Author:
Emerson Michael / Noutcheva Gergana Topics: Economics / Politics
01.02.2005
“Promoting Democracy and the Rule of Law: EU and US Strategies and Instruments”, conference of the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law,
Stanford University, 4
–5 October 2004.
[Text rev. 9.10.4]
1. A gravity model of democratisation
2. Europeanisation defined
3. Democracy ratings in the European peripheries
4. Democratisation in the former Ottoman Empire
5. Democratisation in the former Soviet Union
6. Conclusions
Abstract: Much analysis of trends in democratisation in the world nowadays gives
a rather pessimistic message, with such sweeping notions as the end of the
third wave of democratisation, or of the democratic transition paradigm.
However a closer look at what has been happening in Europe suggests that such
analyses have often overlooked an important explanatory variable, captured in
what we may call a gravity model, borrowing here a term from trade theory in
economics. The gravity model of democratisation joins up with the mechanisms of
Europeanisation, with democratisation progressing fast and deeply in 21
European states that were recently non-democratic, and which have various
integrative relationships with the European Union. The trends and levels in the
democracy scorecard in Europe as a whole shows a clear correlation with the
degrees of strength of these integrative relationships, and the results can be
seen to be linked to the political conditionality and socialisation mechanisms
of Europeanisation. Unfortunately for the advocates of universal democracy,
other continents are presently unable to organise or access something similar,
even Latin America where the US might have been expected to play more of an
analogous role, and even less the Arab/Islamic world where the Afghanistan and
Iraq wars discredit the idea of
‘shock and awe’ from the Pentagon as a short cut into demo-cracy. This is not to argue that the
values and mechanisms of democracy do not have universal plausibility, at least
in the long run. But in the absence of the gravity variable in other continents
there should be soberly realistic expectations over the prospects for fast and
deep demo-cratisation. The EU may itself be reaching the outer limits of its
gravitational power, but this is an ongoing story.
Landmark contributions by political scientists theorising the processes of
global democratisation were until recently positive in message. From the late
1980s and early 1990s we had Sam Huntington writing about a Third Wave of
democratisation in the late 20th century, with the paradigm of Democratic
Transition advanced by Guillermo O
’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter[2]. These visions were taken up with alacrity by
Western aid agencies, and boosted dramatically upon the collapse of the Soviet
Union.
But more recently the contributions have turned in a decidedly negative
direction, with Larry Diamond writing about the End of the Third Wave, and
Thomas Caruthers about the End of the Transition Paradigm[3].
What was going on here?
To be fair to Huntington his thesis all along was that advance of democracy in
the world, from a first wave in the 19th century, to a second wave after the
Second World War, and a third wave since the mid 1970s, was about a succession
of long cycles of advances and partial reversals.
Caruthers, writing in 2002, identified the transition paradigm as having been
based on five common assumptions, all of which had proved to be mistaken:
first, that any country moving away from dictatorship would be moving towards
democracy; second, that democratisation was a sequence of stages; third, that
elections equal democracy; fourth, that initial conditions such as economic
development, history, and socio-cultural traditions would not be major factors;
and fifth, that democratisation would be building on coherent, functioning
states. He then delivered a devastating, and in my view largely convincing,
critique of this set of assumptions, which had created false expectations and
distorted policies of external aid to democratisation.
Testifying to the alleged failure of the transition paradigm there was a
proliferation of terminology, as political scientists tried to capture the
essence of regimes that were neither full democracies, nor in transition, and
were variously named to be
‘qualified’, or ‘semi-’, or ‘weak’, or ‘illiberal’, or ‘façade’, or ‘pseudo-’, or ‘delegative democracies’.
These writers were then singularly disarmed on the question of what the policy
maker should now do. For Huntington the recipe was to emphasise the need for
economic development and political leadership. For Caruthers there was the case
for differentiating the standard aid toolkit. For Diamond the imperative was to
consolidate the democratic territory, while waiting for conditions propitious
for a fourth wave, maybe in a decade or two. This all sounds quite reasonable,
yet not very convincing or credible as real strategy.
Analytically these writings from the US are missing an important explanatory
variable, with strategic policy implications, both as a matter of theory and
empirical evidence. The theory is the gravity model, and the empirical evidence
is Europe. This is not to suggest extrapolating the European model to the rest
of the world, which is hardly feasible. But it is to suggest that the European
gravity model of democratisation captures an essential feature of
fast track democratisation. Its presence or absence in the different continents of the world goes far in
explaining success or failure in securing fast, deep and lasting
democratisation. In the absence of the gravity model factor the processes of
democratisation are not lost or hopeless. They just take longer, maybe decades
or generations, with indeed the now observable cycles and learning experiences
of advance and retreat.
The gravity model is a very simple and basic idea, and draws on its cousin
theory in economics, which is already well established. In trade theory the
gravity model explains different intensities of trade integration as a function
of the size of GDP and proximity of the trade partners[4]. These trade
intensities can be either actual or potential. The actual and potential come
close to each other when markets are entirely open, and indeed integrated into
a single market. But if the markets are relatively closed it is possible to
show how much potential trade is foregone. There are a few major centres of
trade gravity in the world, such as the EU and US.
The democracy gravity model may be described as follows. There are some centres
of democratic gravity, meaning some big democracies that are references in the
world. Again the EU and US are the examples. The tendency for other states to
converge on the democratic model of the centre depends on the reputational
quality and attractiveness of that democracy, its geographic and cultural
historical proximity, and its openness to the periphery. Openness may be
defined first in terms of freedom for the movement of persons as determined by
visa and migration rules, and, second and more deeply, by the opportunities for
political integration of the periphery into the centre. When political
integration is possible in principle the process can become one of
conditionality. When the incentive is one of full political integration the
transitional conditionality can become extremely strong and intrusive, yet
still democratically legitimate and therefore acceptable. The frontiers between
the external and internal are being broken down, and the conclusion of the
process
– with recognition of full compliance with high standards of liberal democracy
and full inclusion in the institutions of democratic governance
– will be ratified, for example by popular referendum. Beyond such voting
mechanisms is the underlying sense of common identity, relying on emotive,
historical and cultural fields of gravitational attraction, where to be
‘joining Europe’ or ‘rejoining Europe’ means something fundamental.
The economic and democracy gravity models can plausibly be set in motion to work
alongside each other, and in the ideal case generate synergetic benefits. Gains
from trade and inward investment may ease the politics of the democratic
transition. The credibility of the ongoing democratic transition should enhance
the quality and perceived reliability of the investment climate. This becomes
then a double, interactive, politico-economic gravity model. The concept of
transition is validated here, because it is a voyage to a known destination,
and further strengthened by the notion of anchorage.
Something like this has manifestly been happening in contemporary Europe, and it
concerns a significant number of states and masses of populations. Operations
lying clearly within the European gravity field have so far been involving a
group of 21 states with a total population of 250 million[5], which is to count
only states that have either acceded to the EU from prior conditions of
non-democracy or have the perspective of doing so. A further 17 states with a
total population of 400 million people are being embraced by the European
Neighbourhood Policy, which seeks to extend the logic of Europeanisation
without the perspective of EU accession[6]. However, whether the Neighbourhood
Policy can succeed in democratising the outer European periphery is itself an
important but unanswered question.
By comparison we may first consider the Americas, where the US plays the role of
regional centre of gravity, and is relatively open for the movement of the
Latin American peoples. However only with Mexico have the US and Canada moved
significantly in an integrative direction under the aegis of the North America
Free Trade Area. Maybe this has resulted in a degree of anchorage and
consolidation for Mexican democracy. There have been other Pan-American
initiatives, notably the organisation of American States (OAS), the Summits of
the Americas and the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The OAS in particular has
long worked on the democracy agenda, passing the America Democracy Charter in
September 2001[7]. The US and its Latin American partners have never
contemplated European-style integration. The democracy efforts of the OAS
actually seem somewhat analogous to the work of the Council of Europe, with
similar dilemmas over how to deal with member states that fail to respect
established democratic norms. However neither the United States nor Canada has
accepted the jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, based in
San Jose, Costa Rica, which therefore suffers in authority compared to the
European Court of Human Rights.
US policy has an old history of intervening militarily in the Americas (twenty
times between 1898 and 1921). Since the World War the US intervened only a few
times, but usually with multilateral blessing. The CIA was en-gaged actively in
covert operations in many Latin American countries in the 1960s, and in Central
America in the 1980s. As a result the idea of external intervention is hugely
sensitive. As commented by Robert Pastor:
“the two contradictory norms – of democracy and non-intervention – stalemated the OAS for decades”[8]. The US in the Americas is thus an intermediate case of the gravity model at
work, with mixed results. Interestingly some comparisons may be made now
between patterns of politics in Latin America and the European CIS states, with
semi-democratic regimes of various types, and uncertain ebbs and flows of
democratic reform. This fits with our uncertainty whether a thin European
Neighbourhood Policy, as now underway, is going to be strong enough in its
incentive and conditionality mechanisms to secure the transition to full
democratisation.
However by comparison with these intermediate cases in the wider Europe and
Latin America, the other continents seem to be light years away. Africa has no
democratic political centre of gravity, even if South Africa has been
impressive politically in the last decade, and the former colonial powers can
hardly be more than references. The only conceivable partial exception is in
North Africa, and indeed here the European Neighbourhood Policy which
reinforces the Barcelona Process of Co-operation tries to do this. Countries
such as Morocco could conceivably find encouragement if not anchorage for
progressive democratic reform from Europe.
The Arab/Islamic Greater Middle East is of course the most dramatic example of a
vast region that has no reference or field of democratic gravity to enter, and
on the contrary the magnetic impulses these days are more negative than
positive. It has no leader in its midst. The US has been the most powerful
external actor, and attempts to promote the democratisation of the region in
the wake of the Iraq war, but for now the scene is one of a dreadful cocktail
of civil war mixed up with guerilla war against the occupying power, with the
reputation of the US as global leader seriously damaged. Europe edges into the
Middle East with the accession candidacy of Turkey and the Neighbourhood
Po-licy. But it is nowhere near getting leverage on the Gulf states,
Afghanistan or Central Asia.
