have written that

expectations (or hopes) for democ-racy in the former Soviet Union haveproved overly optimistic, and that itmay be time to stop thinking of thesecases in terms of transitions to democ-racy and to begin thinking about thespeci c types of regimes they actually

are. And that was in 2002. Yet U.S. of-cials still cling to the notion that theregion is in a transition to democracy. When Secretary of State Hillary Clin-ton paid a visit in 2011 to Uzbekistanand its president, Islam Karimov, oneof the harshest dictators on the plan-

et and perhaps the least likely leader

W


3/14


who believe that a strong leader ispreferable to a democratic governmenthave risen signi cantly over the past 20

years. A survey last year of 10 ex-Soviestates by the Russian research instituteIntegration found that Russian strong-man Vladimir Putin is even more pop-ular in other parts of the former Sovi-et Union than in Russia itself. People

in the region to move anywhere close todemocracy, a State Department o cialtold reporters on the trip that President

Karimov commented that he wants tomake progress on liberalization and de-mocratization, and he said that he wantsto leave a legacy of that for hisbothhis kids and his grandchildren. Pressedby an incredulous reporter, the o cialadded, Yeah. I do believe him.

Evidence, however, is mounting thatnot only has democracy failed in mostcountries of the former Soviet Union,but that people there do not particu-larly regret it. Surveys by the Pew Re-search Centers Global Attitudes Projecthave found that the percentages of

Lithuanians, Russians, and Ukrainians

Not only has democracyfailed in most countriesof the former Soviet Union,but people there do notparticularly regret it.

JANE SWEENEY / JAI / CORBISKazakhstans domed presidential palace in Astana is anked by golden ofce towers.The city has been rebuilt on a monumental scale after becoming Kazakhstans new capital in 1997.


4/14


yev won 96 percent of the vote. Yet Kazakhstan is prospering and

stable, and is building a middle class, while Kyrgyzstan is chronically mired

in chaos. Kazakhs, at least in the bigcities, can shop at nice malls and a ordbeach vacations in Turkey. One West-ern expat who has worked throughoutCentral Asia told me that Kazakhstanis the only place in the region where youcan go to a restaurant where entres cost

more than ve dollars and be surround-ed by locals, not other expats. One of my visits to Kazakhstan, in 2010, hap-pened to coincide with a bout of horri cethnic violence between ethnic Kyrgyzand Uzbeks in southern Kyrgyzstan.Several hundred people, mostly Uzbeks,

were killed. When I broached the sub- ject of Nazarbayevs rule with KazakhsI heard the same thing over and over. After some complaints about cronyismand corruption, my interlocutors wouldadd, But at least were not Kyrgyzstan. An opinion poll conducted around the

same time found that 39 percent of Ka-zakhs blamed the violence in Kyrgyz-stan on a low standard of living, while38 percent attributed it to the authori-ties weakness. e same poll found thatonly seven percent of Kazakhs opposedrecently passed constitutional amend-

ments that cemented Nazarbayevs rule

want a strong hand, stability, growth,and prosperity, explained the institutesdirector, Sergei Moroz.

The divergent trajectories of two

neighboring countries in Central Asia,Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, are illus-trative. In the early days of indepen-dence, Kyrgyzstan was widely describedas an island of democracy. It had gen-uinely competitive political parties, anopen, combative press, and a parliament

that was popularly elected, not a rub-ber stamp. In 1993, Strobe Talbott, thenPresident Bill Clintons special envoy tothe new post-Soviet countries, calledKyrgyzstans president a true Je erso-nian democrat. And while Kyrgyzstanspolitics have had their ups and downs

since then, it still has the most open gov-ernment in Central Asia. For instance,the constitution promulgated in 2010established a parliamentary system, amarked departure from the strongmanmodel that is ubiquitous in the region.

Kazakhstan, meanwhile, is still ruled

by the same exCommunist Party boss who was in control in 1991, NursultanNazarbayev. He has systematically elim-inated any political competition andbuilt an extensive cult of personality. Inthe last presidential election, in 2011,his three token opponents endorsed him

and one said he voted for him. Nazarba-


5/14


me about observing a rally in support ofZhovtis shortly after his sentencing. eo cial approached carefully, not wantingto appear to be part of the event and give

credence to the inevitable governmentclaims that it was organized by foreign-ers. But when he got to the demonstra-tion, he realized that it was maybe 25people, and I knew all of themthey all worked for NDI, DRL, and other Western democracy-promotion organi-

zations, he said, referring to the NationalDemocratic Institute and the State De-partments Bureau of Democracy, Hu-man Rights, and Labor. e ranks of suchgroups in the region have been shrinking

into the future, giving him the titleLeader of the Nation.

