Freedom House scholar outlines factors in political transitions (04/17/05)

Freedom House scholar outlines factors in political transitions

by Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO - "How freedom emerges or how tyranny fails" was the informal title of Adrian Karatnycky's presentation at Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto, on March 4. Mr. Karatnycky is counselor and senior scholar at Freedom House in Washington.

Freedom House publishes the annual Freedom in the World Report of 192 countries, rating them as free, partly free or not free. The ratings indicate the general state of freedom in each country. Free countries have a relatively substantial degree of political rights and civil liberties; partly free countries have a mixed record; and in countries rated as not free there is widespread and systemic denial of political rights and civil liberties.

Freedom House has now put together a study of countries that have undergone a political transition from authoritarian rule toward liberal democracy, either through some sort of revolution or via the disintegration of a multinational state. The study has identified 67 such transitions since 1972 (it excludes countries under 1 million population and those created by decolonization). According to Mr. Karatnycky, the study shows that events in Ukraine were actually part of a broader pattern and that the important elements of the Ukrainian transition were typical of other political transitions. (The study itself ends in 2002 and hence does not include Ukraine or Georgia).

The comparison of the transitions was coded in three dimensions: (1) the factor of violence, (2) the forces that drove the transition: civic activism, power holders, mixed civic forces/power holders and external foreign military intervention, (3) the strength of non-violent civic coalitions.

"Using this methodology, we now have a pretty interesting picture of how freedom emerges or, alternatively, how tyranny falls," Mr. Karatnycky said. (The full report will be available on the website of Freedom House: www.freedomhouse.org.)

Of the 67 countries that have undergone a political transition as defined above, in their pre-transition period 31 were designated partly free and 36 were not free. Post-transition, the designations were: free - 35, partly free - 22 and not free - 9.

Mr. Karatnycky outlined some of the findings of the study: the less the amount of violence, the larger the gains for freedom; transitions with high civic involvement lead to more freedom than top-down transitions; the stronger a non-violent civic coalition, the larger the gains for freedom.

The most substantial factor, if one looks at the composition of the transition process in post-transition societies that end up all right, was the strength of civic coalitions. Of the 35 countries that were designated free post-transition, 24 had very strong coalition movements leading the transition. "The strength of these civic umbrella movements as a factor in the revolution is extremely convincing and extremely important," Mr. Karatnycky said.

"The creation of a strong powerful movement creates fragmentation in the ruling elite and, if there are moderate, reformist voices in the authoritarian establishment, they tend to moderate and restrict the radical and violent behavior of the government. A broad-based coalition tends to discipline a civic culture of protest and maintain it within the realm of order, discipline and non-violence. Because it is a coalition, it has people in it who have had some experience of participation in politics, may have been disenfranchised and moved into the opposition, but they become integrated into this broad-based coalition," Mr. Karatnycky explained.

Ukraine's transition was primarily civic-driven, but there were elements of compromise. "In the Orange Revolution, it was the bottom-up pressure that was the driving force, but the fact that it never became extreme was due to a broad umbrella coalition. Some of the seasoned former government people wanted to steer it in what they considered a responsible direction," he said.

An important factor in the Ukrainian case was the broad-based nature of the coalition. Mr. Karatnycky explained: "When we did samplings and studies of civil society groups in late 2002 we were surprised by a datum. Heretofore 80-90 percent of the reported income of civil society groups had been generated by foreign donations and foreign sources. But the reports that we got from this field poll of NGOs showed that they were getting about 50 percent of their support and income from indigenous sources. So, from the late 1990s to 2002 civil society's indigenous support had risen from 15-20 percent to 40-50 percent.

In the Ukrainian case, most of the Western grants were directed toward training, technical assistance and a limited amount for the production of educational campaigns of a non-partisan nature and election monitoring. None of the Western support was given for the infrastructure of the tent city, for the protests or for the mobilization that allowed these groups to work. That all came from indigenous donors," he said.

Another factor that contributed to the formation of the broad-based coalition was the learning curve. "It was no accident that there were people involved who had been trained in avoiding conflict, trained in dealing with troublemakers and provocateurs," he said. In the protests of 2001 there were incitements to violence that created an environment that scared off the middle class and well-educated people. The people who were involved in the earlier protests became, after the second round of falsifications, key leaders in mobilizing the protests of the Orange Revolution.

"That's not atypical, most revolutions have a failed first dry run. There is also the cross-fertilization. Ideas are continually shared among democracy activists the world over. Zimbabweans are talking to Serbians, Serbians are talking to Georgians, Georgians are talking to Ukrainians, and Ukrainians are probably now talking to the Lebanese. There's a global community of people who share liberal democratic values and who see the success of certain types of techniques. There's a lot of shop talk," Mr. Karatnycky explained. This may be an answer to those who seek an unseen hand guiding it all.

Another factor that helped drive the formation of the broad-based coalition was mobilization politics. The campaign was made up of a lot of locally organized events, of Mr. Yushchenko going to three or four places a day to do rallies of 5,000 or 10,000 people. Yulia Tymoshenko was doing the same thing with her network. Even Borys Tarasyuk was zipping around the country for meetings with 300 or 500 people. All of these created a latticework of cooperation among political forces and community groups throughout the country.

"That was one of the reasons why knocking Mr. Yushchenko off the campaign trail became so important," Mr. Karatnycky pointed out. He also mentioned that it was only after the poisoning that the political elite began to understand that they had to move toward civic action and mobilization.

"There are many ingredients in the Ukrainian transition that reinforce the evidence of Freedom House's long-term look at how transitions happen and which help to explain why most of the countries that undertake the transition from authoritarianism in the direction of liberal democracy tend to end up all right. This leads me to the conclusion that I started with, that Ukraine's democratic transformation, while not assured by some iron laws of history, on the evidence of history should hold and be durable, warts and all," Mr. Karatnycky concluded.

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