Transitions from Postcommunism

A. Main Hypotheses of Relevance to PDT

(All hypotheses drawn from three specific examples of Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine)

Civil Society

A major factor contributing to the success of democratic breakthroughs is the ability of NGOs to provide accurate, independent tallies of actual votes soon after the polls close in order to detect instances of falsification.

Mass Mobilization

The opposition’s capacity to mobilize significant numbers of protestors to challenge falsified electoral results can greatly help the transition process.

Mass protest is also responsible for the decrease in the use of violent oppression by the incumbent’s regime toward the protestors.

Economic Institutions

Development of a middle class/bourgeoisie

(counter-argument) While Ukraine has a growing middle class and a recent history of notable growth, this cannot be said of Serbia or Georgia, which had been experiencing a period of economic trauma and hardship that helped undermine Milosevic and Shevardnadze; therefore, it cannot be said that a middle class is essential for success.

Economic liberalization

(counter-argument) McFaul argues that the state of the economy or the level of economic development is not essential to the success of democratic breakthroughs.

Prior Democratic Experience/Culture

(counter-argument) In the second wave of democratization the incumbent regimes were either competitive autocracies or partial democracies that never suspended formal democratic procedures. This particular regime type allowed for pockets of pluralism and opposition, which was key to the success of the democratic breakthrough.

External Factors

Western democracy assistance programs contributed to all three of the cases McFaul addresses. However, he argues that “foreign aid played no independent role in any of these breakthroughs, but contributed to the drama by increasing or decreasing the relative value of each of the seven factors” (16) he identifies as critical for success.

B. Article Summary

Quick and successful democratic breakthroughs are the exception. Countries such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, and eastern Czechoslovakia did not rapidly consolidate liberal democracies after the fall of communism. The farther states are from Western-Europe, the less strong the pro-democratic pull, accounting for the spread of semi-autocracies and partial democracies across the ex-Soviet states, and the belief that post-1990, further democratic gains would be unlikely.

Democracy gained momentum in 2000 with three specific cases – Serbia, Georgia, and the Ukraine. These cases are similar in four critical ways: a fraudulent national election was responsible for regime change; the democratic challengers deployed extraconstitutional means to defend the existing constitution; “each country…witnessed challengers and incumbents making competing and simultaneous claims to hold sovereign authority;” each of these examples ended in mass violence (6).

McFaul identifies seven major factors for success:

