Post-Soviet Democratization and the Authoritarian Counteroffensive - Adrian Basora

you [Music] today we begin with a talk by my colleague ambassador Adrienne basore he is the he was the last ambassador to Czechoslovakia and the first ambassador to the Czech Republic and he served as a director for European affairs on the National Security Council he was president of the eisenhower exchange fellowships now known as the eisenhower exchange or the eisenhower fellowships and he has been directing our project on democratic transitions for the last ten years or so and is now co-chair co-director of our Eurasia program he is the co-editor of a book that came out a few months ago a few months ago called does democracy matter which is an examination of democracy promotion efforts on the part of the United States it raises the question as to whether democracy promotion should be part of u.s. foreign policy and if it should how should it be used as part of u.s. foreign policy the talk he is about to give is in part drawing on this new book which I'll send you the link for that looks at originally the transitions from communism to democracy at the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and now looking at the reversals from democracy so please welcome ambassador Adrian basore [Applause] thanks Ellen and first of all thank you all for being here I saw a lot of empty seats just three minutes ago so I was very concerned that yesterday's marathon scheduled might have just disillusioned or incapacitated you but as I said to many of you individually yesterday your stamina is extraordinarily impressive and and said at lunch I I mentioned that I figured that since I was deeply immersed in these issues and fascinated by every little datum that we saw on the screen or that different lecturers provided I figured I might have a slightly easier time absorbing all that massive amount of pertinent information but I was exhausted and so I could imagine you who are not specialists at Eastern Europe in most cases most of you might have had a lot to absorb but the bright and cheerful faces so that's good first of all let me say that Thank You Alan for the nice introduction and and let me thank those of could I ask all of the those that are associated with the Eurasia program to please stand starting with Maya and aya and Anushka and Colonel Hamilton and any other fellows or senior fellows or yeah Chris our second speaker Chris Miller will be here and and of course for Rachel who's oh not part of the Eurasia program made this whole program today yesterday is today possible so thank you all okay so it's a real pleasure to be here today in Philadelphia which arguably of course is the place where this dark birthplace of the very concept of modern transitions to democracy it's also an honor to share this podium and this weekend with so many extraordinarily distinguished scholars and I want to single out the modest one who said very little in other words Walter MacDougall was one of the great historians of the contemporary generation of American scholars recognized as such with all sorts of honors and Pulitzer Prizes etc but but who has been the father of this history Institute starting 20 years ago and who has spent all of his time as you had chance for individual conversations with Walter but that is what that is because he is convinced we all at Nifty are convinced that history has a tremendously important educational role to play and as a tremendously important factor in making good government policy making good foreign policy and that's the perspective from which I come at it obviously I was a foreign policy practitioner I'm so I'm not going to try to compete with all the distinguished Magisterial lecturers that you had yesterday rather I'm gonna try to give you my own foreign policy practitioners perspective on the issues of post-soviet post communist democratization and as we called it call it and our title here oh this is the old title now it's called post-soviet democracy democracy and its discontents because it's not all been rosy as you heard some discussion of yesterday and the path ahead is not necessarily going to be that much rosier for at least for the short term today my main focus is going to be on the post communist transition since 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and I wanted to make it clear that my perspective on the subject consists not only of the post I mean look very closely at the post-communist transitions but also from a 30-plus year career in the American Foreign Service where in one way and I heeded the call of John F Kennedy the new frontier the whole idea of helping other countries who were seeking more democratic governance helping them through the Alliance for Progress and many other speeches and actions that hit that administration made and subsequent ones have as well that service was of course it did include Eastern Europe Romania and more recently Czechoslovakia and working on Shubin Affairs at the State Department when Custer had already consolidated power but also assignments in in Latin America which was in Tyre almost entirely dictatorial when I first went there in the 1960s and is now almost entirely democratic also in Spain shortly after the fall of Franco when we were helping still to ensure that that's democracy which was off to a good start in the late 70s was consolidated it was not at all clear I remember you may remember there was a coup attempt just a few years after Franco died in 1975 to try to restore dictatorship and of course I'm drawing as Alan already said in my comments my perspective on this on these issues I draw on this ten-year study of the post communist transitions which in fact expanded into a study of the main literature on transit ology as some political scientists call it the post authoritarian transitions of Latin America and other areas of the world not only Eastern Europe and of course Spain and Portugal and Greece as examples even in Europe all right so and as also as for the background for my just to give you where I'm coming from as Colonel Hamilton did such a great job of yesterday here's where I'm coming from you'd have that out front so I was at the National Security Council working on European affairs on detail from the State Department when the Berlin Wall fell when Shou chess school was gunned down in the streets at right around Christmas time at the end of 1989 and when the first reform governments were forming in Eastern Europe and in fact had the honor and the challenge of putting together a presidential mission to go to Poland to show an American with three cabinet secretaries in the head of the Michael Boston hitters council economic advisors to go to Poland to in effect show the Polish government we're with you and we had two days of discussions with them they want to know how is this gonna work how can we do it not they want our assurances that we would help them but above all they didn't know what they were getting into I mean they knew it was gonna be difficult but they thought maybe we could help them figure out whether it was going to work and if so how so that's my background on this and then as Alan also mentioned I had the honor of serving as the US ambassador in Prague so at the NSC I was able to help through interagency pulling the other propositions from different agencies etc I was able to help put together the the policy of response to the fall of the Berlin or the US policy response what do we do when this sudden miracle that nobody expected the iron curtain fell communism is going gone or going what do we do to take the opportunity positively President Bush George HW Bush Bush father said to us I am NOT gonna stand on the Berlin Wall and thump my chest and say we have won we have won the Cold War instead let us engage the Russians let us have dialogue with the Russians let us help them figure out