Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Easter

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

Re: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Ea

Postby admin » Thu Jun 22, 2017 1:12 am

Part 4 of 4

The German Democracy Foundations

On the other hand, as several German party/democracy foundation leaders report, American foreign policy leaders tend to think in short-term goals, including the deposing of distasteful heads of state. Given the history of German and British militarist interventions against their neighbors, this is a far more delicate matter for European governments. It is a particularly sensitive matter for Germany, given the historical incursions in Eastern Europe under the Nazi onslaught. It is also important from a political economic standpoint that for the European Union as a whole, Russia, which puts up the greatest resistance to regime change initiatives, is their third largest trading partner.

Another difference in the way the German foundations describe their corporate capitalist approach: social market economies (soziale Marktwirtschaft). Indeed, it was the conservative Christian Democrats who developed the concept, which consists of regulated markets, collective bargaining, national health care, and other welfare functions of the state, and it is generally embraced by Germany's other parties. This comparatively positions the center-right Christian Democrats to the left of the Democratic Party in the United States, which flees from such concepts as "social welfare." The notion of the social market economy is also embraced by the rest of Western Europe and is written into the constitution of the European Union. Both major U.S. parties conceive of markets more in terms of laissez faire - even if in practice they support extensive welfare supports for corporations in the form of massive subsidies, huge tax breaks, regulation waivers, cost-plus contracts, and the like.

In Europe there are 32 political foundations, 27 of which had a combined budget of almost €400 million in 2004, of which almost 60 percent came from the two largest German political party foundations (Stiftungen) and 90 percent from the six German foundations overall. Most of these foundations were founded after 1989 (in response to the breakup of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact), and most concentrate their work on supporting likeminded political parties overseas, though half of them regard the absence of established party traditions in less developed countries as a major impediment to that objective. Eastern Europe and Central Asia receive the largest share of attention and financial support. North Africa and the Middle East receive the least attention (Wersch and Zeeuw 2005, xiii, xiv), though those latter regions are among the least democratic.

Among the democracy promotion foundations in Western Europe, the major source of assistance comes from Germany (NED 2006, 10 f16), principally from the party foundations, which contribute the overwhelming share, about 90 percent, of the region's total assistance. The principal party foundations are the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, established 1925, [23] affiliated with the Social Democratic Party, and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (originally established 1955, renamed for Chancellor Adenauer in 1964), affiliated with the Christian Democratic Party; each employing more than 600 individuals (Scott 2002, 194). Both were established as democracy training centers within Germany itself, and this history has tempered their style of behavior abroad. A third significant party institute, the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, established 1958, represents the Free Democratic Party. [24] They are joined by the Hanns Seidel Stiftung (Christian Social Union), established 1967, the Heinrich Boll Stiftung (Green Party), established 1998, and the much smaller Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (Democratic Socialist Party), established in 1990. The largest five of these stiftungen contributed $418.7 million in 2004 in various international programs they support. The leftist and smallest foundation, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, had a budget of $10.8 million (Carothers 2006b, 84-85). Of the five, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung has been the most influential in terms of overseas political party assistance.

In their democracy initiatives, although most share similar strategic opposition toward nationalist regimes in Eastern Europe, the European foundations are more transparent than the IRI or NDI in their political objectives regarding the region, which rest on hopes of preparing them as future allies in the European Parliament. "[A]ssistance to political parties is the core business of the European political foundations" (Wersch and Zeeuw 2005, 14). However, it is more the center and center-right parties that are actively engaged in party-to-party relations than parties on the left, which are more skeptical of finding stable counterparts. Friedrich Ebert (FES), for example, focuses much of its support to Eastern European trade unions (personal communication, Pia Bungarten, 2008). Similarly, the Republican Party in the United States has taken a more active role than the Democrats in supporting campaign victories for favored (rightist) parties in the CEE countries. Hence, party support is less about building democratic institutions and more about consolidating political power (Carothers 2006b, 144-145, 154). The European Union, according to one study, takes a less direct hand in administering democracy assistance at the citizen level, relying for its NGO support more on "a network of local Civil Society Development Foundations" (Ottaway and Carothers 2000, 307).

As Western Europe on the whole has more diverse and articulated political parties and ideological streams, one might expect their party foundations to have greater influence in Central and Eastern Europe than their U.S. counterparts. And despite the fact that the former spends more money on democracy assistance, this appears not to be the case, at least in the short-term. Francis Fukuyama insists that it was only the United States that supported the CEE countries in their resistance to communist rule and therefore enjoys greater trust than Western Europe in the eastern regions. On the other hand, the director of a Polish organization funded by USAID and formerly administered by Freedom House, says that it's because U.S. political advice in Ukraine proved to be irrelevant, that his organization separated itself from USAID in 2005 (Pieklo, personal communication, 2007).

A German head of the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung (FNS) section for the CEE region claims that there is a general distaste for politics, at least in Central Europe, given its experience under communist party systems. Hence the recent emphasis given to NGOs (Tamm, personal communication, 2008). This is hard to determine, as FNS takes a "liberal" view (in the European economic sense, more like libertarianism in the U.S. sense) of these matters and may therefore downplay the importance of statist institutions and practices. He also points to the anxious disposition of most Poles toward Russia, an attitude that does appear to have much resonance, for which reason the United States, which led the Cold War, stands as a stronger ally than Western Europe. Hence the general acceptance in Poland of the Bush administration's "missile shield" defense in that country, a move that was widely understood to be directed at Russia even while cast as a response to Iran's supposed nuclear ambitions. Obama's position toward the shield appeared to be of low priority during his first months as president.

Apart from the way that states relate to superpowers, pro-Western CEE leaders express appreciation for the "flexibility" that the United States exercises in taking action and its "short decision process" (Tamm, personal communication 2008) in moving money and other resources to projects that advance the interests of the donor agencies on whom they are dependent for grants. This renders local NGO actors as little more than relatively well paid professional employees who are often out of touch with the majority of people whose interests they supposedly serve but on whose support they need not rely (Matveeva 2008). The array of foreign- supported NGOs, think tanks, university intellectuals, legal and other professionals, business entrepreneurs, private media executives, and other influentials creates a formidable set of interests that together tend to dominate public opinion, strengthen an elite polyarchy, drive talented people away from government service, and, for all of these reasons, weaken the role of the state. Political leaders and political parties come to increasingly lean on the professional sectors, rather than the majority of their constituents, as the means by which they structure political communication, get elected, and continue to hold power.

More than one German democracy foundation leader does not appreciate the "flexible" means by which the United States operates overseas. Germans and other European governments tend to rely more on a stricter accounting and "conditionality" when giving assistance. That is, they scrutinize how assistance funds are spent and demand the demonstration of indices of change (e.g., democratization) before extending further aid (Agh, personal communication, 2007). According to an FES official, "[T]hey [the American party foundations and other state democracy promotion agents] are in fact flexible in the way that they shift activities according to new ideas about how this best can be done easily, and they don't have scruples [about it]." In Germany, he argues, the constraints of the foreign ministry bureaucracy direct overseas policy toward long-term, and less "flexible," solutions. Moreover, German foundations are considerably more restrained than the United States in confronting state authorities in other countries and prefer to work at a party-to-party or parliamentary training level to effect change (Buhbe, personal communication, 2008). Another German democracy foundation officer on the left shares this view, believing that Eastern European political parties will take American money but prefer the careful governing ideas of the German foundations (Georgiev, personal communication, 2008).

A Heinrich Boll Stiftung (HBS) project director for the Eastern European region also expressed doubts about what she sees as the short-term thinking in U.S. democracy promotion. "We have long-term programs, so we are not really so flexible, not so quick, but we work for a long time with partners [in Eastern Europe] that grow up somehow." Boll, she says, is more concerned with the people, the organizations, and the infrastructure in civil society: "This is the difference" (from the U.S. approach). From her experience in the region, she finds that the United States has contributed to an undemocratic "professionalization" and "commercialization" of civil society. What is happening, she asserts, is that the donor-driven programs in Central and Eastern Europe mirror the wishes of the American funding agencies, and with a contract bidding process and loose oversight of how funds are spent, the local professionals who are hired treat civil society as a kind of profit-seeking business and meet the conditions of the American foundations in ways that generate for themselves the most income.

The problem is that this kind of organization is not non-governmental, but they are commercial.. .. This year they [local NGOs] do this kind of work, and next year they do something else. And then the next year they do something totally different, because the labels [specifications] of the donors change. So they don't develop as an organization (Fischer, personal communication, 2008).


Given the hundreds of billions of U. S. dollars that have" disappeared" in Iraq, including equipment, weapons, and cash payoffs, this comment seems not in the least overstated (Ritchey 2009).

Compared to their U.S. counterparts, the German foundations have a more nuanced position toward Russia. In part, this is historical in nature, reflecting a sense of responsibility for the brutal and disastrous Nazi invasion of that country during the Second World War that led to the deaths of some 27 million Russians. Because of that shameful past, according to the head of the British Westminster Foundation for Democracy, Germany feels a greater need to demonstrate its democratic character and to devote more resources than either Britain or the United States to its democracy projects abroad (French, personal communication, 2008). Just as important perhaps, Germany's close ties to Russia represent the strong current trade ties between the two countries, plus the fact that Germany heavily depends on Russia for oil and natural gas. The Social Democrats in particular have cultivated good relations with Russia, and the current (2009) post of minister of foreign affairs (and deputy chancellor), Frank Steinmeier, is held by a member of that party.25 Former German chancellor, also a Social Democrat, Gerhard Schroder is supervisory board chair of the Baltic Sea (Nord Stream) gas pipeline company that is partnered with Russia's Gazprom and which bypasses Poland, as well as Ukraine and Lithuania.

German foundation leaders with whom I spoke generally concurred in the view that the United States tends to take a more aggressive, short-term approach to political and economic transition in Europe. In the American state approach, bridges to the neoliberal political economy have to be built quickly before the opportunity passes, whereas German officials see the issues in long-term relations with neighboring countries. This, no doubt, has to do with the fact that Germans have to live with consequences of failed states in the region far more than Americans, separated by an ocean and an isolated history over the past 400 years. The one exception to this is the right-wing Hanns Seidel Stiftung, which represents the Christian Social Union Party (the Christian Democrats in Bavaria). Seidel actively intervened in El Salvador to try to block the FMLN from coming to power in 2009. Its interventionist behavior on behalf of right-wing parties abroad, similar to IRI, has drawn the criticism of The Left Party (Die Linke) in Germany and even the embarrassment of the right-wing Christian Democrats (Georgiev personal communication, 2008; Momkes, personal communication, 2008).

Speaking for FES, its director for international dialogue expressed a widely held concern among German foundations that their American counterparts (IRI, NDI) do not always respect the regulations and laws of the countries in which they engage. Second, there is "the perception of the great proximity between the [U.S.] foundations [party institutes] and the State Department ... [such that in several cases] they availed themselves of the immediate help directly from the state." What is lacking, she says, is a proper firewall between democracy promotion and government, the absence of which inevitably leads to local backlash against foreign organizations, affecting German as well as U.S. democracy foundations. However, the German foreign ministry, "prompted by observing the American role" overseas, is reconsidering its position about leaving democracy promotion to party foundations and is considering taking a more active statist position in such matters (Pia Bungarten, personal communication, 2008).

Is there some rivalry between the U.S. and German democracy promotion foundations? Undoubtedly, there is, as both countries are vying for influence within the CEE region and elsewhere. From the perspective of the director for the Ebert Foundation's CEE program, there is a certain arrogance in the way American democracy promoters regard their task - that they "are convinced that the best possible world we have invented so far is the American Constitution and the American way of life. So they only need to export it, and the world would be better. They are so convinced that this [should be] done" (Buhbe, personal communication, 2008). (Pia Bungarten, personal communication, 2008).

Britain's Westminster Foundation for Democracy

Britain's democracy promotion program was established with the formation of the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) in 1992, in response by the Conservative John Major government both to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the earlier creation of NED. WFD is a considerably smaller version of its American counterpart, NED, or the German foundations, with a current (2009) annual Foreign and Commonwealth Office grant of £4.1 million. Only half of this amount goes to the political parties, primarily the Conservatives and Labour. Its board of governors has representatives from the three major British parties, together with the trade unions, business, academia, and NGOs.

WFD focuses its assistance in the areas of democratization, human rights, political participation, and conflict resolution (Scott 2002, 196). As one study on comparative approaches to democracy promotion finds, "while the British and Canadian foundations appear as regional specialists, the US foundation is not only global, but also seems to be something of a roving democracy promoter, shifting its regional emphases with opportunity and need" (Scott and Walters 2000, 253). One difference between the Conservatives and Labour is that the former emphasizes direct party relations and campaigning capacities, whereas the latter, finding party-to-party relations difficult to sustain, focuses more on parliamentary training (Sattar, personal communication, 2008; Thomas, personal communication, 2008).26 Unlike NED or USAID, neither party puts much emphasis on the presence of open business markets as a precondition for assistance to targeted countries. And neither engages in civil society projects.

With its small budget and absence of private funding supports, WFD does not maintain offices overseas and concentrates primarily in providing training in Britain in politics and parliamentarian procedures for visitors from other countries. However, they nonetheless maintain a presence within countries targeted for democracy promotion. According to a spokesperson for the British Conservative Party's international division, British and U.S. regime change agents often coordinate their efforts overseas "under the radar." But the WFD is considerably more explicit, ideological, and explicitly "partisan" in doing political party work than either NED or the German Stiftungen, the latter of which the Conservatives consider too "academic" in their approach. The WFD Conservative's international office director, Philippa Broom, notes that they work closely with IRI and occasionally with NDI to bring about common political objectives (Broom, personal communication, 2008; Thomas, personal communication, 2008). Comparing WFD with the German foundations, the chief executive of the WFD, David French comments: "We don't bother with the niceties of the German system of a clear demarcation between the political party and the stiftung that's affiliated to it" (French, personal communication, 2008).

To make the point about British open partisanship and the shared U.K'/U.S. vision of political change in Eastern Europe, Broom gave the example: "If you look at Ukraine in particular, we all wanted regime change. Heck, we wanted those boys [the Yanukovych government] out, we wanted Yushchenko in." Despite the shared strategic objective, she also critiques the short-term U.S. approach: "For American agencies, it's more political, it's an absolute: 'We want regime change, and we're damn well gonna get it.''' She also has reservations about the more reserved German approach, which, she says, "keep ignoring parties ... you cannot have good governance, you can have as many excellent NGOs as you like, but they're not at the end of the day pressure groups" (Broom, personal communication, 2008).

Other European Democracy Promotion Foundations

There are other, small European democracy promotion institutes, but none compares in scale to the German program. In the Netherlands, the Institute for Multiparty Democracy (NIMD) established 2000 by seven Dutch political parties, works with political parties in over 150 countries, including Eastern Europe. In 2008, it had an annual budget of €10.3 million. NIMD appears to have a more direct style in dealing with other political systems. On its webpage, for example, it describes the breakdown of interparty communication under the Saakashvili presidency in Georgia and the fraud that accompanied both the presidential and parliamentary elections in early 2008 that favored his ruling United National Movement party (NIMD 2009). No "color revolution" support came from the West on this occasion despite massive demonstrations that have occurred calling for his resignation. Saakashvili is regarded by the United States as a reliable ally in opposition to Russian influence in the Caucasus region.