In 2009, Kazakh human rights advo-cate Yevgeny Zhovtis, who had testi ed

several times before the U.S. Congressabout his countrys lack of progress towarddemocracy, was sentenced to a dispro-portionately long prison term followinga conviction for vehicular manslaugh-ter. e harsh sentence drew the ire of human rights groups around the world,

which argued that its severity was relat-ed to Zhovtiss political activities. Yet inKazakhstan his plight did not appear tomove anyone. One o cial at a Westerndemocracy-promotion organization told

KEVIN LAMARQUE / REUTERS / CORBISIn Tbilisi with President Mikheil Saakashvili in 2005,

President George W. Bush hailed Georgia as a beacon of liberty.


6/14


O WHAT HAPPENED? WHY HAS DE-

mocracy failed to gain any pur-chase in the former Soviet Union?

Political scientists have identified a

number of possible explanations. Someare not speci c to the region: Low lev-els of economic development meanthat people are more focused on eco-nomic issues, while countries that dosucceed economically, but only on thestrength of oil and gas or other natu-

ral resources (e.g., Russia, Kazakhstan Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan), tend tobreed autocrats.

But some explanations are unique tothe region. All the countries of the for-mer Soviet Union maintain close tiesto Russia (often willingly, sometimes

not) and, increasingly, China, neitherof which do much to help the cause of democracy. In particular, Chinas eco-nomic success has inspired poor coun-tries around the world, not least those just across its northern and westernborders in Central Asia. And the fact

that Beijing has achieved such success while maintaining the Communist Par-tys monopoly on power feeds into the widespread belief in the former Sovi-et countries that a leaders strong handis what is needed to grow. Meanwhile,the other major regional power, India,

is a democracyand has not done

for years. Some have simply closed theiroperations, while others have shiftedtheir focus to consumer rights and oth-er issues more relevant to the day-to-day

concerns of Central Asians, concludingthat, at least for now, the ground in theregion is simply not fertile for democracy.

And Central Asia is not unique inthe former Soviet world. In 2010, disil-lusioned with the 2004 Orange Revolu-tion that was supposed to have ushered

in democracy, Ukrainians voted back into o ce Viktor Yanukovych, the very apparatchik whose attempt to steal theelection six years earlier had sparked therevolution. In Belarus, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, pro-democracy movementshave failed to gain any traction, and

autocrats seem as entrenched as ever.

S

In 2010, disillusionedUkrainians voted back into

ofce Viktor Yanukovych,the very apparatchikwhose attempt to stealthe election six yearsearlier had sparked the

Orange Revolution.


7/14


and Central Asia specialist at George Washington Universitys Elliott Schoolof International A airs, writes thatmost citizens of Kazakhstan, and per-

haps most post-Soviet peoples outsidethe Baltic states, engage the conceptof democracy much as they embracedcommunism beforeas a mostly emp-ty ideological framework to facilitatedeference to the authority and power of the state, not as a system of formal in-

stitutions that can e ectively representpeoples interests and make governance

more successful in serving the people.Roberts further observes that if many Americans saw in the end of the Cold War the victory of American ideals, per[Francis] Fukuyamas end of history,

most former Soviet citizens viewed itmore as an end of ideology, or a signthat grand ideals are essentially incom-patible with the realities of life.

In each of these countries, the dicta-tor, too, has done his part to discreditdemocracy, painting it as alien to the

countrys history, tradition, and identity,funded by foreign security services, ordriven by U.S. and Western geopoliticaland economic interests, political sci-entists Evgeny Finkel and Yitzhak M.Brudny wrote in a recent article. And inevery case, the ruler has taken aggres-

sive steps to nip democratic movements

nearly as much to relieve the crush-ing poverty under which many of itscitizens su er.

China is a model to be copiedIn-

dia is just a basket case, said StephenKotkin, a historian who specializes inthe former Soviet world. Central Asiasleaders know that China is rising, andthat its model will be the dominant onein the region, he said in an interview.

Some scholars advance cultural

explanations for the regions lack of interest in democracy. e dominantreligions of the former Soviet lands areOrthodox Christianity and Islam, bothof which cultivate values not conduciveto democracy, this argument goes. In thecase of Orthodoxy, writes former Geor-

gian government o cial Irakli Chkonia,those values include submission to au-thority, discouragement of dissent andinitiative, discouragement of innova-tion and social change, [and] submissivecollectivism rather than individualism.

