Yesterday a Russian think tank with close ties to President Dmitri Medvedev issued a report recommending sweeping political reforms, which they say are essential if Russia is to modernize and avoid serious internal instability in the years to come. The reforms include “restoration of elections for governors, an end to censorship of the news media, Russian membership in NATO, and dissolution of the Federal Security Service, successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B.” The think tank is liberal-leaning, and the recommendations are expected to be completely ignored, but it got me thinking.
A friend was just telling me how he recently had to peruse the Russian Constitution for work, and he was very surprised to find in it a pretty exhaustive list of guaranteed individual freedoms, rights of privacy, expression, association, etc.
Indeed, it seems strange that anyone would have to call for an end to censorship of news media in Russia, because Article 29, Section 5 of the constitution is perfectly clear on the matter: “The freedom of the mass media shall be guaranteed. Censorship shall be prohibited.” So imagine my surprise when I found that the International Federation of Journalists has an online database that documents over 300 deaths and disappearances of Russian journalists since 1993, the year the new Russian Constitution was written. Hmm.
Likewise, there should really be no need to worry about overreach by the Russian security services, because the constitution says, “Arrest, detention and keeping in custody shall be allowed only by an order of a court of law.” And: “No one may be subjected to torture, violence or any other harsh or humiliating treatment or punishment.” So no problems there. Well, except for the laundry list of reports over at Amnesty International detailing severe Russian human rights abuses, illegal detention and disappearances, torture, and political repression.
Russia is certainly not alone among authoritarian or dictatorial regimes in their supposed fealty to lofty Jeffersonian principles and their codification of expansive rights and freedoms. Even North Korea has a constitution that appears to guarantee all sorts of rights pertaining to speech, publication, assembly, demonstration, and association. (Read Christopher Hitchens’ piece in Slate this week to learn all you need to know about what a miserable farce those “freedoms” are.)
And the institutional forms and practices of liberal democracy are absolutely dominant in most every corner of the world. People know what a government is supposed to look like, and most regimes by now have been forced into at least providing the proper visual. Everyone has a parliament and an austere parliamentary building, hollow though it may be behind the facade. Everyone allows its citizens to queue up from time to time and put ballots into ballot boxes, even if election outcomes are never in doubt. Everyone has a nominally independent judiciary, even if in practice it is a mere puppet of the executive. Everyone has language that inhibits the behavior of police and security forces, though in practice capricious law prevails.
Arab dictators have become particularly adept at this brand of “illiberal democracy”, or “liberalized autocracy” if you like, regularly announcing and handing out meaningless and toothless “reforms” to appease their Western sponsors and to be able to say that they are adhering to their own professed democratic values and those of their country’s constitution.
This approach spells real long-term danger for these regimes. Once dictators start undermining their own legitimacy by professing and codifying democratic principles, human rights reformers and opposition and resistance leaders have half their work done for them. All they need do is demand the regime live up to the laws, codes, and constitutional guarantees already in place. Obviously regimes are able to deny such claims for decades or more. But once even the pretense of legitimacy is gone, the clock starts ticking. (Go read about the 1975 Helsinki Accords, in which the Soviet Union signed on to what they thought of as a meaningless set of international human rights principles and fundamental freedoms; a few throwaway lines to appease the other signatories. It is widely believed that this act of signing their names to clear democratic principles so galvanized the dissidents and laid the foundation for the demise of empire 14 years later).
Autocratic regimes generally have one overriding goal in mind: survival. So they tend to lurch from crisis to crisis and engage in an unstable cycle of repression, revolt, reform, repeat; finely tuning their responses depending on how much threat their leaders perceive. Again, such strategies can succeed for a very long time, paired as they always are with extremely brutal internal security capabilities. Nonetheless, it is a cause for overwhelming optimism when despots and tyrants are forced to perpeptuate their power by resorting to the language and ideals and principles of liberal democracy. The real thing must someday follow.
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