their own destiny and and the other post communist countries let's just help them but let's not be aggressive about it so for six extraordinary years so then then I was an ambassador of course in Prague initially shuttling back and forth to Bratislava and Prague before the Velvet divorce occurred in the beginning of in 1993 I was charged with implementing the very policies that I had helped to design to try to support these attempted Democratic transitions so for six extraordinary years I was deeply involved in formulating and then force implementing the policies that we put together at that on very short notice and partly pushed by the Congress by the way there was a lot of internal bureaucratic resistance in the executive branch everybody wanted to continue doing the same old same old and then certain congressman senators came over to Europe and so the world was changing drastically and and of course Brent Scowcroft was the national security adviser and Bob gates his deputy also saw that and we were instrumental I think in helping to force the bureaucracy to think anew of this new strategic situation okay so let me start with a preview of where what I want to do today I think we all had all of our presentations yesterday were splendid but the most splendid were those were Colonel Hamilton and Mike and and Steve Kotkin for example said here's what I'm going to tell you and then I'll tell you and then we'll come back to it discuss it so here's what here are some of the things that I want to do because it's a history Institute I want to place the post-communist transitions into a larger historical and global context not just regional so I'm gonna begin with a very brief overview of the state of democracy in the world and how the post-communist region fits in with that then I will discuss the setbacks to democratization in the former Soviet republics and in the other ex communist countries of Europe and finally I will close with a number of thoughts about in my own working hypotheses about the causes or the factors the main driving factors that underlie the successes and the failures of post communist democratization efforts and struggles also I will talk a little bit about the authoritarian resurgence of the past Eck not only the authoritarian counter-offensive as we put it there but also the internal factors that have led to regression I also want to leave us as we were instructed and please keep an eye on my time although I do have a watch so I'll try to help myself as well I want to be plenty of time for discussion and will encourage you to ask very candidate questions and don't if you disagree or are dubious about some of the things that I say please say so and asked me to justify them because this kind of really serious discussion and debate is what you know leads to learning and leads to your decision with as to whether or not anything you hear here today or for that matter yesterday is applicable to your students and worth sharing with them in one way or another okay no I'm gonna do all my colleagues from yesterday one better in addition to telling you what I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna tell you a couple of highlights ahead of my exposition for in other words some couple of conclusions that I draw so the first is that the transformations that occurred in the former Soviet Union and especially in the rest of Eastern Europe to use that term broadly from 1989 to 2005 were absolutely remarkable an extraordinary historic event very much teachable I do regret that I wasn't able to be here last night but I anishka shared with you some of the teachability of history and this to me is a teachable moment of extraordinary importance 1989 to 2005 and that and you saw you'll see in the graphs that I'm about to put on the screen you will see how dramatic the progress of towards democratization was in that period and it remains in retrospect to me highly encouraging to those to me and others who believe that global progress in democratization is a good thing for all of its problems and discontents to use that we're together nevertheless the authoritarian regression of the past decade is undone much of that progress much more of that progress when I started this far deep into the democratic transitions project in 2005 I would not have imagined how much regression it was possible to engineer or that would happen spontaneously and I would not have predicted this much regression Balad Amir Putin absorb of course deserves much of the credit so-called for these reversals but not all the Great Recession of 19 2008 2009 which hit Europe much more deeply and for a much more prolonged period in a double-dip recession so it lasted for several years the the negative impact and stagnation lasted for several years hit the Eastern European countries very very badly and if you add to that the American mistakes abroad in its foreign policy and actions beginning with the Iraq intervention of 2003 and compounded and you compound this with our gridlock at home and our the increasingly let's call it unattractive workings of our democracy or non workings political gridlock etc these have diminished our image and our influence and our leverage and we were a big factor in the successes of the Democrat democratization successes of the 1990s and our less so now a third lesson stands out loud and clear and this draws more on our book by the way we have two of the co-editors the book Maya Otis freely and Anushka were the two Co editors and onions got one of the key chapters and that is the furthest scholarship that's required to understand the lessons learned from democratization efforts and their failures all right so that lesson that stands out for me allowed us and clearest is that the road leading to the consolidation of democracy after long periods of dictatorship is very long very sinuous and very difficult some of the reasons for that is that history and I underlined the importance of history once again and political culture and we can discuss more about what that really means these factors affect the nature of the route towards democracy very very profoundly and when communism fell even though their political systems were all virtually identical except in Yugoslavia with a little more liberalism liberalisation they all started out far basically with the same economic and political model and yet as you will see in the graphs even twenty years later and now almost thirty 28 years later the results are extraordinarily different there's a great dispersion of outcomes so preconditions it's there were other preconditions and I'll get to them in my exposition that were far more important than then many realized at the time including this people like Michael Boston and others who engage the polls and at the beginning of the process okay let me start with a couple of slides to give you a more graphic sense of how democracy has evolved and let us see if my oh is this is working as it turned on nothing is happening when I hit the book the arrow to make it as if I would have said oh no no that's okay thank you very much yeah I should have mentioned being am technologically impaired now you're not of your students generation or your generation so all right so here is the state of democracy in the post-communist region as charted by Freedom House and their superb annual publication called nations and transit which studies all of the post-communist countries with a big annual volume of this thick with very with excellent chapters on each of the countries and there you have a rating system I won't go into the details but so so we start this dramatizes what I just refer to as the great dispersion of results or discrepancy of results they all started ironclad communist dictatorships now as you see the majority of the former Soviet republics after 28 years are colored purple signifying their that their regimes are