Szalontai : Comparisons with Post-Soviet Central Asia

The Unexpected Success of Mongolia’s Democratic Transformation:

Comparisons with Post-Soviet Central Asia

(Draft; not for citation)

     In 1990, the year in which the Communist one-party system came to an end in Mongolia, this country lacked most of the factors which political scientists commonly consider the preconditions of a successful democratic transition. According to the usual criteria of political science, democracy had little, if any, chance to blossom in Mongolia.

     1. Mongolia lacked the spectacular wealth of the East and Southeast Asian “dragon economies,” where the process of rapid modernization often (though by no means always) stimulated a transition from authoritarianism to democracy. Instead, its per capita GDP, $944 in 2006 prices, was comparable to that of the Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union: higher than that of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, slightly over than that of Turkmenistan but markedly lower than that of Kazakhstan.

     2. The absolute dominance of the state-owned and cooperativized sectors in Mongolia’s planned economy, and the consequent absence of a sector of influential private entrepreneurs, greatly hindered the emergence of an independent middle class which could have become an engine of democratization in the same way as it occurred in South Korea and Taiwan.

     3. The country lacked a sophisticated and independent civil society, since the mass organizations established by the Communist system left little, if any, room for independent non-governmental organizations; the Buddhist clergy, having been decimated and economically ruined by the murderous purges of 1937-1938, was strictly controlled and effectively neutralized by the state; and the informal circles created by intellectuals were small and feeble.

     4. Mongolia lacked any meaningful pre-Communist experience with modern parliamentary democracy. In the period before independence, its foreign relations were mostly confined to contacts with Qing China and Tsarist Russia, i.e., two autocratic empires which hardly, if at all, could become the conduits of democratic ideas. In the brief ten-year period between the proclamation of independence and the takeover of the Soviet-supported political forces (1911-1921), Mongolia was ruled by a theocratic government, whose parliament was not an elected one and played only an advisory role.

     5. Finally, Mongolia lacked a well-established dissident movement or a long tradition of anti-Communist resistance. The last manifestation of mass resistance against Communist policies occurred in 1932, during the process of forced collectivization and anti-religious persecution. The occasional cases of intellectual resistance and non-conformism, such as the actions of Professor Byambiin Rinchen and dissident poet Ryenchinii Choinom in the Tsedenbal era (1952-1984), did not evolve into the creation of dissident groups comparable to the organizations set up by Russian and East European intellectuals and human rights activists. At the time of the establishment of the Mongolian Democratic Union (MDU) in December 1989, its participants still constituted a numerically small and hardly well-known group which the regime, had it been determined to use forceful measures, could have suppressed relatively easily before it would have been able to attract significant crowds. 

     Despite all these odds, Mongolia underwent a successful and remarkably peaceful democratic transition in 1990, and it has also succeeded in preserving its newly established democratic system without a relapse into democradura (a hybrid regime between democracy and dictatorship) or open authoritarianism. In contrast, the five countries in Central Asia, whose geographical, economic and social conditions had relatively much in common with that of Mongolia, experienced a far more traumatic political transition from Communism into the post-Soviet era. Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and, to a lesser extent, Kazakhstan quickly degenerated into presidential autocracies headed by the last general secretaries of the local Communist parties; Tajikistan was devastated by a five-year civil war (1992-1997); and Kyrgyzstan’s initially promising democratic experience also failed to last long.

     In an attempt to explain this “Inner Asian anomaly,” M. Steven Fish, a professor of political science at the University of California, compared Mongolia’s transition with that of various other former Communist countries in Eastern Europe and the Community of Independent States (CIS). He concluded that Mongolia’s success was attributable, among others, to the following five factors:

     1. Mongolia lacked a “superabundance of natural resources,” and thus its political elite was more dependent on popular support than those non-democratic regimes whose direct control over such a resource (e.g., oil or natural gas) enabled them to gain substantial revenues without taxing the population, to create extensive patronage networks, and to pursue populist policies.

     2. The country‘s small geostrategic significance did not attract external powers which might have been willing to support the continuation or re-imposition of non-democratic rule.

     3. Mongolia, due to its location and relatively small population, did not strive to spread its influence and become a regional power. In other countries, such expansionist efforts were likely to inflame nationalism and create international tension, and the resulting conflicts frequently hindered democratization or inspired a relapse into authoritarianism.

     4. Mongolia lacked a “national father figure”, i.e., a dominant person who might have acted first as liberator from authoritarianism, only to establish a new autocracy by taking advantage of his unparalleled popularity.

     5. Finally, post-Communist Mongolia did not establish a highly centralized presidential system but preferred to divide power between the president and the legislature.

