Armenia's Velvet Revolution

Authoritarian Decline and Civil Resistance in a Multipolar World

Anna Ohanyan, Laurence Broers

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781788317191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In April 2018, Armenia experienced a remarkable popular uprising leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan and his replacement by protest leader Nikol Pashinyan. Evoking Czechoslovakia's similarly peaceful overthrow of communism 30 years previously, the uprising came to be known as Armenia's 'Velvet Revolution': a broad-based movement calling for clean government, democracy and economic reform. This volume examines how a popular protest movement, showcasing civil disobedience as a mass strategy for the first time in the post-Soviet space, overcame these unpromising circumstances. Situating the events in Armenia in their national, regional and global contexts, different contributions evaluate the causes driving Armenia's unexpected democratic turn, the reasons for regime vulnerability and the factors mediating a non-violent outcome. Drawing on comparative perspectives with democratic transitions across the world, this book will be essential reading for those interested in the regime dynamics, social movements and contested politics of contemporary Eurasia, as well as policy-makers and practitioners in the fields of democracy assistance and human rights in an increasingly multipolar world.

1

Velvet is not a colour

Armenia’s democratic transition in a global context

Anna Ohanyan

Introduction

Velvet is not a colour. And Armenia’s Velvet Revolution, contrary to a narrative widely circulating at the time of the events in Yerevan in April–May 2018, differed sharply from the post-Soviet ‘colour Revolutions’. These were largely top-down, elite-driven ‘revolutions’ across the post-communist space (and beyond), while Armenia’s Velvet¹ was decentralized, socially rooted and resulted from several years and successive rounds of experimentation with diverse strategies of political change. Armenia’s transition had a specific signature – non-violent, civil disobedience on a mass scale – which was dispersed, disciplined and peaceful. It unfolded patiently and incrementally through the existing institutions and laws of the state rather than in opposition to them. This pathway to change stands in contrast to the more prevalent elite-driven, ‘big bang’ colour revolutions to date in Eurasia, which unfolded against backdrops of significantly higher levels of state fragility and institutional weakness than was the case in Armenia.

The discussion on the nature of Armenia’s democratic transition is more than a scholarly exercise. Throughout the Velvet Revolution, incumbent forces and the governing elites sought to portray the Velvet as being precisely a colour revolution. The framing of events in Armenia as analogous to Georgia’s ‘Rose’ and Ukraine’s ‘Orange’ revolutions implied that they were the product of intervention by outside powers and would lead, inevitably, to political instability. In fact, the Armenian movement’s leaders and participants went out of their way to highlight the organic, grassroots nature of the movement, and its focus on internal issues of governance and rights rather than grand geopolitical orientations. In short, managing and framing this movement as organic and home-grown rather than as imported and manufactured were central for maintaining an overwhelmingly peaceful and sustained large-scale mobilization. This strategy succeeded in keeping both people involved and engaged, and external powers restrained.

The scholarly significance of parsing the Velvet Revolution is nevertheless very important. Traditionally, political developments in Armenia have been analysed through the temporal and spatial frames of post-Soviet Eurasia. I argue in this chapter that these frameworks of analysis may obscure more than they reveal about the Velvet Revolution, and that indeed the events in Armenia marked a significant break with traditional trends and patterns in post-communist Eurasia. The blinkered comparison of the Velvet to the colour revolutions in the post-Soviet space exaggerates the agency of (primarily Western) international actors and the power of Soviet legacies at the expense of the local agency of society, and non-Soviet legacies and trajectories. This approach concentrates disproportionately on external factors and the international context at the expense of internal and societal forces in mediating outcomes of authoritarian retrenchment, as well as democratic transition down the road. Indeed, the end of Cold War bipolarity, the hegemony of liberal democracy and Western democracy promotion strategies in 1990s–2000s, along with the post-communist colour revolutions that began with the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in Serbia in 2000, elevated the international context from a mere background factor to the overall determining condition in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and in parts of Asia and Africa (Stone et al. 2013; Pevehouse 2002; Levitsky and Way 2005).

In this chapter, I call for an adjustment of our frameworks of analysis. A more colour-blind approach, so to speak, requires an assessment of state as well as societal forces facilitating authoritarian decline and leading to the democratic opening in Armenia. There is, of course, a rich literature focusing on both structure and agency of societal actors in the outcomes of regime politics in post-Soviet Eurasia. Here, however, I argue that it is the interaction between popular agency, manifesting in patterns of mobilization bubbling up from below, and structural forces (such as the levels of economic inequality, institutional design of the legislature, the specific type of authoritarianism in the country, etc.), that best explains why and how the Velvet occurred at this particular moment in Armenia’s history.

The ‘patterns of mass mobilization’ are indicators of the power of agency, that is, people power and civic depth in Armenia, while at the structural level, the factors that mattered most are the level of state cohesion, the extent to which the state is institutionalized as well as its coercive power. Combined under the rubric of stateness, these dimensions include the organizational power of the governing regime as the dominant political actor (Levitsky and Way 2010). Yet they also signal the broader institutional effects on statehood that emerged, perhaps unintentionally, from the relatively stable entrenchment of authoritarian rule in the decades prior to the Velvet Revolution. The strategic interaction between these two factors, popular agency and stateness, over the years has been ongoing, producing mutual learning, attempts at c o-optation and coercion by the government, and bargaining and push back by social forces. And it is this interaction that is often under-theorized and misunderstood by the scholarship on democratic transitions and hybrid regimes.

Armenia is a country where mass-scale mobilization has been recorded to be the highest in the post-Soviet space over the past few decades, against the backdrop of its ‘Potemkin democracy’: ‘devoid of the most fundamental, rudimentary ingredients of procedural and substantive democracy in its practical aspects’ (Payaslian 2011: 287). Yet while the regime had successfully pushed back against public unrest on previous occasions, the interaction between agency and structure proved to be politically consequential in April 2018, and the regime caved in. I argue that it is the interaction effect between different patterns of popular mobilization in Armenia and the quality of stateness over the years that has generated variable outcomes at different times. This interaction effect becomes particularly explicit when the comparative analysis of other attempts at democratic transition are considered later in the chapter. This framework underpins a core contention of my argument, which is that the Velvet Revolution unfolded along two tracks: on one level in civil society through mass-based mobilization, and on another through elite negotiations and institutional bargaining. This signature ‘dual-track transition’ became possible because of the strategic interactions and learning over the past three decades between social forces and ruling elites, producing a conjuncture conducive to non-violent change.

Specifically, I argue that in terms of its duality in democratic transition, and the interaction between structural factors and agency, Armenia’s Velvet Revolution resembles the Latin American democratic transitions from the 1970s and the 1980s much more than the more recent colour revolutions in the post-communist space, or the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). My argument thereby transcends the spatial and temporal bias that tends to dominate the existing analysis on Armenia, which often groups the country with post-Soviet Eurasia, with the end of the Cold War as a key temporal referent. The approach introduced here is one of interactivity and dynamism between the agency of civil society, which has a chequered history of strength and weakness predating Armenia’s Soviet roots, and the structural conditions of statehood and political economy. A broader, more global comparative analysis of the Armenian case, transcending its Soviet contours, is essential to produce a fuller picture of the political transition in the country.

From people to parliament: The dual transition of Armenia’s Velvet

The post-Soviet framework in which Armenia has been analysed has been rather deterministic in terms of geography and culture. Cultural explanations, such as clientelism and informality, have been privileged in the dominant frameworks exploring regime dynamics. Hale, for instance, has explained the prospects of political change in terms of the dynamics of power pyramids controlled by centralized clientelistic groups (Hale 2012, 2015). According to Hale, ‘After an initial period of turmoil, the political history of (non-Baltic) post-Soviet countries can thus largely be seen as a history of the emergence of single-pyramid systems’ (Hale 2012: 73). The Velvet Revolution showed that the single-pyramid system, described by Hale, was a house of cards in Armenia, lacking institutional durability and vulnerable to internal collapse and social backlash. Culture is malleable, after all. The structural factors favoured by other scholars, such as the relative distance to the West (Levitsky and Way 2010), are also challenged by the Velvet Revolution. The ahistorical nature of structural factors is a conceptual challenge, which omits the power of diasporic groups as transnational actors with direct and indirect effects on Armenia’s political culture. Historically rooted civic legacies (see Chapters 2 and 4 in this volume) illustrate the ethno-centric nature of studies on civil society in political science, which have offered few tools to connect the civic legacies in Armenia’s Soviet and pre-Soviet political histories with their more contemporary manifestations.

Against this backdrop, the framework presented in this chapter attempts to capture the dramatic changes and transitions occurring both within civil society and government/state institutions, the strategic interaction between which is a defining moment of the Velvet Revolution. Reflecting the conceptualization of a ‘dual-track transition’ introduced earlier, I make two main arguments. First, the Velvet Revolution differs from the colour revolutions and the Arab Spring uprisings in terms of the modes of public mobilization. The Velvet Revolution deployed a non-violent disobedience strategy, which required and rested on sustained, broad-based and grassroots-level mass mobilization. In doing so, it utilized deep capacities in civil society that had accumulated over the previous decade. As noted, in this dimension, the movement echoed democratic transitions in Latin America in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and parts of Asia, rather than the post-communist colour revolutions or the Arab Spring.