solidly autocratic but there are some very important exceptions and we learned a little bit about that yesterday from Kevin Platts excellent presentation on the Baltics for example of the three Baltic states very quickly established solid democracies and very prosperous market economies not without a lot of sacrifice but they succeeded and that's further reinforcement and that's we discuss of course with Colonel Hamilton and others the but perhaps we didn't emphasize it enough only I think the only Bob Hamilton did the great importance of the their membership the fact that we they acceded to NATO and to the EU that membership gives them a tremendous let's say guarantee and consolidation that they can preserve their democracy and that's who they are that's their new identity we are democratic marketed Emma Craddock states and market economies ad we have some friends that help protect our system against foreign influences and incursions in contrast and I'm still with the former Soviet republic Oviatt republics so nine of them are highly autocratic three of them are highly democratic the Baltics and then you have three the ones in orange Ukraine Moldova Georgia that are somewhere in between and struggling to break away from Russian domination and from their old their own old bad habits of corruption etc and hanging in the balance and the so authoritarian offensive that we're gonna be talking about a little bit more is focused in some ways very heavily on these three countries we can get to that more in the discussion as well but there's another thing that I want to mention at this is dramatized by this slide and that is the rather striking correlation between movement eastward between either the right hand side the eastern part of that map all authoritarian with a couple of exceptions like Georgia and the everything to the west of the former Soviet Union is either democratic or in somewhere in between but not autocratic not a dictatorial and we'll talk a little bit about what some of the reasons that might explain that okay now let me move to the next slide this is the world I told you I want to put it into a global context and I think that global context is very important understanding what happened in the former Soviet space the Soviet domination area of so domination but also in understanding the interaction between that historic change in that region and the rest of the world back and forth integration or in interaction and interdependent dynamics let's call it so this shows the distribution of democracy and authoritarian world this freedom in the world discussion they doesn't go in doesn't have as highly refined to scale you many of you are probably familiar with freedom in the annual publication of Freedom House so the the purple countries are indeed the they call them Freedom House calls them not free in other words pretty other either totally or various leaning towards heavily towards authoritarianism in between are the partly free countries that will come back to it later hi some people call them hybrid countries and then the green countries are the ones that are considered tree in other words democratic either highly consolidated democracy or at least an emerging pretty pretty well-established democracy now I want to spend also a moment for the purpose benefit our discussion later and also to make a point of differentiation from yesterday about definitions in my view it's very can be a lot of the debate about democracy and what we should or shouldn't do about democracy or what hasn't hasn't happened or should be happening in response to the authoritarian counter-offensive or the backsliding of democracy is confused or people talk about each other because of lack of a calm a clear and common definition of what democracy is what do we mean by democracy and many scholars mean very different things and many journalists use it in very different ways and politicians in their turn use it in still different ways and many of those ways are deceptive or misleading or confusing so in my view it is misleading to use the term democracy unless certain very basic conditions are met and these are the convenes the conditions I've simplified them but that's basically drawn from the Freedom House categorization that they use and by the way if you would like a set of these slides for use in classrooms or figure on personal use or or even of my remarks let us know I guess I would ask you let Maya and and Rachel and or Rachel know and we can send them to you electronically so it is to me it's it's self-evident once you talk about it what democracy for the term democracy have any significant meaning it certainly has to include regular and reasonably fair and competitive elections and with political office that is a realistically open not just nominally open to a majority of citizens without threat of harassment or impossible obstacles to overcome you know yes you could become president my country but if you're married to a foreigner in the case of Myanmar then you can't become president because you know that kind of exception is what I'm talking about secondly there must be freedom of association in assembly again that's pretty obvious once you think about it and of course none of the above can happen in the absence of genuine freedom of speech and by a viable independent written press and media and electronic media now authoritarian regimes obviously represent the opposite of these characteristics that I just enumerated for example elections are heavily predetermined even if the balloting process an election day is you know has foreign observers and they say oh yeah there was no fraud of the electro Busiek elections are influenced and dominated in many other ways and well before Election Day so they're heavily predetermined in the authoritarian country's political office is not realistically open to anybody who opposes the regime and the and of course we're they're lacking freedom of press freedom of speech of association and assembly they're all severely restricted in an authoritarian regime so those are the definitions at one end or the end the other of the spectrum but there's a very interesting and tremendously and in terms of our discussion of the dynamics of going forward and going backwards and democratization today the perhaps the most interesting is the authority is the this third what Freedom House calls the hybrid regimes or partly in their in their Nations in transit accord hybrid regimes or in the world survey partly free countries but I find the interest of the the way that two authors which are worth your looking at if you want to probe more deeply into this deal with it more in more a little bit more accurate or more provocative of thought and insight and that is Steven Levitsky and Lucan way who have a magisterial work called competitive authoritarianism they call these competitive authoritarian regimes in other words in between democracy and full-fledged consolidated dictatorship there's a very large range of countries and they have certain dynamics that are that distinguish them and one of them is okay one of them is that they do hold elections and they do even have certain limited freedoms because they they're they find it important they believe it's important to maintain a facade to do this in order to maintain some facade of legitimacy humidity and of course they they all call themselves democracies they say they're engaged in democratic activities I see some of you snickering at the oversimplification of these and we'll discuss that in the the that the the factors are far more numerous and complex than it here and we but but I do but I but for purposes of exposition I thought it would be best to keep it a little bit simple so in these countries of course the process even though it has some facade of democracy is always heavily tilted to the party and power or the dictator and you know