Autocratic and Democratic External Influences in Post-Soviet Eurasia

Anastassia Obydenkova, Alexander Libman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472441249
• eBook ISBN: 9781317176855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the Ukrainian Crisis shows both political regimes and national borders in Eurasia are still in a state of flux. Bringing together literatures on the external influences of democratization, the post-Soviet space and support for autocracy Autocratic and Democratic External influences in Post-Soviet Eurasia provides a comprehensive overview of the interaction of domestic and international politics during times of regime transition. Demonstrating the interplay of these forces the book explores the rich variation in motives and channels of autocratic and democratic influences. International scholars consider two channels of external influence on regime transition; the role of supranational organizations established by non-democracies and the role of non-governmental organizations and through a set of carefully chosen case studies offer a new theoretical discussion on the phenomenon of multi-level regime transition.

Chapter 1
New Theory of External Dimension of Transition: Introduction

Alexander Libman and Anastassia Obydenkova

Twenty-five years have passed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the new independent states of Eurasia started the process of regime transition and state- and nation-building. All of the former Soviet republics have the same departure point – the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. While to some extent, it can be speculated that certain differences existed in terms of political regimes within the USSR (which reflects the powerful status of some subnational elites in the southern republics), these differences were only marginal. However, 20 years later one can clearly confirm the existence of an enormous variation in the outcomes of regime transition across post-Soviet Eurasia. The region includes relatively stable polities and fragile states, consolidated autocracies and nascent democracies. As the Ukrainian crisis of 2014 shows, both political regimes and national borders in Eurasia are still in the state of flux; large changes may happen unexpectedly for observers, both associate with progress towards democracy and with resurgence of autocracies. Thus, this experience of post-Soviet Eurasian states requires development of new theoretical approaches that would allow for better understanding of rapid dynamics in this part of the world and of the phenomenon of external dimension of regime transition in general.

The chapters collected in this volume aim to address one of the most important dimensions explaining political transition in Eurasia – the role of external factors. There is a multitude of actors affecting the political development of Eurasian states, reflecting its geographic scope – from the Western powers like the EU and the US with an established agenda of democracy-promotion to China, Turkey, Iran, Japan, as well as Central and Eastern European countries like Poland and Romania. The goals these actors pursue, the intended and unintended consequences of their interventions, as well as the way they interact with domestic actors, varies a lot, contributing to the variation of the outcomes of regime transition. Another factor responsible for the multiplicity of external influences is the presence of strong economic, social and political ties between the post-Soviet states, which creates multiple spillovers from the regime transition of one country to another country. These spillovers are not limited to the impact of Russia; other states also play a crucial role, as we will show in what follows. Some post-Soviet regimes embrace this interdependence; others attempt to limit it as much as possible, but in both cases, spillover is a strong factor that is able to affect the paths of regime transition. Democratic revolutions in some of the Eurasian states often echo in others, and internal stability of autocracies can be achieved by supporting a ‘friendly’ autocratic regime abroad.

Although the role of external factors in regime transition has received substantial attention in the literature in the last decade, this volume presents a new take on the problem, differentiating from the previous contributions in a few aspects.

First, while the extant literature mostly focuses on the role of democratic external actors, democracy promotion and diffusion, the book aspired to investigate a broader picture, accounting for the role of non-democratic actors and anti-democratic external influences as well. Of course, anti-democratic external influence is not new both in Eurasia and worldwide: prominent historical examples include the Holy Alliance of European monarchies of the nineteenth century, which was created to prevent the revolutionary movement, Japanese and German satellite states during World War Two and the Warsaw Pact. In addition, there were many examples of ties between autocratic regimes and anti-democratic movements abroad (pro-Soviet Communist parties around the globe and Comintern; Quisling organizations in Europe during World War Two, Spanish Phalanx, German–American Bund and British Movement of Fascists). However, in the past, the role of autocracies has been more straightforward and typically based on direct military dominance, as well as on a clear ideological framework (Communism or Fascism). In contrast to these historical examples of external non-democratic influences, the book argues that modern external autocratic influences are crucially different from their historical antecedents and, therefore, actually present a very new phenomenon of the study. First of all, in the modern world, the clear ideological basis of the autocratic rule is mostly absent: this absence does not mean that the external influences of autocracies do not exist or unsuccessful in their influence – the growth of China and Russia in recent decades, the active standing of Saudi Arabia during the Arab Spring, the foreign policy interventions of Iran (or, possibly the international activity of Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela – if one can indeed treat this country as autocracy of some sort) show that this issue remains important and, hence, deserves thorough investigation. It does, however, imply that the behaviour of ideological autocracies of the past and of the modern bureaucratic and personal rule regimes may differ – and we intend to explore these differences in a systematic fashion.

