Democracy Promotion and the 'Colour Revolutions'

Susan Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138110588
• eBook ISBN: 9781135750596
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book reviews the interplay between domestic contexts and democracy promotion efforts in selected countries of the former Soviet Union and the Western Balkans. The idea behind the six case studies is twofold. In the three cases where 'colour revolutions' occurred (Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine), the authors explore the extent to which external democracy promoters adapted their strategies to respond to new domestic contexts. In the other three cases (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Russia) the authors investigate how the political leadership has reacted to 'colour revolutions' elsewhere and which consequences their reactions have had for democracy promotion. In all cases an assessment of democratization processes in the country is provided as a basis for drawing conclusions about the potential for domestic and foreign actors to promote democratic development. An introduction and conclusion embed the case studies in the existing literature on democracy promotion and generalize the findings across the countries studied.

On the practical level, the volume offers suggestions for improving democracy promotion endeavours, proposing in particular a more balanced approach which goes beyond supporting specific individuals and organizations to include addressing the structural level.

This book was published as a special issue of Democratization.

Democracy promotion before and after the ‘colour revolutions’

Susan Stewart

Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, Berlin, Germany

The term ‘colour revolution’ has come to be associated with a series of events in the 1990s and 2000s which occurred in a number of Eastern European countries and post-Soviet republics. These events were characterized by mass popular uprisings which led to the non-violent toppling of the incumbent regime and its replacement with one with ostensibly closer ties to the populace. As Joshua Tucker has pointed out, the term ‘colour revolutions’

has become a popular shorthand for referring to the events in these countries among regional specialists and local politicians. The use of the word ‘revolution’ is not meant to imply any long-term consequences of these events, but rather to identify that the anti-regime forces were in fact successful in overthrowing the current regime.¹

For this reason, and also due to the non-violent nature of the process, the word ‘revolution’ is often placed in quotation marks, a practice we follow in this introduction as well. Some scholars, most notably Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik (2006), prefer the term ‘electoral revolutions’, which emphasizes the fact that the mass uprisings tended to follow starkly manipulated elections. We opt here for the more frequently utilized ‘colour revolutions’, even though the case of Serbia, analysed in this special issue, does not technically fit the mould due to its epithet of ‘bulldozer revolution’.²

While the three clearest examples of the phenomenon described above are arguably Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, some analysts include the earlier cases of the Romanian overthrow of the Ceauscescu regime and the ousting of Vladimir Meciar in Slovakia. Yet others extend the series to encompass the events in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, although the extent to which these led to a genuine regime change has been questioned. In all of these examples there is some evidence of involvement by external actors, but the degree and impact of their engagement vary widely.³ Furthermore, the ‘colour revolutions’ have had various spillover effects beyond the borders of the countries in which they occurred. In the first place, experiences from the earlier ones were transferred to the later contexts, which have been examined in the scholarly literature as an example of democratic diffusion processes.⁴ In the second place, other countries in the area – most notably Russia, but also Belarus and Azerbaijan – have reacted against the ‘revolutions’ in a variety of ways, some of which are explored in this special issue.

The idea for this special issue emerged out of two workshops held at the University of Mannheim (Germany) in the spring of 2007. The original concept involved focusing primarily on the role of external actors in two sets of countries. The first set consisted of countries which had experienced ‘colour’ or ‘electoral revolutions’. The second set involved countries which were considered potential candidates for such ‘revolutions’ and/or had drawn conclusions from these events which influenced their own domestic and foreign policies. In the domestic policy sphere, there was usually a consequential, more repressive treatment of opposition parties and civil society organizations. In relation to foreign policy, governments of the countries which had not (yet) experienced ‘colour revolutions’ tended to make strong accusations that illegitimate influence on domestic developments in the ‘revolutionary’ countries had been exercised by some external actors.⁵

The goal of the project leading to this special issue was to bring together western scholars involved in desk and field research on these countries with both academics and practitioners from the countries themselves. This latter group had experienced not only the ‘revolutions’ personally, but the before and after contexts as well, and thus brought a different perspective to bear on the role of external actors in the various countries.

Indeed, those participants from the ‘revolutionary’ environments perceived democracy promotion differently from the scholars from European Union member states. First, they did not associate democracy promotion exclusively or even primarily with external actors. Rather, they tended to see domestic actors as equally involved with democracy promotion efforts, since their actions either supported or hindered democratization in their own countries. Second, they insisted on a strong role in the analysis for an examination of domestic contexts, and in particular claimed that internal conditions possessed the greatest salience for the fate of democratization. Due to their input the project shifted away from a primary focus on external actors to a more balanced consideration of both domestic and foreign actors and of the influence of country contexts on international endeavours. The special issue can thus be seen as an attempt at achieving a synthesis of two strong trends in the literature on political transition. While originally the focus in this literature was almost wholly on domestic factors (with Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter the best-known proponents⁶), in recent years much more research has been conducted on the role of external influences, in particular since the collapse of the Soviet Union.⁷ This special issue thus attempts to address the role of both domestic conditions and external (f)actors in recent democracy promotion efforts in a series of post-socialist environments.

As a result the overarching focus of the special issue is the interplay between domestic contexts and external actors, both in countries in which ‘colour revolutions’ have occurred and in those countries which have been considered candidates for such ‘revolutions’. The ‘colour revolutions’ provide a convenient series of case studies, since internal conditions in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine transformed significantly as a result of the ‘revolutionary’ events, even if these changes were not as extensive or sustainable as expected by both domestic and international observers. Thus the articles which investigate these countries explore one or more of the following questions: What have been the approaches of actors in the field of democracy promotion in these countries? To what extent were domestic contexts in the countries altered by the relevant ‘revolution’? In which ways did external actors modify their approaches in response? How have political and societal conditions in the countries facilitated and/or hindered the influence of external actors?