In Sweden, the Olof Palme International Center (OPIC), established in 1992 by the Swedish Social Democratic Party is closely associated with the country's national labor movement. Its funding comes from the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, and the Swedish Co-operative Union. In Europe, it works in the Baltic states, the Balkans, and Russia. In 2004, the Center had an annual budget of €12.5 million. The principal target of its work is civil society issues (Wersch and de Zeeuw 2005). In Belarus, OPIC works to help build and unite social democratic movements against what it sees as the undemocratic character of the Lukashenko government. In Ukraine, its position was weakened after its partner organization, the Socialist Party of Ukraine, failed to gain representation in the parliament in the 2007 election. Compared to the United States, OPIC plays a minor political role in the region and appears to share the larger objective of wanting to bring Eastern Europe into the fold of the European Union and the global market economy.

Although leaders of both the German and British party foundations express deep concerns about the U.S. approach to democracy promotion, they cooperate closely with their American counterparts. According to one long-time democracy promotion practitioner:

"The two institutes [IRI and NDI], meanwhile, are in regular, friendly communication with counterpart party institutes in other countries, from the German Stiftungen to the British Westminster Foundation for Democracy and the Institute for Multi-Party Democracy of the Netherlands, all of whom provide similar kinds of advice and assistance (though on much smaller scales than do the Americans). The two party institutes have begun to accept funding from some other countries' aid agencies for programs with political parties" (Melia 2005, 24-25).


In the next chapter I look at the work of democracy promotion in Eastern Europe. The main studies of "color revolutions" are from Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. An important aspect of democracy promotion in this region is rooted in the Cold War past and the continuing aggressive posture that the United States has taken toward the Russian government in the Putin era. Democracy promotion is also embedded in residual anti-Russian and anti-socialist sentiments shared by different local groups and individuals involved in foreign-sponsored political projects, precisely the factions that the United States helped to bring to power

The principal focus of Chapter 4 is on the "transition" projects of U.S. government and private agencies, with emphasis on the symbolic aspects in the pursuit of regime change. When foreign change agents, as they like to think of themselves, lack knowledge about the region in which they seek to institute democracy, they tend to rely more on their technical expertise in public persuasion than praxis via experiential understanding. The foundation of democracy building is thus built on instrumental communication and opportunistic patron-client relations. As part of the mission, the United States brought a range of tools to effect its political ends, many of them associated with commercial marketing and PR practices and media propaganda.

_______________

Notes:

1. Cited in Brown, no date. Allen's commentary (1949) was published in his "Propaganda: A Conscious Weapon of Diplomacy," The Department if State Bulletin, 21 (546), December 19. Pp. 941-943.

2. Hill & Knowlton gained notoriety prior to the first Persian Gulf invasion of 1991 when, working on retainer for the Kuwaiti government, it organized a propaganda campaign in support of U.S. intervention by the Bush Sr. administration. Craig Fuller, head of the Washington, D.C. office of H&K at the time, was a former chief of staff and close friend of the U.S. president. The consulting firm falsified a report that the soldiers of Saddam Hussein has thrown Kuwaiti babies from hospital incubators, which Bush and others used on several occasions to justify the invasion.

3. Rendon's projects in the Middle East included the promotion of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) under the controversial leadership of Ahmed Chalabi, who hadn't been to Iraq since 1958, when he was 13. Rendon also aided the development of the Iraqi Broadcasting Corporation and Radio Hurriah (which during Saddam's time transmitted from Kuwait to Iraq the messages to Iraqi opposition leaders), did propaganda work for the Kuwaiti exile government during the Iraq invasion of that country in 1990-1991, and other projects - by its own claim, in a total of 91 countries. According to New Yorker correspondent Seymour Hersh, the CIA paid Rendon close to a hundred million dollars for its services on behalf of the INC. See Kennedy and Lucas 2005; Wikipedia 2007b; and Bamford 2005.

4. On the other hand, the CIA chose to hide images of its program of torture of Al Qaeda suspects by destroying at least 92 videotapes that captured such techniques as waterboarding (Mazzetti 2009). The Obama White House declared that it would overturn the policy of torture exercised under the Bush administration.

5. The Lincoln Group and Rendon Group, once partners, both provide psychological operations services for the U. S. government, especially on behalf of the military in' the Middle East. The Lincoln Group was one of three PR organizations to share up to a $300 million five-year contract for the Pentagon in "psychological operations efforts to improve foreign public opinion about the United States, particularly the military" (Merle 2005). One of its objectives was to pay Iraqi news media to place unattributed articles written by the U.S. military, which raised concerns that deceptive reporting "could easily migrate into American news outlets" (Shanker 2006). The Rendon Group, which has rendered media services for presidential candidates in both U.S parties, received $100,000 per month from the Kuwaiti royal family during Desert Storm and also won a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda (Cockburn and St. Clair 2004, 322).

6. Obama closed the Pentagon's "Support for Public Diplomacy" office in 2009 but retained the position of undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs at the State Department.

7. During his first administration, G. W. Bush appointed at least 32 officials linked to the arms industry, among them 17 with ties to major defense contractors. These included Secretary of the Navy Gordon England, a former vice president of General Dynamics and Secretary of the Air Force James Roche, and a former Northrop Grumman executive (Hartung and Ciarrocca, 2004).

8. Such restrictions originate with the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 7, clause 7), which forbids the use of federal funds without legal appropriation. Subsequent legislation (5 U.S.C. 3107) in 1913 prohibited federal funding "to pay a publicity expert unless specifically appropriated for that purpose." P.L. 108-447, Div. H. Sec. 624 restricts U.S. agency communications directed at Americans "for publicity or propaganda purposes" (in its words for content that is for "self-aggrandizement," contains "puffery," is "purely partisan in nature," or is engaged in "covert propaganda") unless authorized by Congress (Kosar 2005, 5-6).

9. When the Bush administration raised the profile of the State Department undersecretary for global affairs to democracy and global affairs and created a deputy national security advisor for "global democracy strategy" in support of Bush's "freedom agenda," USAID also redesignated a deputy assistant administrator position to take on the portfolio for democracy promotion (Melia 2005, 11).

10. IRI is often partnered in its anti-leftist 'non-partisanship' with another NED-funded organization, the AFL-CIO's Free Trade Union Institute. In the 1980s, one of the FTUI's "democracy assistance" projects was a $1.5 million grant in support of a rightwing extremist group, the National Inter-University Union, for the purpose of blocking what the labor group saw as dangerous communist influences in Francois Mitterand's socialist government (Conry 1993).

11. Among other American consultants in Bucharest was the peripatetic Dick Morris (a former Bill Clinton political adviser), working in the service of an American of Romanian ancestry, Lia Roberts., former chair of the Nevada Republican Party, whose campaign was quickly aborted. Israeli consultant Tal Silberstein, together with American consultants James Carville and Stanley Greenberg, worked in the 2004 presidential election on behalf of the prime minister Adrian Nastase. Oddly enough, an Israeli PR firm run by Eyal Arad worked in the presidential campaign for a right-wing nationalist and Holocaust denier, Vadim Tudor and his Greater Romania Party (PRM). In 2007, Silberstein and a team of Israeli consulting partners, together with the well-traveled American consultant Arthur Finkelstein and a Romanian commercial television manager, Dan Andronic, worked in support of the prime minister, Calin Tariceanu and his Liberal Party. American political consultants working abroad frequently switch alliances between leftist and rightist parties, reflecting the collusion between Democrats and Republicans on matters of neoliberal foreign policy.

12. Reagan's image served as a simulacrum, inasmuch as it was not clear whether, given his background and personality, he saw himself as president or as someone playing the president.

13. The current (2009) State Department coordinator of U.S. assistance to Europe and Eurasia, Daniel Rosenblum, was senior program coordinator of the FTUI from 1991 to 1997, a NED grantee that was very active in support of Boris Yeltsin and in the demise of the Soviet Union during the 1980s. Rosenblum had been "a public spokesman for the AFL-CIO on the labor movement in the former Soviet Union."

14. In 2009, street protests erupted in Tehran following the contested election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to a former U.S. government official from the Reagan administration, the C.I.A. and NED were involved, respectively, in destabilizing Iran and channeling funds to the opposition presidential candidate, Hossein Mousavi. The head of a NED-funded organization, the Foundation for Democracy, Kenneth Timmerman, said that NED was involved in fomenting a "green revolution" in Iran, providing money to "pro-Mousavi groups who have ties to non-governmental organizations outside Iran that the National Endowment for Democracy funds" (Roberts 2009).

15. Richard Nixon's close political advisors, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and Charles Coulson, had come from}. W. Thompson - all three were eventually convicted for their roles in the Watergate scandal.

16. Soros, born in 1930, is a contemporary of the German economist Ralf Dahrendorf; both studied under the philosopher Karl Popper at the London School of Economics. Dahrendorf, who died in 2009 and took up British citizenship, was a lifelong proponent of a libertarian version of a civil society, whereas Soros held to a social democratic approach. Both were ardent anti-fascists and anti-communists and shared Popper's advocacy of the "open society" and his anti-communism and skepticism toward Marxian socialism.

17. In early 2009, Obama's national security adviser, James L Jones declared at a meeting of 45th Munich Conference on Security Policy: "As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger, filtered down through General Brent Scowcroft and Sandy Berger, who is also here" (Council on Foreign Relations 2009).

18. One of the more explicitly partisan foreign policy NGOs, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which ironically refers to itself "non-partisan," is in fact a predominantly neoconservative organization founded after 9/11 for the purpose of "fighting the ideologies that threaten democracy." Largely focused on the Middle East, Iran, and the defense of Israel and an advocate for the invasion of Iraq, its board includes prominent political conservatives including Newt Gingrich, William Kristol, and Steve Forbes, conservative journalists, former CIA director James Woolsey, Senator Joseph Lieberman, as well as former government officials appointed by Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, and (Foundation for Defense of Democracies (2008).

19 The European election monitoring organization, OSCE, declared the April 2009 election results, won by the Party of Communists, as valid. Russian political leaders declared their suspicions about interference by Western intelligence to undermine the Moldovan state, achieve anschluss within a greater Romanian state, and extend NATO's reach into Eastern Europe (Trabanco 2009).

20. The Ford Foundation has financially aided a number of political and security-oriented foundations and think tanks in the region, including the Institute of Public Affairs in Warsaw, which also receives substantial grants from the Soros foundations.

21. In January 2009, McFaul was named by the Obama administration as senior director at the National Security Council for Russian affairs and as an adviser to the president.

22. Significantly, compared to the United States, there are few political appointments in the German foreign service and in general less politicization of overseas work and less unilateralism by the party that happens to be in power (Momkes, personal communication, 2008).

23. Friedrich Ebert was German chancellor from 1918 to 1919 and president from 1919 to 1925, when he died in office. He represented the right wing of his party, the Social Democrats (SPD), and used the military (the pro-monarchist Freikorps) to end Germany's communist-led (the Spartacist League) uprising in the early post-World War period and had the radical left movement's leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, murdered. The Social Democrats remain strongly anti-communist in their domestic and foreign policies and played a significant role in preventing the Communist Party of Portugal from gaining power in the 1970s.

24. Somewhat ironically, the Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, representing the pro-free trade Liberals in Germany, has its headquarters in Potsdam on Karl Marx Strasse.

25. The Social Democrats lost their position in the ruling coalition of the German government following the September 2009 federal election.

26. It appears that conservative parties and foundations in the West find it easier to support parties, because right-wing ideology has a long history in Central and Eastern Europe (and elsewhere), whereas social democracy has a much weaker footing. The Western political foundations are generally unwilling to provide support to communist parties overseas, and suspicion appears to be mutual.
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Re: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Ea

Postby admin » Thu Jun 22, 2017 2:15 am

Part 1 of 4

CHAPTER FOUR: DEMOCRACY PROMOTION IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

When we provide the democratic opposition in Albania with 12 Jeep Cherokees and they win an election, I'm incredibly proud.  

-- SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN, CHAIR OF THE INTERNATIONAL REPUBLICAN INSTITUTE, CITED IN BOVARD 2005, 61).


Joke heard throughout the Caucasus: Why is it that the United States never has revolutions? It's because it has no American Embassy.


The Department of Defense used two private military contractors, MPRI and American Systems, to provide in-country combat training to Georgian special forces just before their invasion of South Ossetia in August 2008, according to a report in the Financial Times. MPRI previously had been used to train the Croatian military "prior to their invasion of the ethnically-Serbian Krajina region, which led to the displacement of 200,000 refugees and was one of the worst incidents of ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars" (Clover and Sevastopulo 2008). A Nabucco gas pipeline project intended to bring gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe through Georgia, which would reduce dependence on Russian sources, has been a critical concern of Georgian authorities and the West. Both the United States and Israel are major suppliers of weapons to the Saakashvili government.

Before the Financial Times broke the story, the American mainstream media took a different, quite one-sided view of the conflict that characterized it as an "invasion" by Russian forces. Apparently there was poor coordination among the NATO allies, as it was plain to Western observers on the scene from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that in fact Georgia had initiated the military aggression in order to gain control over the breakaway, nominally Georgian, territory (Chivers and Barry 2008). Russia's then prime minister, Vladamir Putin, expressed obvious sarcasm about the Western response: "I am surprised at how powerful the propaganda machine of the so-called West is .... This is awesome! Amazing!" (cited in Barry 2008). The allied U.S/E.U. favorable disposition toward Serbia's breakaway Kosovo province, and the generally blind eye of the mainstream American media toward the massive protests this generated in Belgrade, provides a stark contrast to the tone of outrage reported regarding South Ossetia.1 Studying the two cases, it is clear that the Cold War is far from over. Russia, and countries like Serbia that are friendly to Russia, serve as NATO surrogates for the extinct Soviet Union.

In the attack on South Ossetia (carried out with many of the 2,000 Georgian troops that its president, Mikheil Saakashvili, had sent to invade Iraq), it was more than the coordinated Western propaganda - and his bombastic rhetoric comparing Russian actions in the region to Nazi Germany's annexations in Central Europe (Chivers and Barry 2008) - that stirred Russian concern. The G. W. Bush administration had unilaterally rescinded the 1972 u.S.-Soviet anti-ballistic missile treaty, refused to sign the Clinton-era comprehensive test ban treaty and changes in the SALT II nuclear disarmament treaty, and pushed the placement of national missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, approved by conservative Polish and Czech governments in 2008. (Obama dropped the plan but continued to promote the myth that Europe is a target of Iranian aggression - just not at the present time.)

In 1999, Clinton had ordered the U.S. military participation in the NATO bombing of Serbia, leading to Kosovo's secession. This had a clear parallel with the desires of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to be independent of Georgia, which the United States and other NATO members firmly opposed. But when the facts came to light, the Georgian invasion, together with Saakashvili's unstable leadership, restrictions on the media, and persecution of political opponents, made it embarrassingly untenable, at least temporarily, to accept the country as a member of NATO.