Finally as regards Asia too there is an absence of any dominant field of
democratic gravity. China stands as the most colossal counter to the argument
that democracy needs to be promoted to achieve a rapid exit from economic
poverty. Japan has become a virtual Western democracy, but cannot be the leader
of the region. And so there is no pattern or dominant trend there.
This quick detour into the rest of the world serves only to reinforce the
pertinence of the gravity model in the search for explanatory variables for
rapid, deep and durable democratisation. Without it there are problems with the
standard methods of cross-section (cross-country) analysis as a tool of
empirical research, where up to 200 identified sovereign states are the
observations
– from Albania to Zimbabwe. They lead political scientists to the conclusions
quoted above, about the end of the third wave, or of transition. The point here
is to bring the dynamics and mechanisms of democratisation in contemporary
Europe into focus, particularly since many American writers seem to be
Europe-blind. With the gravity model explanatory variable, present or absent,
the trends become much clearer. Where the gravity variable is strongly present
the trend towards full democratisation is alive, and transition is indeed a
transit. Where the gravity variable is absent the story is a long and uncertain
one.
The term Europeanisation has gained currency in political science literature
over the past decade or so, as scholars tried to understand the
politico-economic/societal transformation involved in European integration, and
especially in the cases of states acceding to the European Union after exiting
from non-democratic (Fascist or Communist) regimes, and in some cases after
violent conflict (outright war or ethno-secessionist conflict). Europeanisation
may be seen as working through three kinds of mechanism, which interact
synergetically:
legal obligations in political and economic domains flowing from the requirements for accession to
the EU, and/or from Council of Europe membership and acces-sion to its
Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedom;
objective changes in economic structures and the interests of individuals as a result of
integration with Europe; and
subjective changes in the beliefs, expectations and identity of the individual, feeding political
will to adopt European norms of business, politics and civil society.
The mechanisms of Europeanisation can be otherwise described as combining
rational institutionalism through policies of
conditionality, and sociological institutionalism through norm diffusion and social learning. Changes through policies of conditionality may occur in the short to medium
term. The more deep-rooted changes, which occur through the actual
transformation of identity and interests, may only be expected in the longer
term. There may be early change in political discourse, which over time is
internalised and results in genuine identity and interest change. While in the
initial phases of Europeanisation a rational institutional account may better
capture the mechanism of change, over the longer term endogenous processes may
become the main motors of domestic transformation. This phasing of the process
supposes that political leaders are actually willing and able to lead. However
this may not be so, in which case the reverse sequence can prevail. The people
may tend towards socialising with modern Europe, for example partly as a result
of diaspora experiences. The leadership may only enter into negotiations with
the European institutions later.
In the EU context Europeanisation is an interactive process in which member
states affected by the process of European integration are at the same time the
players who initiate and shape the process. There is thus a two-way process
between
structure and agency. In the European periphery, however, the dynamics of Europeanisation are
different. States affected by the process do not have the institutional means
to co-determine decisions of the EU that affect them. In this context
Europeanisation takes on the aspect of an EU foreign policy instrument.
Europeanisation has a further specific application in the pursuit of conflict
settlement and resolution in the European periphery. The interdependency
between democratisation and conflict settlement is an important issue in its
own right. In a recent study of several unresolved conflicts of South East
Europe we have defined Europeanisation in the field of secessionist conflict
settlement and resolution as
“a process that is activated and encouraged by European institutions, primarily
the European Union, by linking the outcome of the conflict to a certain degree
of integration of the parties involved in it into European structures. This
link is made operational by means of specific conditionality and socialisation
measures, which are built into the process of Europeanisation
” [9].
If Europeanisation is defined principally as EU-isation, other organisations and
players must be borne in mind. For democracy and human rights the Council of
Europe is important as a norm-setting organisation and codifier of law.
Membership of the Council of Europe requires adherence to the European
Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, supported by the European
Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg
– which scholars must not confuse with the European Union Court of Justice in
Luxembourg, even if politicians are doing their best to confuse the two. In its
new Constitution, the European Union will itself accede to the European
Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, thus establishing formal
identity between the human rights codes of the two organisations. This
institutional overlap between the European Union and the Council of Europe also
becomes a valuable construction in the context of democratisation and human
rights reform of the European periphery, especially those states of the former
Soviet Union that have no perspectives at present of acceding to the EU. These
non-EU states are at least now co-owners of the Council of Europe and the
Strasbourg Court of Human Rights, which confers a certain degree of legitimacy
to its proceedings and judgments. We return to this later. The OSCE and UN also
complement the Council of Europe with their norm setting roles and security
mandates.
In addition the United States and Russia have important geo-strategic interests
in parts of the European periphery. The United States and the European Union
can work together fairly comfortably with the same normative rule-book and
complementarity of roles in the Balkans and Caucasus, since here
Europeanisation and Westernisation are perceived to be one and the same thing.
On the other hand Russia, while a Council of Europe member state, still pursues
an overtly realpolitik approach to its near abroad, and seems to have no
interest in promoting democratic and human rights values, which actually
impedes conflict resolution.
Europeanisation may also be understood to embrace a certain broad model of
multi-tier democratic governance, which is part of the postmodern European
solution to the World Wars of the early 20th century. The particularity of
European multi-tier governance is that it has introduced the practice of
three-tier federalism, with the EU tier as the third tier to add to the federal
state and the federated entities, first invented to anchor Germany in a durable
post-war political structure. This three-tier federalism is also relevant
however for much of Europe
’s complex ethnic mosaic, with ethno-federations or federative structures in
Belgium, Finland, Spain and the United Kingdom, as opposed to the ethnically
homogenous federations such as Austria and Germany. The Belgian case is notable
in its hybrid combination of territorial federalism with personalised (i.e.
deterritorialised) federalism, and which is interesting for parts of the
Balkans. More generally the European experience is that ethno-secessionist
pressures in various cases have been dampened when placed in a three
–tier EU structure, since the sub-state entities find room for more self-identity
in a framework which gives them a place in the European structures alongside
rather than below the sovereign states.
Freedom House has supplied us with invaluable data on the evolution of
democratic institutions and practice. For reading its democracy scorecard it
offers the following guide:[10]
| Democracy score | Regime type |
| 1-2 | Consolidated democracy |
| 3 | Semi-consolidated democracy |
| 4 | Transitional government or hybrid type |
| 5 | Semi-consolidated authoritarian regime |
| 6-7 | Consolidated authoritarian regime |
Table 1 below regroups the data on democratic performance from 1997 to 2003 by
categories of relationship with the European institutions. The picture that
emerges sees Europe grouping into five categories.
Democracy scores in Europe and Central Asia, 1997 – 2003[11]
[12] Average for region without Kosovo
[13] Serbia and Montenegro
[13] Serbia and Montenegro
The first category consists of the newly acceding member states of the EU, which
have undergone a decade-long political conditionality and monitoring process,
and all now fit comfortably into the consolidated democracy ratings. The
principles were established at the European Council meeting in June 1993, and
became known as the
‘Copenhagen criteria’, notably that:
“Membership requires that the candidate country has achieved stability of
institutions guaranteeing democracy, the rule of law, human rights and respect
for and protection of minorities.
”
Most of the candidates achieved credibly democratic ratings very early on into
the transition after the end of the Communist regimes. These were initially
overnight regime changes in 1989
–1990, which then saw a more gradual deepening of democratic practice beyond the
parliamentary institutions into the judiciary and civil society. The laggard in
the class was Slovakia, where former prime minister Meciar seriously abused his
exercise of power, for example with manipulation of the constitution. By 1997,
with a democracy score of 3.80, Slovakia was well on the way towards ruining
its chances of EU accession with the rest of Central Europe. EU conditionality
on this point was entirely credible. The people got the message, and in due
course elected another government that could slip into European normality
within the life of a single parliament, and Slovakia was able to join the rest
on accession day in May 2004. The general conclusion from the EU
’s ‘big bang’ accession of 10 new member states also became clear. The intensity of the
competitiveness of the accession process, with the Commission
’s half yearly monitoring reports implicitly looking for grounds to differentiate
between front-runners and laggards, was so strong that all arrived at the
finishing line bunched closely together, to the point that there could be no
discrimination between the candidates in the final political judgement. This
even took the EU itself by surprise. Initially the
‘
regatta’ image was used, with 12 competitors sailing forth on accession negotiations
together, with the expectation and even the (diplomatically unspoken) hope that
the sorting process would leave the EU obliged to accept a less enormous
expansion all in one go. In the end it was more like the
‘Tour de France’, with a dense pack of 10 arriving all together.
In the second category are the remaining accession candidates. Only Bulgaria and
Romania could not keep up with the pack. However they have not given up.
According to the data Bulgaria and Romania have been trending down from almost
4 to almost 3, becoming semi-consolidated democracies. The EU has agreed to a
2007 target accession date, thus sharpening the edge of the conditionality
process. Problems of governance remain pervasive in Romania, to the point that
early in 2004 negative evaluations in the European Parliament began to open up
the question whether Romania might be detached from Bulgaria and miss the 2007
target date. The Romanian government was stung into action, removing several
ministers and adopting a huge number of decisions to attempt to improve its
score. Romania may be back on track
– it will be for the EU to decide officially at the end of 2004 whether to
confirm the 2007 accession date.
At this point Croatia enters the stage as a new candidate for accession negotiations. Its democracy score has been improving steadily from an awful starting point under the Tudjman regime, whose ethnic cleansing of Serbs reciprocated Milosevic ’s genocidal assaults against Croats, Bosniacs and Kosovars. The new Croatia wants to accede to the EU as fast as possible. It has understood that all the Copenhagen criteria have to be fulfilled without delay, starting by handing over indicted war criminals to The Hague, where they will join Milosevic. Although this is the most difficult pill for Croatian nationalists to swallow, it turns out that only Tudjman ’s successor to the leadership of the HDZ party, Prime Minister Sanader, has the political legitimacy to do just this. Croatia is trying to accelerate, and to join Bulgaria and Romania in 2007. This is surely too fast, yet the leverage of EU conditionality is now of overriding strength.
