Cautions against exporting revolution

...Direct external financial and organizational aid from third-party countries or from foreign NGOs was not a significant element in earlier waves of democratic revolution—as in Portugal, for example, or the "People Power" revolutions of East Asia, or the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union...

...But these factors may be, as Boot contends, less important in the making of democratic revolution when democratization is given "a little extra shove" from outside or when it occurs in significant part as the result of modular change—due, that is, to the cross-national influence of successful examples elsewhere...

...The result, however, is likely to be a "democratic" revolution in contexts where the structural conditions for democracy are lacking...

...They base their findings on a simple correlational analysis of Freedom House scores over the last several decades...

...Having already entered the democratic revolution business, the United States finds itself facing similar dilemmas...

...When they attempted to spread their revolt to the capital Bishkek, thugs associated with the regime attacked them, leading to the storming of the presidential palace and subsequently to riots that decimated much of central Bishkek...

...THE PROBLEM WITH the Karatnycky/ Ackerman argument (and with Boot's wholesale embrace of democratic revolution for export) is not that revolution is an inappropriate mode of democratization or that the strength of civil-society movements and popular mobilization are unimportant for successful democratization...

...THE EMERGENCE of the American government as a "revolutionary state" within the world system is, of course, a novelty and marks a departure from its traditional role within the cold war order...

...Growing conflict between the United States and a number of post-communist governments (Serbia, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and Uzbekistan) over their foreign policy orientations and internal human rights practices together with the Bush administration's embrace of unilateral efforts to reshape the world in America's interest have been responsible for a more aggressive approach toward democratization...

...In Georgia, democratic revolutionaries have been attempting to transform what amounts to a failed state into a functioning democracy within a short period of time—a daunting task in a society where, in many areas, electricity functions for only an hour a day, and large swaths of the country remain outside the government's control...

...Corruption and the penetration of organized criminal groups into the Kyrgyz government remain prevalent under the Bakiyev administration, and efforts to pursue official wrongdoings led recently to the dismissal of the country's chief prosecutor...

...New as well is the use of third-party, democracy-promoting NGOs to channel aid to revolutionary causes...

...The catch lies in the unpredictability of violence within revolutionary crises...

...Colored revolution" has come to the attention of the U.S...

...They relied on local dissatisfaction and replaced corrupt regimes that maintained themselves in power through electoral fraud (and in the cases of Milogevic and Kuchma, regimes that also occasionally practiced political murder...

...Perhaps the United States would do well to learn a lesson from its rival in the cold war, which also tried to export revolution, though not of the democratic variety...

...Moreover, the effects of the "colored revolutions" on other countries so far have been far from positive, as authoritarian regimes have cracked down on democratic opponents, closed down or monitored more closely relations with human rights NGOs, and attempted to isolate themselves from transnational influences...

...government or NGOs, in order to train local groups in how to organize a democratic revolution...

...In the Kyrgyz "Tulip Revolution" of March 2005, for example, ten thousand opposition enthusiasts, drawing inspiration from recent revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and responding to fraudulent parliamentary elections, violently seized a number of towns in southern Kyrgyzstan...

...ASIMILAR THERMIDORIAN reaction appears to have taken shape in Ukraine in September 2005 when the coalition that had sustained the Orange Revolution unraveled completely...

...In October 2004, Bush signed the Belarus Democracy Act, which authorizes assistance to pro-democracy activism in Belarus, with the intention of overthrowing the Lukashenka regime...

...Like European monarchs after 1848, post-Soviet strongmen are now concerned about the transnational spread of revolution to their fiefdoms...

...For one thing, as those who study revolution know, the outcomes of revolutionary upsurges are highly unpredictable and just as often lead to failure and prolonged civil war as to democratic success...

...There are real dangers in the export of revolution as a strategy for democratization: first, the danger that democracy could come to be viewed as a tool of external statecraft rather than an indigenous development...

...Some of the NGOs involved enjoy close relationships with the U.S...

...Failed revolution can in fact be worse for democratic development than the protracted evolution of civil society— because widespread repression can lead to the decimation of democratic forces...