Citizens of the former Soviet states

also su er from ideology fatigue. Es-pecially on the periphery of the former

Soviet Union, where communism wasexperienced as a reform imposed froma distant capital, many people today seedemocracy in similar terms, as a foreignideology that has little to do with their

lives. Sean Roberts, an anthropologist


8/14


for the United States was reciprocated:President George W. Bush visited thecountry in 2005 and famously called it abeacon of liberty.

But democracy was never quite theright word to describe what Saakashvili was trying to implement. His success-

es, while undeniable, are better thoughtof as progress toward modernization orgood governance. Saakashvilis youth(he became president at 36), uency inEnglish, and rhetorical embrace of de-mocracy cleverly disguised what was ie ect a more enlightened version of the

strongman model favored in many partsof the former Soviet Union.Before the collapse of the Soviet

Union, Georgia was notorious as itsmost corrupt republic. After indepen-dence, things failed to improve. egovernment of Edward Shevardnadze

was so corrupt that when the noted

in the bud by restricting independentmedia, muzzling opposition, trying tocensor the Internet, and using state re-sources to buy political support. e dic-

tators of the region reacted to the colorrevolutions by kicking out Western de-mocracy-promotion organizations they believed were responsible for orches-trating those events.

Fear of democracy per se has not beena driving force in the region. To West-

ern audiences the Arab Spring and colorrevolutions may have looked like inspir-ing outbursts of people power, but they were read very di erently by the leaders,and many of the citizens, of the formerSoviet countries. ere, the Arab Spring was seen from the beginning more as

an outbreak of chaos and Islamist ex-tremism. e color revolutions, too,failed to inspire many people in neigh-boring statesthe events in Ukraineand Kyrgyzstan, in particular, wereseen primarily as events that weakenedthose countries.

F DEMOCRACY CAN HAVE ANY CLAIM TO

success in the former Soviet Union, itsbest case is Georgia, whose 2003 Rose

Revolution, led by the U.S.-educatedMikheil Saakashvili, brought dramaticreforms and a sharp geopolitical turn

toward the West. Saakashvilis a ection

I

The Arab Spring was seenmore as a dangerousoutbreak of chaos andIslamist extremism than

an inspiring outburst ofpeople power.


9/14


do those things because there was noone he had to bargain with, Light saidin an interview. Institutional changeof the kind Saakashvili implemented

would involve more stakeholders in afully functioning democracy. While the reforms succeeded in

rooting out corruption and improvingthe performance of the police, it did soat the cost of remaking the force intoa politicized institution responsible to

Saakashvili personally.

e fruit of thatpoliticization was visible in 2007, whenthe police violently broke up anti-gov-ernment protests and shut down a major opposition-friendly television net- work, events that did serious damage toGeorgias reputation as a champion of

human rights, Human Rights Watchsaid in a report analyzing the crack-down. Furthermore, the reforms failedto create the sort of oversight of a po-lice department that would be expectedin a democracy, and other parts of the justice system remained unreformed. Of

cases brought to court, for example, 99percent resulted in convictions. In other words, Saakashvilis reforms were aboustrengthening the power of the state,not democracy.

Meanwhile, according to FreedomHouse, measures of civil and political

rights in Georgia atlined from 2003

foreign-a airs writer Robert Kaplan visited in 2000, he couldnt imaginethe pervasive venality ever being weed-ed out: Corruption is deeply root-

edperhaps the most corrosive ulti-mate consequence of communism. It will continue at high levels long afterShevardnadzes death. But Saakashvi-li wasnt so fatalistic, and he undertook an ambitious project to reform the po-lice, then one of the most corrupt in-

stitutions in the country. In a massivehousecleaning, he laid o 16,000 policeo cers. He also dramatically restruc-tured the police bureaucracy and raisedsalaries. e reforms worked: By all ac-counts, Georgian police are far less cor-rupt now than they used to be. In 2010,

the international corruption watchdog Transparency International found that78 percent of Georgians believed thatcorruption overall had decreased inthe previous three yearsthe highestsuch gure in the world. (And for whatits worth, despite Kaplans prediction,