Croatia also now enjoys a special conditionality bonus from the EU, by
positioning itself as a model case for the still politically equivocal Belgrade
to take notice of. The EU now says openly and explicitly that it has put
Croatia onto a fast track to serve as a credible incentive to Serbia and others
in the Balkans, for them to get the message too. The same conditionality is
being applied in one go, both explicitly and directly to Croatia, but
indirectly to Serbia and the others. It seems that even this indirect
conditionality has been having some effect, with the election of a new
President of Serbia in July 2004, which was a very hard contest between a
radical Serb nationalist versus a pro-European democrat. The EU intervened very
clearly in the election campaigning, calling upon the Serb people to understand
that one choice would bring them closer to Europe and the other would leave
them isolated. This is case study material for researchers into the often
elusive phenomenon of domino effects
– we return to EU conditionality in the Balkans in more detail below, together
with the case of Turkey.
Our third category consists of the remaining Balkan states and entities that are
not yet accepted as accession candidates by the EU, but do have officially
acknowledged
‘perspectives of full membership’ in the long run, and are partners in the EU in preparing and executing
Stabilisation and Association Agreements (SAA), which involve a spe-cific
conditionality method. The SAA process is a derivative of the accession
negotiation process, but with less demanding criteria, involving a large
landscape of political, economic and increasingly also security policies. We
shall go into the detail in the next section, since there are
interesting variants here, both in the nature of the political conditionality
adopted, and the issues of co-ordination with the US. The Freedom House
scorecard shows a gradually improving record, with the group average trending
down from 4.38 to 3.92 in the period 1997 to 2003. The story is one of
increasing convergence on democratic norms from the end of the authoritarian
Milosevic regime, but through war into the protectorate regimes from Bosnia and
Kosovo, and with struggles to become functioning democracies in Serbia,
Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia. The general story becomes recognisably one of
Europeanisation underway, albeit from a very rough start.
Our fourth category consists of the European CIS states, all except Belarus
members of the Council of Europe, but which as a group exhibit some reversal of
the process of democratic reform. From the Freedom House scorecard they started
in 1997 with a better average position of 4.38 than the Balkan SAA states, yet
they have relapsed to an average of 5.04 by 2003, thus entering the category
now of semi-consolidated authoritarian regimes. This is most obviously the case
with Russia, and one may expect next readings there to continue to mark the
Putin regime
’s slide towards increasing authoritarianism. While Lukashenko’s Belarus is in a class of its own among European states as a consoli-dated
authoritarian regime, the other states of the group (Ukraine, Moldova, South
Caucasus) are mainly characterised by absence of progress, and the deepening of
state corruption as the privatisation process
‘progressed’. How-ever this latter group now becomes target states for the EU’s new European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), which puts democracy and human rights
issues up front on the agenda. The ENP may be described as another cousin of
the EU accession process, or a weaker derivative of the SAA model for the
Balkan states. The issue here is whether the balance between obligations and
incentives demanded and offered by the EU will become powerful enough to have a
material impact of reform trends in these states. For the moment the conclusion
would seem to be at best dubious. The states of this group have all been asking
for a long-term perspective of EU membership, which the EU has refused out of
concern of raising premature or totally unrealistic expectations. Yet this may
prove to be precisely the litmus test for how far the workings of the
Europeanisation model can extend. Yet the aspirations of these countries to
have a European future, rather than one of reintegration with a hegemonic
Russia, is fairly clear, so the potential for conditionality leverage exists.
The membership of the Council of Europe for all bar Belarus also means at least
a small mooring, if not quite anchorage, in European democracy. We return to
the work of the European Court of Human Rights for the rule of law later.
The fifth and last category, consisting of the Central Asian states, shows also
a clear picture of reversion to outright authoritarianism. The early
post-Soviet period saw experiments in formal democracy to go with sovereign
independence. But the process never took root. The group average returned by
2003 to 6.15, thus classifying them as consolidated authoritarian regimes,
after some uncertainties over whether these states were in transition towards
democracy or not. The answer for the time is clearly negative. The President of
Turkmenistan apparently has the distinction of having got as close to absolute
authoritarianism as is humanly possible. It is equally clear that the notion of
Europeanisation is alien to these states. How long matters stay like this is
not obvious, but renewed democratising tendencies seem a remote prospect. One
interesting issue for the EU nonetheless is how Turkish accession might affect
this process. Already one can discuss whether the EU and Turkey should combine
forces for foreign policy purposes early in the pre-accession period, for
example to exploit Turkish assets in regions such as Central Asia where there
are cultural affinities[14]. If Turkey becomes so strongly Europeanised, what
message might this come to represent for Central Asians? Turkey
’s pan-Turkic policy experiment in Central Asia in the early 1990s ended in
failure, partly because it was marketed as pan-Turkism, which collided with
these states
’ newly won independence and their wish to retain close links with Russia. A
fully democratised Turkey, integrating with the EU, could present itself
differently in Central Asia. Maybe this becomes an issue for the 2010s.
Consolidated
Democracy
Democracy
Consolidated Authoritarian Regime
The bottom line of the table gives the average score for all thirty countries,
suggesting a picture of the region stuck in transition with steady average
scores of nearly 4. This is a perfect example of nonsensical empiricism. There
is no meaningful story in the average, since it hides two stories, as the three
groups integrating with the EU achieve high or rising scores, whereas the two
other groups of CIS states reveal poor and deteriorating trends. The
‘end of transition’ is indeed the story here; while some are making the grade as real democracies,
others are back into real authoritarianism, with no group left in transition
limbo.
It is not usual these days for cross-country analyses to take the states of the
former Ottoman Empire as a group, but their collective history together was
much longer if not quite so recent as that of the former Soviet Union, to which
we turn later. The former Ottoman Empire is of course of relevance in marking
out one of the major cultural
–religious–historical fault lines on the map of Europe. Dalmatia belonged to the Doge in
Venice, Zagreb to the Austro
–Hungarian Empire, but from Sarajevo and Belgrade on to the East were the
territories of the Sultan in Constantinople. The reshaping of the post-Ottoman
map of Europe is not yet a hundred years old. The EU and the states of the
region, seemingly obeying laws of historical determinism, have quickly seen to
the accession of the former Austro-Hungarian Slovenia and soon next Croatia,
while taking their time over the former Ottoman Empire. Yet the former Ottoman
Empire is undoubtedly now Europeanising faster and more surely than the former
Soviet Union. The mechanisms of European political conditionality are now
compared for four states of this historical region
– Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia-Montenegro and Bosnia.
The current Europeanisation and democratisation of Turkey is the most dramatic movement now on the European frontline[15]. What is
underway is nothing less than a transformation of the nature of the Kemalist
state, which in turn had marked rupture and reform upon the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire. Kemalism got as far as thoroughly secularising and partly
Westernising the new Turkish Republic. In the early post-Second World War
period the formal mechanism of multi-party parliamentary democracy was
established. Yet Turkish democracy did not readily deepen and stabilise. There
were military coups seemingly once a decade, in 1960, 1970 and 1980. There was
pervasive corruption of the strong state and its business links. The failings
of Turkey
’s secular democracy were serious enough to see the rise in the 1990s of the
politics of Islam, thus threatening to overthrow secularism as the first
principle of Turkish politics. There was lingering resentment at the EU that
for refusing to take its long-standing candidacy seriously.
Since the Helsinki decision of 1999 however the Turkish candidacy has been taken
seriously, but conditioned on the Copenhagen political criteria. This has acted
as the catalyst for what Turkish political scientist Fuad Keyman calls the
‘will to civilisation’, which was the original driving force epitomised and led by Kemal Ataturk, and
now sees a renewal of comparable historical importance. This is precisely
because the imperfectly democratic Turkey of the last several decades was found
to be incapable of completing Turkey
’s economic and societal modernisation, to the point of risking degenerating into
Islamism. It was also recognised that Turkey could not achieve this full
Western-standard democratisation without anchorage in the European Union.
Turkey has thus engaged in the most powerfully conceivable process of
sequential conditionalities and reforms with the EU, with six so-called
‘Harmonisation Packages’ of measures ranging from changes in the constitution to detailed policy reforms
in relation to human rights, the role of the military, the quality of the
judiciary and the treatment of minorities (in particular but not only the
Kurds). The last three years have been about sufficient progress towards
meeting the Copenhagen criteria to warrant the opening of accession
negotiations, with a positive decision by the EU expected at the end of 2004.
As and when negotiations begin in 2005 it is expected that the whole agenda of
political and economic reform in line with EU standards will be deepened and
accelerated. But no-one realistically expects full accession for many years,
maybe a decade. The outcome is not a foregone conclusion, as the very recent
(September) political drama on whether to recriminalise adultery has
illustrated. The EU should not be considered to be bluffing. There will have to
be a full democratic transformation of the Turkish state and society for it to
have a chance of EU accession. The Turkish leadership more or less understands
this, and indeed wants the conditionality to be deeply intrusive as long as it
is fair and sincere. The US is in principle most happy to see the EU and Turkey
here seriously at work, although not so many people in Washington seem to
understand the difference between NATO and EU membership, and there comes a
price for this subcontracting arrangement, as Turkey
’s refusal to join the Iraq war showed. Democratising Turkey, as one of Europe’s largest countries, may be compared now to Russia, with its stalled
democratisation. For those inclined towards cultural
–historical essentialism in interpreting aptitude for Europeanisation and
democratisation, Turkey is coming arguably from further away than Russia. But
nowadays it is joining Europe, whereas Russia is both insisting on its
difference from Europe while pretending to be part of it.
