The Curse of Geopolitics and Russian Transition

SURFING THE WAVES OF DEMOCRATIZATION

transitology is so young and sensitive to changes in the political situation that it still cannot define its subject matter—what exactly is "transition?" The "beginning" of transitology proper can be traced back to the 1970s, when studies drew upon the theory of modernization, which reached its acme in the 1950s–60s (Kapustin 2001, 8). In general terms, "transition" means a passage from one type of society to another, primarily from authoritarianism to democracy. But the dynamics of national development in certain countries and political systems, as well as dramatic global changes in the political landscape, made political scientists revise existing models and create new ones.

New "waves of democratization" (which Samuel Huntington, who popularized this term, understood as "groups of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occur within a specified period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite directions during that period of time" [Huntington 1991, 15]), followed in quick succession. Seva Gunitsky has looked deeper into the history of democratization and counted 13 such waves to date, from the "Atlantic wave" in the middle of the eighteenth century to the Arab Spring in 2011–12 (Gunitsky 2018, 638–39).

At the last turn of the century, some researchers noted the academic weakness of the existing model, which was often based on not-too-reliable assumptions (Cohen 2000; Tőkés 2000; Carothers 2002; Kapustin 2001). They compared different versions of transition typology (Saxonberg and Linde 2003) and questioned even the key tenet that political transformation proceeds from an authoritarian regime to a consolidated democracy (Mel'vil' 2007, 8). Boris Kapustin viewed transitology as "a noncritical directive to consider society (primarily a postcommunist one) as transitional" (Kapustin 2001, 6). Adam Przeworski somewhat foresaw this paradox and, following Schumpeter's thought, suggested considering democracy as "a streamlined open-ended system" or as "organized uncertainty" (Przeworski 1991, 12), thus proposing the idea of "undetermined transition." Further exploration into the realm of uncertainty could render transitology completely senseless as a branch of academic science. So everyone seems to be returning to the set transition track as "development from a particular origin and towards an identified aspiration" (Haskell 2015).

Researchers generally paid more attention to internal changes (or lack thereof) in a country than to its foreign policy. On the one hand, this can be explained in the way transitology studies socioeconomic processes. On the other hand, a considerable part of political realities affecting ideology and government practices, the state of society and its relations with the authorities, got no more than a cursory glance from researchers, not only in the twenty-first century (especially its second decade), with its "democratization" of foreign policy and foreign policy perturbations impacting domestic affairs, but also in the late twentieth century, at least in Russia.

Naturally, the factor of foreign policy influence on democratization (or transition) was not overlooked. Among conditions for a transition, Andrei Mel'vil' names "a favorable international context (including institutional one) to stimulate a transition from authoritarianism to more democratic forms of government" along with "normative attitude towards democracy and mass attractiveness of democratic ideals, economic inefficiency and delegitimization of authoritarianism, and practical experimenting with democratic institutions and procedures" (Mel'vil' 2000, 3–5), but in the last, sixth, place. He also makes a proviso that "democratic transitions by definition do not guarantee a transition to democracy." He then defines the impact of the exogenous factor on transitions as "an impact of the external environment; the degree of inclusion in principal international structures and institutions; the scale of international political, economic and other forms of support" (Mel'vil' 2007, 2).

While studying exogenous factors of transition, political scientists paid the closest attention to the theory and practice of democracy proliferation, which at the end of the 1980s included various concepts of "democracy promotion." By the end of the twentieth century there had formed a rather broad system of views on how exogenous influence produced the democratizing effect. Hakan Yilmaz presented a summary of these views in "The International Context" section of the book...