who's going to win the election but there are some there's a certain amount of competition going on sometimes between the ruling elite within the ruling elites and sometimes in other ways that sometimes break out into drastic changes as we just saw a couple of years ago in Ukraine and we had seen with the Orange Revolution in 19 in 2004 2005 now you heard the term yesterday a liberal democracy you hear it all the time and depress uses it a lot and obviously I'm not going to be able to overcome its use I think it's a very misleading term and a because it confuses the discussion because these countries in between are not democracies and the people who run the countries are not Democrats even though they say they are or about in Hungary's calls and said we're moving towards this wonderful new model called a liberal democracy that's nonsense he's going as far as he can in the direction of total authoritarian control but that label helps him to maintain some respectability because people listen to it and think oh this means something so I think it's highly misleading to use that term and it papers over the fundamental fact that there's a genuine there's very little if any genuine public influence on who gets elected and what government policies are which of course is what democracy is all about alright let me turn now to the sticking with the world for a while this is the state of democracy in the world currently so of the 195 countries in the world eighty seven based on Freedom House again are rated as free that means this includes both fully consolidated and emerging democracies but and it represents 45% of the total covered by this annual survey if you look at the demo democratization product projects in a fairly long perspective in other words back to set in 1972 when there were only 44 are free countries the total ad said we have now represents a 60 percent increase in just two generations to me that's pretty impressive so you can see that democracy has indeed major cumulative progress over the past 45 years and I stress this because not out of complacency but because of the tremendous amount of pessimism and defeatism about this prospects for democracy in the world that is now taking hold in many circles and is popular for example in the press so we'll come back to this longer-term perspective in a moment but the trends that I want to underline today right now are to in these in this very graph the first just looking at those trend lines the first is the very sharp increase in the number of democracies in the world from 89 to 2007 that's why we drew these by Maya who was able to draw for I mean these vertical lines to show you the difference from 1989 to 2007 between the two black lines look at the steepness of that curve and then I'm not 2007 or 8 onward you see it's not only is it does it stagnate but it actually begins to decline a little bit so the very steep rise in the graph after 1989 coincides with the fall of the Soviet empire and it's explained partly but not entirely by the large number of post-communist democracies that have emerged as you know there were in 1989 there were there was the Soviet Union and seven Warsaw Pact countries so we had said we we had something like nine communist countries now there are 29 independent nations post communist countries and a great majority the Murphree are partly free so that that contributed heavily to the numbers but also the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall had a psychological effect and demonstration effect elsewhere in the world so it's very much related to what's happening in the world as a whole just a couple of comments on this this gain coincide in part the causes of it the fall of communism of course was the major factor but also in the 1990s the u.s. image was riding very high in the world you know the successes of the United States our democracy was functioning well and we quote one unquote the Cold War and the and the really negative sides and failures of communism were much became much more apparent in retrospect was the iron curtain fell further more the yeah the failures of the old autocratic Soviet method became much more fully revealed and and the hot that whole generation in post-communist countries saw how much better had learned to see or quickly learned about how much better things were in terms of material sets but also in terms of freedoms in the rest of the world and at that point any case another factor until nineteen totally mid-2000s that is that the Soviet Moscow had stopped intervening in against democracy and in favor of its autocratic method model so let's turn to the other side just showing the converse of this I'm gonna distinguish between those two lines as a natural corollary of the number of democracy the percentage of democracies you see that red line 25 percent we they went from we went from 40 plus almost 50 percent that were only that were not free there were only partly I'm sorry no I okay I want to make a distinction between the thirty percent that are I think this graph is actually there's a mistake here the green law that the blue line is the should be the countries that are not at all free in other words dictatorships and the red line is partly free so we got that we have made mistaken on my apologies well maybe we'll try to correct it if any of you want it we'll send you a corrected version the point is that those the the virtually none of the fully consolidated dictatorships as of the 1970s have ceased to be dictatorships and that of course includes China and currently Russia very big in influential countries whereas countries that were partially free are the main source of countries that are now fully free again that intermediate group that I referred to earlier is very important understanding the dynamics in the overall picture now I am going to it's been one more what's happening here ya know one more minute on the historic and even longer-term perspective into which to set the specific things I'm going to say about post-communist terrific transitions and that is Samuel Huntington's approach to the subject I found his analysis of the waves of democracy you've probably all heard of a read the third wave published in 1991 Samuel Huntington his I find his analysis over the last two centuries now we're going beyond 72 a couple of centuries back very insightful and illuminating he describes these waves of democratization very large waves in the beginning and then reverse waves and this is a pattern that has now repeated itself at least two and a half times and very possibly three times the reverse waves coming after the waves so it's a ratcheting effect it's two steps forward one step back but over a period of decades not just years I find this concept very suggestive in contrasting the impressive proliferation of democracies that we had from 1990 hey in 1989 to 2007 which was just so in the previous graph with the partial regression that we have seen also you saw it in the graph since 2007 so as you can see the great increase in democracies that we just talked about a few minutes ago are all part of this third wave of democratization that Samuel Huntington dates starting in 1974 partly because that was the year when the Helsinki agreements were signed and that to him was one of the causalities partly because the communist system was beginning to show its failings much more clearly and and because of industrial there are a whole bunch of reasons and we can get into that later if time permits so these and as I already mentioned these are the Communist transmit transformations we're a very important part but not all of the explanation of the size of this third wave which as you see is as 30 countries becoming more democratic becoming Democratic Democratic by his measures and today one of the key questions that we rate is that we face is whether or not this wave has now come to