Georgia's Rose Revolution: Change or Repetition? Tension between State-Building and Modernization Projects

Extract

The wave of Colour Revolutions, which started in Serbia in the year 2000, and spread to Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, has changed the existing concepts on how transformation would take form in countries exiting from “really existing socialism.” In the early years following the collapse of the Soviet state, the dominant concepts were that of “transition” or slow, top-down reforms that would transform the existing political systems from ruling-party dictatorships to parliamentary democracies, and planned economies to market-based ones. Yet in the late 1990s there was a growing fatigue and pessimism towards the basic thesis of transition: the transition paradigm was formulated as a reaction to the perceived causes of the Soviet failure: a totalitarian state which monopolized the political space proved itself unable to provide either economic well-being or political legitimacy. The task in the early 1990s was to shrink the state apparatus, to make space for a multi-party political pluralism. Even though some argued that the main objective of transition was to achieve democracy,¹ for transition theories and even more so for its translation into actual political choices the economic aspect of transition was perceived to be more immediate than the political one. Democracy needed a certain material context, and here too decreasing the role of the state was thought to liberate the market and provide material stability to the new democracies. It was necessary to create a new middle class by way of mass privatization of the former state properties to create a social demand for democracy. Those ideas reflected not only an ideological victory of the one side of the Cold War over the Eastern camp, but also very practical needs: the huge Soviet state sector was neither sustainable nor necessary after the fall of one-party rule, and it had to be radically transformed. At the time, this transition was thought to be an easy task: to take off the oppressing lid of the party-state and let democracy and market economies emerge naturally. Yet in the conception of transition there was a certain tension between the economic and political sides of the imagined reforms, between mass privatization with its dire social consequences of unemployment and fall in the standard of living, and the political goals of democratization where people who were being “restructured” were simultaneously promised to receive the right to change their rulers by casting their ballots. Would people who are threatened with job loss and lower living standards vote for the reformers? And in the event of a negative answer, how would the reforms proceed? Should economic reforms come before political ones; that is, first privatization and in a second stage freedom of political choice through parliamentary elections? These are some of the dilemma that the new republics of the Soviet Union and the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe were facing in the early 1990s. At the time, the answer was clear: the economy came first; it was more important to reform the economic sector, to privatize massively, and stabilize the economy as soon as possible. The economy came before politics, in the sense that restructuring of the property structure through mass privatization was supposed to create the material means for the creation of democracy. It was believed that once the middle class was created as a result of mass privatization, the democratic institutions, such as free elections, multi-party system, independent media, an active civil society, in a word, all the attributes of democracy, would evolve naturally.