Second, in Eurasia, looking at the Russian policy supporting authoritarian regime in Belarus or Tajikistan, it seems compelling to suggest the existence of an ‘autocracy promotion’, paralleling the ‘democracy promotion’ by the West (i.e., conscious efforts to spread certain types of regimes abroad). Yet this direct analogy may turn out to be misleading – whether ‘autocracy promotion’ indeed exists, may be questionable. The motives autocratic actors have while undertaking actions limiting the spread of democracy in their neighbourhood may vary a lot and contradict each other – for example, a trade-off between the willingness to support friendly autocrat, rent-seeking and geopolitical goals can be resolved in different ways. The tools used by autocracies also do not mirror those of democracies. Also, resisting democratization and democratic external influences does not automatically mean promoting autocracy in the narrow sense. In this volume, through a serious of in-depth empirical studies, we hope to obtain a more detailed picture of why, how and to what extent autocratic countries affect regime transition abroad.

Third, looking merely at the national level of regime transition in Eurasia is insufficient. Generally, in most large and (de facto or de jure) decentralized states, regime transition process typically occurs at both national and subnational levels. As a result, individual regions develop political regimes, which may deviate from that established in the centre. In autocracies, particular regions could become ‘democratic enclaves’; in democratic countries, some regional leaders manage to create stable autocracies lasting for decades; and in some cases nation-level autocracy and subnational autocracies compete with each other and interact in a complex and unpredictable fashion. The attention to the subnational regimes is a recent phenomenon in political science; particularly, there has been very little evidence on how external factors could affect subnational regimes and whether they can influence them at all. Acknowledging that the subnational and the national regime transition processes may deviate, we also have to acknowledge that the effects of external factors at both levels may be heterogeneous.

For Eurasia, the nexus of the national and subnational regime transition seems to be particularly important. The regime transition process in this part of the world occurred hand in hand with the process of state-building and nation-building, which often involved the active interaction of national and subnational polities as well as interplay with external actors. Twenty-five years ago, it was not clear, which of the subnational units of the USSR could become fully-fledged independent states and which will be integrated into the new polities. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the central governments often established only weak control over individual territories, sometimes resulting in outright secessions, but much more often into de facto autonomy, when subnational regions created their own political regimes, often deviating from the regime transition at the national level. The process of centralization experienced by many Eurasian states in the last decade did not undermine this subnational variation. Ukrainian crisis shows that the ghosts of ‘federalization’ can be summoned any time anew; the polities, which could emerge in this case (like the Crimean Republic in the Russian Federation or the attempted Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics), can develop into entirely different direction than regime transition in Kyiv or Moscow.

Therefore, the chapters collected in this volume intend to make several primary innovative contributions to the debates on external influences, thus contributing to the studies on international relations, comparative politics and international political economy. Overall, the book argues that the international dimension of regime transition may have a double nature, that is, not only democracy-reinforcing (as had been traditionally determined) but also autocracy-reinforcing; we do, however, explicitly want to avoid simplifications and shortcuts often used in the extant literature, questioning the motives, the tools and the outcomes of external influences by non-democracies. The book also argues that regime transition occurs not only at a national level but also at a subnational level. Hence, it is possible to claim that during the process of regime transition, the interplay of external and domestic factors is a much more complex phenomenon than is often hypothesized or theorized.

The volume includes seven chapters (in addition to the introduction and conclusion), where this argument is developed both theoretically and empirically. The book can be broadly divided into theory-building and theory-testing. The book begins with a theoretical chapter that lays the new theoretical framework as a foundation for the further empirical analysis. This chapter summarizes the key concepts that will be used throughout the book and builds a new theory on external influences in regime transition.

