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Progress and Retreat in Africa Richard Joseph H April 2008, Volume 19, Number 2 $11.00 Progress and Retreat in Africa Richard Joseph H. Kwasi Prempeh Joel D. Barkan Larry Diamond Russia’s Transition to Autocracy Pierre Hassner The Freedom House Survey for 2007 Arch Puddington Yang Jianli on China Yun-han Chu et al. on Global Public Opinion Richard Youngs on European Democracy Assistance Mitchell A. Seligson et al. on U.S. Democracy Assistance Sumit Ganguly on India Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador Steven Levitsky & María Victoria Murillo Lourdes Sola Catherine Conaghan Russia’s TRansiTion To auTocRacy Pierre Hassner Pierre Hassner, research director emeritus at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) in Paris, delivered the 2007 Sey- mour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World (see box on p. 6). For many years he was a professor of international relations at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris and a senior visiting lecturer at the European Center of Johns Hopkins University in Bologna. He is the author of La terreur et l’empire (2003) and La violence et la paix: De la bombe atomique au nettoyage ethnique (1995, with an English translation in 1997). it was with great trepidation that I accepted the invitation to deliver this distinguished lecture, together with the suggestion that my remarks should focus on Russia. Although my lifelong preoccupation with inter- national politics—and in particular with the struggle between freedom and tyranny—has led me to follow closely developments in Russia (and, of course, the Soviet Union), I must confess at the outset that I am not an “old Russia hand.” I do not speak Russian, and I have never spent more than two consecutive weeks in Russia. Why, then, did I agree to speak on this subject? In the first place, as an analyst of international relations I have a strong interest in the po- litical role of human passions, and I think that understanding wounded pride, repressed guilt, resentment, and the manipulation of fear is central for interpreting Russia today. But I was also attracted by the idea of pay- ing tribute to the memory of Seymour Martin Lipset. I met him and his wife Sydnee only once, toward the end of his life, at a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. To my knowl- edge, Lipset did not write much on Russia or on communism, but he did write extensively on the connection between economic development, the rise of a middle class, and democracy, as well as on the impact of political culture and traditions. As I expected, in preparing this lecture, I found a good deal of inspiration in Lipset’s intellectual approach. Journal of Democracy Volume 19, Number 2 April 2008 © 2008 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press Journal of Democracy The Seymour marTin LipSeT LecTure on Democracy in The World Pierre Hassner delivered the fourth annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World on 15 November 2007 at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and on November 22 at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto. The Lipset Lecture is cosponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy and the Munk Centre, with financial support this year from the Canadian Donner Foundation, the Canadian Embassy in Washington, the American Federation of Teachers, the Albert Shanker Institute, William Schneider, and other donors. Seymour Martin Lipset, who passed away at the end of 200, was one of the most influential social scientists and scholars of democracy of the past half-century. A frequent contributor to the Journal of De- mocracy and a founding member of its Editorial Board, Lipset taught at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, and George Mason University. He was the author of numerous impor- tant books including Political Man, The First New Nation, The Politics of Unreason, and American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword. He was the only person ever to have served as president of both the American Political Science Association (1979–80) and the American Sociological Association (1992–93). Lipset’s work covered a wide range of topics: the social conditions of democracy, including economic development and political culture; the origins of socialism, fascism, revolution, protest, prejudice, and extremism; class conflict, structure, and mobility; social cleavages, party systems, and voter alignments; and public opinion and public confidence in institutions. Lipset was a pioneer in the study of com- parative politics, and no comparison featured as prominently in his work as that between the two great democracies of North America. Thanks to his insightful analysis of Canada in comparison with the United States, most fully elaborated in Continental Divide, he has been dubbed the “Tocqueville of Canada.” Today, analysts of Russia are threatened by three temptations: eco- nomic determinism, cultural determinism, and political determinism. For instance, the excellent Russian author Dmitri Trenin is optimistic about Russia’s future because, although not democratic, it is capitalist; hence he argues that it will give birth to a middle class that will want the rule of law.1 Other authors believe that Russia will never become demo- cratic, because its culture is basically authoritarian. A third group, com- posed largely of Americans, believes in politics as a deus ex machina: Because all people want democracy and the market, no matter what their Pierre Hassner 7 culture or their state of economic development is, these can be installed virtually overnight. For avoiding these simplifications and for grasping the complicated interrelationship between politics, economics, and cul- ture, I think there is no better guide than the work of Seymour Martin Lipset. For my part, I shall concentrate on the role of politics and especially of a single person—Vladimir Putin. Although he is neither the begin- ning nor the end of the story of democracy and capitalism in Russia, he does play a crucial role. I came here, however, neither to praise Putin nor to bury him. I did not come to praise him because I agree with Sergei Kovalev that “Putin is the most sinister figure in contemporary Russia history.”2 He has led Russia into a harsh brand of authoritarianism with some fascist features, and he remains under strong suspicion of having inspired a number of criminal acts, including the fires that served as a pretext for launching the second war in Chechnya, and the assassination of political oppo- nents such as Anna Politovskaya. On the other hand, I did not come to bury him. His rule is full of con- tradictions and, while it has some extremely ominous aspects, he cannot be said to have burned all his bridges or to have made it impossible for Russia to evolve in a more positive direction once circumstances change. Whatever our final judgment, we must not close our minds to the case made by his defenders, who stress his popular support among the Russian people, the improvements that he has achieved in certain ar- eas (as compared to the catastrophic situation he found when coming to power), and the fact that his undoubtedly authoritarian rule has stopped well short of totalitarian terror. Many Russians and some Westerners assert that, no matter how dubi- ous public opinion polls or how rigged elections are in Russia, a majority of the people still support Putin. In their eyes, that is sufficient to make the regime a democracy of sorts, and one more in line with Russian traditions than is the pluralistic Western model. According to Putin’s defenders, he is not hostile to pluralism as such but merely claims the right to choose a different model, equally imperfect but more suitable to Russia’s present circumstances. For precedents, they cite not only Peter the Great and Alexander Nevsky but also Franklin Roosevelt, who also fought the oligarchs of his time and, in addition, ran for a third (and fourth) term. Another comparison, implicit in some sympathetic French com- mentaries, invokes the precedent of Charles de Gaulle. One of the most shocking features of Putin’s policies is his attempt to claim continuity with both the Czarist and the Soviet pasts. In a way, de Gaulle fol- lowed a similar approach in a France that traditionally had been divided between the heirs of the French Revolution and those of the ancien ré- gime. De Gaulle belonged to the Bonapartist tradition, which wanted to 8 Journal of Democracy unify French history and to promote a nationalism that embraced all of France’s past. Moreover, although France was no longer a great power, de Gaulle’s great game was to pretend that she still was and to get her to punch above her military or economic weight in the Great Powers League. As we shall see, Putin has been trying to do something similar with Russia. Unfortunately, however, there is also much else in Putin’s dossier, and the overall verdict has to be much harsher. True, the case made by defenders of Putin’s foreign policy, largely backed even by many liberal Russians who are critical of Putin’s authoritarianism, should not be dis- missed out of hand: After all the shocks that Russia has suffered—the loss of Eastern Europe, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the great economic crisis of 1998, the huge increase in economic inequality through the enrichment of some and the impoverishment of most, the enlargement of NATO, the presence of U.S troops in Central Asia, and the talk of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO—it is only normal that there should be a reaction of resentment and a wish for reassertion now that conditions permit.
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