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TOL: A Walking, Talking Democrat

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  • TOL: A Walking, Talking Democrat

    TOL: A WALKING, TALKING DEMOCRAT

    Transitions Online, Czech Republic
    May 2 2006

    Washington has again shown the inconsistency of its advocacy of
    democracy. And again Azerbaijan's ruler is the beneficiary.

    George Bush's visit to Georgia in May 2005 had its own deeply troubling
    moments. As he was giving a speech, a man lobbed a grenade in his
    direction. It fell far short, and did not explode, allowing the
    U.S. president to continue obliviously. Otherwise, though, it was,
    politically, an almost cloudless visit. He was in a friendly, welcoming
    country now free of the deadweight of the typical post-communist system
    consisting - as Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in 1992,
    speaking of Russia - of a "repugnant, historically unprecedented
    hybrid" of "the old nomenklatura, the sharks of finance, false
    democrats, and the KGB." Bush's speechwriter duly provided him with
    soaring phrasing and rippling cadences to fit the occasion.

    Cut to Washington, April 2006, and a rendezvous with a Caucasian
    president who represents the deadening politics that the Georgians
    rid themselves of. "Across the Caucasus, in Central Asia and the
    broader Middle East, we see the same desire for liberty burning
    in the hearts of young people. They are demanding their freedom -
    and they will have it," Bush had said in Tbilisi. But here was a
    president, Ilham Aliev, who had prevented them having it. Indeed,
    here was a leader who, as ordinary British viewers were able to see
    in a BBC documentary aired in April and as ordinary U.S. and other
    viewers will see later, showed none of the compunction the former
    leaders of Ukraine and Georgia had when faced with demonstrators.

    Instead, his police forces had waded into a peaceful crowd in brutal
    fashion. The reason for the protests was clear from the documentary:
    when police officers can be seen within polling stations, as they
    were during last November's parliamentary election, it is hard to
    conclude that the polls were free and fair. Rightly, international
    election monitors stated emphatically that they were not.

    Bush said in Tbilisi, "we are living in historic times when freedom
    is advancing from the Black Sea to the Caspian to the Persian Gulf
    and beyond." But, less than six months after that seriously flawed
    election in Azerbaijan, here he was welcoming a man who had halted
    that advance dead in its tracks and whose overly compliant judiciary
    had, just days before, begun trying three youth activists accused of
    plotting to violently overthrow the government.

    Is this how "the leader of the free world" should behave? It certainly
    creates the wrong impression - of a man who leaps on Georgia's
    democratic bandwagon, but then hitches a lift on Azerbaijan's oil
    train, deferring the problematic political issue by saying "democracy
    is the wave of the future."

    Put another way, Bush can talk the democratic talk, but does not walk
    the walk. Again, as after Aliev's victory in the 2003 presidential
    election, Washington was mute and motionless after an example of
    Azerbaijan's warped democracy.

    There are, of course, plenty of good reasons for Azerbaijan and the
    United States to be engaged in high-level diplomatic contact at the
    moment. Azeris make up a very sizable minority in Iran (estimates
    range from 16 million to 30 million) and Azerbaijan therefore needs
    to know what plans the United States has to resolve the crisis over
    Iran's nuclear program. The possibility of military strikes or an
    Iranian-led oil war also makes the issue of energy supplies very
    pressing. The dispute between Ukraine and Russia in January had already
    increased Azerbaijan's importance as an alternative energy source,
    and it has increased since: Russian energy companies want to expand
    (Gazprom's deputy CEO Aleksandr Medvedev last week said, "it is hard
    to find a company [in Europe] we are not interested in"), there are
    indications that the Greeks and Turks may link up with Russia rather
    than a British- and Norwegian-led consortium supplying Azeri gas for
    a new pipeline, and - from Putin to Transneft, Russia's oil-pipeline
    monopoly - Russian economic leaders have recently hinted that more oil
    and gas may flow east than west. And also somewhere on the agenda is
    the issue of Nagorno-Karabakh. Talks seemed to have reached the end
    of another dead end in February, but then, in early April, the Azeri
    foreign minister declared that an undisclosed U.S.

    proposal was "very promising."

    But should this warrant a meeting in the White House? Countries have
    foreign ministers to deal with the nitty-gritty and to navigate the
    turbulent waters of international relations and presidents for the
    formalities and the honors. And that is what Bush conferred on Aliev -
    an undeserved honor.

    FORKED TONGUES

    It is not hard to see in all this a justification for the refrain
    of Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, that the West is
    hypocritical. After all, a comparison with the Belarusian elections
    suggests little fundamental difference, yet Belarusian President
    Alyaksandr Lukashenka cannot travel to the United States while
    Azerbaijan's President Aliev receives handshakes and warm words in
    Washington. Strategists may feel Azerbaijan warrants gentler treatment
    than Belarus, and tacticians can argue that Belarus needs more of the
    stick and Azerbaijan more of the carrot. However, this will do little
    to convince friends who believe symbolism is an important part of
    "democracy promotion."