There are serious questions about whether democracy can be simply instituted, particularly through foreign intervention - that is to say whether democracy is evolutionary or "creationist" in character. According to a study undertaken by the European Union, the Western European PHARE (Poland Hungary Assistance for the Reconstruction of the Economy), and TACIS (Technical Assistance to the Commonwealth of Independent States), foreign-assisted programs started in the early 1990s have been successful in laying the groundwork for democracy and civil society, especially in the NGO sector, in Central and Eastern Europe (Crawford 2003a, 86-87). Skeptics, such as David Chandler, question whether external guidance in the formation of civil society organizations, which on their own lack local organic propulsion, constitutes legitimate institution building. From Gramscian and Foucauldian perspectives, such attempts by external agencies to construct legitimacy in this manner, through "discursive practices and frameworks of knowledge , meaning, norms and values," represents a form of global governance, an "empire of civil society." Democracy export, undertaken "under the rubric of good governance" (Chandler 2006, 15, 63), serves to actually depoliticize the governing system and to avoid adjudications of conflict and equitable distribution of power and rights in favor of a hegemonic market-centered consensus - one that is bound to be polarizing and short-lived.

The attention given to civil society development in "transition states" and its corollary, the downsizing of the government, is embedded with the core conservative assumption that individual citizens and groups are better endowed than public administrators to look after social needs. This involves a subcontracting of services formerly handled by government agencies to interest groups. Such a construct of civil society is rooted in notions about "the property-bearing individual who chooses to participate in civil society and forms associations through active participation; often, the goals of this individual are driven by a commitment to advancing the condition of the self" (Thomas Jacobson and Won Yong Jang, cited in Dutta-Bergman 2005,272). It is a striking alternative to ideas rooted in socialism and the benevolent state.

The proliferation of NGOs over the past 30 years is linked to worldwide neoliberal policies of cutting state welfare programs. In the CEE countries, the expansion of NGOs arose from the collapse of Soviet Union and the efforts of the West to extend its political, economic, financial, and military reach into the post-communist regions. Neoliberal market forces (i.e., the transnational executive class) have set their sights on the former Soviet bloc members. According to a prominent Hungarian political scholar, from the early 1990s to the present, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and, increasingly, the European Union, all of which have adopted the neoliberal credo, have served as the "institutional tutors" of Central and Eastern Europe (Agh 2006, 88).

However, for those organizations in the CEE region that depend on dole outs from foreign agencies, it is questionable whether to describe them as "nongovernment organizations," as they are tied to the financing and agendas of government and government-linked organizations. NGO is thus more a term of ideology and propaganda than an accurate descriptor. According to one close observer, NDI and IRI found that in the course of Bulgaria's electoral campaign, "NGOs could tilt an election in favour of America's preferred candidate ... Petar Stoyanov," which would seem to make them explicitly governmental in character. The following year, NDI and IRI collaborated in support of a Romanian NGO, Pro Democracy Association, to similarly effect regime change. And in Slovakia, a partisan NGO called "OK '98" gained financial assistance from the U.S. Information Service, NED, George Soros's Open Society Foundation, Britain, the Netherlands, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States, which enabled it to organize a range of political activities aimed at defeating Vladimir Meciar in the presidential race in 1999 (MacKinnon 2007, 30-32: Rieffer and Mercer 2005, 398).

For Michael McFaul, who is a member of NED, IREX (International Research & Exchanges Board), Freedom House, the Eurasia Foundation, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the Hoover Institution, civil society means essentially the presence of NGOs representing advocacy groups closely tied to donor interests (Carothers 2006b, 134). NGOs are often seen as alternatives to political parties, as during the 1980s when the trade union federation "Solidarity" (Solidarnosc) was organized in opposition to the Polish state and Communist Party, later to become itself a governing element of the state. In effect, NGOs frequently are constituted as informal governance structures that permit outsiders to work directly with favored groups without having to address formal state or political apparatuses, the latter of which, under U. S. law, they cannot legally fund for campaign purposes. Through NGOs, however, U.S. interests can influence and indirectly fund elections by encouraging local counterparts to engage in political work.

THE POLISH CORRIDOR

The origins of the Cold War can be traced to the anti-communist ferment in the United States going back to the labor movements of the late 19th century, but its associations with U.S. interventions in the CEE region are more directly the result of the disputed status of Poland following the Yalta conference of 1945. Having been attacked twice through the Polish corridor by Germany in the years preceding Yalta and by Poland itself in 1919-1920, and having lost some 27 million people in the second German invasion, the Soviets were adamant about managing the politics of Poland. From the Soviet perspective, this was a country which their Red Army liberated from the Nazis and which required defensive occupation at the end of the Second World War. The United States and Britain regarded communist rule in that country, starting with the contested legislative election of 1947, as unacceptable. Although that electoral outcome may have been rigged to favor an overwhelming victory by the Polish coalition of communist and other left groups, it was probably no worse a case of political manipulation than the demonstration elections held by U. S. allies in the Dominican Republic in 1966, "South" Vietnam in 1967, the Philippines in 1978, El Salvador in 1982, and in other U.S.-protected client regimes.

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Table 4.1 NED Funding by Region, 1990-1997
Source: Adapted from Scott and Steele 2005, 447


Anti-communism was the principal filter that shaped U.S. foreign policy after 1945, which had much less to do with human rights and democracy than the barrier that the Soviet Union and China constituted to global political and economic expansion. Had the United States and its allies concentrated their efforts in eliminating poverty, racism, gender discrimination, and state repression, the conditions in South Africa and much of the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa , the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and a number of other countries would have risen above their concerns about the communist governments in the CEE region. However, in the prevailing political culture of the Cold War, the CEE polities were the central targets of NED funding in the 1990s (see Table 4.1) and continue to be into the 21st century. And, as in previous invasions, the Polish corridor was the West's entry point to the region. As the first country designated for regime change, Poland began to receive significant U.S. assistance in the 1980s. USAID and other public and private funds were funneled to prescribed organizations, largely bypassing legislative mediation. The Reagan administration actively and covertly supported the Polish labor movement, Solidarity, even as Reagan pursued union-busting (e.g., the firing of the PATCO air controllers' union officials) at home.

U.S. democracy assistance groups have consistently argued that their purpose is not to interfere with election outcomes in target countries but only to assure free and fair electoral processes. If that were the case, the fervent anti-communism of Reagan and Thatcher and their coordinated demands on Poland's Jaruzelski government to legalize Solidarity or lose economic assistance would be irrelevant. Solidarity also had extensive underground support from American unions, including the American Federation of Teachers under its president, Albert Shanker, the son of Polish immigrants. Shanker, an outspoken anti-communist and defender of the U.S. invasion of Indochina, was a founder of the Polish Foundation for Education for Democracy, established in 1989 (Kucharczyk, personal communication, 2007). Working closely with the Reagan White House, State Department, CIA, National Security Council, and the Vatican, the AFL-CIO was also an active source of financial and moral support to Solidarity, threatening to shut down U.S. ports to Polish goods until Solidarity was recognized. The AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland covertly channeled about $1 million to Solidarity between 1983 and 1986 (Bernstein 1992; Cwiek-Karpowicz and Kaczynski 2006, 54; Wall Street Journal 2009).

For the United States, support for Solidarity and the overthrow of Poland's communist government was the opening wedge toward the larger goal of destroying the Soviet Union. U.S. House intelligence committee member (1985-1990), Henry Hyde, summarized the tactics employed:

In Poland we did all of the things that are done in countries where you want to destabilize a communist government and strengthen resistance to that. We provided the supplies and technical assistance in terms of clandestine newspapers, broadcasting, propaganda, money, organizational help and advice. And working outward from Poland, the same kind of resistance was organized in the other communist countries of Europe (Bernstein 1992).


During the parliamentary election campaign in 1989, NED passed on $2.5 million to Solidarity, in addition to $5 million to Polish emigres working on behalf of the labor federation (Broder 1997; Calvo Ospina 2007). Through NED, the United States surreptitiously worked with the federation and the Polish underground to "smuggle publications, printing machinery, radio equipment and video cassettes into Poland" (Pear 1988), which helped bring down the communist government of Wojciech Jaruzelski. Solidarity leader, Lech Walesa, was elected president the following year. Official and elite U.S. backing for Solidarity, representing renewed efforts to overthrow the Soviet system, had ranged from Edward Kennedy to George Soros to Jeane Kirkpatrick (Cwiek-Karpowicz and Kaczynski 2006, 23). [2]

A paper from a leading think tank in Warsaw argued that the collapse of the Communist Party in Poland "would not have been possible without considerable Western assistance which ... [was] effectively implemented over the course of many years." With this finding, the study rather blithely presumed that:

Democracy promotion does not serve private interests and strategic goals, but protects people against abuses of power. There is no hidden imperialism here, because the ultimate aim is to give the citizens full freedom of decision-making about the fate of their country (Cwiek-Karpowicz and Kaczynski, 2006, 7, 11).


Its Polish authors would have to be naively unaware of the motives that have guided American foreign policy throughout the 20th century or of the reality that the "formal model of democracy advanced by the US cannot deal with the dominance of the economic realm by forces outside the territorial state." Within the larger global framework of neoliberalism, "a very narrow civil society" (Smith 2000, 75) is imposed upon most "transition" states to restrict their capacity to enact economic and social reforms that redound to the majority. For one British journalist who has covered the "color revolutions," democracy promotion cannot be taken at face value but should rather be understood as "foreign policy-dominated and motivated ... an attempt to develop Western allies if not Western clients in these new transition democracies." For Washington, he avers, "it's a zero-sum game" - governments in the CEE region are seen as being either with the United States or Russia, even when they're simply trying to be independent (Steele, personal communication, 2008). The Visegnid countries (Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia) have in fact resisted some of the more radical austerity U.S. and E.U. neoliberal demands by instituting social protections for the unemployed and those dislocated by economic "reform."

U.S. assistance in dollar amounts does not reveal the long-term consequences the United States helped to impose on the CEE region as a whole in the "transition" period, which increased significantly during the G. W. Bush years. To this point, two close observers note that: "Democracy assistance not only establishes an unequal relationship between donor and recipient but assumes a kind of political intervention by donors that has rarely been undertaken so explicitly by a donor government" (Newberg and Carothers 1996, 99). With regard to civil society, the dissident movement and civil society organizations in Poland (the former Warsaw Pact state that most enthusiastically embraced neoliberalism) that brought about the end of communist rule no longer have a significant presence in Poland. In fact, according to one analysis, in Poland it is only the organizations established during the communist era that retain any social vitality (Magner 2005,49).

The election in Poland of an anti-communist president, Lech Walesa, in December 1990 brought its rewards. U.S. economic assistance immediately increased, according to one area specialist, Joanna Regulska, largely directed at "restructuring, including privatization, investment, trade, enterprise restructuring, and business development (86.2% of obligated funds during 1990-1994)." She also found that during the 1990s the public was largely left out of these initiatives, which became manifest in "overall dissatisfaction with the social and economic reforms" and leading Polish citizens to question the motivations of foreign assistance in the area of civil society. The danger, as she saw it, was that when the United States ended its funding role in Poland, the NGOs might disappear (Regulska 1998, 43, 48, 49). In fact that has not occurred. With Poland safely in the Western orbit, the United States began to organize local "democracy promotion" programs for regional political party training. In September 1998, the NDI brought 11 Serbian political activists to Poland to participate in the Polish electoral campaign in order to prepare them for undertaking regime change in their own country. The Serbians apprenticed with local and national campaign managers and journalists to learn the techniques of election media coverage. This "laid the foundation for NDI's [subsequent] ... program in Serbia" (National Democratic Institute 2007b).

In more recent years, Poland, together with the Czech Republic and Hungary, has served as a political entrepot for Western democracy promotion programs directed at countries to the east. "In Central and Eastern Europe, for instance, NDI assembled leaders from other countries who have been through difficult transitions, such as Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians, to give guidance and support to leaders in countries going through transitions" (USAID 1999, 41). These Visegnid countries (including Slovakia), [3] operate within a neoliberal framework that deemphasizes traditional social democratic functions of the state and opens borders to external economic and political actors (Bohle and Greskovits 2007, 445). It is often the case that conservative parties express greater resistance to open markets than the social democrats, and Polish conservatives have sometimes found common ground with the country's Communist Party.

As a result of the lifting of ownership regulations, for example, German publishing groups dominate the Czech press and, together with smaller Finnish and Swiss companies, control 80 percent of national newspaper and magazine markets in the country, and virtually 100 percent of the local press. [4] Foreign companies also controlled the three largest cable TV enterprises. An American multi-millionaire, Ronald Lauder (scion of the Estee Lauder fortune) started the Czech's TV Nova (which at one time had an 80 percent share of the broadcast TV market) and also has controlling interest in Slovakia's Markiza TV (80 percent) and KANAL A (90 percent); Slovenia's POP TV (86 percent); Romania's PRO TV (66 percent); and Ukraine's Studio 1+1 (60 percent) (European Federation of Journalists 2003; Kuras 2002). Under foreign control, the Czech media tend to avoid investigative reporting so as not to offend Czech officials (Jirak, personal communication, 2007). From USAID's perspective, these political economic arrangements make them reliable partners in carrying out transition work in Eastern Europe. A defender of Western democracy promotion defined the approach as: "The West promoting its own values [and] ... help[ing] other countries [to] live up to these values" (Andrew Wilson, cited in Lane 2009, 127).

Western-oriented Poles have held key positions in government and have helped solidify the NATO axis directed against Russia and the CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) region. Radoslaw Sikorski, a Polish emigre, moved within conservative circles at Oxford University, advised Rupert Murdoch on investment opportunities in Poland, and joined the right-wing think tank, American Enterprise Institute from 2002-2005. At AEI, he was executive director of New Atlantic Initiative, whose aims included bringing the CEE transition states into NATO and the European Union and fostering stronger "free trade" agreements between E.U. and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Association) member states. In 2005, he returned to Poland to become the defense minister (until 2007) as part of the right-wing Kaczynski government (Wikipedia 2007a).

The end of the Soviet/Warsaw Pact system had echoes of the end of Spanish power in the Caribbean and the Pacific, which opened new spaces for the pursuit of America's "manifest destiny." NDI and IRI became increasingly active in the CEE countries, funding electoral initiatives to prevent communists from recapturing state power and, according to NDI, training "the region's talented new leaders, expanding their horizons and encouraging their desire for positive change" (Atwood 1992, 223). For the principal funding source behind U.S. democracy assistance, USAID, the basis of its "democracy promotion" claims is grounded in a political economic rationale ("free trade"). In a glowing account contained in its 2000 document, ''A Decade of Change," USAID describes its humanitarian involvement in the region as such:

In 1989, and again in 1992, the leaders and people of Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia called out to the Western world for help - to make the transition to market-oriented democracies .... Many parts of the U.S. government eagerly joined the effort to show these new independent states how to become market democracies (USAID 2000a).


With a focus on the Central and Eastern European region, including Russia, it was found that between 1989 and 1996:

90 percent of the approximately $108 billion the international community provided was intended to help free markets develop, primarily by encouraging stabilization, liberalization, and privatization of the economy ... the merest fraction of Western aid overall- probably no more than 1 percent - went to civil society (Quigley 2000, 192).