Bulgaria became perhaps the most Sovietised of the former communist states of Central and
Eastern Europe, after the Communist regime replaced the independent Kingdom of
Bulgaria of the interwar period, following the centuries of the Ottoman
domination. However Bulgaria in the post-Communist period opted as clearly and
quickly as any other country of Central and Eastern Europe to claim its place
as an EU accession candidate, but needed more time to reach Copenhagen criteria
standards. The Commission
’s first assessment of Bulgaria’s conformity with the Copenhagen criteria in 1997 was generally positive, since
the main mechanisms of parliamentary democracy and government were seen to be
functioning smoothly. However the more the Commission then delved into
governance structures and their legal basis, the more they saw deficiencies.
Four major areas of concern then emerged as the targets of EU conditionality
– reform of the judiciary, reform of public administration, corruption and
treatment of the Roma minority.
For the judiciary the Commission saw deep structural problems, ranging from
excessive immunity from criminal prosecution to the responsibility of judges
for pre-trial investigation. Since there is no EU legal basis for standards in
this area, the task of the Commission prescribing reform was difficult, and a
large leeway was left to the Bulgarian authorities on how to reform. In the
end, nonetheless, important constitutional amendments were made, facilitating
substantial reform. Moreover, the problem of administrative reform could rely
on no EU code or law. Commission criticisms led to a 1998 government Strategy
for building a Modern Administrative System, with subsequent legislation that
was sufficient to get a
satisfecit mark from the Commission. Even more difficult was the corruption problem, since
Bulgaria
’s ranking in the Transparency International Scorecard was quite poor, but not so
much worse than Greece and Italy. Commission pressures produced a national
Anti-Corruption Strategy in 2001, whose real effectiveness is extremely
difficult to assess. Finally, of the minorities: the legacy of the Ottoman
Empire a Turkish minority of 9.4% of the population, has not been a problem,
and their place in Bulgarian society has not been criticised since the
post-Communist government quickly reversed the expulsion of Turks at the end of
the 1980s. However the situation of the Roma minority was severely criticised,
which led to the government
’s adoption of a Framework Programme for Equal Integration of Roma into Bulgarian
Society in 1999, and which was praised by the Commission. The Bulgarian case
may thus be summarised as one where EU political conditionality was very real,
resulting in a delayed Bulgarian accession timetable, where the formal
institutions of democratic governance were not in question, but where the
quality of governance and the rule of law was judged unsatisfactory by the EU
until a set of remedial measures were taken.
While for Turkey and Bulgaria the EU was acting entirely autonomously in
relation to the rest of the international community, in the cases of Bosnia and
Serbia and Montenegro the stories are of sequential co-ordination with the
international community, and in particular the US given its decisive leadership
in the military interventions to stop the war in Bosnia, the ethnic cleansing
in Kosovo, and ultimately to overthrow the Milosevic regime. While there have
been tensions between the EU and US over the former Yugoslavia during the past
decade, the essence is that these have been the most successful examples of EU
–US co-ordination for regime change and democratisation operations in the world.
While these stories are not yet over by any means, they have reached a point
where there is some substance to the model types often discussed
– for the complementarity of US hard power and EU soft power, or of the ‘good cop bad cop’ act (and chief bad cop, Richard Holbrook, could soon be back on the beat).
For Bosnia the political ground rules flow still from the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995,
which guarantees Bosnia
’s international status as a single sovereign state. The EU was party to the
making of this Agreement, but the US (and Richard Holbrook in person) was the
driving force. The High Representative, currently Paddy Ashdown, has huge
powers of political intervention, consistent with the general description of
Bosnia living under an international protectorate regime. However in recent
years a crucial political role by the European Union for the reform and
democratisation of Bosnia has emerged, as the country has joined the SAA
process. In addition Paddy Ashdown now carries a double mandate as EU as well
as International High Representative. The EU
’s role became significant in 2000 with the drawing up by the Commission of a
Roadmap with 18 minimalist conditions for undertaking a Feasibility Study for
the possible negotiation of a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with
Bosnia, which is summarised in Box1.
BOX 1:
Bosnia – European Commission political conditionality for establishing the feasibility of proceeding towards a Stabilisation and Association Agreement
Bosnia – European Commission political conditionality for establishing the feasibility of proceeding towards a Stabilisation and Association Agreement
… initial conditions in the March 2000 Roadmap
• Permanent secretariat for the Presidency and Chair of the Council of Ministers;
• Introduction of rules of procedure in the Parliamentary Assembly;
• Adoption of a Civil Service Law, and a Civil Service Agency;
• Introduction of a single passport;
• Introduction of a State Border Service;
• Ensuring sufficient resources for the functioning of the Constitutional Court;
• Adoption of an Election Law, with election financing from the state budget;
• Adoption of property laws;
• Ensuring adequate conditions for refugee returns;
• Improving the functioning and resources for Human Rights institutions;
• Adoption of Laws on Judicial and Prosecution Services in the entities;
• Implementation of the Public Broadcasting Service.
• Permanent secretariat for the Presidency and Chair of the Council of Ministers;
• Introduction of rules of procedure in the Parliamentary Assembly;
• Adoption of a Civil Service Law, and a Civil Service Agency;
• Introduction of a single passport;
• Introduction of a State Border Service;
• Ensuring sufficient resources for the functioning of the Constitutional Court;
• Adoption of an Election Law, with election financing from the state budget;
• Adoption of property laws;
• Ensuring adequate conditions for refugee returns;
• Improving the functioning and resources for Human Rights institutions;
• Adoption of Laws on Judicial and Prosecution Services in the entities;
• Implementation of the Public Broadcasting Service.
… further conditions in November 2003:
• Full implementation of the Law on the Council of Ministers;
• Ensuring that the new State ministries become properly operational;
• Establishment from 2004 of a consolidated State-level government work plan;
• Development of an Action Plan for public administration reform;
• Ensuring the proper co-ordinating role of the Directorate for European Integration;
• Legislation and implementation on the Refugee Return Fund;
• Legislation for a single High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council;
• Resources for the State Information and Protection Agency, and Ministry of Security;
• Legislation and resources for an independent single public broadcasting system.
• Full implementation of the Law on the Council of Ministers;
• Ensuring that the new State ministries become properly operational;
• Establishment from 2004 of a consolidated State-level government work plan;
• Development of an Action Plan for public administration reform;
• Ensuring the proper co-ordinating role of the Directorate for European Integration;
• Legislation and implementation on the Refugee Return Fund;
• Legislation for a single High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council;
• Resources for the State Information and Protection Agency, and Ministry of Security;
• Legislation and resources for an independent single public broadcasting system.
When devising the Roadmap, the objective of the Commission was minimalist – to put the European integration issue on the BiH domestic agenda. This early
pre-accession conditionality is in content-linked to the Copenhagen political
criteria for accession. It demands the start of a long-term transformation
process in a number of areas that form an intrinsic part of the democratisation
agenda pursued by the EU in Central and Eastern Europe, with the intent of
building democratic institutions, securing guarantees for the rule of law,
encouraging the creation of a professional public administration, stimulating
the reform of the judiciary etc. Yet, in the Bosnian context the goal of state
building and state consolidation is paramount in all spheres of reform. It took
Bosnia two and a half years to comply. The political conditions set by the
European Commission are not entirely its own initiative or specialty. Some of
the requirements are closely linked to the High Representative
’s own agenda and stem from reform plans he has pursued himself.
In November 2003, the European Commission issued a partially positive
Feasibility Study, acknowledging Bosnia
’s compliance with the 18 conditions from the Roadmap[16]. However the Commission
judged that more was needed to keep the reform and Europeanisation momentum
moving[17]. The Commission then set 16 additional conditions for a fully
positive assessment
– see also Box 1[18]. The EU has also been increasing its pressure for Bosnian
compliance with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
in The Hague, which the US was first in pushing forcefully as part of NATO
conditionality.
While many Roadmap political reforms have resulted from interventions of the
High Representative, there has been a progressive shift towards domestically
driven compliance. However this has not been the case for the expected
co-operation of the Republika Srpska with the Tribunal in The Hague. As a
result the High Representative took the extraordinary step in June 2004 of
sacking 59 leading politicians and officials from their functions in the
Republika Srpska, for which he was wholeheartedly congratulated by the EU and
US.
For Serbia and Montenegro, the core of EU political conditionality has been the re-creation of a common
state between the two republics and the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro
was established in February 2003 as a direct result of EU mediation and
pressure, in the person of Javier Solana
– to the point that local media refer to their new state as ‘Solania’ for short. The Belgrade Agreement brokered by Solana in March 2002 had laid out
the principles for restructuring the relations between the two republics with a
thin common state structure.
The Belgrade Agreement left many institutional and policy questions open, but it
committed the two republics to agreeing on the specific issues in a
Constitutional Charter and an Economic Harmonisation Action Plan, to be worked
out by them in the course of 2002. It laid the foundations for a two-entity
State Union with single international representation and a number of joint
institutions
– a unicameral Parliament, a President, a Ministerial Council and a Court. The
common state layer of government is responsible for defence, foreign affairs,
foreign economic policy, internal economic relations and the protection of
human and minority rights. A joint army, controlled by a common Supreme Defence
Council consisting of three presidents (those of the two republics and of the
State Union), is in charge of the territorial security of the State Union. All
other competences are the exclusive prerogative of the republics.
The Constitutional Charter of the State Union – adop-ted in February 2003, eight months later than the deadline envisaged by
the Belgrade Agreement
– was the result of intensive discussions among politicians and experts in Serbia
and Montenegro about the nature of the common state. The Montenegrin side
maintained that this was a union of two sovereign States in which authority
rested with the republican governments and decision-making at central level was
limited to co-ordination with the consent of the republics
’ authorities. The Serbian side preferred a federation in which decision-making
power for certain policy areas resided with the central authorities and there
was a clear division of competences between the federal and republican levels
of government.