Accordingly, the subsequent chapters are further subdivided into two parts – chapters analysing democratic and, separately, autocratic external influences. The first part, which is somewhat shorter, aims to examine democratic external actors (which can conditionally be described as ‘traditional’ because they have received more attention in the literature). This part aims to extend the agenda of studies of these traditional democracy-reinforcing actors by focusing on both supranational and non-governmental organizations that had been overlooked. This literature on external influences of democracies is already advanced; therefore, our goal is to primarily expand the existing agenda by taking into account the multilevel nature of the transition. Thus, the part includes two chapters on two possible avenues of expansion. The first chapter (by Ekaterina Turkina) explicitly considers how the EU promotes democratization in the post-Soviet space by encouraging the formation of transnational networks on various levels. Thus, it looks at an important case of how external factors influence regime transition indirectly, by affecting political development at a different level. The second chapter (by Maria Bigday and Yauheni Kryzhanouski) is dedicated to the under-studied effects of democratic external influences, which go beyond the typically investigated effects on nation-level politics and are associated with the development of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). They show that even issues typically ignored by the students of democratization (like the development of rock music community) can reflect and influence the process of regime transition and of external influences.

The second part introduces a new agenda, debating the role of autocratic external actors and their influence. It consists of four chapters that systematically examine all levels and channels of autocratic influences. The first chapter (by Tom Casier) starts with the national level, looking at the interplay between Russia and the EU in Eastern Europe and, in particular, on the role of unintended influences on regime transition. The second chapter (by Jakob Tolstrup) looks at the role of external national actors and their effect on subnational politics in post-Soviet countries, where he studies a special case of the ‘pockets of autocracy’ – de facto independent territories rule by authoritarian regimes. The third chapter (by Alexander Libman) investigates the role of supranational organizations in the process we study; it looks, in particular, at the Eurasian Economic Union – the most recent addition to the family of post-Soviet regional organizations, which, due to its influence on governance of trade in the region, has attracted substantial scholarly attention recently. The fourth chapter (by Ekaterina Furman) proceeds to the role of non-governmental organizations. In a unique case study, this chapter examines how the selected Russian NGOs, which position themselves as organizations promoting a ‘Russia-friendly stance’ in the CIS, are organized and the role they play in post-Soviet states. The last chapter summarizes the conclusions and revisits the initial theoretical framework based on the analytical overview of the empirical analysis presented in all chapters of the book. Based on these specific empirical discoveries and conclusions made in the individual chapters, the concluding chapter revise the theoretical framework and outlines new agenda for further studies and research.

The chapters included in this volume are written by researchers of different backgrounds (economists, political scientists, international relations scholars and students of management and business administration) and of different countries (Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Russia, Spain and the UK). The empirical studies presented in individual chapters build upon heterogeneous methods – from quantitative large-N studies (Ekaterina Turkina) to small-N case studies, focusing on social movements (Maria Bigday and Yauheni Kryzhanouski), organizations (Alexander Libman and Ekaterina Furman) and regions (Jakob Tolstrup), as well as broad conceptual and theoretical studies (Tom Casier, Anastassia Obydenkova and Alexander Libman). This approach allows us to analyse the puzzle of heterogeneous external influences of democratic and non-democratic actors in Eurasia, looking at both national and subnational levels.

The book introduces a new theory in the literature on democratization and then tests this theory across various empirical case studies. It also outlines the agenda for further studies based on empirical discoveries developed in the chapters and considers more avenues for further application of this theory for the analyses worldwide. Overall, the book aspires to contributed to comparative political science (especially comparative democratization studies and studies of subnational governance), international relations, area studies and also may have some implications for international political economy.

Chapter 2
Modern External Influences and the Multilevel Regime Transition: Theory-Building^*

Anastassia Obydenkova and Alexander Libman

Introduction

The fact that external factors play a substantial role in regime transition has only recently received recognition in the scholarly literature. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the literature on regime transition began to devote more attention to external dynamics, with the argument that transition should be analysed as the interaction between internal (domestic) and external (international) factors (Pridham et al. 1994; Wedel 1998; Whitehead 2001; Risse 2009; Zielonka and Pravda 2001; Carothers 2004). Disentangling this internal–external nexus is a challenging task that has been addressed in a number of studies (Kopstein and Reilly 2000; Henderson 2002; Kubicek 2003; Simmons et al. 2006; Levitsky and Way 2005; Börzel and Risse 2012a, 2012b; Schmitter 2009; Obydenkova 2010, 2012b; Kelley 2012). Several papers and books (e.g., Levitsky and Way 2010; Jacoby 2006; Obydenkova and Libman 2014c; Magen and Morlino 2009; Morlino and Sadurski 2010) presented various typologies of external factors and studied their role in regime transition.