U.S.-CENTRAL EUROPEAN LINKAGES

Under a flexible accounting system, where U.S. regime change money ends up is somewhat of a mystery. The NDI program director in Hungary admitted that despite bans on foreign financing of elections in that country, there was no accurate record of funding sources, and "the extent of foreign contributions" was "unclear" (Melia 1992, 54). In Poland, NDI, led by its then chair Walter Mondale, former U.S. Senate minority leader Howard Baker, and U.S. Senate budget committee chair, Peter Dominici, trained legislators in 1989 in seminars "that focused on the role of Polish legislatures in developing national economic policy" (Latynski 1992, 95). In 1990, U.S. election experts were invited by Czechoslovakia's new president, Vaclav Havel, to advise his movement, Civic Forum, on organizing election systems (Carnahan and Corley 1992, 112-113). Since co-organizing the "Charter 77" 1977, which was not a social movement as much as "a small circle of intellectuals" (Blazevic, personal interview, 2007), Havel has been at the forefront among Central European politicians in taking up the cause of overthrowing current (Cuba) and former communist governments. [5]

One of Havel's early election advisors was Madeleine Albright, vice chair of NDI at the time, whose father, Josef Korbel, had been a foreign ministry official in Czechoslovakia until he fled the country when it came under Communist Party control. 6 It is not surprising, therefore, that Albright did not extend her advice to the country's Communist Party. When questioned about it, she replied, "We don't figure they need any advice on how to run elections" (Whitney 1990). Indeed, the Communist Party was excluded from the U.S. assistance package distribution (Pringle 1990). Apparently, the government took Albright's advice to heart. Judging by the campaign style, according to a British correspondent, the symbolic aspects of the election were very definitely American oriented (Lucas 1990).

With Albright's assistance, NED funneled $400,000 to two of the 23 political parties in Czechoslovakia, Civic Forum and the Slovak Public against Violence, the two organizations that had coalesced to overthrow the Communist Party in 1989. NED's intervention met with protest from leaders of competing parties contesting the 1990 election. A leaked U.S. government document at the time acknowledged that the purpose of the NED grant to Civic Forum was to provide them with technical equipment "in order to prepare for the June 8 elections and consolidate their position as Czechoslovakia's premier democratic movement" (Engelberg 1990). U.S. government funding was just one form of foreign assistance in the Czechoslovakian election. Where there are Western-supported elections, foreign electioneering and political consultants are usually in tow.

American consulting groups, together with NED-funded political training specialists, American universities, private foundations, and other government agencies, including the U.S. Information Service, helped develop a political consulting industry and public relations in Russia and the CEE countries in the early 1990s (Guth 2000, 205-206; Sussman 2006). But whether electoral management in a country is organized by foreign or local agents becomes less significant once advertising, public relations, marketing, and citizen surveillance are instituted as the principal mode of disseminating public information. The necessity for developing its own post-communist political and commercial propaganda system became obvious to Russian leaders, especially as many Russians resented the American and British styles of advertising and public relations (Guth 2000, 199). One leading and long-time Russian journalist, Vladimir Pozner, claimed that foreign political communications had much to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was the aggressive U.S. media policy directed toward the region, as he saw it, that helped instigate the fall of the Communist Party. "You had better PR," he explained to an American researcher (cited in Guth 2000, 195).

In terms of comparative public relations, one difference is that, given their history, the Russians remain less self-conscious than the West about the propaganda nature of political communication - which heavily draws from their past journalism practices under the Soviet Union. Indeed, the leading "political technologist" group in Russia is called "Niccolo M" (named for the famed propagandist Machiavelli). A second major "political technologist" firm in the country is cleverly called PRopaganda. Whether American or Russian, promotional and personality style politics turns political communication into an instrumental and professionalized activity, mediated by a restrictively expensive system of communicating not politics (i.e., education about conflicting ideas and power relations) but political images. The end result leads to governance by a polyarchy of elite and corporate interests that enjoy the privilege of a costly pay-to-play electoral and political communication system. For the privileged, politics is merely a cost of doing business.

Preceding the first multiparty elections in Hungary in the post-communist era, the ruling Socialist Party invited as its consultant the U.S. PR organization, at the time the world's largest, Hill & Knowlton.7 This was "an unprecedented development in Eastern Europe," according to an American news account, "reflecting further moves toward Western-style politics" ("U.S. Ad Agency to Aid Hungarian Socialists" 1989). On election day, the NDI and IRI (then called National Republican Institute) made unannounced visits to polling stations all over Budapest and found

evidence of a campaign that had benefited much from Western coaching organized by the two American parties' institutes. For nearly a year they have been holding seminars and briefings by American, British and other political experts here and in the United States for the Hungarian parties on how to organise themselves and campaign effectively (Independent 1990).


In 2005 and 2006, Richard Dresner, who previously worked for Boris Yeltsin (see Sussman 2005), the Social Democratic Party in Romania, and the Bulgarian incumbent party, National Movement Simeon II (NSM), advised, with his consulting partner Robert Wickers, the campaign of Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany. Wickers also did consulting for former Romanian prime minister Adrian Nastase and Bulgarian prime minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Dresner, Wickers & Associates 2008). In Romania, foreign consultants have been joined by U.S. and British party foundations. The IRI, with the support of Britain's Conservative Party, played a very active role from its Bucharest office, paying for "a regular stream of U.S. political consultants to train opposition parties in campaign methods and basic party building," setting up field offices for a political coalition it helped to ignite, and "providing strategic advice for the Convention [coalition], stepping up campaign workshops, and sending its main political consultant around the country to exhort opposition party branches to work harder" (Carothers 2006b, 99, 102-103, 153). Discussing the success of foreign consultants engaged in training local political campaign functionaries, a Hungarian official commented: "They have been soaking it all up like sponges" (Clough 1990).


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Figure 4.1: CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

RUSSIA: AMERICANS TO THE RESCUE

U.S. political support for new regimes always has behind it the implied promise of foreign assistance. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the communist party system in Central and Eastern Europe quickly attracted the United States to the region's midst, which has since been a major target of opportunity. Following the collapse, millions of Russians were left without means of subsistence. The first post-Soviet Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, turned to the United States for assistance, and just prior to the 1993 parliamentary elections,8 the Clinton administration responded with a strong endorsement of the country's new market economy, backed a $10 billion loan from the IMF, and turned its back on the brutal war carried out in Chechnya (Cohen 2005).

The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered an acceleration of democracy promotion in the United States and made it into a major industry. For the United States, of all the countries constituting the former Soviet sphere of interest, Russia, with the largest population, a wealth of resources, and a source of potential resistance, is the crown jewel. From 1992 until 1996, when Boris Yeltsin was reelected as president, the United States made Russia its third largest recipient (at more than $2.1 billion) of bilateral foreign aid.9 The World Bank and IMF bailed out his government with a $22 billion rescue package, turning a blind eye to Yeltsin's 1993 use of military force to dissolve the Russian parliament and other repressive measures (Hook 2002, 124; Ralph 2000, 202; Rutland 2000, 254).

As inconvenient as Yeltsin's corruption, repression, massive social dislocations, dictatorial behavior, and his personal chronic alcoholism may have been for his foreign backers, his Western supporters had little difficulty in backing him and his embrace of disastrous neoliberal "shock therapy" policies against the challenge of his main Communist Party rival. For U.S. policy planners, a convenient depiction of Yeltsin was the false propaganda that he was a democrat, indeed a combination of George Washington and Adam Smith (Rutland 2000, 244). Responding to Yeltsin's violent seizure of parliament in October 1993 in which 500 people were killed and almost a thousand wounded, the U.S. secretary of state at the time, Warren Christopher, remarked, "The United States does not easily support the suspension of parliaments. But these are extraordinary times" (Klein 2007, 229).

The United States and its allies, including the international banking community, exercised a double standard in the case of Yeltsin. Russian studies professor Stephen Cohen found U.S. behavior toward Russia terribly misguided:

When in the 1990s the U.S.-supported Yeltsin overthrew Russia's elected Parliament and Constitutional Court by force, gave its national wealth and television networks to Kremlin insiders, imposed a constitution without real constraints on executive power and rigged elections, it was "democratic reform"; when Putin continues the process, it is [called] "authoritarianism."


America's "triumphalism" in the CEE region not only ignores the realities of the Russian and Soviet past, he argues, but represents an unnecessary provocation, which has led to a buildup of Russia's nuclear and conventional arsenal and the country's defensive nationalist reaction to the West and hostility to Western-supported "color revolutions" within the former Soviet region (Cohen 1996).

U.S. support for Yeltsin was linked to a campaign of fear, a key element in shock therapy that would open the floodgates to a neoliberal, IMF -approved economy, with its attendant cutbacks in social protections, carried out in the name of modernization and economic efficiency. [10] According to Cohen, the United States saw the disintegration of the Soviet Union as an opportunity not for strategic collaboration with a remaining major political and military power but for "a relentless, winner-take-all exploitation of Russia's post-1991 weakness" (Cohen 1996). Going beyond the threats to the security of the Soviet Union, the United States and its NATO allies expanded the encirclement of Russia by extending NATO membership to countries in the CEE region and placing or planning military bases in at least half of the former Soviet republics (Cohen 1996).

America's aid package to Yeltsin required a radical restructuring that forced the end of price controls and state subsidies, the privatization of state industries, the floating of the state currency, and reduction of barriers to and restrictions on transnational trade and investments. Led by economic shock therapist, Jeffrey Sachs and the Harvard Institute for International Development, and backed with $57.7 million in USAID funding (and some $300 million in USAID money granted to other American contractors), U.S. economists and business firms worked closely with Yeltsin's first director of economic reform, Yegor Gaidar, and later his main architect of privatization, first deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais, "a darling of the U.S. and Western financial establishments" (Wedel 1998).

The program was intended to dismantle remaining state economic structures and put in place a disciplining infrastructure of market-based institutions. In this vein, George H. W. Bush had earlier announced (1990) a startup initiative of $300,000 for "establishing a center and clearinghouse for American private-sector assistance and volunteer activities in Eastern Europe" that would "support democratic change and market-oriented economic reform" (Devroy 1990). What the Russians had anticipated, but the United States would not deliver, was some degree of equitable partnership. But, as Russian specialist Cohen observed, what the Russians got was an American withdrawal from the ABM treaty, U.S. and NATO military expansion in former Soviet republics in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic, aggressive access to Caspian oil and gas, and hostility to Russian domestic and foreign policies (Cohen 2006).

The collapse of Soviet communist power in 1991 brought chaotic changes. Almost immediately, Russia experienced an explosive proliferation of political parties. Nineteen parties contested elections for the Duma in 1993; two years later, there were 43 (Carothers 2006b, 26), the Communist Party being the largest among them. Initially, two of the beneficiaries of IRI and NDI assistance in the Russian parliament were the pro-Western, "reformist," and personality-centered Yabloko Party and the Russia's Choice party, later reformed as the Union of Right Forces (SPS). The "larger parties such as the Communist Party, Unity [Putin-aligned party, now merged as United Russia], and Vladimir Zhirinovsky's [right-wing nationalist] Liberal Democratic Party appeared to them as unsuitable partners for Western aid." IRI in particular was committed to blocking the leading Communists from coming to power (Carothers 2006b, 102-103).

The conversion of the Russian economy to a haven for foreign investments and trade, with its security supervised by NATO and its politics guided by the West, is a dream of supremacy that would even surpass the wartime "Grand Area" strategy of American global planners. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, a rush of American consultants arrived to train their Russian counterparts in the dark arts and technologies of political consulting (discussed in Sussman 2005). By the late 1990s, Russians had developed a political consulting and electioneering industry of their own. A Russian academic (Pshizova 2007) found that the professionalization of politics in Russia rationalizes the lack of a civil society, which permits the concentration of power in the hands of new political formations, former Soviet Communist Party apparatchiks and nomenklatura, their billionaire allies, former KGB agents, and other closely associated groups and individuals, including those in the state-controlled media.

The management of Russian-style democracy by professionals enables political groups to bypass popular mobilization by citizen activists, an activity in which only the current Russian Communist Party (CPR) is particularly strong. Inasmuch as professional management of politics invites more expensive forms of lobbying and campaigning, business patrons stand to benefit, which works against the political ambitions of the CPR. To wit, in the 1999 Russian parliamentary elections, 78 percent of political party expenditures (83 percent for victorious parties) went to television advertising. The pattern seen in Russian electoral politics, much like the United States, indicates a low level of party identification, close ties between parties and state bureaucracies and the latter's resources, increasing use of political technologies (polling, focus groups, advertising, media appearances, and the like), and image-making and personalization of political "leadership" (Pshizova 2007, 4, 10, 15). Russia's Niccolo M website boasts that several of its top managers are members of the American Pblitical Consulting Association ("Niccolo M" 2007).

Russia's greater absorption into the world economy is made more certain by the presence of global consumer-oriented corporations, including Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Ikea, American Express, Nestle, Wrigley, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nike, Levi Strauss, PepsiCo, Philip Morris, GM, and others. Their presence is supported by the consumer marketing data delivered by such brand research companies as WPP's TGI and TNS Gallup (O'Leary 2008). The operations of leading Western PR consultants, such as Rory Davenport, managing director of the fast-growing Washington-based Qorvis Communications, is another reason behind Russia's accelerating market status. Paced by Russia, whose annual advertising market expanded at an average of 41 percent from 2000 to 2006 and reached sixth place internationally by 2006, Central and Eastern Europe as a region has the fastest advertising growth rate in the world (Campaign Magazine 2007).

After an initial delirium with the U.S. market model, Western economic and political assistance eventually became unwelcome in Russia. Before the 2003 legislative election, Russia's centrist Yabloko Party turned down the offer of foreign assistance. Yabloko and the right-wing SPS party questioned the motives behind Western backing, which they came to see as focused more on campaign victories than long-term party development (Carothers 2006b, 103, 169) - and perhaps because association with the West damaged their reputations as genuinely Russian parties amidst a climate of intensifying nationalist sentiment. Nonetheless, $45.2 million in U.S. assistance to Russia was targeted to democracy programs in FY 2006. Putin himself expressed skepticism about the "civilizing role" that democracy assistance represents (Wilson 2009, 378).

Since Putin's ascendancy to Russia's presidency and then prime ministership, the country's political disposition toward the United States and its program of democracy assistance has significantly changed. One target of the Putin government's political crackdown has been the NGO community, both domestic and foreign, consisting of several hundred thousand non-profit organizations, which the Duma, passing by a wide margin, forced into reregistration under a restrictive 2006 law. Many foreign NGOs were shut down. Speaking for the Duma, Alexei Ostrovsky, a Duma deputy, said to the parliament: "We have seen what happened in Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova [11] and how these local branches of foreign NGOs that are funded by the CIA functioned .... We want to defend our citizens from the chaos which our country can be dragged into by these foreign NGOs" (Page and Evans 2005). Over 90 percent of funding for human rights NGOs is from foreign sources, particularly NED (Abdullaev 2007). Russian officials also distrust local NGOs as being either corrupt or inefficient, leading to their underfunding and the substitution by Russian corporate philanthropy. Responding to criticism from the Council of Europe, Putin's presidential successor, Dmitry Medvedev, agreed in 2009 to revise the 2006 law to permit greater freedom for human rights and other NGOs.