Second, and in contrast to many other cases of popular uprisings, such as those in the Arab Spring, this was a deeply ‘institutional’ revolution, as it worked within the existing institutional parameters of the state, thereby crafting a politically stable path for itself in the long-term. Working with, as opposed to against the state (Ohanyan 2018), the Velvet Revolution unfolded gradually. This perspective necessitates a long view of the Velvet Revolution as a process unfolding over the duration of 2018, rather than just the headline events of April and May. For eight months, newly elected prime minister Nikol Pashinyan was an institutional hostage of sorts to a parliament still controlled by the previous ruling party, the Republican Party of Armenia (RPA). This uneasy cohabitation persisted until new elections were called on 9 December 2018. Institutional stateness is the Velvet Revolution’s second core dimension, and one that has been theoretically significant in the study of democratization and authoritarianism within comparative politics. My conception of institutional stateness incorporates, but is not co-extensive with, Levitsky and Way’s concept of ‘organizational power’, which they used to analyse the composite capacities of the state in terms of coercion, party strength and economic control, establishing hyper-incumbency advantage (Levitsky and Way 2010: 54–70).

Institutional stateness in the Armenian case refers to the stability and consolidation of state governance over the years preceding the Velvet Revolution. To be sure, the democratic deficit in Armenia was real and systemic. Yet in its efforts to consolidate its rule via shallow and co-opted democratic institutions, the authoritarian regime in Armenia succeeded in building a durable and in many ways stable competitive authoritarian system. This also contributed to the institutional stabil ity of the state, which played out in favour of the Velvet Revolution once it erupted. This is a different setting from the ‘Rose’ and ‘Orange’ revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, respectively. Armenia’s Velvet Revolution was challenging a deeply entrenched hybrid regime in a setting of institutional stability, rather than an institutionally weak state, which was the case with Georgia and Ukraine in 2003–4. Despite being shallow and co-opted, Armenia’s democratic institutions were nevertheless subversive institutions creating vulnerability to grassroots mobilization from below.

Over the past few decades, repeated interactions between mobilizing civil society and opposition political parties on the one hand, and the state on the other, generated repeated interaction effects feeding strategic and organizational learning. Whether in terms of large-scale demonstrations in support of Nagorny Karabakh’s secession from Azerbaijan in the late 1980s, or post-election protests in 2008, mass mobilization became a recurrent feature of Armenian politics (see Chapter 2). Yet, as Levitsky and Way point out (2010), if Armenia registered the highest levels of political mobilization in the post-Soviet space, it was also among the more ‘stable’ competitive authoritarian regimes where the ruling regime maintained a solid grip on power (see Chapter 3). Levitsky and Way rightly conclude that mass mobilization is insufficient to dislodge an authoritarian regime. While mass mobilization in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, driven by the Karabakh movement, human rights concerns and environmentalism, registered significant successes, post-election mass mobilizations later on were less successful. Against this backdrop, how and why did this Velvet round of mass mobilization succeed in producing authoritarian breakdown, while the previous waves of post-electoral protests failed to do so, is an important question to ask.

I find answers in the interaction of the structural dimensions of the state with the agency of bottom-up mass-based mobilization. As I argue below, the math of the revolution (large numbers that grew from non-violent civil disobedience) and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: An unlikely transition?
• 1 Velvet is not a colour: Armenia’s democratic transition in a global context
• 2 Thirty years of protest: How Armenia’s legacy of political and civic protests prepared the Velvet Revolution
• 3 How Serzh Sargsyan and the Republican Party of Armenia lost control of a competitive authoritarian system
• 4 Armenian civil society: Growing pains, honing skills and possible pitfalls
• 5 Donning the Velvet: Non-violent resistance in the 2018 Armenian Revolution
• 6 Armenia’s transition: The challenges of geography, geopolitics and multipolarity
• 7 Preserving the alliance against tall odds: Armenia’s Velvet Revolution as a challenge to Russia
• 8 Political patriarchy: Gendered hierarchies, paternalism, and public space in Armenia’s ‘Velvet Revolution’
• 9 Democratization and diaspora: The Velvet Revolution and the Armenian nation abroad
• Conclusion: What’s next for Armenia? Authoritarian reserves and risks in a democratic state
• Index
• Copyright