    And it will of course be grist to the mill for critics who, at their
    most forgiving, argue that when national values clash with national
    interests, interests win.

    Russia, the key faux democracy in the region, has its own traditional
    narratives of U.S. and Western policy, and those were heard again
    last week. President Vladimir Putin himself once more accused the
    West of double standards and hypocrisy when he met German Chancellor
    Angela Merkel in the Siberian city of Tomsk. The issue, in this case,
    was energy, but the underlying story was the same: the West fears a
    strong Russia and its sermons are merely self-serving. As Putin put
    it in Tomsk: "All sorts of excuses are being used to limit us to the
    north, to the south, and to the west. ... What about globalization
    and freedom of economic relations then?"

    The Kremlin's general line on NATO, the West, and democracy during
    the week found an echo from a source possibly of surprise to some -
    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In a Moskovskiye novosti interview conducted
    by correspondence, the best-known chronicler of the gulag portrayed
    another - military, rather than economic - form of encirclement
    ("Though it is clear that present-day Russia poses no threat to it
    whatsoever, NATO is methodically and persistently expanding its
    military apparatus in the east of Europe and is implementing an
    encirclement of Russia from the south"), and saw "open material and
    ideological support for 'color revolutions' " as further evidence
    that the West is "preparing to completely encircle Russia and deprive
    it of its sovereignty." He praised Putin's foreign policy (which is
    generally being carried out "sensibly and with an increasing degree
    of foresight"), and was critical enough of democracy in the West
    ("present-day Western democracy is in a serious state of crisis"
    and Russia should not "thoughtlessly imitate" these democracies)
    and positive enough about Putin's efforts "to salvage the state from
    failure" to suggest he is not too unhappy at Putin's domestic policy.

    COMPETING NARRATIVES

    It is easy to highlight the hypocrisy of Putin's argument - and its
    self-serving nature was all the more obvious in a week when Western
    broadsheets gave substantial coverage to the controversy over the hopes
    of the gas monopoly Gazprom of buying a key British distributor,
    Centrica. It is also right to take issue with Solzhenitsyn's
    perceptions and arguments.

    Right, but it is also necessary to understand that these views have
    real power: Putin and Solzhenitsyn are effectively updating old Russian
    narratives. Fittingly, Putin's shows more of the Cold War legacy, the
    politician's calculations, and the hard interest of a great power's
    leader. Solzhenitsyn's goes back beyond, to the older distinctions
    between civilizations that parted ways in the East-West Schism of the
    11th century. That underlying quasi-mystical perception of Orthodox
    Russia emerged explicitly in the interview when Solzhenitsyn portrayed
    Russia as a defense against the "downfall of Christian civilization."

    In practice, it may perhaps not be possible to accommodate
    Western-style democracy in such narratives. But to win some room in
    a few Russian hearts and minds, competing messages and views need to
    be coherent, which - on a simplified, day-to-day level - means some
    consistency is needed. The fundamental mistake that Bush demonstrated
    by inviting Aliev to Washington was to not realize that the United
    States' own grand, national narrative - as the land of the free and
    leader of the free world - needs better maintenance.

    Bush perhaps has relatively little need to provide Americans with a
    consistent foreign policy. Convinced of the virtues of democracy and
    with a generally positive view of themselves and of their country,
    average Americans may not notice or object to inconsistencies that
    undermine others' perception of the United States as a force for
    good. But the average Russian and many Azeris need convincing about
    the virtues of democracy, and mix real-life admiration for many things
    American with an inherited and nurtured anti-Americanism. For them,
    inconsistencies are not just inconsistencies: they tell the real
    story of a superpower merely interested in pursuing its own interests,
    whether through hard or soft power. To them, the "march of liberty"
    sounds coercive, a frog-march to "liberty."

    So, inconsistent messages matter. Partly so because they undermine
    successes, such as the Orange Revolution. That revolution was, in
    broad strokes, the result of a fractured political system in which
    authoritarians could not consolidate power and monopolize money,
    enabling a new group of politicians - more democratic, less wealthy -
    to establish a power base and to tap into discontent, particularly
    among the post-communist generation. Civil society, surviving with
    difficulty thanks in part to Western money, mobilized to do what
    it could, which was primarily to convince ordinary Ukrainians that
    change was needed and possible and needed their involvement. But
    people understand overarching, broader-brush stories more easily
    than that type of analysis - and it was symptomatic that the story
    that many in Western Europe believe is that Western powers had enough
    power within Ukraine to manufacture a revolution.

    The message of that and other experiences is that a consistent message
    and policy is needed. Words need to match actions. In the world of
    realpolitik, matching the two is, of course, difficult. In previous
    editorials, we have outlined some of the options. But Bush's failure
    in Washington was more basic. He was at least consistent - he neither
    walked the walk nor talked the talk - but that is hardly the message
    or the action that either the Azeri opposition or American public
    diplomacy needs. "Leading the free world" is not a mere walk-on role.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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