Apart from civil society, there has been a degree of foreign political engagement in Russia. An NDI assessment congratulated itself on the role it played in transforming Russian society through the introduction of American electioneering techniques. Under U.S. influence, the study confidently claimed, Russian political parties were now

targeting their communication to voters based on demographic and geographic information ... conducting research on voter attitudes through focus groups and polling ... small meetings, coalitions with civic groups, door knocking, phone banks, and public leafleting; organizing more sophisticated press operations that attempt to create news and respond to events . ... Much of this change can be attributed to NDI training (cited in Carothers 1999, 152; italics added).


If the U.S. influenced Russian politics as much as the NDI claimed, the accession of Vladimir Putin suggests that either the American organization is seriously misguided or the real intent behind U.S. political assistance actually has little to do with institutionalizing democracy.
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Re: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Ea

Postby admin » Thu Jun 22, 2017 2:16 am

Part 2 of 4

THE TEMPLATE "REVOLUTIONS"

Beyond Russia, NED, especially the IRI, has concentrated its democracy promotion funding efforts heavily in the former Soviet bloc states. By 1990, American political consultants were already training future campaign counterparts in a number of former communist party-run states, now considered "transitional democracies." USAID provided $175 million in media assistance to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states during the 1990s, which included the training of over 10,000 media professionals. [12] This form of assistance helped to destabilize a number of disfavored governments (Hoffman 2002; USAID 2000a). Country by country, the United States engaged in a pattern of intervention designed to set up leaders in the 24 CEE countries who, they expected, would further open their state assets to transnational corporate investment, help to isolate or force Russia into the fold, permit U.S. military hegemony over the region, and protect the U.S.-controlled Euro-Asian oil pipeline. Their usefulness had much less to do with how well they introduced democratic political participation. And U.S. determination of worthiness did not necessarily reject politicians with authoritarian histories.

These interventions were in support of regime change in states the United States regarded as resistant to integration into the world market system. The upheavals the Clinton and both Bush administrations supported in Central and Eastern Europe were dubbed "color revolutions," even though they were not revolutions at all; actually, they were little more than intra-elite power transfers. Modern tactics of electioneering were employed to cast regime change as populist, which took advantage of the unstable and vulnerable situations in those regions following the breakup of the Soviet Union. In Ukraine, for example, the core financial-industrial groups were politically divided, which enabled those with better connections to the West and foreign media to launch a coup. This "revolution" consisted of various forms of psychological manipulation, crowd organizing, populist slogans, and publicity techniques designed not for popular empowerment but as an instrument, a template for short-term, euphoric political upheaval and defeat of nationalist incumbents - the political analogue of victory on the football field. For the purposes of the Western propaganda regime, it was branded as "democracy" (Tastenov 2007).

Bulldozing Milosevic from Power

With the successful overthrow of Milosevic in 2000, the State Department had perfected a "revolution template" - or what Beissinger (2006) calls a democracy "module." The template began taking shape in the 1980s in Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, and Bulgaria and became for the whole Eurasian region a cost-effective, non-militarist option for vanquishing left-wing and nationalist political leaders. [13] The first template application was in Bulgaria in 1996, where NED and IRI, and their mostly young, eager volunteers, "discovered" that "NGOs could tilt an election in favor of America's preferred candidate" (MacKinnon 2007, 30) by unifying the opposition and then creating and funding exit polls. The template also involved a "flexible" array of political, financial, technical, and branding and marketing tactics (see Sussman and Krader 2008) to stir up a militant public mood, get people into the streets, and force either an election or a post-election surrender of power by the incumbent.

One Kazakhstan researcher analyzes the uses of marketing in politics this way:

"[B ]randing" technology is a tool of psychological manipulation. The counter-elite works hard to synchronize public consciousness by imposing behavioral and identification matrices on society as a form of fashionable behavior: external and internal forces employ psychological, semiotic, and other mechanisms to plant conscious and subconscious identification with the opposition and its aims in the minds of the people. This makes it much easier to plant political ideas later (Tastenov 2007).


Other foreign-inspired tactics were also at work. One of the keys to defeating what the United States considered an unworthy leader was the unification of disparate, pro-Western opposition behind a single political candidate. NED's affiliated institutes, especially IRI and NDI, moved freely throughout Eastern Europe carrying this message of consolidation. NDI contributed to the template by financing the Bulgarian Association for Fair Elections and Civil Rights to oversee exit polls that year (NDI, 2001). Exit polling was next arranged in Romania in 1997 through support to the Pro Democracy Association (Pro Democracy Association 2004); Slovakia in 1998, where the IRI conducted a "parallel vote tabulation"; and Croatia in 1999, with USAID, NED, Freedom House, and other international financing of a poll watching group, Citizens Organized to Monitor Elections (GONG) (Jasic 2000; MacKinnon 2007, 31-33).

In Eastern Europe, the first target for regime change that seemed vulnerable to election defeat was Serbia's president Slobodan Milosevic. In the late 1980s, NED "began handing out generous doses of dollars in every corner of Yugoslavia, financing opposition groups, buying up hungry young journalists with dreams of a new life, and financing trade union opposition, pro-IMF opposition economists such as the G-17, and human rights NGOs" (Engdahl 2004, 239). Bypassing the United Nations, the United States and NATO initiated efforts in 1999 to dislodge the Serbs from Kosovo and Milosevic from power through a campaign of bombing Serbian-controlled military and civilian installations in Kosovo and Serbia proper, with 37,000 bombing sorties in 78 days. The United States used this "softening up" opportunity to next organize a movement to oust Milosevic by political means and further balkanize the remnants of what had been a multinational Yugoslavia. [14]

Starting in the late 1990s, NDI flew selected Serbian opposition party leadership to Poland to get them to solicit advice from Polish party activists (Roelofs 2003, 186). The U.S. consulting firm Penn, Schoen and Berland (PSB) entered the picture, and after polling for potential opposition candidates, determined that the anti-communist constitutional lawyer Vojislav Kostunica was the most likely person to beat Milosevic (Dobbs 2000). A Washington Post reporter described the US. political initiative this way:

Held in a luxury hotel in Budapest, the Hungarian capital, in October 1999, the closed-door briefing by [political consultant Doug] Schoen, a Democrat, turned out to be a seminal event, pointing the way to the electoral revolution that brought down Milosevic a year later. It also marked the start of an extraordinary U.S. effort to unseat a foreign head of state, not through covert action of the kind the CIA once employed in such places as Iran and Guatemala, but by modern election campaign techniques (Dobbs 2000).


This was a return engagement for PSB. The company had done polling for the opposition in 1992, at a time when the United States showed no interest in defeating Milosevic (Barker 2006c). [15] Acting on this advice, the U.S. secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, brought presidential contenders Belgrade mayor Zoran Dindic (who was later assassinated) and opposition party leader Vuk Draskovic to Budapest, where the two Serbian politicians were pressured to drop out of the race. IRI and NDI had earlier exercised similar counsel in Bulgaria and Romania, getting pro-Western leaders to capitulate to Washington's preference (MacKinnon 2007, 30-31).

On the popular front, the United States, through IRI, NDI, Freedom House, and other groups, worked closely with selective student and youth leaders. Particular attention was given to the student and youth organization Otpor, established in 1998, to foment a "color revolution" against Milosevic. In its 2000 annual report, NED elaborated on the funding support for opposition media, unions, and student groups that it provided prior to the September 2000 elections. "Otpor was the single largest recipient of NED funds during fiscal year 2000, with two grants totalling US $237,360" (Lamont 2009, 192). In support of Otpor and other anti-Milosevic civic organizations, the U.S. government alone spent, according to various estimates, as much as $40 million (Barker, 2006a; Barker 2006c), which would be the equivalent of another country pouring in about $1.2 billion to steer an electoral outcome in the United States. Additional funds came from the German Marshall Fund, the Project on Transitional Democracies (a spinoff of the U.S. Committee on NATO, founded and directed by a neoconservative, Bruce Jackson), the Westminster Foundation, and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (Lane 2009, 127). OSI's deputy director related how Soros's Open Society Institute asked a Slovak, Pavol Demes, to carry cash across the Serbian border to personally deliver to Otpor political activists (Treadwell, personal communication, 2007). Demes is now CEE director for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, based in Bratislava.

Assistance consisted of a fluid package of funding, materials, and other support and mobilization mechanisms designed around promotional tactics, heavily drawn from U.S. political practice. (See Sussman 2005; Sussman and Krader 2008). Further to this effort, the U.S. government set up a series of radio transmitters on the periphery of Serbia to bring the Voice of America and other foreign news sources to Serbians (Cevallos 2001). Albright was a major force behind the overthrow that became known as the "bulldozer revolution" (named for a rebellious driver of what was actually a loading tractor). U.S. support was contingent, based on Albright's demand on the Serbian opposition for cooperation with the United States in arresting Milosevic so that he could be taken to The Hague and tried for war crimes (Lamont 2009, 182).

Otpor was seen by U.S. groups as a crucial instrument for regime change, and, according to a NED official, Paul McCarthy, millions of dollars in direct U.S. assistance were placed in offshore accounts for its use, while secret meetings were held with student leaders in Montenegro and Hungary attended by American government and quasi-government (e.g., NED, IRI) officials. Additional covert aid was supplied (Cohen 2000). According to a political watchdog group, the International Endowment for Democracy, in March 2000, IRI paid for some two dozen Otpor leaders to participate in a seminar in Budapest on how to carry out nonviolent political action. The main text employed for regime change came from an American academic, Gene Sharp, who in an interview confirmed his link to the event. A colleague of Sharp and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Colonel Robert Helvey, was the principal lecturer (Raman 2000; Sharp, personal communication, 2008). His presence was paid for by the IRI. Otpor leader Srdja Popovic boasted that the struggle for power centered on the control of "propaganda":

A battle for 'media space' began, with Otpor producing low-cost propaganda materials, such as posters, handouts, stickers, and graffiti, using only black and white shades on all propaganda material to solidify 'brand recognition.' The movement was able to cover every available physical space and 'managed to a surprising extent to shape, if not to control, the terms of the debate.' ... The strategy of presenting Otpor as the national victim of government repression drew conversions, as stated here, even from within the ranks of the government (Popovic 2001).


Aided by American PR firms (which generated most of the "news" about Yugoslavian events; Salander 2007), Otpor's campaign was celebrated in the West for its masterful marketing and branding techniques. [16] In fact, the slogans that Otpor activists recited and spray painted on walls were first tested by opinion polls and vetted by American advisors. Otpor and Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) spokespeople were also taught how to handle journalists and "stay on message." Lauding the success of the propaganda campaign, DOS marketing specialist, Milan Stevanovic, commented: "The foreign support was critical... this was the first campaign where our strategy was based on real scientific research" (Dobbs 2000). Some of these "scientific" campaign tactics on behalf of Otpor came from the Serbian company Strategic Marketing (currently a joint venture with the American market research firm, A.C. Nielsen, and British PGM Consulting), "which ran a series of focus groups on behalf of the opposition coalition and the Otpor student resistance movement with financial support from Western democracy groups."

Strategic Marketing had a marked imprint of American style ad campaigning. Every one of Otpor's and the other opposition groups' pretested "core messages" was designed to "sell" regime change much in the same way that soft drinks are marketed. Srdan Bogosavljevic, CEO of Strategic Marketing, said "We approached the process with a brand to sell and a brand to beat ... The brand to sell was Kostunica. The brand to beat was Milosevic" (Dobbs 2000).

Logos were critical to the marketing campaign. Otpor's black-and-white fist logo was graffitied on walls, printed on stickers, emblazoned on t-shirts (and later copied by Georgia's Kmara youth movement). USAID paid for 80 tons of stickers reading 'Gotov je' (He's finished), which young Otpor activists pasted on every available flat surface throughout Serbia (Dobbs 2000). Peter Ackerman (see Chapter 2), an American executive producer of a propaganda film about the fall of Milosevic, "Bringing Down a Dictator," boasted that Otpor "became a ubiquitous brand-name, as familiar as Coca-Cola and Nike" (Ackerman, DuVall, York, and Zimmerman 2000). Otpor co-founder, Ivan Marovic, concurred: 'Our idea was to use corporate branding in politics .... The movement has to have a marketing department. We took Coca-Cola as our model' (quoted in Traynor 2005).

Reasoning that brands were more powerful than even charismatic leadership, Otpor organizers enlisted twenty-odd revolving surrogates (Stefanovic 2000), who represented their organization through prepared logos and messages. Marovic explained to National Public Radio's Bob Garfield:

In the 20th Century, branding was done by connecting a movement to the leader, so everybody remembers Lech Walesa, or Nelson Mandela, or Mahatma Gandhi. In Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, branding was done not by connecting to leaders. Leaders could have been blackmailed or bribed or even maybe killed. You can't do that with brands or ideas (Garfield 2004).


The United States played an inside-outside game. As long as neoliberal-oriented Serbian opposition groups were willing to assert themselves, they relied on the external support they needed, through state, quasi-state, and NGOs instruments, to build up the propaganda assault on Milosevic. In testimony before the European Affairs Subcommittee of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, James Pardew, deputy secretary of state for Kosovo and Dayton Implementation, stated: "Well, we work through nongovernmental organizations. We have established ... a ring around Serbia, which is using international broadcasts, but we're offering that to independent voices in Serbia ... using [U.S.] international facilities." By "independent voices," he meant those pursuing a line in consonance with that of the U.S. agents. Pardew's superior, special envoy to Yugoslavia, Robert Gelbard, testified that: "We're supporting Montenegran television and radio so that they can be another voice for the Serb opposition" (U. S. Senate 1999). According to Gelbard, during the previous year the Yugoslavian government's voice, carried via Serbian TV, was "shut down" (i.e., bombed) (cited in Israel and Varkevisser 2000).

In 1998, Paul McCarthy, program officer for Central and Eastern Europe at the NED, issued a statement to the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, offering the following assessment of the requirements for U.S. and NED action in Yugoslavia:

Western organizations should increase direct support to the independent media in Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. Special attention should be given to supporting the independent electronic media in Serbia, such as Radio B-92 and TV Negotin ... The Association of Independent Electronic Media (ANEM) should continue to be aided ... covering all of Serbia/Montenegro .... Assistance should target the establishment of small "underground" print shops and distribution networks .... Think tank programs focusing on practical policy development can also be helpful in identifying and nurturing new leaders .... Funding must also be directed at developing the leadership skills of NGO activists .... Western funders must be prepared to support alternative educational institutions .... [O]ne of the most important tasks is to increase cooperation between trade unions and political parties .... Finally, support should be increased for cross-border programs, which promote the transfer of experience and advice from more advanced Eastern European countries (NED 1998).


In short, the United States and NED were planning not simply democracy assistance but the reconstitution of the regional state system, what had previously been the political entity of Yugoslavia.

Gelbard added that the Clinton administration was encouraging the official radio propaganda organizations, the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, which ringed Serbia's borders, to provide Serbians with outside and internal opposition perspectives on domestic events in that country (U.S. Senate 1999). Within Serbia, the VOA also assisted independent Serbian radio transmitters, which, as McCarthy indicated, included the station called B92. In the early 1990s, NED and Soros's Open Society Institute (OSI) had funded Za Mir ("Peace"), a media network based in Bosnia. NED also funded the National Independent Journalists for Central and Eastern Europe through the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe. It presently supports the International Journalists' Network (Barker 2008; Network of Independent Journalists 1993). A Guardian foreign correspondent, Jonathan Steele, determined that the behavior of NED (as well as the British Westminster Foundation) was not consistent with the neutral claims such organizations made about supporting pluralist democracy in the region, inasmuch as funding local opposition radio stations for regime change is hardly non-partisan. "They [NED] have no shame" (Steele, personal communication, 2008).

