Backing democracy good, buying elections bad
An interesting and provocative (6000 word) piece on the openDemocracy site today - Democratisation, NGOs and "colour revolutions" by Sreeram Chaulia suggests that the recent revolutions in the Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan are not authentic democratic uprisings supported by NGOs but were largely brought into being by organizations substantially backed and led by the US. The author is clearly of the view that such great power meddling is inherently wicked.
Personally I prefer to look at the results - does it matter if the US "does good by stealth" in its own interests as long as it is in fact doing good? Is any governmental support for changing regimes bad, no matter how nasty the regime? The author states, "the orange and tulip revolutions are cases of ‘regime change’, not ‘regime-type change’, for they did not democratise Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan". I don’t know enough about what is going on on the ground to be able to judge but while Ukraine seems to be in a mess at least the electorate appears now to be an important element in the internal struggles in the Ukraine.
If there are readers out there who are political scientists or Eastern Europeans (or both) I would be curious to know what you think.
Update: Another cautionary voice - that of Prof. Mark Beissinger - is raised in Dissent Magazine.
January 21st, 2006 at 2:39 pm
I haven’t read the piece, but it is no secret that these were largely US-funded and based on the lessons of the Serbian opposition and the removal of Milosevic. They are treating their work with the Belgrade opposition as something of a template.
Your point about ‘doing good by stealth’ is a bit weak, IMHO, because most US client regimes come to power with at least some populist goodies in their pocket, so they always seem to ‘do good’ in the short term. As for results, it seems to be a case of plus ca change in Ukraine at least, but it is probably too early to tell.
I think the wider issue is what this says acout the US and democracy. Clearly they do not trust the people in these countries to make their own decisions.