The Challenges of Russia between Democracy and "Sovereign Democracy"

Location: Forlì, Italy
Period: 4-6 December 2006

Putin's 'Sovereign Democracy'
By Masha Lipman
Saturday, July 15, 2006
 
MOSCOW -- In the weeks before the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg, two things went on at once: There was an intense public relations effort to improve Russia's image and, along with it, a widening crackdown on democracy and individual freedoms. The reality, not obscured by the PR, is that the Russian government has resorted recently to police practices strongly reminiscent of those used some three decades ago in the Soviet Union.
On the public relations side, one of the most influential Kremlin aides, Vladislav Surkov (defined as the main ideologist of the Kremlin _Sb), met with Western journalists to explain that Russian "sovereign democracy" is not much different from democratic practices of the Western countries. "Sovereign democracy" is a Kremlin coinage that conveys two messages: first, that Russia's regime is democratic and, second, that this claim must be accepted, period. Any attempt at verification will be regarded as unfriendly and as meddling in Russia's domestic affairs.

Source: The Washington Post [website]  
 
Sovereign Democracy:
The phrase 'sovereign democracy' was re-invented by Putin just a couple of years ago. He meant democracy that is being developed by the people, whom this democracy serves, not by outsiders who know better what model of democratic institutions fits best for the particular country. Putin also hinted that countries, like Estonia or Georgia "built" their democracies simply copying word by word what they were told to do, either by EU or America. We are building are democracy ourselves, making a lot of mistakes, stumbling, doing two steps forward and one step back, but this democracy is ours to its root not a thoughtless copy of some "standard" that cannot even theoretically exist.

This very phrase 'sovereign democracy' made Russian liberal democrats and US-sponsored NGO's simply mad. For example, Nemtsov (politician. Very critic of the Putin's regime) said that if there's any attribute before the word 'democracy' then it's not democracy but dictatorship. Carnegie Endowment in Russia was thundering that the idea of 'sovereign democracy' is dead for a hundred years already. One liberal from Novaya Gazeta even further -democracy today could not be sovereign because the Civilized Domocratic International Community decides what is democratic and "sovereign" countries should obey.

Source: "Russian Blog [website]"

"Sovereign democracy", Russian-style
By Ivan Krastev
November 16, 2006

The Russian governing elite is adapting conservative European intellectual models of political hegemony to justify its rule and consolidate its power, says Ivan Krastev.
Putin's Russia is not a trivial authoritarian state. It is not "Soviet Union élite". It is not a liberal democracy either. It is, however, a "managed democracy". The term captures the logic and the mechanisms of the reproduction of power and the way democratic institutions are used and misused to preserve the monopoly of power.
But the concept of managed democracy is also insufficient. It cannot illuminate Vladimir Putin's Russia considered not as a power machine but as a political ambition. It cannot explain why Putin resists becoming president-for-life; why, unlike his central Asian colleagues, he has declared his intention to step down at the end of his second constitutional term in 2008. It cannot explain what distinguish Putin's concept of sovereign democracy and Hugo Chavez's concept of sovereign democracy.
What is missing in western attempts to make sense of Putin's Russia is an insight in the political imagination of the current political elite in Moscow. What is missing is an interest in the arguments with which the regime claims legitimacy. Carl Schmitt could be right when some fifty years ago he noted that "the victor feels no curiosity".
[...]
Sovereign democracy": the political origin
By nationality the concept of sovereign democracy is Ukrainian. It has its origin in the Kremlin's conceptualisation of the orange revolution (orange technologies in Kremlin's terms) of November 2004 to January 2005 in Ukraine. This lineage can be tracked in Surkov's thesis, reprinted in Sovereignty. Sovereign democracy is Moscow's response to the dangerous combination of populist pressure from below and international pressure from above that destroyed the Leonid Kuchma regime.
The Kyiv (Kiev) events embodied the ultimate threat: long-distance controlled popular revolt.
Putin's preventive counter-revolution that followed marked a profound transformation of the regime of managed democracy in Russia.

Source: Russian Profile [website] e Opendemocracy.net [website]