Democracy in Central Asia: Competing Perspectives and Alternative Strategies

By Mariya Y. Omelicheva

Promoting democracy has long been a priority of Western foreign policy. In practice, however, international attempts to expand representative forms of government have been inconsistent and are often perceived in the West to have been failures. The states

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813160702

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Democracy in Central Asia

DEMOCRACY

IN

CENTRAL ASIA

Competing Perspectives

and Alternative Strategies

MARIYA Y. OMELICHEVA

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Copyright © 2015 by The University Press of Kentucky

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Contents

Introduction

1. Political Regimes in Central Asia: Two Decades after Independence

2. A Framing Perspective on Democracy Promotion

3. Western Perspectives on Democracy in Central Asia

4. Models of Governance Promoted by Russia and China

5. Central Asian Democracy Frames

6. Democracy in the Public Eye

7. Assessing the Effectiveness of Democracy Promotion Frames

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix A: Survey Instrument

Appendix B: Focus Group Methodology

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

Democracy, first and foremost, means order, but it is understood as anarchy and all-permissiveness here. . . . One can steal, kill, take things away, and plunder. This is how democracy is understood here and in the entire post-Soviet space. . . . It is mayhem.

—Focus group participant from Kazakhstan

Set off by the collapse of communism in Europe and the demise of the Soviet Union, the global resurgence of democracy has become a pivotal political trend in contemporary international politics. The wave of democratization that swept across Eastern and Central Europe and rippled into parts of the crumbling USSR consolidated the idea of democracy as a universal human right that should be supported by the international community.¹ This new conviction rekindled a belief that the democratization of communist states can be fostered from abroad if domestic forces are weak or lacking within these states.² Encouraged by the growing perception of democracy as the only legitimate form of political rule, scores of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), charities, and foundations, most of them sponsored by advanced democracies from the West, rushed into the former communist states and offered them financial resources and know-how for rapid democratization.

Despite the initial optimism that democratic aid would be able to nurture and support people power in transitioning states, it has produced mixed results at best. Although the European Union (EU), the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and other international actors have scored some notable achievements in Eastern and Central Europe, especially in terms of electoral assistance and the organizational capacity of civil society groups,³ democracy assistance has been ineffective in contributing to the long-term sustainable development of democratic culture, institutions, and processes in other previously communist states.⁴ In some instances, democracy assistance has had regressive consequences by destabilizing regimes and creating fragile, dependent, and unrepresentative political opposition.⁵ By pressing for democratic change in one state, agents for democracy have unwittingly urged authoritarian leaders in neighboring states to protect themselves by becoming even more repressive. All in all, many analysts concur that when democratic aid has had a favorable impact, that positive effect has occurred largely on the margins.⁶

The USSR’s successor states are clearly representative of these trends in democracy assistance. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which benefited greatly from political backing and various forms of assistance from the EU, the United States, and individual European states—have succeeded in transforming themselves into sustainable democracies; however, the rest of the former Soviet Union has not made a smooth transition to liberal democracy. Admittedly, there have been a few democratic breakthroughs marked by the so-called color revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. But even in these more politically liberal post-Soviet states, the future of democratic gains is uncertain.⁷ Most observers agree that democratic reforms are shallow and spotty in these states, which must constantly contend with authoritarian resurgence.⁸

The focus of this book is democracy and democracy promotion in the three post-Soviet republics of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.⁹ Arguably, Central Asia is the region where Western democracy assistance has yielded the lowest results. In the early 1990s the new Central Asian governments seemed to be committed, if only rhetorically, to the idea of democratization. They joined the corpus of international treaties prescribing recognition of the principles of democracy and fundamental human rights. They also set up formal democratic institutions consisting of modern laws and constitutions, elections, parliaments, and parties. Inspired by the democratic rhetoric of the leadership of Central Asian states, the United States, EU, United Nations, and Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), in addition to individual European states, NGOs, and international financial institutions, launched multiple development and democracy promotion projects in the region.