Shevardnadze is still alive.) This was Saakashvilis greatestachievement. But the reforms were farfrom democratic, and couldnt have eventaken place in a democracy, according toMatthew Light, a University of Torontocriminologist who has studied Georgias

police reform. Saakashvili was able to


10/14


which Saakashvilis party faced a trulycredible opponent. When billionairebusinessman Bidzina Ivanishvili formeda political party called Georgia Dream

to vie for power, Saakashvilis govern-ment threw up substantial roadblocks.It stripped Ivanishvili of his Georgiancitizenship (after several years of livingin Paris, he had also acquired Frenchcitizenship), levied extraordinary mul-timillion-dollar nes on his party for

campaign nance violations, and ha-rassed and intimidated his supporters.In the end, however, Ivanishvilis deeppockets helped Georgia Dream over-come these obstacles. While Georgians were pleased by the drop in corruptionunder Saakashvilis administration, that

was outweighed by their discontent overits failure to raise living standards.Ivanishvili had warned his supporters

to be ready for the incumbent presidentto steal the election, and even sympa-thetic outsiders wondered how Saakash- viliwho holds an outsized impression

of himself and his role in Georgian his-torywould take a loss, but he gracious-ly accepted defeat. ere are very deepdi erences between us, and we believethat their views are extremely wrong,but democracy works in this waytheGeorgian people make decisions by ma-

jority, he said.

ats what we of course

to 10 (but did tick up slightly thereaf-ter). e organization bluntly concludes,Georgia is not an electoral democra-cy. at is hardly surprising, given that

Saakashvili has frequently cited author-itarian Singapore as a model (as doesKazakhstans Nazarbayev). Singaporehas a lot going for it, but that [Saakash- vili] says that is revealing, Light said.He doesnt say Switzerland, or Sweden,or Canada, or the U.S.; he says Singa-

pore. It was not democratic principlesthat inspired Georgias focus on policereform. at was motivated largely by Saakashvilis fear of Russia and his wor-ry that a dysfunctional state would notbe able to defend itself against its super-power enemy to the north.

I dont think they were lying whenthey said they wanted a democracy, butthey saw Georgia as on the brink of statefailure, Light said, referring to Saakash- vili and his allies. e president gave lipservice to democracy, and he believed iton some level, but it just wasnt the pri-

ority.

ats the benign interpretation. e less benign was that he genuinely saw the model for Georgia as authori-tarian capitalist development like [thatin] Singapore.

e contradictions of Georgias de-mocracy were on full display during the

2012 parliamentary election, the rst in


11/14


had to pretend it cared. is phenom-enon can be seen in the emergence of several ersatz democracies in the for-mer Soviet Union, with varying degrees

of credibility.

AZAKHSTAN PROVIDES AN ESPECIALLY

stark example. President Nazarba- yev has shrewdly developed what

he calls a multivectored foreign policytrying to maintain good relations with

many powers so as to not be too depen-dent on Russia. Ties with the UnitedStates and Europe depend to some de-gree on being democratic, so even whileit in no way resembles a democracy, Ka-zakhstan makes great e orts to pretendto the world that it is one. e countrys

diplomats campaigned hard, over sever-al years, for it to be given a turn as chairof the Organization for Security andCooperation in Europe, a multination-al body that is perhaps best known forits election monitoring. Many OSCEmembers had reservations, but as part of

its campaign Kazakhstans governmentpromised wide-ranging reform of lawsrelating to national elections, politicalparty registration, and the news media.

e gambit worked, and Kazakhstan was awarded the chair for 2010. Butthe reforms were only partially imple-

mented, and the experience of chairing

respect very much. Peacefully handingover the reins of government to a rival was perhaps Saakashvilis most demo-cratic move.

In the end, Saakashvili was trapped by his own rhetoric: ough he knew thatdemocracy wasnt what he was bring-

ing to Georgia, his legacy depended onoutsiders perceiving that to be the case.Democracy, while it may not be partic-ularly relevant in places such as the for-mer Soviet Union, remains the standardof the international community, or atleast the portion of it that wields the

most powerthe United States and itsallies. So Saakashvili and his Westernbackers had to carry out a sort of mutualcharade: He had to pretend that Geor-gia was transitioning toward democ-racy, while the United Stateswhich wanted good relations with Georgia

for a variety of geopolitical reasons

K Saakashvili had topretend that Georgia wastransitioning towarddemocracy, while the

United States had topretend it cared.


12/14


prepare for Kazakhstans then-upcom-ing OSCE chairmanship.