an end this third wave and whether we are therefore at the start or have been over the past decade at the start of a new reverse wave and certainly the countries that you see there Russia Kazakhstan jiggies Don builder was hungry I mean some of them had had a little bit of or apparent or had been either correctly or incorrectly measures having begun to become more democratic now they're all consolidated marks and even hungry which was one of the frontrunners in democratization is now falling away behind and now Poland is seriously threatened as well so are we in a third wave that's one of the questions I'm not going to give you a definitive answer I fear that we may well be the beginning of a third wave but some Larry diamond and others who are far more expert than I feel that maybe if the West mobilizes help properly we can stop this from becoming a full wave and consolidate the gains the enormous gains of the past 40 years ok now let me see let me go back to this slide and talk a little bit about the so now we're back to just bringing you back as I promised to a little little more slowly than I had intended back to the region in the post-soviet region so this as I said this slide dramatizes the extreme diversity of outcomes with the authoritarianism to the east and the democratization to the west and I'll come back I've already discussed some reasons but I'll come back to that later I just want to set that in bringing you back to the subject and then and then go into a slightly more detailed analysis that I'll go through very quickly country by groups of countries now I'm talking about the five the five different types of countries that you see in the in the color scale but that I will comment on individually so here are the what Freedom House considered to be the Democratic frontrunner and and they were calling them as of the year 2000 at least they were all considered consolidated democracies by Freedom House's judgment and measurement techniques so what this slide shows is that by 1997 which is only eight years after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the outside the former second unit itself and only six years after the Soviet Union itself broke up six countries or had already removed very strongly in the direction of democratization in only six years so those countries were Poland Hungary Czech and Slovak Republic's and the Baltics lights states plus Slovenia which is a very special case and this pattern so until 2007 you saw that they all with the only one the red line is Slovakia and that was a very special case lotty very mature if this time it's a coffee break and anybody's interested in knowing about a lot of your measure and how he worked that back democracy and my struggles with him personally when I was commuting back and forth from Prague to Bratislava I'll tell you about it but but with that exception they were all they all very quickly became quite democratic and and that that pattern you see those all those countries until about 2000 and that continued to be the case mm not only in 2000 till 2007 but in most cases it with the slight exception of Poland initially and the larger exception of Hungary they also continued to be quite democratic but then there was some slippage in Poland that has gotten much worse very recently and a very steady and and worrisome slippage in Hungary and and that of course that trend line in Hungary starts to go downhill with the victory of Viktor Orban in the elections of 2010 and the strong majority that got in the parliament and his use of it to consolidate the power of his own party and and in fact build up his own position and then we can talk later about the Kachinsky the effect of the Kachinsky brothers on poland and and particularly the election of the the law and justice party pis in 2015 and the threats to democracy that the serious threat to democracy that represents now so these were the frontrunners in the next group also emerged very quickly as very promising with very promising moving towards democracy oh by the way I think you all know from having had a session with an Marchak last night that she lives part of the time in Poland and is deeply knowledgeable so if you want to talk about the deterioration it actually in Poland that I think she'll be willing to talk to you about it in the at the coffee break or afterwards so by the late 1990s another significant group had emerged and that seemed clearly headed towards democracy and these are the ones you see there I won't numerate the country so they're quite legible hopefully including from the back row and but basically there they were the most important of the or most of them were of the among the most important Balkan countries and only one of these countries namely Macedonia has looked back into the hybrid rage since then so they're they've held pretty pretty well now now for the countries in between Freedom House calls some hybrid regimes as I said I call them vertical consolidated authoritarian regime I'm sorry competitive authoritarian regimes so these five countries seem to be on the liberalizing track in the 1990s it's already although I hadn't gone with the one exception they hadn't gone all the way into but Freedom House rated as democracy democratic territory or predominantly democratic territory territory and they have but they've been on a pretty solid liberalizing track the exception to some extent is Moldova and you heard something about the reason now I'm sorry we didn't we had a seminar on Friday afternoon with the Moldovan think-tank scholar talking about why Moldova has an internal Hamilton's frozen conflicts presentation also helped it helped to understand it why it's a special case you know first of all lack of a very strong national identity in contrast with the Baltic countries that you heard from Kevin plant but also very heavy Russian intervention and poor leadership poor and corrupt leadership you know leaves that country very much on a teetering on the edge of going back to authoritarianism and we can again discuss that case if you're interested in the in the Q&A period now the case of Russia of course is is the most important sorry I'm now switching to the next slide the here I've combined both the semi consolidated and consolidated groups in one graph but as you see the case of Russia is by far the most important and interesting with the benefit of hindsight I believe that freedom house was too optimistic in assessing Russia as an emerging democracy which you see there semi consolidated democracy that green line as of 1997 nevertheless there was a let's call it a Moscow spring or a Russian spring and it has since been aborted very quickly and and it's that change underlined several of the factors that in my view explain why in less than three decades after the fall of communism there's such a wide discrepancy in outcomes the russian case which i'll get to in a little detail in just a moment helps explain so it so what we're talking about is a huge dispersion which on the one hand you have fully consolidated democracies such as Estonia and Latvia or Slovenia on the one hand and you have Russia and Kazakhstan and the other stands on the other and again we you know history is very very complex multivariant etc so I'm I'm now going to turn to us I'm now going to turn to the explanations or the hypotheses as to why these outcomes are so disparate and this again with apologies so any who are PhDs in political science and realize that the list should be longer and the spelling out of the factors should be far more sophisticated and complex but for purposes of exposition this is these are some of the things that I think you have to look at in trying to understand why the outcomes are so different in Russia versus let's say Estonia so this leads naturally to the lessons learned which is what I've devoted a lot of my time to in recent years and the I