...Rather than active engagement with nondemocratic societies in order to encourage the emergence of democratic forces, what we see is the increasing isolation of authoritarian regimes, even where the prospects are remote for successful democratizing revolution...

...They are consistent proponents of nonviolent resistance...

...Andijan lies immediately across the border from the Osh valley, where the Kyrgyz revolution originated...

...More than a fifth of the population has abandoned Georgia due to the dire conditions there, and most live below the poverty line...

...Let us hope, for the sake of democracy, that the results prove better...

...Yushchenko's chief political adviser, Oleksandr Zinchenko (head of Yushchenko's 2004 election campaign), resigned, claiming that corruption "is now even worse than before...

...And, though it was inspired by the example of nonviolent revolution in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, it succeeded only because it was violent, because the structural conditions for a successful "people power" revolt were lacking...

...After the Rose and Orange revolutions, Georgian and Ukrainian youth movements began to challenge Otpor's consulting monopoly...

...The Kyrgyz opposition was at most capable of DISSENT / Winter 2006 21 turning out fifteen thousand people in demonstrations —hardly enough to force Akaev's resignation through nonviolent disruption...

...Thus, one of the unintended consequences of the attempt to export democratic revolution could be the inadvertent stimulation of repression, ethnic conflict, and even civil war...

...And where sharp cultural differences are embodied in state institutions, the political crises provoked by mobilized civic groups may easily flow over into ethnic violence...

...Bakiyev subsequently ran in a presidential election in which he captured 89 percent of the vote...

...OVER THE PAST five years, four successful revolutions have occurred in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, overthrowing pseudodemocratic regimes and bringing to power new coalitions expressing commitment to democratic reform...

...The Kyrgyz experience suggests the possible consequences of stimulating revolutionary democratic change where the conditions for civic activity are weak...

...in other countries their ability to work effectively has been undermined...

...And in May 2005, Bush traveled to Tbilisi, where he praised the Rose Revolution as an example to be emulated throughout the Caucasus and Central Asia...

...The Soros Foundation, for instance, no longer operates in Belarus, Russia, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan precisely because of growing hostility from host governments...

...There was nothing inevitable about their felicitous outcomes...

...Recent developments in the four countries that experienced "colored revolutions," however, raise questions over whether the promotion of democratic revolution from abroad significantly advances the long-term prospects for democracy—or, alternatively, has unanticipated and sometimes deleterious effects for democratic development...

...As Boot has argued, "The triumph of the Orange Revolution should dispel the quaint notion still prevalent in many Western universities and foreign ministries that democracy is a luxury good suitable for rich countries with a tradition of liberalism stretching back centuries...

...second, that human rights organizations could compromise their ability to act as independent monitoring organizations if they involve themselves with specific political movements or come to be identified as "revolutionary organizations...

...Since then, we have seen active efforts by the United States and a number of American-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs such as Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, and the Soros Foundation) to support democratic revolutions within the post-Soviet region and elsewhere...

...In the wake of the latest revolutionary wave, the transnational NGO presence within the Eurasian region is waning...

...The United States Agency for International Development (USAID), for instance, granted millions of dollars to the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative (PAUCI), administered by Freedom House...

...This is not likely to be a recipe for promoting the long-term prospect of democracy...

...In addition to the millions of dollars of aid involved, numerous consulting operations have arisen, many of them led by the former revolutionaries themselves...

...Another report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe singled out Serbia for its high levels of corruption and lack of judicial independence, lumping it together with Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan...

...But we don't know what the long-term prospects for democracy are in any of these countries, and recent trends have raised doubts about democratic stability...

...Human Rights Watch has documented a wave of violence against minorities in Serbia since 2003 (including physical assaults, attacks on religious and cultural buildings, and cemetery desecration) to which the authorities have turned a blind eye...

...The Clinton administration even erected a series of transmitters around the periphery of Serbia to provide alternative news coverage, and it established a special office in Budapest to coordinate assistance to Milogevic's opponents...

