Zigging and Zagging Toward Democracy
The Washington Post ::
November 15, 2005
by Adrian Karatnycky :: link to the article on the Washington Post website
Just half a year ago, a million nonviolent demonstrators in Beirut led a "Cedar Revolution" that successfully forced Syria's military withdrawal from their country. Last April 2005, mass protests in Kyrgyzstan, dubbed the Tulip Revolution, had forced the country's corrupted President to resign. Following Ukraine's Orange Revolution of November 2004 and Georgia's Rose Revolution of November 2003, it seemed the world was being swept up in a rising tide of democratic ferment.
This week, the picture is more sobering. Though democratic opposition forces in Azerbaijan have begun massing and are wearing orange colors, they face very long odds as they attempt against to overturn a November 6th parliamentary election judged unfair by international observers. Moreover, in recent months, civic movements have lost steam while authoritarian leaders work to preclude (Russia) and tyrants to suppress (Belarus, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe) pro-democracy movements.
At the same time, reform momentum appears to have run aground in places where civic forces triumphed. In Lebanon, the Syrians may be out, but terrorism persists and the country's democratic transition is held hostage to an antiquated electoral system that allocates quotas in the parliament and government to the country's religious denominations. In Kyrgyzstan, recent weeks have seen the murders of prominent parliamentarians, as well as successful efforts by old regime holdovers in parliament to block democratic reformers from key government posts.
In Ukraine, rivalries among leaders of the Orange Revolution led President Viktor Yushchenko to dismiss both his Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko and his national security advisor. Now some erstwhile allies assert Yushchenko is colluding with representatives of the old order and glossing over the high criminality and corruption of the recent past.
In Georgia, critics worry that an election won by a margin of some 90 percent has left the country without a real opposition to check incumbent President Mikheil Saakashvili.
Still, not all is as grim as it might appear. A recent Freedom House study on how democracy takes root shows that not all anti-authoritarian revolutions are equal. Those that succeed in building durable democracy have three common characteristics: 1) they maintain the discipline of nonviolent civic action; 2) they are led by cohesive and broadly based civic coalitions; and 3) they force splits within the ruling elite and its security forces, some of which ally with the opposition.
If the evidence of the past is a guide to the future, Ukraine and Georgia have better chances for durable democracy than Lebanon or Kyrgyzstan, where civic coalitions never cohered or where there was some serious opposition violence.
Indeed, one year after the Orange Revolution, Ukraine, enjoys a vibrant and diverse political spectrum with three major parties and important minor parties, most with a real chance to influence the shape of the next government. Civic activism is high, with protestors regularly challenging everything from economic policy to environmental degradation to urban development plans. There is an emboldened and free press whose zealous pursuit of every lead concerning corruption and conflicts of interest both real and imagined have created an atmosphere of unjustified pessimism. As one leading investigative journalists told me off the record this week, "charges of corruption [against democratic reformers] are rampant, but many are not borne out by documented facts."
President Viktor Yushchenko may have lost some revolutionary luster and seen a drop in public support as he moves from revolutionary rhetoric to pragmatic and effective governing. Still, he is deeply committed to democracy and widely regarded as personally incorruptible. In recent weeks he has successfully brought $ 4 billion into state coffers by re-privatizing a steelworks bought through an insider deal by relatives and allies linked to the former regime. And he has renewed his commitment to solve the case of murdered journalist Heorhiy Gongadze and to punish the planners of last year's massive voter fraud.
At the same time, despite a huge mandate and large parliamentary base, Georgia's President Saakshvili was forced to dismiss close ally, Foreign Minister Salome Zourabichvili amid widespread public and legislative criticism.
What does all this signify? First, we need to recalibrate our expectations about civic revolutions and the coalitions that make them and to better understand that their splintering is a good sign of political differentiation, not a bad sign of lack of cohesion. We also need to understand that coping with the legacies of the corrupt past is not simply a matter of revolutionary will. This requires the concurrence of a legal system that often includes old regime holdovers, and needs to be resolved quickly or not at all, otherwise foreign investors will be scared off by the uncertainty of what belongs to whom.
Democratic civic ferment may have slowed in recent months. Yet, the record of the last three decades shows that some 70 tyrannies have fallen and half of them have ended up as free and open democracies. As importantly, many of these successful revolutions first had inchoate and failed trial runs at coalition-building and nonviolent civic action.
This alone should give pause to those who say that civic ferment is in decline and that the color revolutions of the last few years are fading. It also should give heart to Azeris who massed on the streets of Baku today and to the Zimbabwean, Belarusian, and Uzbek democrats who continue to struggle against autocratic rule.
History had not ended. Nor has the democratic wave. It comes in uneven spurts; it zigs and zags. Yet, in the end, humankind moves forward to greater freedom.
Adrian Karatnycky is counselor and senior scholar at Freedom House and co-author of its recent study, How Freedom is Won.