The U.S. radio invasion in Serbia was similar in approach to the VOA-sponsored Radio Marti broadcasts, managed by Cuban exiles, that the United States has been sending into Cuban airspace to destabilize the Castro government (Beissinger 2006, 20; Lewis, 1999). The VOA, RFE/RL, Radio Marti, TV Marti, and other formerly government-run broadcasting stations are now part of the nominally independent federal government entities, the International Broadcasting Bureau and Broadcasting Board of Governors. Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, however, is a private corporation funded in part by George Soros (Talbot 2003). OSI was decisive on the media front. The hedge fund billionaire "channelled more than $100m to the coffers of the anti-Milosevic opposition, funding political parties, publishing houses and 'independent' media such as Radio B92" (Clark 2003). Soros also has been a financial supporter of Transitions Online (TOL), a journalist training program for Eastern Europe and Russia. Run by an American, Jeremy Druker, TOL aims to integrate all print media throughout the region (Roelofs 2003, 62). As of 2007, it had moved toward training journalists in the art of blogging and, most likely, now Twitter - perhaps in anticipation of media-savvy youth rebellions in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia. For the NED grants TOL receives, the main target country is Russia, with an emphasis on Internet security issues (Franko, personal communication, 2007).

Present during the Serbian election of 2000, a Washington Post reporter found that "U.S.-funded consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet of the anti-Milosevic drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote count." Election monitors were paid $5 a day out of Western aid funds, a significant amount given that Serbians earned on average $30 a month (Dobbs 2000). The private consultants were joined in the spectacle by the National Endowment for Democracy, which spent $282,000 in 2000 alone to help the Serbian opposition. The United States provided poll watchers at every polling station in Serbia, along with other, more subversive campaign activities. Part of the arsenal of U.S. taxpayer-funded regime change tactics included 5,000 cans of spray paint given to student activists to spread anti-Milosevic graffiti and some 2.5 million stickers and millions of t-shirts, funded by USAID, carrying the movement's catchphrase. IRI spent almost $75,000 to set up offices for Otpor in Belgrade and three other Serbian cities (Corwin 2005; Dobbs 2000). In 2004, IRI provided campaign training for the pro-Western Serbian president Boris Tadic (Theimer 2007).

After the overthrow and arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia descended into political disarray. As Senator Joseph Biden (later U.S. vice president) stated in public testimony at the U.S. Senate, just after the NATO bombing of Serbia (in his usual elegant style): "There ain't no Democrats in Serbia that I've found." In effect, he was acknowledging that the "democratic opposition" to Milosevic that U.S. policy described was anything but democratic, simply an invention to rationalize regime change. One of the U.S. hopefuls for a Milosevic successor, Vuk Draskovic, was described by Biden as "the Rasputin of the 21st century." U.S. special envoy Gelbard could only say in reply to Biden: "he's going to take a lot of work" (U.S. Senate 1999).

Serbia ranks poorly on measures of economic corruption, among the worst of the former Soviet aligned countries, and the government has been largely captured by private corporate interests. According to one study from the European Centre for Policy Studies, since the fall of Milosevic, Serbia has undergone a "seizure" of laws to the advantage of corporate business via influential political links in the parliament and government" (Pesic 2007). Serbian governments after Milosevic have done little to discourage persecution of ethnic minorities (see Human Rights Watch), particularly the Roma, but little of this catches the attention of the U.S. media, especially when compared to the "ethnic cleansing" that led to U.S. intervention.
The ousted leader's Socialist Party in the aftermath of his deposal shared power with prime minister, Vojislav Kostunica. Boris Tadic, reelected as president in 2008, is a strong advocate of Serbian membership in the European Union, though he opposes the independence of breakaway Kosovo. According to one poll, the Serbian public in 2006 regarded poverty as the worst problem facing the country (slightly worse than in 2001), with unemployment coming in second (by a much larger percentage than in 2001) (Begovic et al. 2007, 23).

Georgia: Taking the "Color Revolution" on the Road

In the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. foreign policy was grounded in an ultimately discredited "domino" theory of world revolution, attributing peasant and worker uprisings in the Third World to a set of coordinated conspiracies launched in the Kremlin to replace Western-leaning "democracies" with communist-controlled autocracies. It formed the rationale for the invasions of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia (and elsewhere) and denied informed accounts and even the Defense Department's own secret history of the real causes of revolution in Indochina. In the short term, the domino theory served as a useful propagandistic metaphor, but today it might be better applied to the series of interventions in which the United States itself has engaged to block nationalistic and left-leaning political movements from capturing or retaining power. The list of such interventions is far too long to recount here, and one would be well served to read the accounts of William Blum (2000, 2008) for this purpose.

Relied upon to help depose incumbents, one of the factors of "revolutionary" reproduction of the United States was Serbia's student/youth movement, Otpor. With the conclusion of the "bulldozer revolution" and overthrow of Milosevic in 2000, the United States financed youth movements and NGOs to be couriers for regime change and the module for destabilization movements in other parts of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Former foreign-trained members of the local Otpor movement became traveling consultants on non-violent political tactics. The trips of the Serbian and other student leaders in the region to Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, and elsewhere were paid by NED grantee Freedom House and Soros's Open Society Institute (MacKinnon 2007, 60, 67, 109, 110). With the aid of OSI, Otpor hosted in spring 2003 the Georgian student association, Kmara, in Belgrade, while Otpor advisors also began working with Ukraine's opposition as early as 2002 (Antelava 2003; Bransten 2004). The deputy director of OSI in Budapest asserts the Institute supports "organizations that are not afraid to confront their governments" (Treadwell, personal communication, 2007). Presumably, she is not referring to protests against neoliberal states.

Freedom House, together with USAID, helped bring together the three main student organizations from Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine to Tirana. They were joined by representatives from Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Uzbekistan. Such interventionist initiatives have alarmed Russian and other CIS state security agencies and led to retaliations against suspected foreign NGOs operating in their countries. It was less than an act of statesmanship when Condoleezza Rice described the Lukashenko government in Belarus as "the last tyranny in Europe," a rhetorical flourish certainly not conceived to calm the region's executive leadership regarding US. intentions (Durden-Smith 2005). For the United States, probably Belarus's greatest "tyranny" is that the major industries remain largely state-owned.

In training the youth movements in Georgia (Kmara) and Ukraine (Pora), Otpor repeated the marketing tactics employed in Serbia. Pora "supported by the [British] Westminster Foundation, brought in Serbian agitators to train 200 [Ukrainian] activists" (Lane 2009,129). Otpor activist Aleksandar Maric boasted: "We trained them [Ukrainian youth opposition] in how to set up an organization, how to open local chapters, how to create a 'brand,' how to create a logo, symbols, and key messages" (quoted in Bransten 2004). Pora also received $500,000 from Freedom House, while a Ukrainian opposition group, Znayu, was given $50,000 from Freedom House and $1 million from the US.-Ukraine Foundation to start a teaser-type advertising campaign in seventeen Ukrainian cities. "Znayu was one of our larger projects in terms of visibility, but it was really just a small part of our whole work," commented an election specialist from Freedom House in Kiev, Juhani Grossman (MacKinnon 2007,174). Backing all these efforts, a State Department official boasted to a House hearing in December 2004 of the high-powered delegation, including John McCain, Richard Lugar, Donald Rumsfeld, George H. W. Bush, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger, and Wesley Clark, it had sent to influence the electoral outcome in the country (Cohen 2005).

A long-time critic of US. oil policy in the region, F. William Engdahl, sees a tight cabal of high-powered Washington insiders with energy industry connections as central to the political dynamics of the "color revolutions." The United States had central interests in Georgia's Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline (opened in 2005), and the Bush administration had grave concerns about Georgia president Eduard Shevardnadze's oil deals with the Russians. [17] At the time of the "rose revolution," Georgia was a country of significant interest to the United States, and with a population of 4.5 million people Georgia was the second highest per capita recipient of US. foreign assistance over the previous ten years (Weir 2004).

Table 4.2 indicates the changes in US. foreign assistance, arms sales, and investment in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine since the 1990s. More than two-thirds of the world's armaments sales originate with US. companies (Shanker 2009), making the United States an even more formidable military-industrial complex than it was during the Cold War. With respect to Georgia and Ukraine, the expansion in military assistance and arms sales was significant between 1995 and 2007. Much of this has been directed against a perceived threat from Russia. The main purpose of military assistance for Serbia in 2000 was in support of NATO intervention and troop presence. By 2007, economic assistance to Georgia had overtaken the amount dedicated to Ukraine and Serbia, despite the fact that the latter two are much larger countries. This too may be attributed to the tensions between that country and Russia and the disposition of the United States in that conflict on the side of Georgia. US. foreign direct investment, on the other hand, has precipitously declined in Georgia for reasons of political and territorial instability and is heavily concentrated in Ukraine. But it has gone up significantly in Serbia, which now has one of the most open investment environments in the region.

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Table 4.2: Total U.S. Military and Economic Assistance, Military Arms Sales, and Foreign Direct Investment

The scheduled election in 2003 was the target for making sure U.S. interests prevailed. That year, Bush's ambassador in Tbilisi, Richard Miles, who had previously been chief of mission in Belgrade during the NATO attack on Serbia, "went to work making sure that life after Shevardnadze would look the way Washington, not Moscow, desired," a task that led him to assume a proconsul role in organizing the opposition to the Georgian head of state (Engdahl 2005; MacKinnon 2007, 107). It is also likely that the country's political opposition was covertly lent the hand of the CIA (Margolis 2003),18 but in any event, the NDI was pushing the opposition hard to unite around a single candidate (O Beachain 2009, 206).

Engdahl notes that Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor to Jimmy Carter and a consultant to BP during the Clinton presidency, was sent to Baku to meet with the Azerbaijan president, Haidar Aliev, to negotiate what was to become the BTC pipeline. Brzezinski is a member of the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce along with fellow USACC board members Tim Cejka, president of ExxonMobil Exploration, Henry Kissinger, and James Baker III, "the man who in 2003 personally went to Tbilisi to tell Shevardnadze that Washington wanted him to step down" in favor of a pro-U.S. politician, Mikheil Saakashvili. Other members include Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to Gerald Ford and George Bush senior. Dick Cheney was also a member until he became U.S. vice president (Engdahl 2005). G. W. Bush, Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (a former member of the editorial board of NED's Journal of Democracy), and Secretary of the Interior Donald Evans all had strong oil business interests before entering the executive branch in 2001, lending support to the idea that the White House was acting as a lobbyist for the oil industry.

The pipeline was built by a consortium led by BP (U.K.) and includes Unoca1 (now Chevron, U.S., a company in which Condoleezza Rice was a board director for ten years until her State Department appointment), SOCAR (Azerbaijan, a company of which the country's current president was formerly a vice president), Statoil (Norway), and Turkish Petroleum, among others (Engdahl 2005). Saakashvi1i, a George Washington University alumnus and Columbia University law school graduate and an ardent U.S. and "free market" advocate, was the White House's first choice to replace Shevardnadze. He also had been an Open Society Institute fellow, courtesy of George Soros (Treadwell, personal communication, 2007). Washington and Soros backed his campaign with pollsters, strategists, and consultants (Traynor 2003). [19]

In the wake of Shevardnadze's sudden and forced departure in 2003, following a controversial electoral outcome that many claimed was rigged and after opposition-organized demonstrations demanded his resignation, the United States raised $14 million to help pay Georgian government salaries. Saakashvili was swept into office in new elections in January 2004. To sew up his victory, Saakashvi1i's supporters in parliament had forced a reregistration, which discouraged Shevardnadze supporters and reduced registration lists by one-third, thereby guaranteeing an official turnout of 50 percent (of registrants), the minimum required to make the election stand (Warner 2004, 3). After his deposal, Shevardnadze would comment "I did not think I should have paid serious attention to these young people running around with flags and making graffiti on the streets. I was wrong" (quoted in Kandelaki 2007). Shevardnadze, like Milosevic before and Yanukovych after him, was unprepared for the modern mode of political warfare and regime change.

Domestic political turbulence was at the center of the regime change, but external forces played a substantial and perhaps decisive role in the outcome, among other reasons because it emboldened the opposition to step up the level and forms of protest knowing a superpower was behind them. In Georgia, polling "exposure" was widely seen as stirring public incitement against Shevardnadze. At a hearing of U.S. House Committee on International Relations in December 2004, John Tefft, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, insisted that the Bush administration's bankrolling of exit polls in Georgia, Belarus, and Ukraine was designed to "help to expose large-scale fraud." But as two voting specialists skeptically observe, this same concern, for obvious reasons, was not expressed by the U.S. government about exit polls a month earlier that found presidential contender John Kerry winning the popular vote in the American election (Freeman and Mitteldorf2005), nor did they draw comparisons with Gore's apparent and decisive victory in Florida, also based on exit polls, in the 2000 presidential election. One of the limitations of exit polling is that, even if conducted impartially (which in the fervor of regime change initiatives is a dubious assumption), it offers limited choices constructed not by voters themselves but by political functionaries in the employ of partisan interests. In Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, on the other hand, polls soliciting voter opinions on democratic welfare functions of the state indicated strong popular support (Lane 2009, 132), a finding not likely to be reported in mainstream Western media.

In pushing Shevardnadze to resign, the Bush administration did not solely rely on the use of exit polls. In 2003, the Republican Party's most reliable negotiator, James Baker III, was dispatched by the White House to "advise" his old acquaintance, Shevardnadze, to give assurances that the upcoming presidential election would be "free and fair." This is tantamount, in Mafia semiotics, to handing him a dead fish. Shevardnadze had been working on a plan to sell off part of Georgia's energy grid to Russia, a move that much displeased the Bush administration (Democracy Now! 2003). U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell was widely reported to have exerted similar pressure on the beleaguered president. Meanwhile, American advisors were persuading opposition leader Zurab Zhvania to cede the candidate spotlight to the tested World Bank advocate, Saakashvili.

In the wake of Shevardnadze's overthrow, the contest for power fell on three politicians, Saakashvili, Burdzhanadze and Zhvania, all of whom had the support of various NGOs "that have sprung up since the fall of the Soviet Union," many of which "have been supported by American and other Western foundations, spawning a class of young, English-speaking intellectuals hungry for pro-Western reforms" (Pope 2003). The Wall Street Journal found that:

Chief among these NGOs is the Liberty Institute, which is funded by the United States Agency for International Development's Eurasia Foundation as well as financier George Soros's Open Society Institute. The Liberty Institute's 31-yearold co-founder, Giga Bokeria, took a Soros Foundation-funded tour last February of Serbia to learn how the Otpor, or "Resistance," student opposition had ousted Milosevic following a disputed election in the autumn of 2000 (Pope 2003).


