#16 - JRL 8224 - JRL Home
From: Ira Straus (IRASTRAUS@aol.com)
Date: Tue, 25 May 2004
Subject: Re JRL 8222, Freedom House's Nations in Transit 2004

The annual Freedom House report is important, both for its content and for its influence. This particular report makes some interesting comparisons. One wishes it was the kind of thing that could be cited as authoritative and objective; not least because it is often cited that way.

It fills a definite need. I hope that critical analysis of some problems in it could help it fill that need better rather than just create irritation.

In this day and age, the need objective and comparative evaluations of democracy and democratization is something that flows from a mass of policy requirements. Democratization has become one of the guiding public policy goals, and has become inextricably intermeshed with international alliance-formation. The need for such evaluations will only keep growing.

It is impressive that a private agency like Freedom House provides the most authoritative evaluation as yet extant. It is only natural that there is still some way to go in taking more factors into conscious account and evaluating them more objectively.

It seems to me that a cursory reading of the report sections reproduced on JRL reveals a disturbing number of assertions that sound wrong, or sound wrongly weighed or wrongly compared. Russia sometimes seems to be judged by a higher standard than other countries.

Why? It is hard to say. Perhaps there is an enduring suspicion of Moscow as the nerve-center of the former enemy-empire and the home base of the remnants of the enemy institutions. Or perhaps the bias is on the other end of the equation, in favor of the other countries. Perhaps anti-Russian ethnic policies are viewed gently because it seems hard to distinguish them from liberation from former Russian ethnic domination. Perhaps anti-Russian politicians are seen as removing their countries from Russian influence, which many Westerners have long viewed almost a priori as an anti-democratic influence; so logic and fact can get short-circuited here in evaluating some kinds of minority nationalism. Indeed, sometimes anti-Russian politicians and their measures are positively welcomed as liberators-democratizers for doing the very same things that Russia is damned for.

There is a case that Russians have been citing recently. Georgia's Saakashvili bears more than a passing resemblance to Putin in his election, his recentralization policies, his media policies, and his anti-corruption measures. In some respects he goes much farther than Putin in the methods used and results imposed. Yet he gets flying colors from the West, including the Freedom House report, where he is praised for some of the very same things that are used to demote Russia a rung further from democracy.

I am not going to attempt a thorough review of the report here, much less a balanced review where I would have to repeat all the numerous areas where it is helpful in making comparisons. I want only to look at one major point in the report, one that indicates some far-reaching confusions that stand in the way of an objective comparative assessment.

The summary release says, "President Putin's policies "have sought to centralize power, leaving little room for a vibrant civil society, independent media, or political opposition..."" Now, the wording here is wrong, and the mistake is revealing. The correct phrasing would be, "concentrate power", not "centralize power" -- that is, at least, since the rest of the sentence is concerned with the danger to civil society, media, and opposition, not with federal-provincial relations.

It is concentration of power that is dangerous to freedom. Centralization vs. decentralization runs along a different axis, perpendicular not parallel to freedom-unfreedom.

The phrasing used by Freedom House reflects a widespread confusion between centralization and authoritarianism. A huge number of analyses, editorials, and commentaries in the West have described Russia under Putin as authoritarian or anti-democratic because of its recentralization.

And they are all misleading. They lead the West to bark up the wrong tree, a tree that doesn't help democracy at all but only looks like it would weaken Russia.

And that in turn leads many Russians to discard Western advice as pernicious, and to distrust the slogan of democracy itself as something that seems anti-Russian.

The reality is very different from the equation of decentralization with democratization.. Putin's recentralization has had many virtues, including some democratizing virtues. The U.S., like most solid democracies, is more centralized than Russia. Authoritarian countries tend to be decentralized. Even totalitarian countries are a strange amalgam of hypercentralization with chaotic decentralization. Modernization is a centralizing and liberalizing trend at one and the same time.

Putin's recentralization has a lot in common with Alexander Hamilton's -- destruction of provincial barriers to trade and to the common currency, barriers that emerged in Russia after the crisis of 1998 just as they emerged in early America during the weakening of central authority; restoration of a nationwide market; restoration of basic nationwide legal authority; widening the geographic space for ordinary free human activity. The recentralization under Putin has led to some substantial, although as yet far from comprehensive, reductions in corruption; but this is ignored in the report. Russia is viewed as having gotten no better in the report's category of "corruption", and we are told that Russians perceive it as having gotten worse; and is graded as having gotten actually worse in "governance", as well as in "constitutional, legislative, and judicial framework". This contrasts with perceptions of other sources, reported on an earlier JRL, which show that people feel there has been a substantial improvement in the functioning of the law and the courts; a view held among others by foreign businessmen. I am inclined to think that latter sources are more objective, because resulting from practical experience, and influenced, if at all, by financial calculation not political passion. Orttung, the author of the Russian section of the report, explains that Russia is demoted in the category of "governance" primarily because of its recentralization, depriving local authorities of much of their autonomy. An autonomy that -- it should be added to put the matter more objectively -- they had had to excess in the '90s and had abused severely. Paradoxically, while the recentralization is graded as bad for governance in Russia, it is mentioned that Putin has become beholden to "regional and business interests" and that this might mean more corruption in the future. It is hard to see any consistency in all this, except perhaps in the orientation of its conclusions: against Putin's Russia.

