Democracy in History
Rights 4 Russia
Belarus
5
6
7
7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Civil Liberties
figure 2-3. Freedom House Ratings of Four Post-Socialist Regimes,1991–2006 Source:Compiled from Freedom House2002,2006
treatment of its substantial Russian minority did not keep Estonia from a rating of1,1– in the company of Europe’s leading democracies.
Meanwhile, Russia and (especially) Belarus headed downward toward fewer political rights and diminished civil liberties. In Russia, the Yeltsin- Putin wars in the Northern Caucasus and the state’s silencing of opposi- tion voices pulled the beleaguered country back from the partial democ- ratization Mikhail Gorbachev had initiated during the1980s. Yeltsin and Putin concentrated their efforts on restoring the Russian state’s internal capacity and external standing. They sacrificed civil liberties – or, more generally, democracy – as they did so. Putin used the state’s control over valuable stores of oil and gas to pry his government free of popular con- sent. Inequalities of class and ethnicity became more salient in Russian public politics; Russian citizens disconnected their tattered trust networks even more definitively from public politics, as protection, breadth, equal- ity, and mutually binding consultation diminished visibly (Fish2005).
Belarus slid even farther. Belarus president Aleksandr Lukashenka won his office in a 1994 popular election as an anti-corruption watchdog.
But as soon as he had consolidated his hold on the office, Lukashenka instituted censorship, smashed independent trade unions, fixed elections, and subjugated the legislature, thus compromising the country’s previous small democratic gains. He benefited greatly from Russian aid, especially in the form of subsidized prices for Russian gas and oil. Like many an authoritarian ruler across the contemporary world, Lukashenka could avoid consulting his people by using mineral revenues to support state capacity.
Lukashenka did not, however, neglect internal repression. According to Kathleen Mihalisko,
Less than a year into his presidency, in April 1995, riot police acting on Lukashenka’s orders beat up Popular Front deputies on the steps of the Supreme Council, in what was a first manifestation of regime violence. Ever since, the spe- cial interior ministry troops (OPMON) have become a most visible reminder of how Lukashenka prefers to deal with critics, being used against peaceful demon- strators with escalating brutality and frequency. In two years, the number of security forces is estimated to have risen to about180,000, or double the size of the armed forces. (Mihalisko1997:237; see also Titarenko et al.2001)
The use of specialized military forces to establish political control drew on an old Eastern European repertoire. By the presidential elections of 2006, Lukashenka was taking no chances of a “color revolution” in the style of Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. In fact, the head of Belarus’s KGB justified repression by accusing the opposition “of planning to carry out a coup after the voting on Sunday, supported by the United States and Georgia” (Myers 2006: A3). Repression worked: only a few thousand protesters showed up on election night, as the government announced that Lukashenka had won82.6percent of the vote (Myers and Chivers 2006: A11). Although dwindling numbers of demonstrators continued to brave the cold for the next few days, on the sixth day riot police swept up the few hundred that remained (Myers and Chivers2006). Post-socialist regimes that de-democratized after1991 teetered between dictatorship and civil war.
Figure2-3 reinforces a point that Figure 2-2 made visible. Regimes crowd along the diagonal, generally receiving broadly similar scores for political rights and civil liberties. When political rights and civil liberties change in any particular regime, furthermore, they tend to change together in the same direction – not in exact parallel, but in rough synchrony. In this book’s terms, the installation of relatively broad, equal, and mutually
binding popular consultation promotes the strengthening of protections against arbitrary action by governmental agents. Expanded protection, in its turn, promotes broader, more equal, more binding political participa- tion. Not perfectly, as the erratic courses of Belarus, Russia, Estonia, and Croatia tell us, but enough so that democratization arrives as a simul- taneous increase in political rights and civil liberties. That increase, as we have seen, often occurs with impressive rapidity in the aftermath of intense conflict.
What’s to Explain?
We obviously have our explanatory work cut out for us. At least super- ficially, the histories of democratization and de-democratization we have surveyed lend themselves to completely contradictory explanations. We might, for example, think of democracy as an idea that someone (the Greeks?) invented, starting a centuries-long effort to implement the idea.
We might take an opposite tack, arguing that only the conditions of indus- trial capitalism could support broad, equal, protective, and mutually bind- ing political relations between states and citizens. We might also think that competing models of government, once familiar to national elites, attracted different sorts of ruling classes, and that some of these chose dictatorship and others democracy. Call these three approaches to expla- nationidealist, structuralist, andinstrumentalist. You will have no trouble finding examples of each one in the vast recent literature on democracy.1 When taken separately, none of the three approaches come close to providing coherent explanations of the histories we have reviewed. In each case, we find ourselves asking “How?” and “Why?”Howdid ideas of democracy translate into concrete relations and practices? How did industrial capitalism generate pressures for democratization? How did self-interested rulers fashion democratic institutions?Whydid it take so long? “How” and “why” questions spring up at every step of our histor- ical way.
1For example, Acemoglu and Robinson2006; Alexander2002; Andrews and Chapman 1995; Arblaster1987; Boix2003; Collier and Levitsky1997; Collier1999; Cruz2005;
Dahl1998; Diamond et al.2004; Di Palma1990; Engelstad and Østerud2004; Geddes 1999; Gurr, Jaggers, and Moore1990; Held1996; Hoffmann2003; Huntington1991;
Kurzman1998; Lijphart1999; Linz and Stepan1996; Markoff1996b; Morlino2003;
O’Donnell 1999; Ortega Ortiz2001; Przeworski et al.2000; Putnam, Leonardi, and Nanetti1993; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens1992; Skocpol2004; Sørensen1998, Whitehead2002; Yashar1997.
Here is my claim: it will take a thoroughgoing process-oriented analysis of democratization and de-democratization to provide coherent answers to such questions. Available idealist, structuralist, and instrumentalist accounts of democracy do not offer adequate answers. We must dig much deeper into political processes. Later chapters will emphasize three kinds of political processes, those that alter relations between state-citizen inter- actions and 1) interpersonal trust networks, 2) categorical inequalities, and3) autonomous power centers. They will also examine the effects of shocks such as domestic confrontation, revolution, conquest, and colo- nization in activating and accelerating those processes.
Looking closely at the effects of such shocks, furthermore, will clarify the extent to which popular struggle (rather than leaders’ wise political deliberation) advances democratization. Before excavating our answers, however, we need a still clearer map of the terrain to be explored. Thenext chaptertakes us much farther into the actual processes of democratization and de-democratization. This further exploration will equip us to examine how and why those fundamental processes occur.