The United States has been one of the largest donors of democracy assistance and development aid in Central Asia. It disbursed more than $1.8 billion to Central Asian republics from 1992 to 2006, based on the Freedom for Russia and Emerging Eurasian Democracies and Open Markets Support Act, passed by Congress in 1992 (see chapter 3 for more information). The US democracy assistance programs in the region have been matched, if not surpassed, by aid from the EU. By some estimates, the EU and its member states spend US$3 billion on democracy, governance, and related activities annually, exceeding US expenditures.¹⁰ Despite the sheer size and volume of democracy assistance programs in Central Asia, there has been little meaningful and sustainable political change in these states.¹¹ In fact, as US and EU regional engagement intensified in the early 2000s, the quality of democracy in the region declined.¹² There has been a regression of democracy in recent years across the region and growing resistance to Western democratization efforts by these Central Asian governments.

Why has democracy promotion been ineffective in Central Asia? Why, despite considerable efforts by the West, have democracy promotion programs in Central Asia resulted in little improvement in governance or complete failure? It has long been assumed that the main sources of resistance to democracy are the Central Asian governments themselves. Democratic progress has been hindered by the lack of genuine commitment to democratization by Central Asian leaders who perceive democracy as a grave threat.¹³ Some authors stress that because the Central Asian states lack historical experience with democracy, they have been slow to change.¹⁴ Others emphasize the lingering Soviet legacy of authoritarianism and a weak and deferential civil society that has been unable to push for reforms.¹⁵ It has also been argued that these countries’ traditional power institutions and the mentality of their populations have served as democratic roadblocks.¹⁶ Eugene Huskey, for example, argues that amid the strains for the transition from communism, civil traditions have shown little evidence of taking root in a society dominated by a mixture of family, clan, regional, and ethnic loyalties.¹⁷ Other scholars note that the prevalence of patronage and clan networks has crowded out the fledgling civil and political societies in these states.¹⁸

Although there are clearly significant constraints on international democratization in the region, including the difficult and multifaceted transition process itself, it would be both inaccurate and unhelpful to conclude that the Central Asian governments, culture, or people are solely responsible for the stalemate of democracy promotion in their states. The producers of democracy assistance must share responsibility for the region’s presumed inability to embrace democratic transformation. The literature on democracy assistance has spawned a variety of criticisms of the political development efforts funded by the West, but these analyses focus largely on the types of democracy promotion projects and the methods and strategies of assisting democratization from abroad. In contrast, this book gives prominence to the content of democracy promotion policies and how the ideas promoted by agents of democratization resonate with the target societies and states.

In a nutshell, an important reason for the ineffectiveness of Western democratization efforts in Central Asia is that their content fails to resonate with Central Asian societies and states. As demonstrated in the chapters of this book, the ideas, values, and practices promoted by the United States and the EU in Central Asia lack cultural compatibility, salience, consistency, and credibility for the targets of democratization.¹⁹ Western policy makers and academics have developed sophisticated conceptualizations of democratization processes, zeroing in on political pluralism, elections, and civic engagement, among other things. Yet these conceptualizations are largely divorced from how democracy and democratization are perceived and understood in Central Asia.²⁰

Here is a Kyrgyz anecdote told in the streets of Bishkek that illustrates the problem: One day, President Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan, President Karimov of Uzbekistan, and President Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan are sitting around, boasting about their possessions and accomplishments. Nazarbayev tells the others, In my country we’ve got a glut of oil and don’t know how to spend all the petrodollars. We build new cities, raise salaries. Our people drive Bentleys and Rolls Royces. All in all, we are blissed out.

Karimov responds, And we, we’ve got a surfeit of gas and I’ve got plenty of dough to strengthen the army.

Bakiyev scratches his head, trying to think of a bragging point, when he suddenly remembers, And we, we’ve got democracy and glasnost!

Nazarbayev and Karimov ask, What’s that?

Bakiyev tries to explain: Democracy is when anyone can shout out ‘Bakiyev is a fool’ in public and get away with it.

Nazarbayev responds, We also have democracy, then! In our state, anyone can shout out ‘Bakiyev is a fool’ in public and get away with it.