     While these factors indeed appear relevant, either in original or modified form, I am of the opinion that Fish’s explanation does not pay sufficient attention to some other internal and external factors which seem to have played a decisive role both in the success of Mongolia’s democratic transformation and in the failure of the Central Asian transition processes. Of the latter factors, I may mention the following:

     1. The agenda and composition of the early Mongolian opposition movement was markedly different from that of the opposition movements which emerged in the Central Asia in the last years of the Soviet regime. True, the Central Asian movements also included numerous well-educated and highly cultured intellectuals. One may mention Muhammad Salih, one of the founders of the Uzbek opposition movement Birlik and now a political exile in Norway, as an example. Having extensively studied modern French poetry and existentialist philosophy, he was an acclaimed poet since the late 1970s. Intellectuals played a prominent, and often predominant, role not only in Birlik but also in other pioneering opposition movements, such as Rastokhez in Tajikistan, Agzybirlik in Turkmenistan, and the Democratic Movement of Kyrgyzstan (DMK). Both the Mongolian and the Central Asian intellectual reformers were inspired by the conviction that the Communist system had “failed.” However, their diagnosis of system failure was focused on different problems.

     The Mongolian reformers, many of whom were economists like Mendsaikhany Enkhsaikhan and Davaadorjiin Ganbold, or social scientists like Sanjaasurengiin Zorig, regarded Mongolia’s one-party regime and planned economy as the principal sources of the country’s problems, and sought to solve these difficulties through the introduction of a multi-party system and a market economy. That is, the establishment of parliamentary democracy constituted the very core of their reform conception, and they made great efforts to make the population familiar with the basic ideas of democracy. Ethnic, cultural or religious nationalism did not constitute a major element of their ideology and program, though they did highlight Mongolia’s subjection to Soviet domination. Since the country’s only significant ethnic minority, the small and politically passive Kazakh community in faraway Bayan-Ulgii province, did not become involved in inter-ethnic clashes, the dissidents’ attention was not diverted from political and economic questions to ethno-nationalist ones. In any case, they laid great stress on using peaceful methods and preventing violent disturbances.   

     In contrast, the aforesaid Central Asian opposition movements had a primarily nationalist agenda. They focused their attention on the preservation and revitalization of national culture (and occasionally of Islam), the enhancement of the status of national languages, the rehabilitation of the “bourgeois nationalist” intellectuals who had been executed in the Stalin era, and similar issues. Significantly, the founders of Birlik belonged mostly to Uzbekistan’s literary elite. While they did demand democratic rights, the ideas of democratization and economic reform were given less emphasis than nationalist objectives.

     This nation-centered approach and prioritization was certainly understandable. After all, Central Asia had been subjugated by Russia several decades before the Bolshevik takeover, and thus it was obvious that the local nations’ problems did not result solely from the Communist nature of the ruling regime but also from a longer tradition of Russian/Soviet expansionism. Still, the opposition movements’ preoccupation with ethnic nationalism proved a serious obstacle to democratization. For one thing, it diverted attention from the issue of democracy. Worse still, the announcement of such explicitly nationalist programs in an increasingly tense political atmosphere carried substantial risks. In 1989-1990, violent inter-ethnic riots broke out in the Ferghana Valley (Uzbekistan), Novy Uzen (Kazakhstan), Ashgabat (Turkmenistan), Dushanbe (Tajikistan), and Osh (Kyrgyzstan), which often enabled the authorities (particularly the Uzbek government) to depict the nationalist movements as a source of instability and bloodshed, and to justify their suppression or curtailment by emphasizing the necessity of maintaining public order. Finally, the post-Soviet authoritarian regimes, particularly Islam Karimov’s in Uzbekistan and Saparmurat Niyazov’s in Turkmenistan, effectively deprived these movements of their principal raison d’etre by “stealing” their program, i.e., by demonstratively adopting a position of state-managed secular nationalism.   

     2. Apart from an overall urban-rural disparity, in Mongolia there were no sharp inequalities and conflicts of interest between the country’s various geographical regions. Throughout the Communist era, the country’s political, economic and cultural life was constantly dominated by a single urban center, Ulaanbaatar, and none of the other cities was of a comparable importance. The location of the major industrial and mining projects was hardly, if at all, influenced by the provincial background of the party’s top leaders. For instance, the relative overrepresentation of cadres from Uvs province (Tsedenbal’s home region) in the party leadership was not combined with a massive diversion of investments in favor of that province. While the city of Ulaangom, the center of Uvs, did receive somewhat preferential treatment, the province’s role in the national economy remained much less significant than that of Ulaanbaatar or the Erdenet mining area. Thus the Mongolian political and social elites were not divided by irreconcilable inter-regional conflicts which could have considerably hindered, or even prevented, a smooth democratic transition. In the 20^th century, clans and patrilineal lineages did not play a major role in Mongolian politics and society, which further reduced the likelihood of inter-regional and inter-communal conflicts. 

     In contrast, regional disparities and inter-regional rivalries were highly pronounced in several Central Asian countries, particularly in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The seven decades of Soviet rule hardly reduced, and often actually increased, the conflict potential created by such disparities. For instance, federally inspired major economic projects, such as industrialization and cotton cultivation, were often confined to one or another main region of the given republic, which perpetuated the economic backwardness of the other regions. In Tajikistan, the resulting intense resentment against the dominant Leninabad and Kulyab regions eventually culminated in a civil war that claimed at least 50.000 lives. In three of the Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan), a high percentage, or even the majority, of the population was composed of ethnic groups who did not belong to the republic’s titular nation.  Moreover, Central Asian societies are still extensively pervaded by clan and tribal organizations, which creates splits within ethnic groups and considerably hinders the opposing political forces in reaching compromises. Despite repeated attempts, the Soviet regime could not eliminate such clan identities. On the contrary, kinship ties were frequently intertwined with formal party and government organizations, and Moscow’s occasional efforts to curtail the influence of one clan or region often resulted only in the emergence of another regional power center. In post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, inter-regional and inter-clan rivalries played a major role in the failure of the country’s democratic experiment, as both President Askar Akaev and his opponents started to rely on clan networks to an increasing extent.    

     3. During the mass protests of early 1990, the program of the Mongolian democratic opposition included two demands of crucial importance: collective resignation of the entire Politburo and the holding of multi-party parliamentary elections. The successful accomplishment of these aims seems to have produced a substantial effect on the subsequent development of the Mongolian party system. Combined with the first two factors (the institution-centered, non-nationalist and democracy-oriented nature of the reformers’ agenda, and the absence of inter-regional or inter-clan conflicts), it laid the basis of a political system that was less personality-centered and more party-oriented than politics in post-Soviet Central Asia. That is, a relatively clear and permanent dividing line was created between the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) and the one-time democratic opposition. On the one hand, the MPRP remained an institutionalized entity and a major participant of electoral competition, but none of its highest-ranking pre-1990 leaders could convert his pre-reform bureaucratic power base into a personal political machine that would have enabled him to dominate the political scene as a quasi-independent individual, rather than a representative of the MPRP. On the other hand, the influence and image of the parties created by the democratic opposition (the Mongolian Democratic Party and the National Progressive Party) was based primarily on their leaders’ decisive role in the dismantling of the one-party regime, rather than on association with certain reform-oriented Communist leaders or involvement in other (e.g., ethnic, regional or environmental) issues. By concentrating on institutional reform, rather than on personal changes, the opposition succeeded in making multi-party parliamentary elections a central element of political life.

     In contrast, the principal characteristics of the post-Soviet Central Asian party systems were intense fragmentation, fluidity, and the predominance of personal and clan factors over political and economic conceptions. In Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, the initial conditions for peaceful political competition were more favorable than in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan (where the end of the Communist regime was almost immediately followed by the establishment of another monolithic system) or in Tajikistan (where political competition soon degenerated into a civil war), but even these countries have not experienced the emergence of a stable two-party or multi-party system. On the contrary, a main element of both the Kyrgyzstani and Kazakhstani political scene was a striking contrast between a strong (and increasingly authoritarian) presidency and a high number of small, weak and unstable parties.

     Partly due to the high importance of ethnic, regional and clan identities, the lines between the former Communist power-holders and the non-Communist organizations seem to have been more blurred in Central Asia than in Mongolia. For one thing, three of the last general secretaries of the local Communist parties (Niyazov in Turkmenistan, Karimov in Uzbekistan, and Nursultan Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan) successfully transformed themselves into quasi-independent presidents, whose ruling parties were their own personal creations, rather than direct and declared successors of the old Communist parties. Secondly, there were tactical alliances between certain Communist politicians (most notably Nazarbayev, Akaev, and the Garmi and Gorno-Badakhshani factions of the Tajikistani Communist party) and various non-Communist groups against other Communist leaders who were perceived as conservative and/or regionally or ethnically biased. For instance, in the fall of 1990 the members of the Democratic Movement of Kyrgyzstan, just like the Mongolian democratic opposition a few months before, resorted to hunger strikes in order to put pressure on the Communist leadership, but their objective was different from that of their Mongolian counterparts. Instead of asking for the replacement of the entire Politburo, they demanded the resignation of First Secretary A.M. Masaliev, and supported Akaev’s candidacy for president. Remarkably, Akaev was to be elected not by a democratically elected multi-party parliament but by the country’s Supreme Soviet, but the DMK did not question the legitimacy of the latter institution. On the contrary, Akaev could remain in office until the end of his term, though the Soviet system on which the legitimacy of the Supreme Soviet was based collapsed less than a year after his election.        