The Journal also found that the Liberty Institute "became the organizing juggernaut behind the move to push Mr. Shevardnadze out of office." One of the areas of U.S. interest was legal reform, with a particular emphasis on codifying property rights. The U. S. embassy in Tbilisi got involved in this effort by "bringing in exam papers prepared by the American Bar Association to provide the basis of tests for Georgia's judges. Almost 90% of Soviet-era judges failed the exam, allowing the [Georgian] government to fire them" (Pope 2003).

As in Serbia, the student movement in Georgia played a central role in regime change. Access to digital communication technologies was crucial in mobilizing street demonstrations, even if the enthusiasm for Saakashvili proved to be transient. Protest paraphernalia included the basics (buttons, stickers, posters, spray paint) as 'well as more sophisticated technologies which 21st century youth have assimilated: mobile phones, computer-generated graphics, text messaging, chat rooms, websites, blogsites, and, with the "color revolution" in Iran, the use of Twitter. "Foreign actors readily extend information and propaganda support designed to promote 'controlled democracy,''' which has the tendency to increase social and political chaos (Tastenov 2007).

In October 2001, Shevardnadze allegedly tried to shut down a private Tbilisi television station, Rustavi-2. The station's reporters had been trained by the U.S. government-funded Internews, which is an activist news distribution agency throughout the region. Rustavi-2 served as the principal voice of the protesters who forced the resignation of Shevardnadze in November 2003 (Hoffman 2002; USAID 2000a). In response, the U.S.-funded Liberty Institute made its computer room available as a key base of action, and "backed with a steady barrage of advertising slots from the [opposition] Rustavi 2 television, Kmara's 5,000 students became the foot soldiers of the opposition politicians" (Pope 2003).

Georgian student leaders acknowledged that they had mimicked the Serbian revolt step-by-step and also relied on the support of foreign allies. More than 1,000 Georgian students were trained in three-day seminars by Otpor activists on the staging of a bloodless coup. "Both trips were funded by Soros's Open Society Institute" (Van der Schriek 2003). Georgian government authorities were deeply suspicious of US. government and private support of the electoral process in their country, particularly the efforts of George Soros, who made no secret of his dislike for communist and authoritarian regimes and his willingness to help overturn them. The billionaire financier also provided funding for the opposition television station Rustavi-2, [20] the newspaper 24 Hours (24 Saati), and the Georgian youth movement Kmara. Soros was indeed widely recognized for having had a substantial hand in orchestrating the transfer of power.

If Soros was the most visible hand among foreign interests involved in Shevardnadze's defeat, USAID, NDI, IRI, Freedom House, and the State Department also played key roles in the president's departure and in steering the outcome of the country's election. The Soros Foundation acknowledged spending $4.6 million for its programs in the country in 2003, which included projects on voter education, voter participation, get out the vote efforts, exit polling, and other politically targeted initiatives. NED added $240,000 in youth voter mobilization drives from 2001-2004, plus more than $100,000 in 2004 alone for another youth voter program (Corwin 2005).

The State Department, the World Bank, and the IMF, meanwhile, all ended or drastically cut back assistance to Shevardnadze's government (Barker 2006b). The US. ambassador in Belgrade, Richard Miles, who worked assiduously to get rid of Milosevic, was transferred to Tbilisi, where he "repeated the trick" by coaching Saakashvili on methods to bring down Shevardnadze (Traynor, 2004). Ukraine president at the ,time Leonid Kuchma insisted that Shevardnadze's defeat was a "western engineered coup" (Warner 2004,4). The US. touted Saakashvili's 96.24 percent margin of victory in January 2003 as a legitimate expression of electoral democracy (Laughland, 2004b), a margin of victory it never would have accepted had the winner been on its blacklist.

The succession to the Shevardnadze government by Mikheil Saakashvili has not led to the political stability that some in the democracy assistance community had expected.21 In early 2005, Forbes magazine portrayed him as a "handsome, American-schooled young leader" and his succession as "the toast of the West" (cited by Barker 2006b). Bush, speaking at Freedom Square in Tbilisi in May 2005, declared that Georgia had become a "beacon of liberty" for the region and the world (Wilson 2009, 378). But within a year Saakashvili's government was characterized by its "increasingly authoritarian drift" and "his emphasis on ensuring territorial integrity over civil liberties" (Beissinger 2006, 23). In September 2007, Saakashvili's chief prosecutor, Alasana Irakli said at a press conference: "The style of Saakashvili's governance, which has gone beyond the limits, has made dishonesty, injustice and oppression a way of life. Everyday repression, demolition of houses and churches, robbery, 'kulakization,' and murders, I would stress, murders, have become common practice for the authorities" (Laughland 2008).
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Re: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Ea

Postby admin » Thu Jun 22, 2017 2:17 am

Part 3 of 4

The "Orange Revolution"

In the period from 2000 to 2001, the student movement in Ukraine led to violent clashes with the police, similar to the experience of the Serbian student movement in the 1996 to 1997 period in opposition to Milosevic. In both cases, as well as in Georgia, an established template of non-violent tactics was employed to mobilize as many as one million protesters in the streets of each national capital. With the tutelage of Robert Helvey, former president and director of the Albert Einstein Institution and an exponent of Gene Sharp's doctrine on strategic non-violence -- a euphemism for regime change - the tactics were successful in forcing out the respective incumbents. The Helvey/Sharp approach isolated more radical elements within the student movement that preferred more confrontational methods. Street protests were the key, as non-violent confrontation hopefully would induce the poorly paid police to refuse to fire on the crowd and get them to lose confidence in the regime (Steele, personal communication, 2008).

Non-violent conflict, which was central to the strategic objectives of Gandhi and King, preempts the possibility of revolutionary change through means that maintain a monopoly of coercion in the hands of the state. Sharp's notion of non-violent conflict is active only at the stage of replacing one with another set of elite actors and commonly leads to a passive response of the populace toward the everyday affairs of the corporate state. With non-violent tactics, the term "revolution," originally conceived as the overthrow of a class of rulers (e.g., slave holders by aspiring free individuals, aristocracy by merchants, capitalists by workers), is appropriated as a term of propaganda to instigate rebellion without social change, that is, the transfer of political control without a major social redistribution of power. Such was the character of the "orange revolution."

The use of non-violent tactics was also directed at pacifying the Ukrainian-military. A former Wall Street Journal editor and current national security fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Max Boot, pointed out that

NATO has also spent a good deal of money [under a U.S. initiative] to train Ukrainian officers over the last decade as part of its Partnership for Peace initiative. This Western education, which includes instruction in human rights, was one reason why the Ukrainian military refused to move against pro-democracy demonstrators (Boot 2004).


Although the Ukrainian military may show deference to human rights, there remains a question about why anti-Semitism remained pervasive under Viktor Yushchenko's presidency, and why the State Department under Bush said little or nothing about it.

In 2004, Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych vied to succeed Kuchma, who, facing the end of a two-term limit, was forced to retire as Ukraine's president. Both had previously served under Kuchma as prime ministers (Yushchenko from 1999 to 2001, Yanukovych from 2002 to 2005), but Yanukovych was seen as his "heir apparent." Although Russia also intervened in that country's electoral affairs (as an adjoining state with much associated history, having a legitimate basis for concern about the outcome), U.S. intervention was far more extensive (Steele 2004). Foreign assistance was flexibly adapted by the United States to undermine Yanukovych's bid for power.22 Perhaps the most effective tool in the U.S. arsenal was the use of polling. This was a means by which external intervention could be justified as non-partisan, scientifically-determined public opinion research, though "in practice it is only put at the service of one side" (Steele 2004).

British journalist Jonathan Steele offers the following insightful analysis of (externally-organized) polling:

Exit polls are a crucial tool. By getting their data on the table as soon as voting ends and being widely disseminated in the opposition media, they create an alleged truth against which the official results are measured. Any divergence of the official count is seen as proof that fraud is under way. Crowds pour into the streets, ready to block public buildings and engage in civil disobedience. This in turn puts the police and security forces under pressure, with the aim (successful in Belgrade and Tbilisi) of getting individual policemen and then whole units to mutiny against their commanders and switch sides. It can also have an intimidating effect on the Parliament and the courts, when they are asked to find compromises or adjudicate, as in Kiev (Steele 2004).


The Western press tended to report polling in Ukraine as a unified exercise that demonstrated majority support for the U.S.- and E.U.-backed candidate Yushchenko. In fact, there were multiple polls that predicted very different results. Five organizations, the Center for Social and Political Research, the Kiev International Institute of Sociology, Social Monitoring, and two think tanks, Razumkov Center (affiliated with Freedom House) and Democracy Initiatives Foundation, cooperated to produce a "national exit poll." They did not concur on the results of their individual efforts, however (McFaul 2006, 23-25). Several of the pollsters and both think tanks involved in the "national exit poll" were NED grantees and recipients of other Western funding (Bandera 2006; National Endowment for Democracy 2004).

Keywords are also part of the artillery of propaganda. The use of the term "revolution" in Eastern Europe clearly was a marketing and polemical device to depict what was actually an escalating agitation aimed at regime change and to construe it as a far more momentous event than it actually was. The protest movement in Ukraine as in the other "color revolutions" that followed the 2004 election of Yanukovych (and forced a second election, in which U.S.- and E.U-backed Yushchenko was declared the winner) was far from revolutionary - certainly not a massive upheaval leading to a class restructuring, radical form of government and governance, or major shift in the society's way of life. What the upheavals in Eastern Europe achieved, beyond experience of the participants in protest actions, was little more than the replacement of one section of the power elite by another. It is more the case that in the street protests that ousted Yanukovych, Yushchenko and his foreign backers opposed a revolution rather than led one. The conservative syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer may have perfectly summed up the U.S. administration's position on this and other "color revolutions": "This is about Russia first, democracy only second .... The West wants to finish the job begun with the fall of the Berlin Wall and continue Europe's march to the east .... The great prize is Ukraine" (cited in Cohen, 2005).

Local media also played a significant role in Yanukovych's defeat. During the uprising that followed his initial declaration of victory on November 21,2004, the opposition media, particularly Channel Five, kept the street protests kindled by monitoring and reporting government movements on the ground as the protests were being mobilized and by maintaining 24-hour live coverage of the main plaza where some 100,000 protesters were assembled (Regulska 1998, 43). An unnamed Western diplomat, commenting approvingly of this media initiative, called it "the ultimate trump card" that warned the government that if it responded with a bloody response, it would be "live on CNN" (cited by Binnendijy and Marovic 2005, 415). [23]

One study analyzes the public protests as arising not so much from a rebellion against the concentration of power by Kuchma and his preferred successor, Yanukovych, as much as from the conditions imposed by the radical shift to a market economy. In 1987, the Soviet Union ranked 25th in the world in the human development index, but Ukraine, one of its most developed republics, fell to 80th by 2000. In 2004, the year of the uprising (until January 2005), health and other quality of life indicators were viewed by most Ukrainians as seriously deteriorated, which contrasts with the anticipated vast improvement in their lives with the collapse of the communist regime. Its GDP that year was 59 percent of the 1989 level. Such deterioration of Ukraine's welfare conditions and resentment against the oligarchs who clearly benefited were "predisposing people to protest," and yet, beyond Kiev and parts of western Ukraine, there was no evidence of a nationwide mobilization ("people power") against Kuchma's chosen successor (Lane 2008, 526, 544). [24]

Foreign-supported regime change, not revolution, was in the making. Although he is known for making intemperate remarks, the peripatetic American political consultant Dick Morris "admitted to a clandestine meeting in an unnamed Eastern European capital with Yushchenko's team, at which he advised them that a big exit poll ... might ... help to bring protesters out into the streets if the exit poll indicated obvious ballot fraud" (Wilson 2006). [25] KIIS, a local opinion polling firm with U.S.-trained leadership, counts among its former clients USAID, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the U.S. State Department, and Coca-Cola (Kiev International Institute of Sociology, no date). A Ukrainian NGO, Committee of Ukrainian Voters, which organized a parallel vote tabulation, had a close working relationship with NDI, with its funding base coming from the U.S. government (Committee of Ukrainian Voters, 2006; Laughland 2009; McFaul 2006). Violating the assumption of non-partisianship, several members of the European Parliament who served as election observers wore the color orange to show their solidarity with the uprising even while on mission (Almond 2006).

It is striking that the U.S. government put such a high premium on its exit poll results in Serbian (2000) and later Ukrainian (2004) elections as the basis for helping to oust the incumbent government in the first case and block the election of a nationalist in the second case. Was it a matter of "situational ethics" in Ukraine that the International Republican Institute disputed the initial election victory declaration that favored Yanukovych, while the same method of determining electoral outcomes was treated as irrelevant in the United States, both in the 2000 and 2004 presidential contests? And unlike the United States, where the conservative-dominated Supreme Court overruled Florida's highest judicial body in calling for an extensive recount of the ballots in 2000, the U.S. democracy promoters expressed great satisfaction when the Ukrainian supreme court voided the initial election count altogether. There is little consistency in how American politicians view popular empowerment. On the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, March 19,2008, Martha Raddatz, host of "Good Morning America," asked Dick Cheney what he thought about the fact that two-thirds of the American people thought that "it's not worth fighting." Cheney's response was "So?" Raddatz followed with "So? You don't care what the American people think?" To which Cheney replied, "No. I think you cannot be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls."

According to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter, Carol Off, who helped make a CBC documentary, "Anatomy of a Revolution," about the events surrounding the 2004-2005 Ukraine uprising and elections, foreign money, especially from the United States, was central to that "revolution." What she observed was that the Ukrainian uprising was a "carbon copy" of the staged events employed a year earlier in Georgia. (Yushchenko and Saakashvili were reported to be close friends.) To a great extent this was because of the "Madison Avenue-style branding" efforts of professionals from the United States. When Serbian, Georgian, and Ukrainian student leaders were brought together in Hungary to study techniques of non-violent conflict, the funding and technical support came from the International Republican Institute, George Soros, and Colonel Helvey.26 In Kiev, Off found that "so many of the same tactics, so many of the same kind of procedures happened in Serbia, but I [also] realized that so many of the same people were there, so many of the same funding agencies were there" (Off, 2005).

The thousands of tents, the food, the buses, and other logistical requirements to bring hundreds of thousands of people into Kiev to take over the parliament were funded by U.S. and Western European governments, the European Union, private foundations, and other foreign interests. The cost of these "democracy building" efforts came to hundreds of millions of dollars, and in fact billions when other foreign contributions were included. In terms of Western support, what did Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine at the time all have in common? "It's not a coincidence," Off noted, "that Serbian, Georgian, and Ukrainian opposition leaders were all free market reformers with the World Bank stamp of approval." She also believes, nonetheless, that they represented the popular choice of the majority of their citizens (Off, 2005).

In the context of disparate influences of Western, especially U.S., influence in the region, through both hard (military preponderance) and soft (cultural or persuasive) power, it is difficult to assess what popular choice actually means, from where it derives, or how enduring such opinion actually is. A Russian historian and head of the country's Paris-based Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, Natalya Narochnitskaya, is skeptical about what constitutes such choices. She avers that "people power" is greatly influenced by what appears in the mainstream media, which does not reflect neutral outlooks (cited in Lane 2008, 528). The attention and intervention of a foreign power such as the United States and the very presence of international election observers tend to undermine the credibility and legitimacy of the ruling group and fuel the performative effects of protest organizers. This raises essential questions about the organic character of such uprisings. One Central Asian study found that external pressure and the steady stream of foreign-sourced information, electronic communications, and propaganda training had more to do with the occurrence of the "color revolutions" than their being the "logical outcome of domestic political and social processes." There was little evidence that the "coups" led to more than elite power grabs, followed by purges, splits, political instability, economic decline, and disillusionment (Tastenov 2007).