In this humorous but telling exchange, the Central Asian political elites downgrade democracy to a lower priority than economic prosperity and security. They are also remiss when it comes to appreciating the universal qualities of a democratic regime. Instead, the political leadership of the Central Asian republics supports a culturally sensitive understanding of democracy as far as its institutions and principles are concerned. As for the citizens of these republics, the concept of democracy has been detached from a system of formal institutions that can effectively represent their interests and protect their rights and freedoms (as exemplified by the epigraph to this introduction). Democracy is perceived as either an empty ideological framework or a recipe for mayhem. These attitudes are bolstered by the people’s fatigue and resentment of the externally driven ideologies that have been a constant reality during Russian colonialism, Sovietization, and post-Soviet democratization.²¹

Further complicating the situation is the presence of external actors offering alternative perspectives on democracy. Russia and China, in particular, have tried to counteract Western democratization efforts with their own ideological conceptions of the proper forms of governance and arguments about the ills and merits of democratization. The Central Asian governments, with the backing of Beijing and Moscow, have effectively discounted the universal notion of democracy and redefined the agents of democracy promotion as emissaries of Western influence and threats to regional security.

This book does not take the concepts of democracy and democratization at face value. Instead, it suggests that these concepts are defined and redefined through the interactions of agents, targets, and opponents of democratization, each advocating for their own priorities and worldviews. This does not mean that this study approves of the semantically circular logic wherein democracy becomes whatever local historical, cultural, or social conditions define it to be. The crux of the theoretical argument here is that concepts such as democracy or human rights are merely constructs that reflect ideas and images held by representatives of a community. These ideas and images expressed in the language of concepts can be more or less defined, but they are always dynamic and inevitably contested both domestically and internationally. When these ideas concern intangible goals such as democracy and human rights, abstract beliefs and hypothetical constructs become reified. When policy makers fall prey to a common fallacy—attributing a real identity to a concept and treating an abstract idea as if it were real—they convert doctrines and philosophies of action into their states’ foreign policy intentions. According to Paul Ernest, the ideas and concepts become axiomatized—that is, beliefs and imagery about the world become the accepted assumptions of foreign policy.²² This is how the perception of absolute values about democracy may arise.

Other states and societies may borrow these ideas, but in the process, the concepts are often resignified. The notion of resignification describes a transformative practice of using concepts in new contexts; this often involves altering these terms’ original definitions by either stretching their content or ascribing additional meanings to them. Some of this resignification may be pragmatic in nature. For instance, the adoption of the notion of democracy by Central Asian elites is often politically motivated as a means of maintaining engagement with the international community and legitimizing the ruling regime. Although incentives for faking democracy exist, this is only part of the story. It does not explain, for example, why there is not more demand among Central Asian citizens for democratization and change.²³ Furthermore, the new connotations ascribed to democracy cannot be divorced from historical experience, cultural heritage, and intellectual traditions.

The language of policy statements issued by Central Asian leaders contains deliberate attempts to present democracy in certain ways, but it also draws on the concepts, beliefs, assumptions, and values held by members of their societies. As discussed in greater detail in chapter 2, language is a complex and adaptive social system of interrelated patterns of word usage, social practices, and cognitive processes. As such, it has a unique ability to institutionalize beliefs, shape attitudes and knowledge, and even regulate behavior and interactions. The better the language of public communications reflects the general population’s ways of thinking and shared axioms, the more likely it is to succeed in shaping their attitudes and opinions. In this way, the language of political discourse can be an instrument of social influence and regulation. Democracy promotion as a form of discourse represents an exercise of power and influence in international relations through the use of discursive persuasion. The efficacy of democracy promotion, therefore, depends not only on the types and methods of democracy assistance but also on the content of promoted ideas, perspectives, and values and whether these ideas resonate with the targets of democratization.

To discern the various understandings of democracy in Central Asia, this study analyzes democracy discourses at three levels. First, it examines the practices and discourses of democratization promoted by the United States, the EU, Russia, and China in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. Second, it examines the national varieties of democracy—that is, the alternative ways democracy and democracy promotion are presented and contested in the three Central Asian republics. Finally, the book explores the beliefs, understandings, and attitudes about various aspects of democracy and democratization held by the people, discerned through public opinion surveys and focus group interviews carried out in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.

As a type of international influence, democracy promotion is effectuated through verbal and written communication. The content of such communication imparts certain meanings to democracy promotion efforts, making them intelligible to target states and populations. To identify and analyze alternative perspectives on democracy and democratization, this book relies on the concept of frames. A frame is a specific presentation, packaging, and positioning of democracy issues made up of a set of values, beliefs, and expectations that underlie the practices of international democratization. A democracy promotion frame encompasses a certain understanding of democracy, assumptions about why it is important, intentions with regard to the desirable goals of democratization, and explanations of how to meet these democratic expectations.

The regional players selected for the study—the United States, the EU, Russia, and China—are certainly not the only international actors whose ideas and practices could serve as models of political and economic development in the Central Asian republics. Undeniably, however, these actors enjoy considerable political clout in the region, with the United States and the EU being the two largest sponsors of democracy there. The author’s field research suggests that the locals view these actors as the chief democracy promoters in their states. Additionally, they are the seedbeds of liberal philosophy and ideology epitomizing democracy and liberalism, as well as the exemplars of ideological differences in the conceptions of democracy and democratization within liberalism. Today, the different US and EU understandings of democracy and approaches to international democratization are acknowledged at the level of senior European and US policy makers.²⁴ These differences are also explored in this book.

Threatened by the stream of color revolutions in former Soviet territory, the governments of Russia and China have tried to counteract appeals to democratic rule with their own ideological conceptions of governance and arguments about the path to democratization. Neither Russia nor China has promoted its views as actively as the United States and the EU have. But because both Russia and China desire a greater predictability in international politics, they have sought some convergence between their own and other states’ perspectives on governance and international relations by embedding their norms and expectations into their foreign policies toward Central Asian states. Together, the United States, the EU, Russia, and China represent opposite sides of the ideological spectrum and opposite ends of the continuum of value systems and templates for governance, with the United States and the EU on one side and Russia and China on the other side.

This book begins with a brief introduction to the Central Asian regimes. Chapter 1 discusses the state of democracy (or the lack thereof) in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan, setting the stage for this study. Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of international perspectives on democratization, based on the premise that the strategies of international actors determine the outcomes of democracy promotion abroad. It then offers a novel perspective on international democratization, focusing on discourses of democracy promotion comprising ideals, beliefs, perspectives, and values. To discern the content of these discourses, chapter 2 also introduces the concept of frames.

Chapters 3–5 are dedicated to an analysis of the views, ideas, and perspectives on democracy promoted by the United States, the EU, Russia, China, and the Central Asian governments. Chapter 3 discusses US and EU views on democracy and international democratization, as well as normative and instrumental beliefs about the benefits and intrinsic merits of democracy as a political system. Chapter 4 examines alternative democracy promotion frames advocated by Russia and China through their foreign policies toward the Central Asian states, including through regional organizations such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). As discussed in chapter 5, the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan have devised and disseminated their own rhetorical and ideological substrata of democracy, presented under the guises of presidential democracy in Kazakhstan, consultative democracy in Kyrgyzstan, and the Uzbek model of democracy in Uzbekistan. Chapter 5 examines the essence of these local democratic varieties, as well as the strategies used by these governments to defend their alternative models of democracy and the different standards for assessing it.

Chapter 6 explores the beliefs, understandings, and attitudes of the people of Central Asia with regard to various aspects of democracy and democratization, discerned through a public opinion survey and focus group interviews carried out in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. The survey questions tap into the respondents’ understanding of democracy, as well as their values, priorities in life, and attitudes toward various social and political institutions. Interpretive data collected from the focus group discussions are used to elucidate quantitative results and add depth to the understanding of democracy embedded in the people’s political knowledge.

Chapter 7 assesses alternative democracy frames along several dimensions, such as cultural compatibility, salience, consistency, and credibility. This chapter demonstrates that what has been promoted by the United States and the EU in Central Asia is culturally unsound and inconsistent, and it lacks credibility for Central Asian societies and states. Democracy promotion policies have neglected important attitudinal changes among the Central Asian population and local understandings of regional and national needs. This chapter demonstrates that the alternative models of governance promoted by Russia and China find greater support in Central Asia, as do the Central Asian governments’ own models of democracy.

The book’s conclusion provides an overview of the findings of the study and discusses their implications for the practice of democracy promotion and the effectiveness of Western democracy promotion abroad.

1

Political Regimes in Central Asia

Two Decades after Independence

The seeds of democratization were planted in Soviet territory in the mid-1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s charismatic and progressive new leader, launched his extraordinary perestroika and glasnost reforms. Gorbachev’s limited democratization measures removed the obstacles set up by the communist regime to suppress the political activity of the masses. His new policy of electoral democracy permitted the