Fwd: The National Future of Belarus
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FYI: forwarded from soc.culture.baltics. . . .
the article appears on the Web at: http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/5155
Jan Grinberg | April 17, 2008
Editor: John Feffer
Published by Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF), a project of the Institute
for Policy Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright (c) 2009,
Institute for Policy Studies.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Belarus
Date: Mon, 1 Jun 2009 13:38:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: Tadas Blinda <tadas....@lycos.es>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Newsgroups: soc.culture.baltics
The National Future of Belarus
Jan Grinberg April 17, 2008
Last December Vladimir Putin of Russia paid a visit to Aleksandr
Lukashenka of Belarus. This prompted local and international media to
speculate on whether the visit was to clinch a deal between the two
presidents for a (re)unification of Belarus with Russia. Belarusian
nationalists bemoaned the prospect while tacitly admitting that they
wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Although nothing came of the
meeting, the issue remains on the agenda.
Aleksandr Lukashenka was democratically elected in 1994, and by 1997
had become the president of what George W. Bush's administration has
branded " the last dictatorship in Europe." Given that by 2007 most of
the West started calling Vladimir Putin's state a dictatorship,
Belarus might no longer lay claim to this distinction. Of course, the
present U.S. administration might be thinking that Russia, being
Asiatic, has nothing to do with Europe. However, as concerns Belarus,
the brand is well earned. Lukashenka has several political murders
attributed to him, has thrown his critics into jail, rigs all
elections, has practically eliminated the free press, and has
destroyed most independent NGOs. His crack troops have beaten
demonstrators under the cover of an "anti-terrorist" act.
Internationally, Lukashenka has defied the United States and the
European Union, expanded his country's arms trade, and befriended
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
Belarusian intellectuals have read what nationalism has achieved in
other places and are nearly unanimous in their eagerness to put that
knowledge to practical use. The Belarusian people, meanwhile, haven't
read anything of the sort, largely because neither Soviet nor post-
Soviet schools assigned such reading. As a result, all they can rely
on is their personal experience.
It is just this experience that has prompted the majority of
Belarusian people to vote Lukashenka into power, repeatedly.
Lukashenka's elections have never been fair. But had they been fair he
would have won anyway, which even the Belarusian opposition publicly
admitted last year. The early years of transition from the breakup of
the Soviet Union in 1991 to the mid-1990s were not kind to the
Belarusian people. In power, the transition pro-democrats were so
maladroit that the state nearly stopped delivering its services even
as it maintained control of the economy in the Soviet fashion.
Lukashenka was then democratically voted into power as the tentative
alternative for people without much hope. He surprised even his own
team by (a) establishing an effective dictatorship by 1997 and (b)
delivering to the people. He made sure that salaries and pensions were
paid, that social services functioned, and that health care began
edging upward to reach (very mediocre) Soviet levels.
Belarusians have retained tragic memories of World War II, in which
2.2 million Belarusians were killed, and a popular saying even today
is "anything but war." Lukashenka didn't bring war, and he kept his
promise to double the mean salary by 2000. The country's gross
domestic product and salaries have been increasing steadily since.
Thus the Belarusian experience puts Belarusian nationalism in the
specific context of a failed transition from the sovok (or the Soviet
system) to democracy. The Belarusian people already waived one of
their birthrights, to democracy, in exchange for a "good life" a la
Lukashenka. What are the chances that they won't waive their
"birthright to nationalism" as well, regardless of the
intelligentsia's brave new nation?
Transition Trouble
Belarus started its transition from sovok together with all the Soviet
Union in 1991. As with the rest of Eastern Europe, it was a transition
from and not a transition to. Majorities believed that they knew what
they wanted their lives not to be but did not know what they wanted
their lives to become. Enter the new elites-to-be. From this point on,
the course of a country was defined by the outcome of the power
struggle within the new elite, with the winner usually the one that
displayed the greatest prowess in appealing to the citizenry with
populism.
These transitions were not initially driven by popular demands to
change from. Throughout the lands of the former Soviet Union, the
winning elites pointed the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Georgia toward
post-communist democracy, and Belarus, Russia and Central Asian states
were directed toward post-communist dictatorship (while countries like
Armenia and Moldova still appear undecided). In all these processes of
internal political orientation, nationalism played a very ambiguous
and very important part. Not only was nationalism the main slogan of
the pro-democrats of the Baltic states but also of Putin's "sovereign
democracy" dictatorship. In Belarus, nationalism has worked in turn
for democracy and for dictatorship.
The Belarusian pro-democrats of 1991-1994 were ardent nationalists.
They started learning Belarusian (for all were literary Russian
speakers) and started teaching it to the people (who hitherto spoke -
and still speak - a Russian dialect). Lukashenka, who replaced them,
re-established Russian as the official language of the country. The
language would be the basis for unification with Russia, which was his
proclaimed political goal. Although the people didn't at the time
react to this policy, the opposition elite did, branding him a traitor
to the nation. Although they agreed with this label, the people did
nothing.