want to make it clear that the factors that that these factors of course all have a negative counterpart so the absence of these things help to explain the degree of authoritarianism in the East and the presence of some of these positive factors helps to explain the positive outcomes in further largely further west and I may be the best way to envision is to talk about this very briefly is with the relative success story where the discussion period supposed to start in about ten minutes all right yeah yeah okay I think I can stick to that I would like to seek that so I'll go very quickly and stop me if you don't understand something and I've said too fast let's start with the relative success story and of course the one I know best Czechoslovakia as of 1989 as you saw in the earlier graph it rated very high on many of these but it's very it was one of the frontrunners and it it mary it rated very high on all of these criteria I'll just give you a couple of examples of that so for 20 years after the end of World War one a check since the Czechoslovakia had a history of successful democracy worked very well and they participated democracy and even 40 years after after 40 years of communism had been imposed on them Czechoslovakia still had a significant underground movement called charter 77 Vaslav Havel came from that background and this despite the Soviet repression just a few years earlier of the so-called Prague Spring where they had already begun to democratize or open up and liberalize additional factor this was the most industrialized of the Warsaw Pact countries at the time that Soviets enforced communism there and as such they had a very substantial very highly educated population very substantial middle class again among these fits with these factors and then when after communism fell they put into effect one of the most four-sided or prescient systems of privatization most of the scientists don't pay a lot of attention to the privatization process in the post communist countries but it played a tremendously important factor so after communism fell they the Czechs designed the devised a voucher privatization process whereby for most enterprising state enterprises all citizens were given vouchers they became owners and they could trade these shares and in other words it wasn't given to individual oligarchs or the so-called nomenclature of privatization that prevails in so many of the other countries furthermore as of 1989 the so-called Velvet Revolution brought had brought forth a number of very high calibre leaders of vision and inspiration the most obviously the best-known of these lots of hobble but there were others whom I had the pleasure of getting to know and that in the early 1990s and we're extraordinary people both in qualifications and many of them with real integrity and sense of public service not simply out to enrich themselves furthermore Prague and ran after the split development divorce and 93 both Prague and Bratislava received very substantial us and and soon after European Union support and assistance for their their trend their transformations now let's turn let's turn to the the obverse the negative side and I'll use Russia as the example the negative side of these factors so as of 1991 Russia had virtually no prior experience with democracy as we heard from Nick Acosta yesterday I mean the the period the first two years a couple of years after 1917 there was a little facade of democracy but they never dug put down roots and dug deeply into the into this society so history of almost unmitigated authoritarianism of a very heavy hand a sword are very heavy-handed and that means that until at least the Gorbachev here's the communist system had been very rigorous and stamping out moved any opposition movement civil society the Orthodox Church was completely dominated by the government whereas in Poland the Catholic Church had maintained some independence for example as a contrast and underground opposition movements were heavily heavily and systematically suppressed there was a significant middle class with high education levels in a few cities we heard a little bit about that yesterday but the great majority the population was in the countryside are employed in state enterprises are very much regimented or controlled and not available and in many and their political culture was one of let's say acquiescence or understanding it's always been this way it always will be the stability is what counts authoritarian regimes are part of what Russia is was there meant that that was their political culture and of course the in Russia the nomenclature of privatizations were particularly egregious lacking in transparency and they benefit a small number of insiders quickly creating a powerful set of oligarchs with all the implications for a political impact and and and widespread for their taking power but also the widespread resent it cause white president men among the people and guess who was blamed for that gig or guide our Nemtsov the the liberal reformers were seen as the people who gave us who gave away all of the state assets that these laborers had worked to create for senton for decades all of a sudden they were given to a few suddenly rich people and people were left with nothing other the rest of people were left with nothing so how how much more could you do to discredit the reforms and the Democrat emic rats who are trying to change Russia so and finally well let me let me skip forward because I think it's pretty the the the general picture is pretty clear that kinds of causes we don't since I do want to make sure to leave plenty of time for discussion so I will only mention one thing that is the Western influence and assistance I said that was a positive factor in the case of the Czech and Slovak since lo box much less so in Russia I mean we did have some we and the EU did have some assistance missions etc but we did nothing proportionate to the size of the task and the challenge of helping them to figure out how to make a democracy and a privatization scheme work fairly and transparently so what just one final comment in terms I've talked in the UC Western law at the bottom of this let a set of bullet points Western leverage and assistance right I've said there was very little of it that's fit and even though we're near sufficient of it in the case of Russia but the obverse of that is assistance in the opposite direction which of course the Russians and others have been providing in spades more recently this is a phenomenon and then again I commend to your attention in the Levitsky and Way book they call it the Black Knight phenomenon in other words in the case of Russia intervening to make sure to undercut using their leverage to undercut democracy and that started fairly fairly early and it became more systematic of course once a Putin had consolidated power in Russia and B once he saw the Orange Revolution occur 2004 2005 and saw that and realized that correctly realized that that was an existential threat to his regime and to him personally if it had happened if the color revolutions in Georgia or even starting more than earlier in Serbia and now culminating in in in the Orange Revolution the part of the former you Russian Heartland at least in the mythology well why couldn't it happen next very soon in Russia strong motivating factor for the authoritarian counter effects offensive which he Putin has has led in okay much much more could be said in doing justice to the reasons why a majority of the former Soviet republics because what I've said for Russia was true for the vast majority all the purple states and vanaya autocracies in the former Soviet Union no one quick pause the existence of both favorable and unfavorable preconditions historic political culture and others that I've mentioned institutional is only part of the story we still need to explain the