Are authoritarians winning the war of ideas in the former Soviet bloc?
“A new battle for hearts and minds is being waged in the republics of the former Soviet Union – and the west is in danger of losing it,” notes one observer.
Russian premier Vladimir Putin’s call for a new Eurasian Union as an alternative pole of attraction to the democratic West has already received support from Belarus and Kazakhstan. The timing of the announcement was probably no coincidence, coming just two days after the dramatic failure of the European Union’s efforts to revive its partnership with its eastern neighbors.
The EU’s Eastern Partnership summit in Warsaw ended in embarrassment when the EU’s Eastern partners refused to even sign a declaration expressing “deep concern over deteriorating human rights, democracy and rule of law” in Belarus.
The partnership is premised on the premise that the EU can employ its economic weight as the region’s biggest trading partner and its much-vaunted soft power to incentivize the states along its eastern periphery to adopt democratic reforms. But that simply isn’t happening.
“In security and democracy terms, the EU has failed not only to achieve most of its objectives, but also to prevent a deterioration of trends on the ground,” says a new report from the Brussels-based European Council on Foreign Relations. “In fact, every country in the region except Moldova is less democratic now than it was five years ago.”
“There is a deep irony here,” writes the FT’s Neil Buckley:
The west risks “losing” former Soviet republics just as it is trying to nurture democracy in the Arab world, after uprisings often compared with eastern Europe’s 20 years ago and partly inspired by the post-Soviet “coloured” revolutions.
Yet another arena in which democracy is an issue of geo-strategic rivalry?