Then in 2003, Lukashenka made one of his notorious about-turns: he
embraced Belarusian nationalism. The nationalist intelligentsia didn't
believe him, but did nothing. There wasn't much to do. After
delivering economically, Lukashenka pulled the nationalist rug from
under the Belarusian opposition. In the eyes of the people, there
wasn't much left that he could be accused of. There were the political
murders, of course, of rivals and journalists. But not surprisingly
the official investigations didn't pin these murders on Lukashenka.
And the people, having endured centuries of decimation, remained
silent.
More than that: after successfully concluding hard bargains with the
Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom in the winters of 2006 and 2007,
Lukashenka emerged as something of a national hero even to the
opposition intelligentsia (albeit they would never admit it in
public). The Russians were threatening Belarusians with a winter
without heating - and Lukashenka rode along and saved them. Against
the backdrop of the Belarusian intelligentsia, which has displayed a
fixation on nationalism (and to a lesser scale on democracy), the
Belarusian people have behaved like realists. They know their country
is relatively weak in comparison to Russia and other great powers and
have adjusted their expectations accordingly.
Response from East and West
Should Russia decide to reswallow Belarus, the West has been clear: it
will provide no help to the Belarusian opposition. The West has tried
to help democracy and failed.
The United States has been staunchly backing Belarusian
democratization since 1989, with willful disregard for the changes of
the last two decades. The State Department (together with the European
Union) underwrote opposition protests after the rigged presidential
election of 2001, hoping that these would topple Lukashenka. But the
organized opposition failed to oppose. Instead, it ran away, leaving a
handful of betrayed youths to face Lukashenka's riot police.
The same scenario replayed itself in 2006, only this time the EU was
conspicuously absent from the scene. The State Department nevertheless
continued unwaveringly to underwrite opposition protests after the
rigged presidential election, doubtless imagining that Minsk would
follow Kiev in another "color revolution." This time, the Belarusian
opposition understood that such a color revolution was impossible but
still was reluctant to refuse the funding. When the time came for the
traditional protest in the main square, the organized opposition
performed within what turned out to be the accepted limits of protest,
and the regime answered with a limited amount of violence. Nobody was
killed, which was the only good outcome. A new set of youths, not the
ones whom the opposition betrayed in 2001, maintained an improvised
protest for a time, which the regime tolerated for a few days before
sending the riot troops for a final crackdown. The Belarusian people
personally sympathized with these brave youngsters but politically
remained silent and did nothing to support them.
Since then the West's position hasn't much changed . True, the EU got
so scared when Lukashenka, pressuring Russia, turned off the Russia-EU
gas pipeline for a while, that they started making some small clumsy
overtures to him, beginning in 2007. Lukashenka took his time to
react. Finally, at the beginning of this year, he permitted an
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe office in Minsk
and released most of his political prisoners. The Belarusian pro-
democrats felt betrayed. The hardball U.S. position had failed to move
Lukashenka while the EU's softball position achieved some small
results: last March an agreement was signed to establish an EU
Delegation in Minsk. Recognizing the lack of revolutionary potential
in Belarus, the United States has reverted to human rights issues.
Unlike in the 1980s - and in the aftermath of Kosovo and Iraq - human
rights are no longer a mobilizing tool, either for Belarusians or for
the international community.
The message from the East, meanwhile, has been ambiguous. Russia is
currently divided between nostalgic imperialism and realism. The
nostalgic imperialists want to force Belarus back where they think it
rightly belongs: for them it's simply White Russia. Realists in Russia
understand that a politically independent, but economically and
culturally dependent Belarus is a better bargain: it wouldn't burden
the centralist Putin administration system with its problems, there
will be no nationalist resistance, and the West will be calm. However,
Russian realism is known to be rather idiosyncratic. Therefore all
Russian vagaries are being watched closely not only from the political
and intellectual capital of Minsk, but from the whole country.
Looking Within
Having looked at the mighty powers East and West, the Belarusian
people are now considering the other important player in this game:
their own regime. And they have concluded that the present regime no
longer really needs or wants unification with Russia. Andrey
Lyakhoivich, a leading Minsk-based political analyst, wrote recently
in a Slovak journal of foreign policy: "Independence is in [the
material interest of Lukashenka and his men]. They have the monopoly
of control over the Belarusian market." So, direct state ownership is
no longer a Soviet-era requirement. In the Belarusian transition, the
regime can derive enough benefits from simply controlling a market
that is gradually adopting private ownership as its basis. Which means
that the regime should naturally tend toward sovereignty: if the
current Belarusian leaders lose their state, it shall be the Russian
and not the Belarusian bureaucratic elite that gets all these
benefits.
As a result, the Belarusian people will not likely trade their
birthright of nationalism for the good life. They believe they have
already traded democracy for this good life. To renounce nationalism
and sovereignty and unite with Russia would probably result in a worse
life, they would reason. Moreover, it would be bad in the eyes of the
West, the realistic part of the Putin regime, and for their
president's men. Which means that, besides being undesirable, the
reunification of Russia and Belarus is unlikely.
Jan Grinberg is the pen name of an East European analyst who has
researched developments in the region for the last two decades. He is
a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (www.fpif.org).