stagnation and in some cases regression that's I said in in 2007 in the chart that you saw making that dramatic so here's very quick and now I am running over time by about three or four minutes very quickly some of the factors that I think explained the drastic change that you see in those graphs and that is carried out that you see in the headlines in many cases these days in the media and we need to explain them so here my is a quick and / obviously admittedly overly simplistic but still hopefully suggestive set of factors as to why the chain the trends changed so drastically after 2007 in the former communists area first is the rise of Putin in Russia and I've already alluded to that the second is the Great Recession in Europe after 2008 the third is Democratic and the long stagnation and economic impact on these countries on the transitioning countries the the third is Democratic disillusionment for some of the reasons I've mentioned but others we can get into in the discussion the fourth is the authoritarian counter-offensive and Russia's which is abetted by Russia's and restored leverage in the region as Putin has brought back the economy and stabilized it and modernized a lot of their military a third of the lost track the fifth is the fourth is the fifth is the diminished leverage and engagement of the United States and of the European Union and I would call it even feckless honest not just diminished engagement and certainly our diminished credibility as Democratic models and finally a fact that I would mention and alluded to in the case of Putin individual leaders who have made a difference both in some cases for democracy in other cases strongly against democracy now I'm gonna race through these because time is at hand for discussion the the I've already mentioned how that the 2008 recession lasted longer in Europe it hit the post communist countries far more powerfully they had just begun to recover from the transition from these very inefficient command economies to market economies and in 2009 some even had double-digit decreases in their GDP and and they got very rather little help from the West so that sacrifices that they had to make to restore their economies were very very painful and this caused a lot of people to lose faith and workings of the Democrat they believe that I blame the democratic system that their their Democratic leaders for the pain or they blame the capitalist economic system and of course by then then we're hearing a lot of propaganda about how bad it is the democratic system in the etc so the timing could not have been worse of that recession and its duration secondly that that whole process was a factor in the Democratic disillusionment because there were all of a sudden suffering economically whereas they had promised utopia when they moved to the west and adopting the adopting the Western political America economic models and of course the emergence of oligarchs and the great disparity of wealth that began to emerge there was some disparity they facto under the communist system but it got much much more dramatic and more transparent after communism and all of this provided skillful a lot of material for skillful demagogues so Orban as one example in Hungary used we fall out in the pain of the recession to get himself this elected in 2010 just one year after two years that one year after the pain was evident in Hungary and of course he was used blaming the IMF blaming blaming Western Europe blaming the United States for problems that were not of our making but nevertheless he was very skillful in making them seem to Hungarians as being our fault and a fault of liberal democracy so he was therefore talking about a liberal democracy in order to justify his own tenure and of course I've mentioned the authoritarian counter-offensive it's not just it's not just Putin but also other skillful autocrats I think of nazar by if in Kazakhstan is an extremely skillful guy who did initially he was the ruler right from the breakup of the Soviet Union and he you know paid lip-service yeah paid lip service to democratization democratic forums for a little while and soldered his power and then you know showed his true face I won't get into the details you saw an example that Colonel Hamilton provided of the kind of propaganda that the Russians are ultimate realities that they try to propagate using their Russian Russia today Russia RT television in many languages very heavily funded and very slickly produced also social media you've seen that in the press both the covert and as well as ovaries and of course I again we can talk later in discussion about the lack of the regression oh the reason the withdrawal of American and Western European influence and the fecklessness with which the membership process went especially after they became members of the EU the teeth the enforcement the promises that they had made to respect democratic norms are not being enforced at all with any effect so and I've already alluded to the fact that the the fact that individuals can make a difference again I will not I've mentioned some of the negative people and I've mentioned Havel but I as the positive people particularly in the process leaders have made a positive difference but there's Bowen saw at the beginning in and out of Michnik and usually can talk about risk in Romania closely honest the president there are some leaders of integrity who are making a difference and it if the West could help to reinforce them even more that would be a lot better so if the eluding and now going back to the history in the larger global picture if the history is prologue the experience that we have a democratization around the world on the one hand says to me that we should not give up hope but on the other hand it says it further reinforces what I said at the beginning that it's abundantly clear that the pathways to freedom are long winding bumpy and difficult therefore US policy and the policy of the Europeans has to take that into account if we're gonna have any effect we have to be patient strategic and have a long-term view I personally remain guardedly optimistic that history will the waves of history will gradually and with the intermittence that the ratcheting that we've already described that that there is a very good possibility and probability that we will see further further progress towards democracy but it'll take mobilization and it'll take the next generation and along and they need to have a long-term view history and that's where all of you come in because you are the teachers of the next generation and so you have an essential role to play in the future of this story that is unfolding so thank you very much and let's take some questions mr. Feldman is first but but he needs a microphone yes good morning Jim Feldman Lake Shore High School I'm curious if you find any correlation between the control of cultural institutions in a lot of the former Soviet places as to their dr. mock realization you know the like the arts the music the writing certainly control of cultural institutions and the use of cultural institutions to either build a basis for democracy in some cases or to undercut democracy in other cases very that's a it's a very important tool and I think kevin platt showed you yesterday how what how that tool played out in the Baltic republics you know maintaining a sense of cultural identity and you know we we are us we have the the Baltic people could feel different and feel that they had a best a different destiny in that sense but of course the the Russia under communism and then more recently under Putin Putin's particular version of autocracy he uses cultural expressions as a means of legitimizing his regime as a means of cultivating the image of Russian the glories of the Russian past I mean the Bolshoi Ballet or whatever the Hema Tosh and st. Petersburg they put a lot of