EU standards and EU integration are the key reference points in defining the
main goals of the State Union. In addition to respect for human rights, the
promotion of rule of law and the introduction of a market economy, Article 3 of
the Constitutional Charter defines the raison d
’être of the State Union as “integration in European structures, the European Union in particular;
harmonisation of its legislation and practices with European and international
standards; and establishment and insurance of an unhindered operation of the
common market on its territory through the co-ordination and harmonisation of
the economic systems of the member states in line with the principles and
standards of the European Union.
”
The two parties agreed to a transition period of three years, after which there
could be recourse to legal procedures for possible secession from the Union,
which would be dissolved. Solana reluctantly approved this with his signature
under the Belgrade Agreement. Solana did make this important concession to the
Montenegrin side, which indicated his priority in getting a political deal, at
the risk of putting in place an unsustainable institutional structure.
Solana’s mediation was a solo act, but one fully supported by the rest of the
international community. The EU
’s incentive of membership in the long run was the main leverage factor bearing
upon the negotiation strategies of the two principal parties. The US abstained
from direct participation in the process, was relieved to see the EU taking
this more active role in the former Yugoslavia, and wanted it to succeed.
Space does not permit us to go at any length into the cases of Macedonia and
Kosovo, which are also rich in case study material. In Macedonia Solana was
again the main international actor, helping broker a new constitution that
better embedded the rights of the Albanian minority, with support from a first
military mission by the EU, taking over from NATO in 2003. The Kosovo case
bears some comparison with that of Bosnia, by virtue of its international
protectorate regime, born of US military intervention, but with the EU largly
taking responsibility for the post-war state building process. However both the
EU and US remain stuck in a state of dangerous uncertainty over how to handle
the final status question, with a renewed outbreak of inter-communal violence
in the Spring of 2004 warning that the status quo is not sustainable.
The general conclusion can nonetheless be that Europeanisation is at work in
these states of the former Ottoman Empire. It is a rough process, but it seems
to be working.
The decline of Russian semi-democracy. So much is being written about trends towards renewed authoritarianism in Russia
that we will not here give any detailed description. The litany of Western
criticisms is familiar: lack of effective parliamentary opposition parties,
lack of effective electoral competition for the presidency, increasing state
control or influence over the media, lack of transparency and independence in
the rule of law (Khodorkovsky case), etc.
Yet Putin’s presidential regime manifestly enjoys public legitimacy, and the demise of
political personalities deemed to be truly democratic by Western observers is
devastating. Opinion polls are consistently confirming the results of the
presidential election of the spring of 2004. Putin has continued to command an
overwhelming majority support. The next three most popular politicians are the
unreconstructed Communists Kharitanov and Zyuganov, and the ultra-nationalist
court jester figure of Zhirinovsky (all under 10%). The ranking democrats
Khakamada and Yavlinsky are humiliatingly down to 2% or 1% support ratings.
What do Russians think they are doing politically? One interpretation is that
Russians are not only accustomed to strong personalised leadership from the
Tsars to the Communists, but have also observed the perils of chaotic democracy
with weak leadership. The Russia of President Yeltsin was perceived to be
risking political disintegration at the level of the regions, and the manifest
chaos in the government had become laughable at times, to the point of loss of
national pride. Sergei Ivanov, head of the Russian National Security Council,
recently interviewed by a Western journalist about perceived failings in
Russian democ-racy, answered:
“You must be talking about your model, your idea of Western democracy, but if
Western democracy exists, there should be Eastern and Southern democracies.
”
More explicit and analytical is Ivan Ivanov, former deputy foreign minister, who
has offered a vivid Russian self-perception in relation to the processes of
European integration.
“Our country is not in need of affiliation with the EU. This would entail loss of
its unique Euro-Asian specifics, the role of the centre of attraction of the
reintegration of the CIS, independence in foreign economic and defence
policies, and complete restructuring (once more) of all Russian statehood based
on the requirements of the European Union. Finally, great powers (and it is too
soon to abandon calling ourselves such) do not dissolve in integration unions
– they create them around themselves.”
To say the least, Russia is not yearning to attach itself to the Europeanisation
train. In response the EU is itself discouraged or confused about whether it
should try to get leverage on Russian political and human rights tendencies.
The EU understands that the kind of intrusive political conditionality it is
engaged upon in much of the European periphery cannot work against the
political current. In the last year there were revealing episodes with Russia,
in which the EU institutions and national leaders tried to define their
position on Russian politics. There was the now notorious Italian Presidency of
the EU in the second half of 2003, which saw Prime Minister Berlusconi at a
summit press conference with President Putin volunteering to serve as Putin
’s advocate in response to critical questions about Chechnya. The European
Commission, supported certainly by a good number of member states, followed a
few months later with a policy paper proposing a return to order by the EU as a
whole, with due emphasis on values and principles of democracy and human rights
in its dealing with Russia. As soon as the EU Council of Foreign Ministers had
broadly endorsed such a position, President Chirac made a speech the day after
recommending that the EU should show more respect towards Russia. Here the EU
was putting itself by default in virtual alliance with President Bush, whose
position on Russia and Chechnya was, as ever, defined through the prism of the
‘war on terror’. “Terrrorists are the enemy wherever, from Al Qaida to Chechnya, and the enemies
of terrorism are my allies.
” Thus President Putin has had a not uncomfortable ride in international
relations even with respect to the manifest, sustained and large-scale abuses
of human rights by his security forces in Chechnya, let alone for progressive
withering of Russian democracy.
A historian of Russian philosophy, seeking to take a longer view of these
tendencies, recently wrote in terms that were still entirely consistent with
Ivanov
’s above[19]:
“Russia is not an enigma. Against the background of the Russian Idea, Putin’s increasing authoritarianism is no mystery; nor is its acceptability to most
Russians. Russia has a strong need to believe it is morally right to hold out
against total westernisation. National pride is not only, not even largely,
built on military strength. Moral self-belief is the key.
“Russia can probably now look to a longer period of stability precisely because
it has re-established an official national discourse that Russians feel at home
with. Putin
’s authority has been boosted by unprecedented economic growth, but it is also
rooted in the moral tradition
– moral as Russians understand it – he has helped revive.”
Our own inclination is still to view Russia as an enigma, in the sense that
profound changes in politics there seem to be constantly happening and
constantly unpredictable. While the above quotations have Russia installed
solidly in its role of the not-so-democratic
‘other’, a contrary view is that Putin’s present ascendancy will weaken as his personal rule fails to solve terrible
problems, first of all that of Chechnya. At present the Chechnyan tragedy is
poison for Russian democracy, as loyalty to the war against terror suppresses
opposition voices, Russian society becomes even more intolerant towards its
Caucasian and Islamic minorities, and abuses of human rights by Russian
security forces go unchecked by the judiciary. In this sense Dmitri Trenin is
arguing that Chechnya will determine the future of Russian democracy[20], and
indeed for the time being more violence from Chechnya means less democracy for
Russia. Others are arguing, for example Anders Aslund[21], that Putin
’s second term is going to run into big trouble, with falling popular support,
and that the very recent aggravation of Chechnyan suicide bombing and
hostage-taking will lead to the realisation that his policies and indeed regime
are not working. This could lead to a swing in the pendulum back in favour of a
more democratic regime, Latin-American style. Who knows?
It may be that the EU will be part of the background to the next tendencies in
Russia. For the moment Russia plays the part of being above the EU
’s Neighbourhood Policy and its sermonising about democracy and human rights. But
if the other CIS countries of the now overlapping near abroads turn
increasingly towards Europe, a message will begin to sink into the internal
debate of the governmental elite about their geo-political attitudes. The
people for their part may be steadily normalising, westernising, globalising
and Europeanising in their attitudes. However here it becomes important whether
the enlarging EU of 25 to 30 member states, shows it can still function and
indeed build up its political, economic and foreign policy strengths, and in
particular develop a real neighbourhood policy.
The EU’s new neighbours. The essential point here is that the present political regimes of Ukraine,
Moldova, Georgia and Armenia may be potentially fluid, in the direction of
renewed moves towards democratic and governance reform. All these states have
fallen into a condition of deeply corrupted democracy, with linkages between
newly privatised ownership structures in the economy and the interests of the
political leaderships. The new political economy of these states has created
vicious circles of resistance to economic and political reform. But this is not
the same type of resistance or disinterest in democracy observed in Russia. If
Russian non-democracy is supported by the politics of difference and identity
compared to Western Europe, there is no such antibody in the system of these
other European CIS states. On the contrary Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia and
Armenia are all asking the EU for a
‘perspective’ membership in the long term. While Russia has a powerful geo-political position
(especially energy and military aspects) in its near abroad, it has no
normative political appeal for its neighbours. On the contrary, the more Russia
makes non-democracy part of its politics of difference and identity, the more
its neighbours want Europeanisation.
The Georgian ‘rose revolution’ is one example from the last year. This signalled some salient factors. Poorly
performing corrupt democracies in the Russian near abroad may resist collapse
for a while because of certain political equilibrium factors already referred
to, but when they do collapse the reference becomes Europe, meaning the EU. A
related factor was the US
–EU interrelation in the Saakashvili regime change. US diplomacy was certainly by
far the most active in the run-up to the overthrow of Shervarnadse. Yet when
his moment of triumph came, Saakashvili thanked Secretary of State Powell, and
waved the EU flag. European integration is a distant but conceivable prospect;
integration with the US is not. Saakashvili became instantly the darling of the
West, his Europeanising credentials boosted by his Dutch wife, and choice of a
French diplomat (of Georgian origin) as his foreign minister. His credibility
was enhanced when he pulled off without bloodshed the collapse of the Abashidse
local dictatorship in Ajara. The virus of popular uprising against rotten
leadership was spreading. But at the time of writing his attempt to move on
into regaining secessionist Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia, presumably hoping
for the virus to spread there too, seems now to encounter firmer resistance
from the local leaderships that enjoy explicit backing, and indeed protection,
from Russia[22].