     4. In the last four years of the Communist one-party system (1986-1989), the foreign policy of the Mongolian government underwent a gradual reorientation. Anxious to improve its relations with China, the Soviet leadership gradually reduced its military and political commitment to Ulaanbaatar (e.g., it withdrew its troops from Mongolia), and at the same time it allowed the Mongolian government to broaden its contacts with China, Japan, the U.S. and Western Europe. Due to the aid-dependent character of the Mongolian economy, the decrease of Soviet and East European economic assistance compelled the Mongolian leaders to look for alternative economic partners and aid donors. As early as September 1988, they expressed their intention to apply for observer status in the Non-Aligned Movement, and establish commercial relations with the Southeast Asian Newly Industrialized Countries (NIC) on the grounds that the goods imported from the Soviet bloc were more expensive and of an inferior quality than Singaporean or Thai products. In July 1989, the Mongolian minister of foreign trade visited Britain and the U.S. to investigate the possibilities of attracting Western capital investments. The more the Mongolian leadership developed its relations with Japan and the Western powers, the more embarrassing would have been for it to resort to repressive measures against a peaceful pro-democracy movement, and such an action would have probably hindered its efforts to obtain foreign aid and investment. The only major foreign power that might have been willing to accept, or even approve, the forceful preservation of one-party rule in Mongolia was China, whose leadership proved quite ready to give support to certain non-democratic regimes (e.g., Burma and Uzbekistan) which were criticized by the Western powers for the violation of human rights. Nevertheless, the Mongolian population’s traditional distrust of, and dislike for, China was so strong that it would have been highly counterproductive for the Mongolian government to pursue a policy that combined the suppression of peaceful protests with extensive reliance on Beijing. Nor was the leadership interested in adopting an exclusively pro-Chinese orientation.  

     In Central Asia, external factors played a more ambivalent role in the transition process. In Kyrgyzstan, one of the two poorest Central Asian countries, the necessity of obtaining Western economic assistance did induce Akaev to show a stronger initial commitment to the ideas of democratization and radical economic reform than the leaders of the other Central Asian regimes. Nevertheless, neither external aid nor extensive contacts with Western governments and NGOs could prevent Kyrgyzstan from gradually relapsing into semi-authoritarianism. On the contrary, some authors argue that foreign aid actually enabled Akaev to reinforce his position at the expense of the opposition. In Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the abundance of valuable natural resources (particularly oil and natural gas) made it relatively easy for the ruling governments to find economic partners and attract foreign direct investment, which emboldened them to ignore Western criticism of their repressive practices. For instance, U.S. capital investments in Kazakhstan underwent an increase in the second half of the 1990s, i.e., in the very same period when American criticism of Nazarbayev’s increasingly authoritarian leadership style intensified.

     In general, Central Asia’s authoritarian rulers had two main lines of defense against Western criticism of their repressive policies. Firstly, they could, and did, take advantage of the competing interests of the various foreign powers, and by skillfully maneuvering between the latter, they avoided excessive dependence on any of them. Since several of these powers (Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, and Japan) were uninterested in pressuring them to introduce democratic reforms, the Central Asian autocrats were usually able to find alternative partners if they faced U.S. or West European criticism. For instance, in 2005 the U.S. government sharply condemned the massacre that the Uzbek military carried out in Andijan, whereas both Russia and China approved it. Secondly, the Central Asian leaders sought to justify their restrictive policies by portraying themselves as guarantors of stability in a region threatened by violent inter-ethnic conflicts and Islamist movements. For example, Nazarbayev adopted the role of inter-ethnic mediator between Kazakhstan’s Kazakh and Russian communities, while Karimov cited the Ferghana riots and the emergence of Islamist terrorism as reasons for his use of authoritarian methods. Since in Central Asia, as opposed to Mongolia, the risk of political instability and inter-ethnic or inter-regional violence was indeed great (see the riots of 1989-1990 and the civil war in Tajikistan), and practically every foreign power that was active in the region was interested in maintaining stability and preventing a “spillover effect,” this security-centered argument did not fall on deaf ears.