However, the special issue goes beyond these questions to examine the situation in three countries (Russia, Belarus, Azerbaijan) which were potential candidates for ‘colour revolutions’ and which responded to the events in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine with a series of domestic and in some cases foreign policy measures mainly oriented at countering any moves towards similar ‘revolutions’. These articles address the questions of (1) why the conditions for a ‘colour revolution’ or, more broadly, for democratization, were at least partially absent in these countries,⁸ (2) which approaches have been taken by external democracy promotion actors with regard to the countries in question, and (3) why these countries' leaders responded both to these ‘revolutions’ and to external democracy promotion efforts in the ways that they did. The implications of the answers to these questions for future democracy promotion approaches are also explored.

The selected research foci and the findings presented in this special issue are related to the current literature on democracy promotion in three main ways. In the following we review each of the three relevant subsets of literature and then outline the contributions of the special issue to each subset. First, the articles pick up on the frequently voiced criticism of democracy promotion efforts as inadequately embedded in specific country contexts. Second, they add to the literature on the ‘backlash against democracy promotion’ and thereby on the difficulties of providing democracy assistance in (semi-)authoritarian contexts. Third, they contribute to the growing literature on the consequences of the ‘colour revolutions’ for both the domestic and the international arenas. At the end of this introductory article we offer brief summaries of all the articles in the special issue, in order to (1) situate each analysis within the research framework presented here and (2) allow the reader to grasp the main conclusions of each author quickly.

A note on terminology is appropriate before we begin our literature review. Democracy promotion is defined to include activities engaged in by external actors to encourage the development of democracy within a given country. Our focus here is primarily (but not exclusively) on what Peter Burnell has called ‘democracy assistance’, which ‘occupies the positive terrain, comprising elements of support, incentive, inducement and reward’ and ‘recognizes the primary force for democratization is and must be internal to the country in question’.⁹ Nonetheless, each author was free to select his or her own definition of democracy promotion, either explicitly or implicitly, so the concept differs somewhat from article to article.

To begin our literature review, we address key works on tailoring democracy promotion efforts to domestic contexts. While there is evidence for a learning process occurring among external actors with regard to such tailoring,¹⁰ there have been few attempts to assess the impact of this process in specific instances. The occurrence of the ‘colour revolutions’ presents an excellent opportunity to explore the ways in which external democracy promotion actors have (or have not) learned to respond to changes in domestic context. Although these ‘revolutions’ have generally not resulted in the type and degree of change anticipated by those involved, they have nonetheless served as focal points indicating both the culmination of certain developmental processes on elite and mass levels and the initiation of certain new tendencies in governance and foreign policy orientation. As such they present logical turning points for a reassessment and reorientation of democracy assistance by international actors.

The democracy promotion literature includes frequent admonitions to international actors to take country contexts adequately into consideration. These admonitions often centre on a critique of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, which has been seen to be present in both American and European approaches to democracy promotion.¹¹ As Peter Burnell has put it: ‘The three main approaches [to promoting democracy] – economic relations, state relations and civil society – are not mutually exclusive. We should expect that different combinations would offer most potential purchase, and threaten least potential harm, in different situations’.¹² Schmitter and Brouwer link this need to tailor democracy promotion efforts to local contexts to the efficacy of these efforts:

…the net impact of external DPP [democracy promotion and protection] upon democratization is likely to be only marginal in determining the outcome – and, hence, singularly difficult to measure and predict. Its efficacy will depend very much on the way that it is ‘processed’ through domestic actors which, in turn, implies the content of DPP will have to be tailored both to differences in national points of departure and modes of transition. Standard ‘treatments’ are not likely to produce standard effects.¹³

Furthermore, authors such as Carothers have called for ‘more attention to the effects that a country's underlying economic, social, and political conditions, structures, and historical legacies will have on the chances that a democratic transition can succeed there’.¹⁴ Larry Diamond points out that ‘DG [democratic governance] assistance priorities must fit the particular political conditions of the country, and this requires periodically an authoritative, shrewdly perceptive, and well-focused strategic assessment’.¹⁵

Alongside these admonitions, the literature does present some evidence that learning processes have taken place with regard to concern for domestic contexts, as well as more broadly. Carothers points out significant learning processes which have gone hand in hand with the continuing expansion of democracy assistance worldwide since the 1980s. He laments, however, that most of this learning has not been formalized, but rather exists in the heads of individual democracy promotion practitioners.¹⁶ The ‘learning curve’ is likely to vary for different international actors. The European Union (EU) should in principle be better poised to respond to country contexts due to the decentralized nature of much of its assistance (via the member states) and to the specific expertise of certain EU members in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Democracy promotion before and after the ‘colour revolutions’
• 2. Which way the wind blows: democracy promotion and international actors in Serbia
• 3. Georgia's ongoing struggle for a better future continued: democracy promotion through civil society development
• 4. External democracy promotion in Ukraine: the role of the European Union
• 5. European democracy promotion in Russia before and after the ‘colour’ revolutions
• 6. Outpost of tyranny? The failure of democratization in Belarus
• 7. Internal and external factors in the democratization of Azerbaijan
• 8. The interplay of domestic contexts and external democracy promotion: lessons from Eastern Europe and the South Caucasus
• 9. Epilogue – From the ‘colour revolutions’ to the ‘Arab spring’: Implications for democracy promotion
• Index