...government spent $65 million promoting democracy in the years immediately preceding the Orange Revolution—most of it channeled to Ukrainian NGOs and social movements that opposed Kuchma—through third-party NGOs such as Freedom House or the National Endowment for Democracy...

...It was more a shift in power among clans than a democratic breakthrough...

...They depended on the political restraint of the actors involved—including the restraint of the dictators themselves, none of whom ordered widespread repression...

...By inflicting an overwhelming blow against dissent, Karimov sought to demonstrate that he would not tolerate the same outcome as in Kyrgyzstan, where President Askar Akaev was overthrown in part because of his refusal to apply significant force against his opponents...

...Some have already taken countermeasures to stave off such a possibility...

...government...

...Few advocates of democracy could deny the euphoria felt in Serbia, Ukraine, and Georgia as hundreds of thousands of citizens— in Kyiv, up to a million people—incensed by massive electoral irregularities, braved the threat of violent repression (and inclement weather) to reclaim their right to free and fair elections...

...A number of leaders of the Ukrainian youth movement Pora were trained in Serbia at the Center for Non-Violent Resistance, a consulting organization set up by Otpor activists to instruct youth leaders from around the world in how to organize a movement, motivate voters, and develop mass actions...

...Georgian social movements first formed links with Otpor in spring 2003 (six months before the Rose Revolution), when civil-society activists from Georgia visited Belgrade on a trip sponsored by the Soros Foundation...

...Nor were the results of the Tulip Revolution particularly democratizing...

...Their correlations show that when movements turn to violence, the long-term prospects for democratic development sharply decline...

...IN SHORT, democratic development remains under serious question in all of the countries that experienced "colored revolution...

...MARK R. BEISSINGER is a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison...

...Such organizations in the past acted mainly as monitors and informational clearinghouses, mobilizing transnational support in order to sanction offending behavior, rather than as the financiers and trainers of revolutionaries...

...Pora activists even joked about creating a new Comintern for democratic revolution...

...President Mikhail Saakashvili has engaged in a concerted campaign against corruption and contraband, initiated a major roadbuilding effort, and overthrown the local satrap in the enclave of Ajaria, bringing the region back under Tbilisi's sway...

...The achievements of the Orange Revolution have today been placed in doubt...

...In November 2003, as the Georgian Rose Revolution was just getting underway, President George W. Bush spoke before the National Endowment for Democracy, where he redefined (once again) the purpose of the American invasion of Iraq, calling it the beginning of a "global democratic revolution...

...On the contrary, a large body of literature in recent years has documented how mass movements and pressure from below have played a more critical role than is usually recognized in democratization...

...Some observers, for instance, attribute the Uzbek government's radically repressive response to the May 2005 protests in Andijan, where Uzbek government troops by some accounts killed more than five hundred people, to the panicky sense that the spread of revolution in Central Asia had to be stopped...

...Karatnycky and Ackerman are aware that their statistical association between the strength of nonviolent civic movements and long-term gains in democratization was not controlled for the influence of levels of income, education, or other factors widely known to be associated with stable democratic development...

...government as well—as a strategy for promoting democratization...

...In an astounding reversal, Yushchenko then forged an alliance with his 22 DISSENT / Winter 2006 erstwhile rival Viktor Yanukovych (whose electoral manipulations had prompted the Orange Revolution in the first place) to ensure the election of his choice for prime minister...

...There is now enormous interest in revolution among democratic activists throughout the region...

...The attempt by professional revolutionaries to stimulate global revoDISSENT / Winter 2006 23 lution and provide "a little extra shove" to what they envisioned as the march of history, and even to engage in externally induced regimechange through military means, transformed their movement into a tool of state power, perverted its goals and meaning, generated a series of unstable postrevolutionary regimes, and ultimately unleashed forces that it did not understand and could not control...

...Others, such as the Soros Foundation, have independently embraced more confrontational modes of fostering democratic change out of frustration with the progress of democracy in the postcommunist region and under the influence of the civil-society communities they serve...

...Yushchenko's popularity has plummeted, and many of those who helped to make the revolution now find themselves in opposition...