There is an Armenian analogue waiting to happen. The current regime there is one
of the most egregious examples of the corrupted democracy equilibrium, in which
the business interests and monopolistic controls of the ruling class stifle all
chances of true economic reform and re-naissance. Impoverished Armenia, holding
on to Nagorno Karabak and other Azeri territories, is desperately dependent on
US diaspora money and Russian security guarantees. Yet the common perception is
that neither the US nor Russia is their nation
’s future, except for the emigrants. “Europe is the only light at the end of the tunnel”, as an Armenian commentator said recently. A cleaning-up of Armenian democracy
is indispensable for economic recovery. This is why the potential of European
Neighbourhood Policy here too is considerable.
For Moldova the Europeanising perspective seems inevitable, given their
geographic and cultural
–linguistic proximity to Romania, which could accede to the EU in a few years
time. Since most Romanian-speaking Moldovans can obtain Romanian citizenship,
they will have access also to EU citizenship. A substantial proportion of the
population has already emigrated to Western Europe. If Moldova does not improve
its domestic governance and economic performance in the next few years, a
further catastrophic emigration seems inevitable. The people will be voting
with their feet. There is even the conceivable scenario of Moldova at some
point after Romania
’s accession returning to the idea of re-unifying with Romania in a common state,
drawing on the precedent of the DDR acceding to the EU automatically upon
German re-unification. This would be a special model for the weak state to
secure anchorage into the EU, without having passed the Copenhagen criteria and
undergone the usual negotiation process. The EU begins to apply its politically
conventional Neighbourhood Policy in Moldova. The incentives provided under
this policy may well be insufficient to motivate and drive Moldova
’s Europeanisation. In which case a different integration logic will take over,
for example the politically incorrect DDR model idea. This would trigger some
final solution to the annoying little Transdniestria problem, either for it to
confirm a vocation as a mini-Russian protectorate, for which there are no
democracy conditions, or for it too to vote with its feet into Europe.
This leaves Ukraine as the biggest open question for democracy in Europe.
President Kuchma
’s reputation has not been able to recover from the lurid Gongadze affair. His
succession will be decided in an election in October 2004, in a contest between
Yushenko, who is styled as a Westerniser and Europeaniser, versus Yanukovitch,
who belongs to the new oligarch class from Donetsk. Ukraine is the interesting
question, in the sense that the other two big non-EU states today, Russia and
Turkey, point in clearly opposite directions. One is definitely not a candidate
for the EU and not trying to become a Western democracy; the other is decidedly
the reverse on both accounts. Where does Ukraine position itself? Maybe an
eternal buffer zone and compromise between Russia and the EU, matching its
internal regional divisions of interest and culture? Maybe the perpetual player
of the game of playing one off against the other? It does seem clear that
Ukrainian independent statehood is established. The resistances to renewed
union with Russia seem strong. It is now the direct neighbour of the EU, and it
has already suffered some negative consequences of exclusion, notably visa
restrictions on cross-border movements. So maybe the
‘eternal compromise’ will not be so sustainable in due course. Could Ukraine under new leadership
put itself into a modernisation and democratisation drive with the same energy
as Turkey, but without a credible incentive of long-term EU accession? This
looks unlikely today, but the impact of the Polish and Baltic accession to the
EU may build up and help turn the trend, especially if Turkey also sustains its
convergence on EU norms.
A smaller but still interesting question for the future is what will happen in
Belarus after Lukashenko
’s departure some day. Belarus is sufficiently small that all possibilities seem
open, from becoming functionally integrated with Russia, with some kind of
special association status, through to the opposite of submitting a clear
application for EU membership, volunteering to embark on the pre-accession
conditionality and harmonisation process. The latter course would of course
mean full Europeanisation politically, and the Polish and Baltic models would
be there to provide vivid inspiration. If the Ukrainian model might more likely
remain in the compromise mode, Belarus could more easily
– because it is smaller, more unified and potentially agile – make a categorical choice.
The last footnote here belongs to Azerbaijan, whose political regime under the
Aliev dynasty seems to trend more towards the authoritarianism of contemporary
Central Asia, rather than towards the norms of the Council of Europe of which
it is a member. The Central Asian states themselves are now, as noted above,
nowhere on the map even of democratic transition. This is confirming our
underlying argument that the processes of democratisation in the wider European
neighbourhood are obeying something of a cultural
–societal gravity model.
The European Court of Human Rights in the former Soviet Union. In their first years of post-Communist independence all the European CIS states
except Belarus joined the Council of Europe, entailing as conditions that they
subscribe not only to general principles of democracy, but also the precise and
legally binding European Convention on Fundamental Freedoms and Human Rights,
and thence to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg. This has meant at least a toehold, if not anchor, for democracy,
human rights and the rule of law in a permanent European institution. All the
new member States
– Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan – were admitted when they were making their first experiments in democratic
practice. There was at the time a difficult and controversial debate among the
old member States whether these countries met the conditions for membership,
and if not whether they should be admitted on a probationary basis, expecting
that the encouragement factor would prevail, whereas exclusion would be a
recipe for the early collapse of their democratic openings. In the event all
the above states were given the benefit of the doubt, and only Belarus ruled
itself out.
While the continuing monitoring and conditionality of the Council of Europe is
for the general conditions of democracy a loose affair in terms of definitions,
criteria and above all in not being directly legally binding, the reverse holds
on all accounts for the Convention and Court of Human Rights. The new member
States of the Council of Europe stepped quickly into this remarkable mechanism
of supranational jurisdiction, probably with little awareness of what it would
mean. For the reality is that the Convention and Court of Human Rights
represents the highest degree of political and legal integration, which might
normally be expected to be found only as one of the strongest features of the
EU system, and not of a marginal and otherwise weak organisation for regional
co-operation.
Students of the rule of law in transition States may not yet have readily
available a digest of the work of the European Court of Human Rights
(Strasbourg) as it now begins to grapple with cases submitted from the former
Soviet Union states that are now member states of the Council of Europe. There
are time-lags in the process, since the Court cannot accept cases arising
before accession, and domestic remedies have to be exhausted before Strasbourg
can have jurisdiction. Given the dimensions of this new responsibility of the
Court in terms of population and presumed incidence of human right abuses in
this group of States, there has been serious concern that either the Court
would be overwhelmed by an avalanche of cases that it could not possibly
handle, or that the States concerned would refuse to respect its judgments.
For Russia alone 18,500 complaints have been lodged since ratification of the
European Convention on Human Rights by Russia on 5 May 1998. Of these about
9,000 were not admitted on preliminary examination by the panel of three
judges. Another 9,000 have not yet been processed. 270 cases have been
communicated to the Russian Government, showing that the procedure of
admissibility by the Grand Chamber of judges has started. Forty cases have been
accepted by the Grand Chamber for trial, and 10 judgments have been made so
far.
In Annex A we document all 21 cases of final judgements by the Court so far from
these CIS states[23]. These number 10 from Russia, 6 from Moldova, 4 from
Ukraine, and 1 from Georgia. The following statistics show which were the
specific human rights on which the cases were founded[24]:
| Article 3 | Prohibition of torture and degrading treatment | 3 cases |
| Article 5 | Right to liberty (includes conditions of detention) | 5 cases |
| Article 6 | Right to fair trial/hearing/legal certainty | 9 cases |
| Article 8 | Right to respect for private life | 1 case |
| Article 9 | Right to freedom of religion | 1 case |
| Article 10 | Right to freedom of expression | 1 case |
| Article 13 | Right to effective remedy | 3 cases |
| Protocol 1 | Right to protection of private property | 3 cases |
The most recent case of Ilascu and others versus Moldova and Russia is of
special international interest, since it concerns plaintiffs from the
non-recognised secessionist Transdniestria. Mr Ilascu in particular had been
sentenced to death for anti-Soviet activity in 1992, before
Russia’s ratification of the Convention, but the conditions of inhuman detention in
death row continued even until Russia
’s ratification in 1998. Who is responsible for the rule of law in a failed,
unrecognised, secessionist, non-state entity? The Court deemed that Russia was
responsible since their forces had been responsible for the original arrest,
and their continued presence in Transdniestria, in denial of OSCE agreements to
withdraw, had supported the continued existence of the non-recognised regime.
This bears comparison with the Loizdou case in Northern Cyprus, where Turkey as
occupying power in this non-recognised secessionist entity was in multiple
rulings (1995, 96, 98) judged to be responsible for the denial of property
rights to the Greek Cypriot plaintiff. Russia has been ordered to pay 180,000
euros in compensation to Mr Ilascu. The Russian judge in Strasbourg wrote a
lengthy dissenting position, but was overruled by sixteen votes to one.
Consensus or unanimity is not required for the Court
’s judgements, whose acceptance is unconditionally obligatory upon the guilty
party. The Russian foreign ministry issued criticisms of the judgment, but has
not refused to comply.
Six complaints against Russia ‘concerning events in Chechnya’ were declared admissible in January 2003, and the Court will hear these cases
on 14 October 2004. The complaints concern allegations of torture and
extra-judicial executions, and indiscriminate bombing causing loss of life and
destruction of private property[25]. The forthcoming judgments on these cases
will be taken against the background of serious tensions within Russia, and
between Russia and the EU, in the aftermath of the Beslan tragedy of early
September.
What is to be made of these first year’s experience of the Court of Human Rights, which is demanding high compliance
from States that are otherwise either not progressing in terms of the quality
of their democracies, or relapsing either into a semi-failed state or
semi-authoritarian regimes? Pessimistic interpretations would dismiss these few
judged cases as being mere specks of dust compared to the main functioning of
legal institutions in these States. A more optimistic interpretation would be
that this European supreme court for human rights, at the top of the legal
pyramids of each these States, has become a permanent feature of their systems.