Ironically, when Kazakhstan held par-liamentary elections early last year, the

OSCE was critical, saying the processdid not meet fundamental principles of democratic elections. Nazarbayev redback at the organization he had beenso eager to have his country chair, say-ing that hired monitors with an agen-da would not be invited to observe his

countrys elections in the future. But in Washington, Kazakhstans lobbyists puta brave face on the results, and a Ka-zakhstan-funded group of Americanexperts who made up their own smallerobserver mission praised the vote. Ka-zakhstan has taken an important step

forward towards a multiparty polity withthe election, the group said in its o -cial statement. e conduct of the elec-tion, while falling short in some respectsof the gold standard . . . demonstrated acommitment to widen voter choice.

At a press conference, one member

of the group lauded what he called theorchestrated approach to the elections. e opening of the political processcannot proceed in a chaotic, disorder-ly fashion, said Vladimir Socor, an an-alyst with the Jamestown Foundation,a Washington think tank that recently

signed a partnership agreement with

the OSCE for a year seems not to havedone much to whet Kazakhstanis appe-tite for democracy. Indeed, 2010 was the very year they named Nazarbayev their

de facto president for life. Kazakhstanrecently celebrated a new national hol-iday in his honor, First Presidents Day,amid a fresh assault on opposition me-dia and political gures.

Meanwhile, the governments PR e orts continue unabated. Shortly af-

ter the Arab Spring began, Nazarbayev published an op-ed piece in e Wash-ington Post touting Kazakhstan as amodel for Middle Eastern countries. Ittook the great democracies of the worldcenturies to develop, he declared. Weare not going to become a fully devel-

oped democracy overnight. But we haveproved that we can deliver on our bigambitions. Our road to democracy isirreversible, and we intend to provideeconomic and political opportunitiesfor our citizens.

e Kazakhstani government has on

retainer several Washington lobbyingand public-relations rms, and it hascontributed to prestigious Washing-ton think tanks. In 2009, for example, itgave the Center for Strategic and Inter-national Studies and a smaller organiza-tion, the Institute for New Democracies,

a $290,000 grant to create a task force to


13/14


creasingly come to value a judiciary thatreats all citizens equally, a civilian-con-trolled military, uncensored media, andhonest electionsthe building blocks

of democracy.

Even in Kazakhstan, a few monthsafter Nazarbayev bragged in e Wash-ington Post about how his country

avoided mass protests by meeting itspeoples economic needs, riots brokeout (and were violently put down) inthe remote city of Zhanaozen amongoil workers who had been striking formonths. is was a di erent sort of pro-test from those in Moscow: mounted by

the working class rather than the edu-cated elite, and demanding not politi-cal rights but higher wages. Yet it sim-ilarly demonstrated the fragility of thestrongman model.

Could these developments in Russiaand Kazakhstan be the rst cracks in

the antidemocracy faade of the former

the Nazarbayev Center, an institute runby the Kazakhstani government. Whenthat happens, as in neighboring Kyr-gyzstan, the consequences can be disas-

trous. Reforms need to be coordinatedfrom above.But could all this be changing? In

Russia, the massive, unexpected pro-tests that erupted in 2011 in reaction toVladimir Putins announcement that he would seek another term as president

have changed the political landscape.Putin still won handily, and democra-cy still seems a distant prospect, but thedemonstrationsin a country with anillustrious thousand-year history of des-potismsuggested that the relationshipbetween the Russian government and its

citizens has changed. Russians seem tobe demanding more say in how thingsare run. More than half now believe that voting matters, according to the Pew Research Centers surveys, a signicantincrease from only a few years ago.

Russia is the wealthiest of the ex-So-

viet republics, with the largest middleclass. A substantial scholarly literaturehas correlated rising incomes with in-creased expectations of political liber-alization, and indeed it was Moscowsmiddle class that led the anti-Pu-tin protests. Over the past three years,

Pews surveys found, Russians have in-

The massive, unexpectedanti-Putin protests thaterupted in late 2011 have

changed Russias politicallandscape.


14/14

Soviet states? As fearful as people inthis region are of chaos, could thatfear one day soon be outweighed by their desire to have more say in how

their countries are run? Even if that isthe casea big if that is the easy part, said Stephen Kotkin, the histo-rian specializing in the former Sovietstates. Far harder, he noted, is the work of building the institutions of a dem-ocratic society, such as a responsible

parliament and an e ective bureau-cracy. Protests cant do that, he said,drawing a parallel to the Arab Spring.You can break the regime with pro-

tests, but then youre Egypt, he said. en what?

J O S H U A K U C E R Ais a freelance journalistin Washington, D.C., who specializes in theCaucasus and Central Asia.

voting against freedom - wilson quarterly

Documents