However, in spite of this growing scholarly attention, the literature remains unbalanced in two ways. On the one hand, it has concentrated on types and channels of democratic external influence and devoted much less attention to other types of influence. Most likely, the best-studied area of discussion is the external democratic influence on regime transition at the national level. In this case, attention is primarily devoted to the role of international organizations (the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank or the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development), as well as the US, the EU and Western non-governmental organizations. The reasons for this focus are straightforward: on the one hand, democracy promotion plays a crucial role in the agendas of key democratic countries and their international organizations today; hence, the evaluation of outcomes and tools of democracy promotion matters from both normative and positive perspectives. On the other hand, the relative weakness of the post-Soviet states in the 1990s caused them to be more or less eager to accept advice from Western partners (or at least to pretend to do so). Of course, substantial variation existed in this respect as well, as there were several notable exceptions to the willingness to embrace Western assistance (such as Turkmenistan, Belarus and Uzbekistan). Still, the role of autocratic external players was clearly less important 20 years ago than it is now.

The attention to anti-democratic external influences is a much more recent phenomenon, though it has already been investigated in a number of studies. Some of the papers concentrated on providing possible conceptual frameworks for the analysis of anti-democratic external influences (Burnel and Schlumberger 2010; Ambrosio 2010).¹ In terms of empirical analysis, three topics attracted particular interest. First, the most popular line of research is the examination of the impact of dominant autocratic states (‘black knights’, as they are called by Levitsky and Way 2010 and Way and Levitsky 2007), which could potentially affect regime transition in their neighbouring states (Ambrosio 2006, 2009; Silitski 2006; Tolstup 2009; Jackson 2010; Cameron and Orenstein 2012; Bader and Kästner 2010; Obydenkova 2011b; Kästner 2010; Baracani and Di Quirico 2013). In the post-Soviet region, the attention devoted to this topic is driven by Russia’s revived increase in its influence on its neighbouring states through both hard and soft power (Nygren 2008), as well as the growing role of China in Central Asia and the post-Soviet space in general (Kavalski 2010). Second, the post-Soviet space witnessed the emergence of the mutual provision of aid and rhetoric support between coalitions of autocratic governments; this discussion is closely linked to the analysis of the political consequences of post-Soviet regional integration (Collins 2009; Allison 2007, 2008, 2010; Libman 2007; Furman 2004; Fel’dman 2005; Melnykovska et al. 2012; Libman and Obydenkova 2013). Outside the post-Soviet space, Söderbaum (2004, 2010) describes what he calls ‘regime-boosting’ regionalism in Africa, where integration rhetoric is used to strengthen ruling elites. Third, it is hypothesized that close social ties between post-Soviet countries and elites stimulate the mutual learning of autocratic regimes (Herd 2005; Silitski 2005, 2010; Hale 2005, 2006; Kubicek 2011; Del Sordi 2011; Obydenkova and Libman 2012; Vanderhill 2012) in an attempt to respond to common challenges. However, the existing theorization and evidence is still extremely limited, and all studies explicitly acknowledge the need for further detailed examination at both the conceptual and empirical level; we see our volume as a contribution to this scholarship.

On the other hand, although the emergence of subnational regimes has been acknowledged as an important feature of the regime transition process worldwide (McMann 2006; Gel’man 2010) and in the former Soviet republics in particular (Stoner-Weiss 1997; Obydenkova 2006a, 2006b; Obydenkova and Libman 2013), the attention devoted to this topic has been substantially smaller than that devoted to nation-level processes. The interest to the subnational level is triggered not merely by the interesting heterogeneous dynamics subnational regimes often exhibit, but also by the importance of nation-building and state-building in many recent regime transitions (Offe 1991; Kuzio 2001; Frye 2010). However, we still argue that the subnational level of regime transition deserves further investigation, for two reasons. First, many post-Soviet countries exhibited sophisticated decentralization dynamics, which made local go...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 New Theory of External Dimension of Transition: Introduction
• 2 Modern External Influences and the Multilevel Regime Transition: Theory-Building
• Part I Democratic External Influences – Overlooked Dimensions
• Part II Autocratic External Influences – Testing a Multilevel Approach
• Index