Democracy promotion, soaked through with geopolitics
In Georgia, the West's most ambitious and self-enamored democratization project has ended in disruption and bitterness, amidst a region in flames.
Before the October 26 elections in Georgia, I co-authored a policy brief titled “The West and Georgia’s Crisis” for the Quincy Institute, where I am a non-resident fellow. It was to be followed up with some co-authored op-eds, for one of which I drafted the text below. But that never happened because of the US elections, which tends to push other news from the op-ed pages and people’s minds.
Democracy promotion, soaked through with geopolitics
If we zoom out from the Republic of Georgia’s current political upheaval - a hotly contested election, accusations of vote rigging and impetuous, reckless side-taking by some Western governments - we can see these events as the latest crest of a greater, chronic crisis.
Throughout the post-Cold War period, US foreign policy has been run along two vectors - the impulse to democratize other countries and liberalize their political systems, and the desire to dominate in the competition with great powers. In some foreign policy circles, these two strains have long been viewed as one and the same: surely, as societies become democratic, free and prosperous (with our indispensable guidance and resources), they will take our side in geopolitical contests. Or vice versa.
In no part of the world has this dual strategy been pursued with such single-minded fervor and immense resources as in the post-Soviet states surrounding Russia. Here, the Republic of Georgia stands out for having received the highest per capita democracy promotion aid, for the longest time, making it the most legendary (notorious?) poster child of Western democracy promotion. This may explain why the West now behaves towards the country like a majority stakeholder entitled to cashing in his shares.
Three decades in, this conflation of geopolitics with democratization has led to perverse outcomes for democracy, freedom and civil society. Since the political party landscape of countries like Georgia has become “geopoliticized”, elections are increasingly styled as epic battles between the world’s great powers, democracy versus autocracy and for the country’s civilizational destiny. Foreign interference in elections has become ever more unabashed. This leaves no room for citizens to demand action on the issues they care about far more, like poverty and depleted public services. The tug of – literal – war between the West and Russia is echoed in the turbo-charged toxicity between Georgia’s political parties that has led the country’s once-resilient democracy down a dead end.
When Western democracy promotion coopts civil society in places like Georgia, Ukraine or Moldova, activists become estranged from their fellow citizens and lose their trust. Civil society cannot remain accountable to the community when it is instrumentalized for its foreign patrons’ geopolitical ambitions. As youth empowerment programs turn into “combating disinformation” boot camps or workshops on violence against women are paid for by NATO and display its logo, the oxygen gets sucked out of civic mobilization. The US government’s actions against Georgian judges whose rulings it doesn’t like, such as sanctioning them or disinviting them from study tours, sit awkwardly with our professed support for judicial independence and the rule of law.
Fundamentally, is “democratize” a transitive or intransitive verb? Do powerful outsiders democratize societies struggling to build free, yet orderly systems of government? Or do societies democratize best on their own, when they have the freedom, agency and safety to do so? The three-decade experiment of externally-led democracy promotion has answered the first of these two questions in the negative. The second question remains hypothetical, because we have never afforded these societies the appropriate freedom, agency and safety.
Arguably, if our foreign policy had centered the flourishing of post-Soviet societies, we would not have designated them a zone for zero-sum competition with Russia. US and Western accommodation of Russian interests in the South Caucasus and a collaborative approach to resolving the region’s challenges would have led to very different outcomes on conflict transformation, security, investment and the flexible trade integration that is key to the region’s prosperity. In such a scenario, any outside power would have had to keep a respectful distance from local sovereign politics and civil societies. Then again, in such a scenario, we might not have succumbed to our current compulsion to cultivate local proxies.
The paragraph above is written in the past conditional tense: if we had done X, then Y would not have happened. It is much more beautiful in the future conditional tense: if our foreign policy centers the flourishing of post-Soviet societies, we will not designate them a zone for zero-sum competition with Russia.