Significantly: recentralization in other countries in the East is not always counted in the West as anti-democratic. In Georgia it is being counted as pro-democratic. One gets an impression that this is because Georgia is perceived as being on our side and the recentralization is being done by someone who is perceived as "our guy". Ergo we want Georgia to be strong, and we want Saakashvili to be strong and to succeed.

This raises a methodological question: Does "democracy" mean, "that which is good for America", or perhaps "that which is good for the West"? Several scholars, including Nikolai Petro, have pointed out that the Western media and governments have repeatedly distorted their "grading" of events and regimes in the East along just such lines. This creates an impression of hypocrisy, to put it mildly; it is a large part of what Russians are talking about when they complain -- as they do pretty often -- of the "double standards" of the West.

For myself, I am ready to count this Western behavior as not merely or not purely a corrupt habit in the West. Probably to some extent the interest of the West does have some relevance in evaluating democracy. For one thing, "democracy" is not a finished product, fully objectified, to be measured in completely separable comparative cases; it is also a historical development, still in process, on the global as well as the national levels. For another thing, the West is at the core of this global process: it is the original home of modern liberal democracy; it remains the heartland of stable liberal democracy in the world. In the present evaluations, we are talking about unstable democracies whose future as democracies is likely to depend in part on the continued strength of Western global leadership, and may also depend partly on these countries' identification with and integration with the West (the "anchoring" role); and whose contribution to the processes of global democracy depends heavily on this relation.

However, even after granting all this, it would remain a fact that the interest of the West is only one aspect of the matter, not the whole of it. There has to be some degree of objectivity in evaluating democracy internal to each country, based primarily on comparative domestic characteristics. If we are de facto going to use conformity to Western interests as a criterion for democratization, then we ought to use it de jure, i.e. explicitly, with full awareness of it, and a critical awareness at that, so we can use it responsibly, place honest limits on how we use it, and how much, and avoid using it not as a prejudice which erases the objectivity from all the other criteria.

And what if actually Russia is on our side as much as Georgia, or more so (as indeed it is on our side in the war on terrorism, which is the only real war going on and the only real enemy that America faces in this period of history)? And what if Putin is really "our guy" (as many Russians think he is; and since he came to power genetically, so to speak, through Yeltsin, who was viewed by Russians and Americas alike as "our guy", perhaps there is something to it)? In that case, a strong Russia is good for world democracy, and any biases in our categories should be going in favor of recentralization in Russia, not against it.

Further: in this case, the pro-Western orientation of the Putin regime, which Freedom House mentions for the sake of contrast to its authoritarian trend, is something that cannot be completely separated from the domestic trend. Rather, it must be counted as a factor ameliorating that trend and making it more likely that the goal of domestic democracy still genuinely exists in the minds of the government. And also as making it more likely that the government will come back toward that goal. Just as, during the Cold War, identifying with "the Free World" -- a phrase much ridiculed in its time for its mass of ironies and hypocrisies, but that was upheld courageously by people like those in Freedom House -- on balance made it more likely for a country to evolve under Western democratic influences and move toward democracy.

It seems indubitable that some people today oppose recentralization in Russia for the simple reason that they view Russia as our adversary and they want it to be weak. I only wish they would say so outright, and stop confusing their preference for a weak Russia with a preference for democratization of Russia -- a behavior that is damaging to the reputation of genuine democracy-promoters in Russia.

In the meantime, the rest of us need to separate the de facto pro-Western criterion from the other criteria that are used for evaluating a country's democratic standing. And then, if we find it necessary to maintain both kinds of criteria, we should re-link them, but this time in a conscious, limited, responsible manner.

In that case, we might find that, when dealing with criteria that affect the strength of a country, such as the strength of its central government throughout the realm, we would conclude that it cannot be judged in itself, but must be viewed as pro-democratic to the extent that that central government is pro-democratic. And that the pro-democratic character of the central government is also not a purely objective matter, but is subjective matter of its orientation and perspective, including not only its orientation toward a goal of democracy at home but the extent of its orientation in favor of the democratic world at large.

And probably we would find that a true democrat in Iraq is someone who wants modernization of the society, and who wants a reformist government, with balanced support from the major groups in the society, that moves the country in a direction compatible with the trends in liberal democracy globally; not someone who wants immediate elections and power to the majority no matter if the result is an "illiberal democracy" or worse. Yet the latter kind of person will speak just as enthusiastically for democracy, maybe more so. We might find that full-scale democracy, of a civilized and liberal variety, is a more proximate option in Russia than in Iraq; but that it is also possible and not unreasonable for many Russians to believe that it will be some time away before that option could safely become real, and such people can be genuine democrats, not always worse than those who call for immediate democracy. Unfortunately our evaluative criteria have not always helped us in making these distinctions.

Ira Straus
(U.S. coordinator, Committee on Eastern Europe and Russia in NATO)

p.s. One blooper: "Investigative journalists were executed for their work exposing corruption and organized crime". "Executed"??? Surely this was a slip of the pen. Contract killings still exist, but they are down to about 10% of the level they reached in the 1990s. Most of them are carried out by independent private bodies, "civil society" bodies so to speak; they are never an official judicially-sanctioned action, which is the meaning of an "execution". (When people write of "mafia-style executions", the term is being used metaphorically, to refer to a mafia organization that has pretensions to authority like a state of its own, and gives a kind of structured sanction to its killings.) Some journalists have indeed been killed under suspicious circumstances, not only in recent years but in nearly every year since 1991, usually after disputes with autonomous local bosses or private interests.