The end of the Orange Revolution
On Sunday, voters in Ukraine elected Viktor Yanukovych as their new president, marking an end to the Orange Revolution. Yanukovych, for those who don’t remember, was the pro-Russian former prime minister who was ousted by the mass nonviolent movement after a rigged vote in 2004.
While I’m not one of the conspiracy theorists who see the “color revolutions” as orchestrated by the US, the election of Yushchenko was undoubtedly in the interest of the West, as was the Rose Revolution in Georgia the previous year.
Yushchenko had long been an advocate of economic “liberalisation,” according to an interesting piece by Niall Green, and oversaw the privatization of state-owned assets in the 1990s while he was head of Ukraine’s central bank.
His continued pursuit of these “free market” policies as president – including pushing for the country’s ascension to the World Trade Organization and turning to the International Monetary Fund for a massive $16.5 billion emergency loan (with all the usual strings attached) in 2008 – led to worse conditions for Ukrainian workers and a serious decline in the standard of living for the majority of the population during his tenure.
While some believe that Yanukovych has come around on these neoliberal economic policies in recent years, everyone seems to be arguing that he will also reorient Ukraine back towards Russia.
This story of dashed hopes after nonviolent movements or the leaders they install embrace toxic economic reforms – sometimes with little or no input from the public – is unfortunately not new. A tale similar to Ukraine’s could be told about South Africa after Mandela’s election, Georgia after the 2003 Rose Revolution, and Poland following Solidarity’s victory at the polls in 1989, as I document here.
Some responded to my article very critically, saying that we shouldn’t expect these movements to right every wrong. And I completely agree. Every movement is human and will make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that we should remain silent about where nonviolent movements fall short. That is the only way we will avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future.
Therefore, when a nonviolent revolution pushes more people into poverty, which Martin Luther King wrote is a form of violence that “hurts as intensely as the violence of the club,” we shouldn’t shy away from critiquing them.
Eric, I’m wondering why you’re not one of the “conspiracy theorists” who see the Orange Revolution and other pro-democracy movements as orchestrated by (or at least economically and diplomatically supported by) the U.S. I’d be interested to see specific reasons, since the link to Michael Barker’s “Regulating Revolutions” was pretty convincing.
I think it’s fairly well documented that there was US funding (and of course diplomatic support) behind some, if not all, of these recent color revolutions. It also appears that there was training by some experts in methods of nonviolent action of opposition activists.
That said, while I think this support can help, it isn’t sufficient to cause a nonviolent revolution. My general point is that these critics seem to overstate the influence or role of the US in these movements and downplays the serious sacrifice that thousands made in these campaigns.
Here are a few links that point to the US role in these movements, and a couple responses to the conspiracy folks. Pretty interesting stuff. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it all and figure out exactly where I stand:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa
http://legacy.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041211/news_1n11usaid.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18395-2000Dec3?language=printer
http://gowans.wordpress.com/category/non-violent-direct-action/
http://michaeljamesbarker.wordpress.com/icnc/
Responses:
http://fletcher.tufts.edu/news/2004/12/ackerman2.shtml
http://www.fpif.org/reports/nonviolent_action_and_pro-democracy_struggles
Stephen Zunes has several other articles on his site responding to critics that I think are quite well done:
http://67.199.81.153/linkstorecentpublications.html#bkNonviolentAction
For those who are wondering about how much the US funds velvet movements, IMHO it’s far more productive to support ALL soft revolution movements that are clearly opposing a vicious regime (e.g., do we really think the old Yanukovych-Kuchma-Putin machine SHOULDN’T have been swept aside?) and focus even harder in our personal activism on reducing and reorientating the US military budget. As long as the US is invading, occupying and basing all over and anywhere possible, all US meddling is suspect, and rightly so. Holding these contradictory/complementary notions simultaneously ought not be all that difficult for those who are focused on constructive conflict management.
I never said we shouldn’t support all nonviolent movements against vicious regimes or that the Yanukovych-Kuchma-Putin machine shouldn’t have been swept aside. I just think that its never black or white. We don’t have to proclaim that every nonviolent movement was perfect, when they clearly weren’t.
If we want to always advance our understanding of nonviolence we need to look critically at where past movements succeeded and where they came up short. In this case, I would say that the economic agenda advanced by Orange Revolution, or at least by the leader they took to the streets for, is problematic and ultimately led to his rapid fall from grace.
Thanks for this article Eric. I agree with Tom about the inherent contradictions and how we still shouldn’t let them keep us from continuing with our “experiments in truth” (to borrow a WNV phrase). But one of the main problems with NV movements seems to arise particularly when they become intertwined with, and evaluated upon, mere electoral changes. It seems to me that this is a primary coopting mechanism of NV “people power” movements, and when they lose their primary connection to substantive, grassroots change and replace it with the more passive “hope” attached to a new leader, a movement cedes its power back to the very system that it was struggling to alter in the first place. All of the examples cited in the article seem to follow this pattern, and the 2008 presidential election in the US mildly fits with this general theme as well.
[...] I have written about on this site, many recent victories for nonviolent movements have been diluted after the government that they [...]