...That is to be expected whenever a repressive regime is overthrown...

...But while the sources of these revolutions DISSENT / Winter 2006 19 may have been indigenous, support provided by the American government and Americanbased NGOs was critical to their materialization and spread...

...SOME DEMOCRACY-PROMOTION NGOs such as Freedom House have embraced nonviolent resistance as the most promising path for promoting democratic change around the world...

...Ukrainian, Georgian, and Serbian activists have developed modules for teaching the art of nonviolent revolution...

...Indeed, fostering democratic revolution has now become an international business...

...Indeed, Serbian president Boris Tadic has recently accused the Kogtunica government of reviving the political atmosphere of the 1990s, and many leading liberals have expressed dismay with the direction in which the country is moving...

...It has failed to live up to its obligations to turn over war criminals such as Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic to international authorities...

...These revolutions reveal the hollowness of the cliché that 'democracy can't be imposed by outsiders.' . . . Sometimes, when dealing with an entrenched dictatorship, this requires military intervention of the kind that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan...

...According to Freedom House's own ratings, the progress has been more evident in Serbia and considerably less so in Ukraine and Georgia...

...Some, like human rights activist Davit Zurabishvili, who ran Tbilisi's Liberty Institute (a human rights center that played a critical role in making the Rose Revolution), have left Saakashvili's parliamentary group over concerns about the direction in which the country is evolving...

...As the Serbian and Ukrainian cases suggest, a strategy of external encouragement for a broad coalition among opposition forces may indeed aid the overthrow of dictators...

...Stunned by the resignation, Yushchenko fired his entire cabinet, which had been consumed by behind-the-scenes fighting between populist prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko (Yushchenko's ally during the Orange Revolution) and chocolate magnate Petro Poroshenko (head of the National Security Council) for control over key media and industrial assets...

...Kogtunica's government, for example, has dropped criminal charges against Milogevic's son and lifted an international warrant against his wife...

...Even in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine the long-term stability of democratic change produced from these revolutions is in doubt...

...In the Russian case, the emergence of youth movements favoring "colored revolution" inspired the Putin regime to organize its own countermovement—Ours (Nashi)—which is strongly anti-American and attacks the influence of foreign ideologies (particularly liberalism) on Russian society...

...In fact, Vladislav Kaskiv, the leader of Pora, met with President Bush at the Bratislava summit and received the president's support for creating a center to aid the spread of democratic revolution to Russia, Belarus, Moldova, and Azerbaijan...

...But this has hardly solved the deeper problems of the country's territorial integrity, ethnic division, rampant lawlessness, and corruption...

...third, that efforts to promote democratic revolution could produce intensified ethnic conflict and even civil war...

...They taught us everything we know," one leading member of Pora told a Deutsche Welle correspondent...

...More brittle regimes can be brought down by their own people, but even they often need a little extra shove...

...Of course, Karatnycky and Ackerman most definitely do not advocate the violent seizure of power...

...and finally, that giving democratic revolution "a little extra shove" could lead to postrevolutionary situations in which democratic development is highly vulnerable to reversal...

...The "colored revolutions" (so named for their adoption of "people power" tactics of nonviolent resistance and their symbolic use of colors to identify supporters) have inspired oppositional groups in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan...

...A March 2005 Freedom House report by Adrian Karatnycky, senior scholar at Freedom House, and Peter Ackerman, chair of its board of trustees, argues that the greatest long-term gains in democratization have occurred as a result of nonviolent "people-power" movements rather than "pacted" democratic transitions from above...

...In a deal brokered by the provisional government's leader, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the fraudulently elected parliamentarians were allowed to remain in place, thus undermining the original rationale for the revolution...

...In Ukraine, the U.S...

...Saakashvili's increasingly authoritarian drift and his emphasis on ensuring territorial integrity over civil liberties (opposition figures and independent journalists have been harassed, a subtle censorship operates, and police torture is still practiced) have spawned fears among a number of his erstwhile revolutionary allies about the potential "Putinization" of Georgia...