It has provided also an institutional and normative basis for judges,
prosecutors and lawyers in these States to value as part of their system. The
case law moreover is all the richer for the multilateral quality of the
Convention and Court, and the 21 cases here documented all become of course
valid case law for all member States. The Court offers to the legal profession
an independent axis for development of the rule of law, and one that cannot be
touched by domestic politicians. Associated training and seminar activities in
Strasbourg are drawing in considerable numbers of legal practitioners, to learn
more deeply about European norms and practices. One extraordinary quality and
chance has been for these new member States to become politically equal owners
of the system, which means that the chances of this foothold for international
standards becoming the anchor in due course should be quite good. By comparison
this is light years ahead of whatever Europe
’s Arab/Islamic neighbours might today be willing to contemplate, for example for
some Arab or Central Asian Convention and Court of Human Rights, or what Latin
and North America might consider together.
We conclude with a handful of principal ideas.
First, the remarkable success of democratisation in much but far from all of
Europe since the beginning of the post-Communist period is undoubtedly linked
to the processes of European integration centred on the EU. The fit between
democratisation and the strength of the EU connection leads to the idea of a
gravity model of democratisation, according to which fast and deep
democratisation is explained to a significant degree by the proximity and
possibility of anchorage and integration with a major world centre of
democracy. Where there are no such gravitational forces the process of
democratisation may still be a universal tendency going with economic and
social advance, but the timing and smoothness of the process may be much longer
and more drawn out, and subject to reverses and huge uncertainties as to
sequencing. Within Europe, while the EU is now the leading driver of
democratisation, overall the US finds it quite easy to encourage this process,
and aid it at critical moments when some extra hard power is needed (e.g. the
Balkans), so here there is complementarity of roles, and no real dispute over
principles or methods. The NATO enlargement process led by the US has also been
perfectly complementary to the EU enlargement processes in reinforcing the
mechanisms of democracy conditionality.
Second, the absence of this integration dimension to the role of the US in the
Americas has meant that the gravity model could not really work in Latin
America, except maybe to a degree in the case of direct neighbour Mexico, with
the OAS remaining a thin international organisation. This also connects to a
wider structural difference in the roles of the EU and US as the two pillars of
world democracy. The US does not have a regional integration dimension largely
because it is such a huge and mature modern state structure, compared to Europe
where the EU is still a collection of integrating states without a hegemonic
power centre. The distinction between internal and external for the US is
clear, all the more so after 11 September, whereas for Europe this distinction
is blurred. Part of the same package is the huge military power of the US, and
limited means of the EU. All this has led to a different culture or philosophy
of democratisation regarding the rest of the world. The EU has been able to
employ extremely intrusive political conditionality as levers to secure
democratic practice, but only in its field of gravity, where the integration
prospect legitimises the conditionality. The US on the other hand seeks to
project its huge power and influence globally. However in the present post-11
September environment this has led to a disastrous mingling of three distinct
matters: democratisation, the war against terror and the axis of evil. In
particular it has seen the US leadership deploy the Pentagon
’s ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq as an intended instrument of democratisation in default for the WMD
rationale, which has had negative consequences for the reputation of the US as
world leader of democratic values.
Third, on the other hand, the European gravity model of democratisation is
itself not without problems. Where does the gravitational pull end, and what
happens in the territories next beyond? An attempted answer to these questions
is seen in the efforts of the enlarged and still further enlarging EU to
develop a neighbourhood policy for its new neighbours. This brings together two
theatres of operation: the CIS states of the former Soviet Union states and the
Arab states of the Mediterranean and Israel.
As regards the former FSU states, Russia now seeks as a matter of foreign policy
priority to reconsolidate the CIS space with its own gravity model, based on
history, military presence and energy geo-economics, as well as disinclination
to follow anything like EU political criteria and conditionality. On the
contrary, exclusion from perspectives of EU accession seems to lead as a matter
of political psychology to wanting to be the
‘other’, which means inter alia being not-so-democratic. The EU’s positive democracy gravity model may then have the unintended effect of
stimulating on the other side of the field a contrary gravity model, actually
stimulating undemocratic practice. Russia
’s power of attraction for its neighbours is nonetheless damaged by lack of
normative appeal and the tragic brutalities of Chechnya, yet still one can
observe the pluses and minuses of the two alternative centres of gravity being
weighed in the discourse of Ukrainian leaders for example.
As regards the Mediterranean countries the EU’s attempt to build on its Barcelona partnership to make a new Neighbourhood
relationship is certainly worth a try. Countries such as Morocco are possibly
showing the way for gradual modernisation and democratisation, encouraged by
close proximity to Europe. The EU hopes to encourage the set of progressive and
moderate Arab states, but the issue of how far or fast political conditionality
can be brought into the process is a highly delicate and as yet unresolved
issue. The Mediterranean countries, together with Turkey as accession
candidate, could conceivably become an increasingly solid bulwark of moderate
and modernising Muslim states that favour the harmony of civilisations. Beyond
this possible bulwark lies the hard core of the problem: Iraq, Iran, Saudi
Arabia and Afghanistan, which (fortunately for us) lie outside the scope of
this paper.
Fourth, and finally, is the big European question. Through its new ‘Neighbourhood Policy’ idea the EU sets out in principle to extend its gravitational field in favour
of democracy and human rights, but without the incentive of accession
perspectives it seems most uncertain whether this can work. This reluctance to
extend further the perspectives for EU enlargement is driven by concern that
the EU itself would become ungovernable, which would in turn destroy the
magnetism of its field of gravity. In this sense the EU may tend to move
towards the US model, which does not offer political integration to its
neighbours. So there may be some kind of equilibrium underlying the world
’s current governance structures, in which the EU and US may remain the only two
major continental centres of democ-racy for longer than our leaders hope. The
other possibility is that Europe will continue to devise further dimensions to
its complex of regional and partly integrative governance structures in its
wider neighbourhood. This would emphasise that Europe does not become a binary
regime in or out of the EU, but one in which European values, policies and
integration dynamics can be extended beyond the core, maybe on into the
Arab/Islamic neighbourhood, starting with the moderate Mediterranean Arab
states, leading on later to a positive civilisational influence at some stage
in the more difficult parts of the Greater Middle East.
Annex:
Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights – cases involving CIS member states of the Council of Europe.
Judgments of the European Court of Human Rights – cases involving CIS member states of the Council of Europe.
Russia
1. Gusinskiy v. Russia (19.05.2004)
Mr Gusinskiy, a Russian and Israeli national, was arrested on 13 June on
suspicion that he had fraudulently transferred broadcasting functions from a
state-owned company to a private one. ECHR held that Mr Gusinskiy
’s detention was in breach of the Amnesty Act which gives him protection against
imprisonment. ECHR found that the Russian Code of Criminal Procedure on
detention does not attain the quality of law requirements in Article 5 (right
to liberty and security) of the European Convention on Human Rights. No
non-pecuniary damage was awarded by the Court.
2. Plaksin v. Russia (29.04.2004)
ECHR awarded victory and 2,500 euros for non-pecuniary damage to Mr Plaksin, a
Russian national, born in 1965. The applicant sued the Russian government over
the length of the civil proceedings he brought after a fire in his flat left
his daughter severely injured and his possessions destroyed. The proceedings
lasted five and a half years and are still pending. Furthermore there was no
court in Russia to complain to about the excessive length of the proceedings.
ECHR held that there had been a violation of Articles 6
§ 1 (right to a hearing within a reasonable time) and 13 (right to an effective
remedy) of the Convention.
3. Kormacheva v. Russia (29.01.2004)
Ms Kormacheva, a Russian national, born in 1952, issued proceedings against a
former employer for the recovery of sums due to her dismissal. ECHR held that
the proceedings which had lasted more than five years were in violation of
Article 6 (right to a trial within a reasonable time) and also in breach of
Article 13 (right to an effective remedy) in that no remedy was available in
Russia which would have enabled the applicant to enforce her right to a hearing
within a reasonable time. ECHR awarded the applicant 3,000 euros for
non-pecuniary damage.
4. Rakevich v. Russia (28.10.2003)
The applicant, Ms Rakevich, a Russian national, born in 1961, was taken to a
psychiatric hospital in September 1999. Two days later the medical commission
diagnosed her as suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and applied for the
court order authorising her detention. The matter came before the court 40 days
later, instead of five days as required by law. ECHR held that there was a
violation of Article 5
§§ 1, 4 (right to liberty and security) and awarded the applicant 3,000 euros for
non-pecuniary measures.
5. Timofeyev v. Russia (23.10.2003)
ECHR held that there had been a violation of Article 6 § 1 (right to fair trial) of the Convention and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1
(protection of property) in the case of Mr Timofeyev, a Russian national, born
in 1948. The applicant tried to recover his confiscated property after unlawful
persecution by the State in 1981 for dissemination of anti-Soviet propaganda.
The three-year delay in the execution of the final judgment of 8 December 1998
was due to the intervention of the supervisory-review authorities, and lack of
clarity in the judgment.
6. Ryabykh v. Russia (24.07.2003)
In 1998 Ms Ryabykh, a Russian national, born in 1949, sued the Savings Bank of
Russia and the State for the drop in value of her personal savings after
economic reforms in 1991. The District Court awarded her 133,936 roubles. This
judgment was set aside by the Regional Court. The applicant was neither
informed that her claims had been dismissed nor invited to attend the hearing.
ECHR found that supervisory-review procedure had infringed the principle of
legal certainty and the applicant
’s right to a fair hearing under Article 6 § 1 of the Convention.
7. Smirnova v. Russia (24.07.2003)
On 5 February 1993 criminal proceedings were brought against two Russian
nationals, Yelena Smirnova and Irina Smirnova, twin sisters born in 1967, on
suspicion of having defrauded a Moscow bank by obtaining a loan on false
pretences. ECHR held that repeated detention in the course of one criminal
investigation, and the length of the proceedings (over nine years in case of
Elena Smirnova) amounted to a violation of Articls 5 (right to liberty and
security) and 6 (right to a fair trial within a reasonable time). Yelena
Smirnova
’s national identity paper (‘internal passport’) was taken away from her when she was arrested in 1995 and withheld over four
years. There had accordingly been a violation of Article 8 (right to respect
for private life). ECHR awarded the first applicant 3,500 euros ) and the
second applicant 2,000 euros for non-pecuniary damage.
8. Posokhov v. Russia (04.03.2003)
On 22 May 2000 Mr Posokhov, a Russian national, born in 1966, who worked for
Taganrog Customs Board, was held guilty in criminal proceedings brought against
him for being an accessory in the avoidance of customs duties and of abuse of
office. ECHR held that there had been a violation of Article 6
§ 1 (right to fair hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal) of the
Convention. The applicant was convicted by a court composed with no legal
grounds for the participation of the two lay judges in the administration of
justice on the day of the trial.
9. Kalashnikov v. Russia (15.07.2002)
Mr Kalashnikov, a Russian national, born in 1955, a president of the Northeast
Commercial Bank in 1995, was charged with embezzlement. ECHR found that the
applicant
’s conditions of detention, in particular the severely overcrowded and
insalubrious environment (there was 0.9-1.9 m of space per inmate in the cell)
and its detrimental effect on the applicant
’s health, had been in violation of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or
degrading treatment) of the Convention. The period spent by the applicant in
detention pending trial (over four years) exceeded a
“reasonable time”. The applicant was awarded 5,000 euros by ECHR for non-pecuniary damage and
3,000 euros for costs and expenses.
10. Burdov v. Russia (07.05.2002) First judgment concerning Russia
In 1986–7 Mr Burdov, a Russian national, took part in emergency operations at the site
of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in and, as a result, suffered from extensive
exposure to radioactive emissions. In 1991 he was awarded compensation by the
State. Mr Burdov sued the Russian government in 2000 over its failure for years
to enforce the national court decision to pay him the compensation. ECHR held
that Article 6
§ 1 (right to a fair trial) and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 (protection of
property) were violated.
Moldova
1. Ilascu and Others v. Moldova and Russia (08.07.2004)
The applicants, all Moldovan nationals at the time of application, were arrested
in 1992 and accused of anti-Soviet activities and combating the government of
the State of Transdniestria, and were also charged with two murders. Mr Ilascu
was sentenced to death, while the applicants Lesco, Ivantoc and Petrov-Popa
were sentenced to terms of 12 to 15 years
’ imprisonment. ECHR ruled that both states Moldova and Russia are held
responsible in violation of Article 3 (prohibition of torture and inhuman or
degrading treatment), excluding Moldova in the case of Ilescu, as well as
Article 5 (right to liberty and security) and Article 34 (right of individual
petition). ECHR established a link of responsibility of Russia for the
applicants
’ fate on the grounds that the Russian authorities have contributed both
militarily and politically to the creation of a separatist regime in
Transdniestria. Having failed to withdraw its army from the region in
accordance with 1999 and 2001 OSCE summit decisions, Russia virtually assures
the survival of the Transdniestria regime. Fines between 120,000 to 180,000
euros have to be paid by Russia to all the applicants, and of 60,000 euros by
Moldova to some of them.
2. Luntre and Others v. Moldova, Pasteli and Others v. Moldova, Sîrbu and Others v. Moldova (15.06.2004)
The applicants, all Moldovan nationals, living in the Republic of Moldova,
complained about the non-enforcement of various judgments (for between 20
months and five and a half years) due to lack of State funds. ECHR did not
recognise the lack of funds as an excuse for not honouring a judgment. ECHR
held that the Moldovan authorities violated the provisions of Article
6 § 1 (access to a court) and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 (protection of property). Amounts between 700 and 1,000 euros were awarded to
the applicants in respect of non-pecuniary damage.
4. Prodan v. Moldova (18.05.2004)
ECHR held that the Moldovian government’s failure to enforce the national court ruling on restitution to Ms Prodan of
her parent
’s home, nationalised in 1946, had violated Article 6 §1 (right to a fair hearing) of the Convention.The impossibility for the
applicant to obtain the execution of the final judgment had also to be regarded
as an interference with her rights to peaceful enjoyment of her possessions
guaranteed by Article 1 of Protocol No. 1. ECHR awarded the applicant 14,000
euros for pecuniary and non-pecuniary damage.
5. Amihalachioaie v. Moldova (20.04.2004)
In 2000 Mr Amihalachioaie, a Moldovan national, born in 1949, criticised the
decision of the Constitutional Court in an interview published in the Economic
Analysis journal. The Constitutional Court imposed on the applicant an
administrative fine of 36 euros for being disrespectful towards it. ECHR held
that there had not been a
“pressing social need” to restrict Mr Amihalachioaie’s right to freedom of expression, guaranteed under Article 10 of the Convention,
and that the domestic authorities had not provided
“relevant and sufficient” grounds justifying the interference.
6. Metropolitan Church of Bessarabia and Others v. Moldova (13.12.2001)
ECHR held that the Moldovan government’s refusal to recognise the Metropolitan Church of Bessarabia constituted
interference with the right of that church and other applicants to freedom of
religion as guaranteed by Article 9
§1 of the Convention. Moreover, the denial of the recognition had deprived the
applicants right of access to a court to defend their rights and protect their
property, given that only denominations recognised by the State enjoy legal
protection.
Ukraine
1. Merit v. Ukraine (30.03.2004)
The applicant, Sam Merit, an Israeli national, born in 1939, is the main owner
of an enterprise registered in Ukraine. In 1997 a criminal investigation was
opened against him on charges of smuggling and fraud. ECHR held that the
Ukrainian government had violated Article 6
§ 1 (right to a fair trial within a reasonable length of time) and Article 13
(right to an effective remedy). The criminal proceedings lodged against Mr
Merit have lasted more than six years and are still pending. ECHR awarded the
applicant 2,500 euros for non-pecuniary damage and 1,500 euros for costs.
2. Naumenko v. Ukraine (10.02.2004)
The applicant, Mr Naumenko, a Ukrainian national, born in 1964, is currently
serving a life sentence in Zhytomyr Prison. In 1996 the Kharkiv Regional Court
convicted him of two counts of murder, one attempt to murder and one count of
rape. ECHR held that there was no violation of Article 3 (prohibition of
torture or inhuman or degrading treatment) and Article 13 (right to an
effective remedy) of the Convention in connection with the complaints about
ill-treatment and torture lodged by Mr Naumenko.
3. Poltoratskiy, Kuznetsov, Nazarenko, Dankevich, Aliev, and Khokhlich v.
Ukraine (29.04.2003)
The applicants were convicted of murder and attempted of murder and were
sentenced to death. A moratorium on executions was declared on 11 March 1997
and the death penalty was abolished on 22 February 2000. ECHR held that in all
cases (excluding Aliev) there was violation of Article 3 (prohibition of
inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment) of the Convention as regards the
conditions of detention to which the applicants had been subjected on death
row. ECHR awarded the applicants in each of the cases 2,000 euros for
non-pecuniary damage.
4. Kaysin and Others v. Ukraine (03.05.2001)
A friendly settlement was reached over a case brought to ECHR by the 13
applicants, all Ukrainian nationals, who worked for a state-owned company and
complained about the non-execution of a domestic court ruling recognising their
right to an invalidity pension. The Ukrainian Government has agreed to pay each
applicant the equivalent of the invalidity pension plus 5,000 Ukrainian hryvnas
in compensation.
Georgia
1. Assanidze v. Georgia (03.04.2004)
In 1994 Mr Assanidze, a Georgian national, a former mayor of Batumi and a member of the Ajarian Supreme Council, was accused of illegal financial dealings, and of unlawfully possessing and handling firearms. Later in 2000 he was accused of kidnapping. In both cases Mr Assanidze was acquitted, but he still remains in custody. ECHR held that there had been a violation of Article 5 § 1 (right to liberty and security) of the Convention on the account of the applicant ’s detention three years after having been acquitted.
[1] The authors are respectively Senior Research Fellow and Research Fellow at
the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), Brussels; they thank Senem Aydin
and Natalia Loguinova for their valuable collaboration.
[2] Sam Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratisation in the Late Twentieth
Century, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991; Guillermo O
’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Regimes:
Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies,
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
[3] Larry Diamond, “Is the Third Wave Over?”, Journal of Democracy, 7.3, 1996; Thomas Caruthers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm”, Journal of Democracy, 13.1, 2002.
[4] The gravity model of trade theory is capable of formal specification and
econometric estimation as for example, done for European transition countries
in Daniel Gros and Alfred Steinherr, Economic Transition in Central and Eastern
Europe, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
[5] These 21 states include all that have been acceding or have perspectives of
acceding to the EU from initial conditions that were not fully democratic.
[7] For a review of these efforts see Robert Pastor, “A Community of Democracies in the Americas – Instilling Substance into a Wondrous Phrase”, Canadian Foreign Policy, vol 10, no 3, 2003.
[9] Quotation from G. Noutcheva, N. Tocci, T. Kovziridze et al., Europeanisation
and Conflict Resolution: Theories and Paradigms, in Chapter 2 of B. Coppieters,
M. Emerson et al., op.cit.
[14]M. Emerson and N. Tocci, “Turkey as Bridgehead and Spearhead – Integrating EU and Turkish Foreign Policy”, CEPS EU-Turkey Working Papers, No 1, August 2004.
[15] This section on Turkey draws heavily on Fuad Keyman and Senem Aydin, “European Integration and the Transformation of Turkish democracy”, CEPS EU-Turkey Working Papers, No 2, August 2004, available at www.ceps.be.
[19] Lesley Chamberlain, “Holding a key to the Otherland”, Financial Times, 17-18 July 2004, based on the book Motherland: A
Philosophical History of Russia, Atlantic Books, 2004.
[22] In particular his threat in August 2004 to sink any ship, maybe carrying
Russian tourists, trying to break the Georgia blockade of Sukhumi harbour,
seems to have been a major tactical mistake. It immediately provoked Russian
parliamentarian Vladimir Zhirinovsky to hire a ship in the Black Sea and head
for Sukhumi with a boat load of Russian political figures and journalists.
Georgia did not dare sink his ship, and Zhirinovsky received a hero
’s welcome.