Bureaucrats and diplomats #1strictly editorial
May 20, 2007
The manuscript is a monograph— Belarus: Europe's Next Flashpoint? It will pay well (has in fact already paid 50 percent up front). For a week or so I harbored a sense of potential guilt that it might pay too well. I have changed my mind.
It’s hard to argue that most of it was done not because the national elite, as was the case in neighboring Baltic states, had both the plan and the overwhelming support of the population. On the contrary, in the early years of independence Belarusan nomenclature, that continued to dominate in the government, with various degrees of vehemence and success fought against many democratic and economic reforms. The government of the then premier Vyacheslav Kebich pursued, as it seemed, the only viable policy—staying in Russian economic space as long as possible by bartering its goods in exchange of preferential prices for energy. It was the government of Kebich which first introduced the issue of a monetary union, which to this day continues to haunt bilateral relations between Minsk and Moscow.
Most of the advancements in nation-building should be attributed to the efforts of national-democratic opposition, which has been able to wield significant influence on the country’s political life. The brief democratic thaw of the late perestroika period and the years before Lukashenko’s coming to power, along with the modest media exposure, allowed them to lay solid foundation for the edifice of future Belarusan statehood.
In contrast to the Belarusan governments’ inertia, resulting partly from unwillingness, partly from incompetence in state building, Baltic states all have embarked on a road of ambitious market reforms, supported by national consensus. Russian government, headed by liberal reformers under Yegor Gaidar also started a radical economic program, and in Ukraine all the branches of the government supported state and nation building and pro-Western foreign policy.
But a retrospective analysis of the events of the early period of Belarusan independence should be based not on criticizing past mistakes and blunders, willfully or inadvertently committed by the then government of Belarus, but on acknowledgement, that sheer complexity of the task, facing the government in 1991-1992 clearly surpassed many similar attempts, known to political science in other historical circumstances and regions of the world, let alone anything Belarusan nation faced in its previous history.
In dismissing the progress made by Belarus in the first years of its independence many commentators remind of some events of this period, that show reluctance of the then government to fully invest its energy into nation- and state building. Among such events—enthusiastic support by Belarus of the creation of the Commonwealth of Independent State, which was perceived as an attempt to preserve at least some Soviet heritage, the signing of an agreement on military co-operation with Russia, decision to join the CIS Collective Security Treaty, which undermined the neutral status of Belarus, proclaimed by its 1990 Constitution.
Nevertheless in the same period, Belarus democratically adopted new constitution, which formalized its status as independent and unitary republic. This constitution, with all of its imperfections, which has become later exposed by Alexander Lukashenko’s cynical manipulations, was based on the universal democratic principles, it declared the separation of powers, rule of law, respect for human rights and individual freedoms of Belarusan citizens. With several exceptions, which, when compared in retrospect to gross abuses of power by the Lukashenko regime, today look trifling , the then powers did not prevent emerging Belarusan civil society from laying foundations for true democracy, the rule of law and market reforms.
A translation will, in time, follow… Right now I struggle with a Sunday afternoon —and spring has finally arrived to stay— and other things I'd rather do, though the day is already well spent on other things. This morning, the final nine reviews for the DCShorts film festival, and taking the bicycle downtown to return those films. This midday, finishing The Professor and the Madman, which has been sitting on my shelves since I borrowed it from my father eight years ago. I digress, again, by way of putting off Belarus, in hopes that it might go poof in a puff of something definitive and final…