...Rather, the problem lies in the consequences of packaging, exporting, and spreading democratic revolution like a module across a broad array of settings, irrespective of local circumstances...

...In view of the unpredictable outcomes of revolutionary crises, promoting a wave of democratic revolutions is a form of brinkmanship— the equivalent of playing a high-stakes game of poker with democracy...

...But it does not promote stability or predictability in the democratic evolution of postrevolutionary governments...

...Ackerman himself is a major expert on nonviolent resistance and founder of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, which conducts training workshops on promoting democracy and human rights...

...Of course, revolutionary coalitions are always fragile formations and typically begin to disintegrate once the revolutionaries take power...

...Nevertheless, neoconservatives have lauded the Bush administration's readiness, in Max Boot's words, to "apply the lessons of Ukraine" throughout the world...

...PostSoviet Eurasia today is a region consumed by the hope and fear of revolutionary change— and of its aftermath...

...With financial and logistical help from abroad, Otpor activists trained Georgian activists in techniques of nonviolent resistance...

...The seizure of power occurred several days after the new, fraudulently elected Parliament was sworn in...

...These modern professional revolutionaries have turned up with increasing frequency in Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan...

...Oppositions in places as distant as Lebanon, Egypt, Togo, and Zimbabwe have been emboldened by these developments...

...government, for instance, spent $41 million promoting antiMilogevic civil society groups such as Otpor, the student group that spearheaded the Serbian Bulldozer Revolution in 2000...

...PAUCI then sent these funds to Ukrainian NGOs associated with the anti-Kuchma opposition...

...Vojislav Kogtunica returned to power in March 2004 as prime minister, after slightly less than four years as president of Serbia, by forming a coalition with Milogevic's Socialist Party of Serbia—the very political force that the Bulldozer Revolution aimed to overthrow...

...Since the Serbian revolution, for instance, Otpor activists have become, as one Serbian analyst put it, "a modern type of mercenary," traveling the world, often in the pay of the U.S...

...For instance, civil war was only narrowly averted in the Georgian, Ukrainian, and Kyrgyz cases...

...Part of the deal with Yanukovych included formal promises by Yushchenko not to open criminal cases against those involved in perpetrating electoral fraud in 2004 and to expand parliamentary immunity to local deputies, thereby protecting criminal structures...

...His film Bringing Down A Dictator, a PBS documentary detailing the overthrow of Milogevic, has become something of a best-seller among wouldbe democratic revolutionaries...

...Political freedoms improved in all three of these countries in the immediate wake of revolution...

...The U.S...

...As the Uzbek case demonstrates, that same restraint is not likely to be evident in most places where dictatorial regimes are entrenched...

...Karatnycky and Ackerman call for a "paradigm shift" in democracy-promotion that would target aid to those groups that make nonviolent civic resistance a priority, encourage broad-based coalitions among opposition forces, transfer knowledge about civil resistance to opposition groups, invest in alternative media networks, and wield external sanctions to constrain the repression of democratic 20 DISSENT / Winter 2006 opponents...

...The local Georgian branch of the Soros Foundation helped support Kmara (the Georgian version of Otpor) out of its $350,000 election support program, and Kmara and other opposition groups received significant financial and organizational aid from the National Democratic Institute...

...The role of NGOs such as the Soros Foundation and Freedom House in aiding democratic revolutionaries has precipitated a backlash in a number of postSoviet states, which have begun to view them as revolutionary organizations...

...The Tulip Revolution occurred almost accidentally and in contradiction to the plans of opposition leaders...

...Democratic opposition leaders in Armenia and Azerbaijan (both countries plagued by extensive electoral fraud and both allies of the United States) took heart from Bush's speech, seeing in it the possibility that they too might receive support for efforts to topple their corrupt regimes—although senior administration 18 DISSENT / Winter 2006 officials were quick to deny that the United States was in "the revolution business...

...For the most part, the post-communist "colored revolutions" were not engineered from abroad...

...The National Endowment for Democracy, for instance, was established by the Reagan administration as a private, nonprofit organization that channels federal funding to pro-American civil-society groups throughout the world...