Activism, national security and foreign money
Russia has some law about that, don't they? Should we, too?
The other day I came across this tweet by Damir Marusic of the Wisdom of Crowds blog.
It was poignant to see it spelled out like this. No less by someone who thinks about the big questions of democracy, freedom, sovereignty, national security and foreign policy and has his finger on the pulse of the DC blob.
Because for years, Russia and other authoritarian states faced loud accusations from the West for their suspicion of civil society and cracking down on foreign funding for NGOs . And because all that time I was thinking “what would we do if the table was turned, if our activists got funding from Russia, Iran, China, or even just the French?” But also because while I share Marusic’s discomfort with implications for sovereignty and national security, I strongly disagree with his prescription that activists should be profiled under a presumption of guilt. That way lie paranoia, arbitrary rule and abuse.
Let me take a quick step back. A decade ago, Russia introduced its notorious “foreign agent” law, which does something very close to what Marusic suggests: if you’re a non-profit and you do something that could be considered “political” AND you receive foreign funding, you get audited and might be forced to register as a “foreign agent”.
Cue massive outrage, by Russian activists and the foreign organizations and governments that fund them. To give them credit, Russian civil society (to be precise, the narrow, but disproportionately vocal segment that owes its existence to foreign funding) put up one hell of a fight - in the courts, in the media, in international fora, through increasingly contorted evasive maneuvers for accepting foreign funding. For a decade, these often arbitrary, burdensome and disruptive investigations launched under the foreign agent law have been a constant in the life and work of practically all my friends and colleagues in Russia, and therefore in my life, too.
Russia is hardly the only country to have adopted such laws. If anything, it has become a global trend. Western grant-makers, foreign aid agencies and international organizations eventually came up with a melodramatic name for it: “the shrinking space” (as if it had previously been unheard of that inconvenient activists face repression). Grant-makers did what only they could do, they started throwing new grants at the fight against this problem. This allowed a number of Russian human rights organizations to dedicate much or all of their work to litigating cases under the foreign agent law.
Globally, human rights institutions started to equate NGOs’ ability to receive foreign funding with freedom of association. Most recently, in June 2022, the European Court of Human Rights ruled for 73 Russian civil society organizations that their right to freedom of association had indeed been violated by the “foreign agent” law. Once again, this feels poignant, because the ruling came three months after Russia withdrew from the jurisdiction of the court, in the aftermath of its invasion of Ukraine (and nine years after the application was filed).
All along, I was uncomfortable with the reading that freedom of association means NGOs should be free to receive funding from abroad, including from foreign governments, with little or no scrutiny, let alone interference. I just didn’t buy that any and all states would or should accept this. Powerful Western states own major stakes in other countries’ civil societies via their foreign aid programs, and they view this as the natural order of things. But surely, they would never tolerate it the other way around. Whenever I heard “foreign grants are freedom of association” at human rights conferences, I used to think “what if the Chinese funded the ACLU, or the Russians gave money to BLM, would the US accept that, serenely, as freedom of association?” I don’t think I ever said that aloud. In my circles - in the West and in Russia - it would be considered dangerous heresy. Besides, until recently it was largely hypothetical.
It may no longer be so hypothetical today, as “hybrid war” thinking is rising fast.
Money is speech, we were told in Citizens United, but many find that ruling so disastrous precisely because money can be much more powerful than just speech. A Swedish mid-level official might criticize some post-Soviet country’s legislation on women’s rights and it would hardly register, but when that same mid-level official approves grants worth millions of euros to that country’s NGOs to lobby for different laws, significant political shifts might take place. Sovereignty, porous as it may be due to supranational norms, globalized communications and networks, is still a thing. It’s indispensable for statehood and the basic building block of national security.
We can continue to arch our eyebrows when authoritarian and/or developing nations resist foreign funding for their NGOs, and we can keep lecturing them about freedom of association. We can tell ourselves they’re lashing out in bad faith, that they’re not actually concerned about sovereignty, they just don’t want pesky activists challenging their torturing, corrupt, homophobic etc. ways. We can cite that Strasbourg ruling and compile more precedents. We can even keep doing all that for a good long time, while starting to suspect and crack down on foreign funding for activists at home, and eventually on the activists themselves. Double standards never seem to bother or stop us.
But instead, we could be honest with ourselves and with our competitors and enemies, admit that money is powerful and rarely comes without strings attached and hammer out norms that apply all around.
At home (for me that’s Europe and the US) we should approach this issue with wisdom, caution and the strictest, hair-trigger observance of the rule of law. We should never place under a general suspicion movements whose work touches on national security (which to Americans especially could be virtually anything - starting with Marusic’s example of fracking and LNG, but also activists working on non-proliferation, transparency in military spending, concerns about killer robots, prevention of torture, migrants’ rights and reproductive rights etc). To go down that rabbit hole would be devastating for us.
PS: For the record (and for future, more extensive newsletters), I have been thinking that foreign money is a problem and a liability for civil society in Russia since long before the 2012 foreign agent law. For some other post-Soviet countries even more so. Because foreign money causes organized civil society to drift away from society, become estranged, unmoored, elitist and at the same time precarious, weak and vulnerable. For the last decade, I therefore tried to do what seemed the obvious, sensible thing - help Russian activists raise money at home.
If you’re interested in that, you can read/watch about it here: