Bozen – According to most theorists of Modernity, the French Revolution signaled the birth of a brave new world. Although followed by the terror, during which people were subject to indiscriminate violence, and the widespread destruction of religious and political artifacts, seen as symbols of the past, the French Revolution is judged to have mostly had a happy outcome – the birth of democracy and the secular state. Perhaps for this reason, the sudden appearance of the people in the streets, manning the barricades against tyranny, is now so often taken for a sign that democracy is about to be born. So it was with the “Arab Spring”. But in its euphoria this new populism, supported by Western powers, is opening old wounds. Now the virus of street violence has moved from the Middle East to the Ukraine and the Balkans, and we have the frightening prospect of revisiting the horrendous civil wars of the late twentieth century.
At a security conference in Munich on February 1, 2014 Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov posed a very intelligent question: “What does the inciting of street protests, which are growing increasingly violent, have to do with promoting democratic principles?” Lavrov, responding to the statements of the European Council President, Hermann van Rompuy, and NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, accused the West of a kind of hypocrisy. “Why do we not hear statements of condemnation toward those who seize government buildings, attack and burn police officers and voice racist and anti-Semitic slogans? Why do senior European politicians de facto encourage such actions, while at home they swiftly and harshly act to stop any impingement on the letter of the law?”
Reflecting on the aftermath of the “Arab Spring” in Egypt, Libya, and Syria, we have to agree with Lavrov: what indeed does violence in the streets have to do with the democracy promotion? In all of these countries the outcome has not been so much regime change as civil war! This enormous blood-letting, which has unleashed old political and religious antagonisms, can never be justified in the name of democracy, the prospect of which is ever more distant. Nowhere is this more evident than in Syria, where no one knows any more what side the perpetrators of sectarianism and violence are on, or what Great Powers they represent! This violence born of populism and the hope of greater democracy is now also infecting the Balkans where we see copy-cat demonstrations, as well as in equatorial Africa, which supplied many of the mercenaries, who are returning home to wreak havoc in their own countries.
The naiveté of the West in leaping to the support of the street fighters, who brave and idealistic as they may be, simply fail to understand what democracy-building entails, is once again hardly credible. Possibly the West has taken heart from the breakup of the Soviet Empire, which was remarkably bloodless. And why was it bloodless? It was relatively ordered, just because power devolved from the centre (Moscow), which had collapsed, to local Communist Party networks, which were already in place and managed to rebadge themselves as democratic. But the break-up of the Soviet Union was a very special case, and the hope of rescuing order out of disorder was due not because liberal democracy is the future to which all countries are destined, and that all it requires is the removal of a few dictators. The bloodless transition in the new states of the former Soviet Union was due precisely to the institutionalization of the Communist Party in all its satellite states, and the fact that these institutional networks remained, as possible vehicles for new political activism, once communism was dead.
But now the Russians are right to wonder whether there is not a more sinister side to the Western enthusiasm for intervention in the cause of democracy promotion. Seen from the Russian perspective, and even that of some Middle Eastern players, it looks increasingly like a return to “the Great Game” – the strategic rivalry and ensuing conflict between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia that lasted officially from the Russo-Persian Treaty of 1813 to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. The term „The Great Game“ is attributed to Arthur Conolly (1807–1842), an intelligence officer of the British East India Company‘s Sixth Bengal Light Cavalry, and captured the imagination of many when the British novelist Rudyard Kipling used it in his novel Kim, of 1901.
In fact, the “Great Game” continued to be played throughout the twentieth century, in the guise of the Cold War, and still continues to be played, now that the Cold War is officially over. For changing reasons, which include their economic resources, like oil, and the large population centres of the Middle East and Central Asia, there are always reasons for the “Great Game” to be played.
After all, a long string of regional civil wars, beginning with street riots, and gaining traction with Great Power intervention, were part of the “Great Game”. So for instance, as recently as the civil war in Lebanon of the 1980s, President Mitterand’s decision to give the green light to the Maronite Christians precipitated a civil war of unprecedented sectarian violence. Only to be followed by the even greater sectarian violence of the Balkan conflict, catalyzed when Germany gave the green light to Croatia to “go it alone”, which led to the blood-letting that broke up the former Yugoslavia. In each case, big-power intervention was a game changer, as it always will be, because it brings to the conflict massive new resources, which internationalize the conflict.
In fact, the classic theory of revolution, as the happy story, which moves from the street crowd to the overthrow of the regime on the part of a revolutionary vanguard, is now, more or less, obsolete. Samuel P. Huntington, more famous for his Clash of Civilizations (1996), gave it the death blow in his Political Order in Changing Society (1986). There, reviewing modernization theory, he challenged the notion that social revolutions bring new political orders to power. Social revolutions usually lead to more and more disorder. This is because revolutions take place, not when people are down and out, but once their aspirations begin to rise and they see some hope for change. But those expectations keep rising far faster than any regime can try to meet them, and then disorder and terror ensue. This was true of the early French and Russian revolutions, and it has remained true for all the revolutions that followed. It was not when the power of the Shah of Persia was most repressive that revolution came, but when he began to liberalize, just as it was with Mubarak and Gadhafi. It is small surprise when Revolutions end up by empowering the military, because only the military has the power to restore order.
Surely, Sudan and Nigeria are worst case scenarios – but still there is tacit agreement, among members of the Organization of African Unity, for instance, that state boundaries should not under any circumstances be revisited. In the early days of independence, because of reasonably good preparation by the British, these states managed to weather the storms that faced them due to faulty internal construction out of parts that were incompatible for religious and ethnic reasons. But under increasing pressure from ruthless oil-thirsty international powers and their multi-national companies, these resource-rich states have fallen apart along ethnic and religious lines.
There is no reason to think that Europe and its periphery will be spared the kind of ethnic and religious sectarianism that we are witnessing in Africa and the Middle East. Societies under economic pressure as rich as Switzerland, as we have seen only this past week, see immigration, ethnic and cultural diversity, as threats to their well-being. The ethnic and religious diversity inherited by new European nation states from the old empires out of which they were cut after two World Wars, was further complicated by large scale population exchanges and mass migration, like that in the Balkans between the southern Slavic Peoples, and between Greece and Turkey, after WWI, and Germany, Poland and Ukraine, after WWII. The problem of Ukraine is another instance, like that of the old Yugoslavia, of a new entity that was created out of incompatible parts – Eastern Ukraine, with a largely Russian population that looks to Moscow, and Western Ukraine, which was once Polish territory, and which continues to look further West.
But should Western support of the current demonstrations encourage the break-up of Ukraine, then we would know for sure that we have learned nothing over the long history of nation-building. A moral dilemma will always remain when brave street-fighters look to us for support in their democratic struggles. But we have to stand by the principle that democracy does not grow out of the barrel of a gun or from the euphoria of street demonstrations, but from the much more prosaic work of patient institution-building.
The author: Patricia Springborg was foundation “professore ordinario” in Political Science at the Free University of Bozen from 2007 to 2013. She received her first degrees in Political Science from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and her doctorate from Oxford and has taught at a number of Universities. Since her retirement last November she is guest professor in Bolzano and at the Centre for British Studies of the Humboldt University in Berlin.