Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries

"This book is not directly about civil resistance. It’s really about elections in the post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav worlds, in which rulers with a dictatorial or semi-dictatorial frame of mind – people like Tudjman in Croatia or Milosevic in Serbia – were removed from power, and not always with huge numbers of people on the streets, or strike movements or whatever. But there is a recognition that success was thanks to the brilliance of people on the spot, both before elections – for example in creating unity and clarity of purpose among opposition parties – and in some cases, after fraudulent elections, in insisting that the rigged results should be annulled. So the book is a sideways tribute to civil resistance but not directly about it. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter All of those. Also elections in Croatia and Slovakia, where there were no great public campaigns afterwards because the results of those elections were more or less observed. The authors, Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik, look at quite a wide variety of cases between 1998 and 2005. I don’t start from the premise that civil resistance is a cure-all. And I don’t ever make the general statement that the best democracies come from civil resistance. If you’re going to create an effective functioning democracy there’s a lot of things you need, and civil resistance may be one. But democracies depend ultimately on having a sound constitution which does a good job of balancing the interests of particular sections of society, or particular regions, with the interests of society as a whole. That said, civil resistance is particularly effective at defending democracies against military coup d’état and also against fraudulent election results. There have been quite a few cases where it’s been successful in that role. The way in which copying occurs is very interesting. It would be fascinating to study those who were involved in Tahrir Square as an example. Obviously they knew a lot about what had just happened in Tunisia, but how much did they know about the revolutions of 1989 or the Soviet revolution against the coup in 1991? There are a lot of things we don’t know, and I’m struck by how indirect long-distance influence can be. I knew some Greek students who took part in the Athens Polytechnic uprising in 1973 against the Greek military junta. I asked them what the trigger for it was – why they had suddenly embarked on activism. They said they’d seen on television news a report on student activism in Thailand, and felt ashamed. They felt that if students in Thailand can be active against then-existing military rule, why couldn’t they – in the birthplace of democracy – do something to get rid of military rule in Athens? So these things have a strange genealogy that is quite hard to trace. It certainly helps if there are free institutions of one kind of another which are not controlled by the regime. But the types of social organisation that can achieve that objective – of providing social cement, mutual confidence and sometimes a place of sanctuary – can be many and various. In South Vietnam, when the Buddhists were campaigning in 1963 against the regime of President [Ngo Dinh] Diem, there was an impressive Buddhist organisation behind it. We saw the same in Burma [during the Saffron revolution of 2007]. The most striking case of all was in [Communist] Poland, where the existence of the Catholic Church in a supposedly totalitarian state meant there was a countervailing force that could provide an organisational base for a lot of the opposition. So civil society can take many forms – but some type of organisation of that kind does appear to be a sine qua non of resistance."