1. A semi-autocratic regime. In the second wave, every incumbent regime was some form of competitive autocracy or partial democracy, and the particular type of regime allowed for pockets of pluralism and opposition, which in turn proved to be critical for success.
   • Serbia – Milosevic never set up a full-blown dictatorship and although he tampered with election results, he never banned them. Local elections led to opposition control over local government and over regional media outlets, which was key to Milosevic’s overthrow in 2000.
   • Georgia – Shevardnadze tried to become more authoritarian with time, but “his achievements fell far short of his ambitions” (8). His efforts to monitor or curtail civil society and the media were relatively unsuccessful and, at times, backfired.
   • Ukraine – Kuchma came to power through competitive 1994 elections and eventually tried to build a “‘managed democracy,’” but he “never quite rallied all of Ukraine’s economic elites behind his rule, and the fall of 2004 found them still divided” (8).
2. An unpopular incumbent. The declining popularity of the incumbent leader was necessary for the success of a democratic breakthrough. The cause of unpopularity differed in each case.
   • Serbia – Milosevic had won a number of free and fair elections, but military defeats (ending with the 1999 NATO air campaign) combined with years of economic decline, greatly reduced his support.
   • Georgia – Shevardnadze was popular at first, but his support plummeted after he failed to improve Georgia’s economy and failed to win or resolve wars and territorial disputes (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Ajaria). This led to an increasingly corrupt regime.
   • Ukraine – Kuchma’s severe corruption made him very unpopular and the murder of the investigative reporter Georgi Gongadze exposed Kuchma’s illegitimacy.
3. A united opposition is crucial for democratic breakthrough, although the degree of unification varies.
   • Serbia – opposition set aside their differences to form the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), which supported one presidential candidate, Vojislav Kostunica. Kostunica’s newness and moderate nationalism made him a popular candidate
   • Ukraine – it was difficult to create a unified opposition for many years because of the strong and legitimate Socialist Party. There was no “single, charismatic leader of the opposition who stood out as an obvious first,” until Kuchma dismissed Viktor Yushchenko as prime minister in 2001, thus creating such a leader.
   • Georgia – Saakashvili mobilized popular protest, delivered “fiery speeches” and led unarmed protestors into the parliament chamber to interrupt Shevardnadze’s speech, a bold, but tactically risky move.
4. Independent electoral-monitoring capabilities. It is crucial for the success of a democratic breakthrough that NGOs provide an accurate, independent tally of the vote quickly after the polls close.
   • Serbia – the Center for Free Elections and Democracy (CeSID) conducted parallel vote tabulation in the 2000 elections. On election night, DOS officials announced the results of their own parallel vote tabulation, knowing their results would correspond with CeSID results. Thus, “CeSID…provided the legitimacy for the claim of falsification” (10). They had learned from the experience of opposition groups in Bulgaria (concrete example of diffusion effects).
   • Ukraine – Committee of Ukrainian Voters (CVU) played a central role in monitoring all rounds of the 2004 presidential vote. However, they also had to deal with Kuchma, “a far more sophisticated vote manipulator using novel tactics” (11). Ultimately, after the second round of presidential voting, two exit polls were released with different results.
   • Georgia – opposition groups, buoyed by international funding, operated to conduct exit polling and a parallel count, the results of which “were remarkably similar and strikingly at odds with official tallies. Observation teams documented instances of vote fraud” (10).
5. A modicum of independent media. Another critical element for success is the “presence of independent media able to relay news about the falsified vote and to publicize mounting popular protests” (11).
   • Serbia – The ANEM, a network that houses a news agency, television station, and several daily and weekly papers, helped deliver news to Serbians from outside the Milosevic-controlled media sources.
   • Ukraine – major broadcasting channels were controlled by oligarchs loyal to Kuchma and Yanukovich. Ukrainians, slightly wealthier on average than Georgians or Serbians, responded with the use of Internet and text-messaging. The Orange Revolution, for example, was organized largely online.
   • Georgia – Rustavi-2 became the most watched television network in Georgia and broadcasted live from sites of protest, thus encouraging more Georgians to join the efforts, and encouraged erstwhile loyal networks to follow suit.
6. Mobilizing the masses. The opposition’s capacity to mobilize and challenge falsified electoral results proved to be critical. Student groups worked together with opposition parties and NGOs to mobilize large demonstrations.
   • Serbia – the student group “Otpor, DOS, regional government heads, union leaders, and civil society organizers coordinated efforts that culminated in the million-strong 5 October 2000 march on Belgrade” (13). There were numerous police barricades, but not one really attempted to stop the protests.
   • Ukraine – the student group Pora and “Our Ukraine” activists joined together and organized a protest that for a number of days fed, clothed, and kept warm hundreds of thousands of protestors. Support from city hall eventually made this protest a huge success.
   • Georgia – protestors were less organized and smaller in number than in Serbia, but the student group Kmara took lead, and after street protests, “Saakashvili became the voice and face of the opposition” (13). Sheverdnadze realized the only means of suppression would be mass casualties, and deemed this unacceptable.
7. Splits among the “guys with the guns.” Splits developed in all three cases among the military, police, and security forces, and it was determined that violent repression was a risky, and generally bad, option. Additionally, the sheer size of the crowds helped keep violence down, as smaller groups of protestors would have been a much easier target.
   • Serbia – Milosevic called on police to increase violent activity toward Otpor protestors.  As the number of protests and protestors continued to increase, police and intelligence officials decided violent repression was not an option.
   • Ukraine – contacts between opposition leaders and the security apparat “helped to close the door to violent repression” (15).
   • Georgia – key officials “either openly deserted Shevardnadze or made it clear that they would refuse to order units under their command to arrest, much less to shoot, peaceful protestors” (14-15). Shevardnadze has a positive reputation in the West and was “reluctant to mar that good name with the blood of civilians.” Moreover, opposition groups had been courting the security services prior to the 2003 election (14).

The last section of McFaul’s paper identifies the “Unessential Factors” in democratic breakthroughs. These include: the general state of the economy, wealth and the middle class, resolution of border disputes, “splits between hard-liners and soft-liners among the semi-authoritarian incumbents,” western democracy-aid (McFaul argues that it played a role, but not an independent one), the quality of oppositions’ ideologies, the role of the opposition leader, and democratic breakthroughs in and of themselves.

C. Comments

McFaul’s seven major factors for success were very useful because he provides both a detailed explanation of how these factors function and a context in which they succeeded and played a pivotal role. Equally as interesting are the factors he identifies as “Unessential Factors,” a list that includes several factors other authors have deemed fairly important. This suggests an opportunity for further study of whether these factors can play or have played a role in other scenarios that have unfolded differently than the examples of Georgia, Ukraine, and Serbia.

Summarized by Emily Stromquist, 07/10/06)