interest and effort into this and and I think it it helps them create this alternative mythology of what he call at one point Putin was calling sovereign democracy or managed democracy but above all Russian democracy the Russian approach Russian grandeur and Russian greatness I think the call institutions in Russia are used to perpetuate that image does that address your question or were you aiming it's something a little different I was I was kind of good more like if you talk about how the Lithuanian is like had this love for basketball and and were there institutions that the Russians didn't control control as much in say like the Czech Republic as opposed to saying oh the Cossacks they're there well first of all the answer is different for the USSR and versus the Warsaw Pact countries there was more Liberty somewhat more openness in Liberty second it varied over time because there were periods if they talked we're more so one of my Jobs was the University of Illinois jazz orchestra was allowed to come to Bucharest when I was the junior press and cultural officer at the Embassy and that and an exhibit of American American art you know some of the great abstract Impressionists a fabulous show and it drew droves and droves of people so in that sense the opening enabled us to use cultural diplomacy in a very positive way and then the closing of that of course the the the in periods of increased oppression those things were closed off but in the meantime a lot of theater life and other things however in a place a lot of the at least Eastern European intellectuals and some of the russian intellectuals were extremely clever so they so Havel wrote these satirical plays and they were actually performed on stages in Prague and throughout Czechoslovakia and they had a subversive message in other words they were making fun of the communist regime while not not quite they were showing some of the falsehoods or the hypocrisy of the actual practice versus the rhetoric so again in many cases and during many periods the the the communist regimes put onto that and repressed it and use the lack of that as part of their so that I think that's as far as we can go on that for now so other who's next yes lien is apparently Leonar Leonar I think of the Leonora overture as one of the great pieces of music including the pen of democracy and of course the well just Beethoven and I have so many questions and things but going back to the brief going back to how you began your session with how history has a tremendous role to play and I think we and all of our students know about the Treaty of Versailles and the harsh treatment of Germany after World War one but Hungary and how it was treated after World War one is not discussed nearly as often and I'm wondering to what extent do you find World War one still a factor in Hungary today I think what happened after World War one not the war itself so much but this the solution the Versailles Treaty in 1918 tremendously important in its implications and in the case of Hungary one of the of course outcomes was the the split up of the austro-hungarian Empire and Walter correct me of my historical facts are true but Trianon thank you Versailles was when and where thank you oh okay the Trianon is the one that created the thank you so but but the result was that Hungary which had been nominally at least the co center of the austro-hungarian Empire and the Hungarians had a major role including and suppressing the slovak s-- the Slovakian territory that they they controlled until 1918 all of a sudden lost you know lost so much of its glory so and and and the irritant you know about the irredentism that the dreams of the past and let's let's get back transylvania and really slovakia the southern slovakia belongs to us etcetera etcetera so that i think that was a factor a very important factor in that there was more of a latent sense of having been wronged and having been robbed of their glory and the kind of nationalism that Orban appeals to I think is probably enhanced by that history if that is that more less but but you said a couple of questions was the other or okay right behind you at all well so as someone who has oh I'm sorry as extensive I thought I had why I didn't look at my watch carefully enough so as someone who has extensive experience with yeah someone who has experience with Czech Republic and Slovakia what do you make of the the ah no party the ano and its leadership DZ as a threat to the Czech Republic's democratization do you see it possibly sliding back to more authoritarian regimes in the near future I'm very very concerned about the Czech Republic I know in Czech means yes and of course Bobby SH in fact means or his program is no two democracies an authoritarian he's very much and a corrupt oligarch and and would I think we would very much follow be inclined to follow in the steps of an ARB on for example so I think that's very very dangerous very worrisome and one thing that doesn't mentioned well a lot of things went wrong that's off Klaus the first Prime Minister or not quite first but the first long-serving Prime Minister after communism fell became he started out right but gradually became more cynical and more corrupt some of the people around them also and then you had well I'll talk privately about about the the current president of a very corrupt figure on the Social Democratic side and I I do believe that the the Russians have been able to exercise some covert influence and helping certain people out it's very extremely disappointing because they they had all the preconditions for an extraordinary success and partly because they were so successful I think they became complacent I mean the true Democrats are the people there's another fact that that's important to understand in the case of Czechoslovakia and that is about Slav Havel while an inspirational leader of great integrity was a man who was politically inept he didn't know how to maintain power he didn't know how to use his persuasive powers to translate them into political a political movement that really could because you have to have you have to create structures we didn't talk about the institutions of democracy but political parties and political movements eternally important and he failed to keep together the the movement well that's happened although it took longer in Poland the Solidarity movement was very powerful so it was the charter 77 that became so I I apologize for not having left for having missed the mark but I'll certainly be if you'll permit me to get it well I have a super board happy to talk to anybody who would like to get conferred whose questions aren't answered now I'll be right here and and again thank you all very much [Applause] you

Channel: Foreign Policy Research Institute

Views: 4,045

Rating: 4 out of 5

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Id: nMfYeXkHWDY

Length: 75min 41sec (4541 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/kanliot]

3 kinds of lies: Lies, damn Lies, and statistics.

Pretty sure this guy could show that feeding children to sharks would increase class participation.

This lecture isn't an argument for neoliberalism, but it's close enough.

let me list something obvious from the lecture:

• Factors Favoring Post-Communist Democratization
• Prior direct experience with democracy or with partial freedoms
• Vestigial “civil society” institutions or other forms of pluralism
• Development of underground opposition movements
• Absence of ethnic or religious conflicts
• A substantial middle class
• High educational levels
• A fair and transparent approach to privatization of economic assets
• Extensive exposure to Western democratic societies
• Leaders of high caliber in the early or intermediate stages of transition
• History of prior existence as a state or a strong sense of national identity
• Western leverage and assistance