David Lane, emeritus faculty from Cambridge University, sees the Ukrainian uprising not as a "revolution" but as an intra-elite transfer of power in which the public acted more like an "audience" than an engaged citizenry. From survey research in Kiev, he found that less than 5 percent of the city's population participated in the uprisings that brought Viktor Yushchenko to power. A high level of disillusionment set in among participants in the "orange revolution" protests within a year of Yushchenko's assumption of power, and within two years, about 56 percent opposed or were non-committal about the merits of the "revolution." One of his respondents offered that the protest arose as a result of "well-staged technology [modern political communication] which ended in fiasco" (Lane 2008, 531). And whereas American democracy promoters enthused over the rhetoric of the "orange revolution," the German international foundations, particularly the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, were more apt to see such a term as little more than an exercise in branding (Matthes Buhbe, personal communication, 2008).

Indeed, US. democracy promoters generally look at the question of regime change quite differently from their German counterparts. Writing in the Washington Post in defense of US. democracy assistance, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution remarked that acts of US. intervention in Ukraine constitute a transcendent right:

Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes .... but their work, however labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine .... Those who champion the sovereignty of the people are the new progressives. In Ukraine, external actors who helped the people be heard were not violating the sovereignty of the Ukrainian people; they were defending it (McFaul 2004).


Based on empirical findings, David Lane contested this assessment. He maintained that McFaul and others understate the impacts of foreign sponsorship of local organizations and the weaknesses of Ukraine's civil society. Moreover, McFaul did not mention in the above-cited study that he is a board member of a NED-run think tank, the International Forum for Democratic Studies.

A neoconservative, Max Boot, writing a newspaper op-ed, "Exporting the Ukraine Miracle," for the Council on Foreign Relations in 2004, where he was then a senior fellow, offered the opinion: "The triumph of the Orange Revolution should dispel the quaint notion still prevalent in many Western universities and foreign ministries that democracy is a luxury good suitable only for rich countries with a tradition of liberalism stretching back centuries." It's not clear which universities and governments hold such a view. More on this straw man argument, he wrote:

These revolutions reveal the hollowness of the cliche that "democracy can't be imposed by outsiders." True, but outsiders can help committed democrats overcome internal obstacles. Sometimes, when dealing with an entrenched dictatorship, this requires military intervention of the kind that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. More brittle regimes can be brought down by their own people, but even they often need a little external shove (Boot 2004). [27]


The Western-assisted revolt led to a forced restaging of Ukraine's presidential election in December 2004. America's bite noire, the sitting prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, lost the presidency in the revote but later returned to power, an accomplice of the man, Viktor Yushchenko, who defeated him for president, as the country's prime minister (hence both becoming "victors" in a sense). But Yushchenko faced a collapse of his government starting in 2005, with his then prime minister and national security council director vying for control over strategic media and industrial outlets (Beissinger 2005,22). [28] In late 2006, Yushchenko's power was greatly diminished as a result of a legislative move to shift power to parliament, where his main rival presided. It demonstrated that domestic political culture and practice might be revised but not necessarily reformed in the ways that some American institutionalists might have imagined.

A second rival for power, Yulia Tymoshenko became prime minister from January 24-September 8, 2005 and announced plans to build a new oil and gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Ukraine to Poland, reducing reliance on Russian oil and gas supplies. Ukraine relies on Russia for 80 percent of its energy. (Russia still subsidizes energy exports at various levels to most of the other CIS states.) One of Ukraine's potential partners was Chevron, on whose board Condoleezza Rice, then secretary of state, previously had served as a director. Indeed, Bush, Cheney, and several cabinet members also have business histories with the oil industry, leading a number of observers to see oil politics driving foreign policy, from the Middle East to Central Asia. A country's control over oil in another country gives it effective veto power over the latter's foreign policy. The view of another close observer was that the Ukraine uprising "had little to do with real democracy and far more with military and oil geopolitics" (Engdahl 2005). Tymoshenko returned as prime minister following the December 2007 parliamentary elections.

During his second term as prime minister (August 2006-December 2007), Yanukovych made a Fall 2006 visit to the United States in hopes of normalizing relations with the superpower, but George Bush refused to see him, delivering a formal snub to the Ukrainian head of government. Perhaps it was the anticipated rejection by Bush that prompted Yanukovych to fire his Russian "political technologists" and hire, starting in 2005, the high-powered Republican political strategy team of Paul Manafort and associates (Mayr 2006). And he perhaps also calculated that it might alter his "pro-Russia" reputation to do so. Yanukovych's physical appearance (suits, haircut, and stylized gestures) and language addressed to audiences and the media were said to have been dramatically altered by his consultants.

With the aid of Republican professionals, the White House's enemy and his party (Party of Regions) won the 2006 parliamentary election. Manafort returned the following year to attempt a repeat performance. In one event organized by his American advisers, the finale to a series of speeches by Yanukovych and his party colleagues, a "rain of ... white-blue confetti flooded the stage," reminiscent of the conclusion of the previous Republican Party convention (Nayem 2007). Yanukovych won a plurality of the 2007vote but not enough to form a government (which went to the Tymoshenko faction). Though unsuccessful in his bid to retain control of parliament, he seemed to have been, from Washington's perspective, at least partially rehabilitated.

Who was this American blue-chip hired gun that Yanukovych put to work? Manafort, a partner in Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, and former partner of Republican national chairman Lee Atwater, is a seasoned consultant and lobbyist. His firm's client list has included, among others, George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, and a series of dictators, including the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia's Mohamed Siad Barre, Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko, Angola's Jonas Savimbi, and the military regime in Argentina in the 1980s. [29] He was also a Reagan appointee to the board of the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation and more recently a political adviser to John McCain, who chairs the International Republican Institute. Ironically, in a way that suggests that money usually trumps principles, Rick Davis, McCain's 2008 presidential campaign manager, also worked for Yanukovych despite the fact that McCain was a strong supporter of Yanukovych's political rival, Victor Yushchenko (Birnbaum and Solomon, 2008; Burkholder 1993; Khmara 2007).

Yushchenko, meanwhile, lined up his own celebrity consultants for his Our Ukraine Party in the 2007 parliamentary campaign. Washington Republican lobbyist and U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president Stanley Anderson, who previously had worked with Paul Manafort's consulting firm, headed up one team (BBC 2007; Bryl and Oryshchuk 2007). Others working for Yushchenko and Our Ukraine included Stanley Greenberg, the celebrated pollster for Bill Clinton, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign manager, Stephen Schmidt, and Neil Newhouse, who had worked for Mitt Romney (a U.S. presidential contender in 2008) when he was still governor of Massachusetts (Levy 2007). Tymoshenko's campaign was led by former Bill Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart (BBC 2007). [30] According to one source, the monthly charge by Manafort's team was $150,000. Tymoshenko paid about $200,000 per month, and Yushchenko hired his American advisers at about $100,000 per month (Bryl and Oryshchuk 2007).

NGOS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AS REGIME CHANGE AGENTS

Local electoral and civil society trainers are often drawn from countries with political experiences that the American institutes wish to transfer to third countries, particularly those from the Visegrad region. According to USAID, NDI assembled leaders from Central and Eastern Europe "who have been through difficult transitions, such as Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians, to give guidance and support to leaders in [other] countries going through transitions" (USAID 1999, 41). "For example, NDI organized a program to bring Serbian opposition party leaders to Poland to receive advice and guidance from Polish party activists on their current political situation, based on the similar experiences of the Poles in recent years" (USAID 1999, 36).

Poland continues to have a major role as a democracy promotion NGO center, particularly in the former breadbasket of the Soviet Union, Ukraine, its principal country of interest, which it aims to bring into NATO and the European Union and to make it "closer to Europe" (Szymanski, personal communication, 2007). Polish NGOs more closely identify with American NGO institutions than with those of Western Europe. As a director of the Soros- and other primarily U.S.-funded Batory Foundation in Warsaw sees it, USAID established the model for NGOs in Central Europe.

In Poland or wherever you'd meet with people from Central and Eastern Europe, all of them are saying how different we are from, let say, E.D. non-government organizations, which are based on European ideas, whereas the model of NGOs in Poland and Central and Eastern Europe was definitely based on the institutions that are active in the U.S. (Kulik-Bielinska, personal communication, 2007).


One critic, however, does not share such a benign view of such influence: "The idiosyncratic NGO sector in the United States heavily influenced how USAID-supported advisers conceived of the NGO sector," pushing for arrangements in Eastern Europe "that were likely inappropriate for the political culture and economic conditions of the country they were advising" (Quigley 2000, 200). Moreover, U.S. support to NGOs in the Central and Eastern European regions has influenced them to work closely with and under the guidance of state agencies, which belies their non-governmental status. The director of one Warsaw think tank believes that NGOs need to keep an "arm's length" from government, though he admits this will not happen under present political conditions in Poland (Kucharczyk, personal communication, 2007).

Batory, like other politically oriented NGOs, and its leadership came out of the dissident movement that opposed and eventually overthrew the (communist) Polish United Workers Party under Wojciech Jaruzelski. It was established in 1988 with the support of US AID, NED and Soros. Even after USAID ended its funding of Batory in 1999, funding continued to come from the U.S. Embassy in Poland (Gromadzki, personal communication, 2007). Polish NGOs function as a go-between for NED and other U.S. organization interests in Eastern Europe, particularly in Ukraine and Belarus (Kulik-Bielinska, personal communication, 2007). Two Batory officials in Warsaw acknowledged that political democracy, nearly 20 years after the triumph of Solidarity, remained undeveloped, particularly as measured by voter turnout - one of the weakest in Europe (Gromadzki and Kulik-Bielinska, personal communications, 2007).

A Warsaw-based NGO, funded by USAID, the Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative (PAUCI), was run by Freedom House until 2005 (following the "orange revolution"), when it was transformed under its first Polish director into a "legacy foundation" (now called Polish-Ukrainian Cooperation Foundation). PAUCI had formerly been used as a vehicle to channel funds to Ukrainian anti-Kuchma opposition groups (Beissinger 2006, 20). According to its executive director, Jan Pieklo, PAUCI channeled some $6 million to Polish and Ukrainian NGOs, which he called "a small contribution to the "orange revolution" (Pieklo, personal communication, 2007). More recently PAUCI has turned to Germany for financial support, though it still lists its partners as Freedom House, Batory Foundation (Soros-funded), and the German Robert Bosch Foundation. As a functionary of E.U. and U.S. interests, its current declared mission is "to build the capacity of Ukraine to integrate more closely with the European Union and NATO" (forumnet.Ukraine 2009).

After Ukraine, the principal country of concentration for Polish NGOs is Belarus, where the United States and the European Union have tried to unseat a popular president, Aleksandr Lukashenko. A Warsaw-based radio station, European Radio for Belarus (ERB), established in 2005, joins Poland with the Czech Republic in this regime change project. In Prague, an NGO, Civic Belarus, created in 2004, says on its website that it "strives to support non-governmental and non-profit organizations in Belarus, including those civic initiatives which have been deprived of the ability to operate legally by the regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko (Civic Belarus 2009). Civic Belarus acts as the arm of the Czech government in the ERB project and relies on its major donor support from NED (Marian, personal communication, 2007).

Established in 2005, ERB, nominally run by Belarusian journalists, has received funding (in the order listed by Civic Belarus) from the United States, the Czech Republic, Canada, Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the European Commission. According to Civic Belarus, the "goal of the radio station is to deliver factual, current and trustworthy information to Belarusian listeners about events in Belarus and the world culture. The programs are prepared by Belarusian journalists in Warsaw, Minsk and throughout Belarus." Echoing a central neoliberal trope of US AID, Civic Belarus further declares that the project "also aims to assist with the development of a new generation of journalists, who will be able to work professionally in Belarus in the future during an eventual transition to democracy and the free market." Running on a 24-hour music and news schedule, transmitted over AM, FM, satellite, and Internet, ERB specifies that its main target audience is 18- to 35-year-olds (Civic Belarus 2007). This is an age group, which includes the anti-Lukashenko youth organization, Zubr, that is most active in organizing regime change.

In 2007, the Polish foreign ministry and Polish public television, financially backed by the European Parliament, established a TV station, Belsat, transmitted by satellite to Belarus. The U.S. State Department contributed television equipment, and the British government paid for TV crew training. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty provides some of the program content. Programs are available in the Belarusian, Polish, and Russian languages (Belsat TV 2009). Such multi-level modes of penetration are difficult for the Lukashenko government to block. Given the similar design of these projects to the U.S.-run anti-Castro Radio Marti and TV Marti, it would be reasonable to assume that U.S. advisors, including those from the CIA, had some involvement in the radio and TV stations' development.

Jan Marian is a consultant for the Prague Security Studies Institute (PSSI), a think tank that was organized by Roger Robinson, who previously had been a senior director of the U.S. National Security Council and chair of the William Casey (CIA director under Reagan) Institute of the Center for Security Policy. Robinson had also been vice president for development in the Eastern European region for the Chase Manhattan Bank. According to Marian, funding for PSSI comes from the U.S. government, the Czech foreign ministry, the German Marshall Fund of the United States, and private corporate donors (Marian, personal communication, 2007). The Institute's advisory board includes former CIA director James Woolsey and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright. PSSI therefore bears the heavy imprint of U.S. political and economic security interests.

Marian also serves as executive director of Civic Belarus, which owns a share of the quasi-private ERB enterprise. Marian acknowledges that ERB and Belsat are" definitely not welcome" by the Lukashenko government. Both Poland and the Czech Republic have weak diplomatic relations with Belarus. The two principal donors to Civic Belarus are the Czech foreign ministry and NED (Marian, personal communication, 2007). Such propaganda assaults on the government and territorial sovereignty of Belarus and foreign financial support for unregistered organizations, strictly forbidden in most countries, clearly constitute an undeclared invasion, albeit by non-violent means.

Along with support for student organizations, a key strategy in support of regime change was and continues to be the foreign funding of in-country-based NGOs. Western aid to NGOs in weak democracies is predicated on the assumption that a dense democracy requires an active civil society and that the latter is constituted by multiple advocacy groups. But as Ottaway and Carothers argue, this is not necessarily the case, as social movements, more than advocacy groups, historically have made the most important advances in the democracy struggles of many countries around the world. In South Africa, the Philippines, [31] Nicaragua, Bolivia, central Mexico, Venezuela, South Korea, and in much of Central and Eastern Europe, it was social movements more than established advocacy groups or NGOs that impelled the most sweeping changes toward popular democracy.

Moreover, the two authors find that NGOs created in the aftermath of such changes often became foreign-funded, donor-driven outlets for displaced elites (Ottaway and Carothers 2000, 295, 299). This tends to create a local elite class of subalterns, according to one Prague-based NGO director, who travel the international "conference tourism" circuit, touting, sometimes falsifying, their credentials for self-advancement. Nonetheless, as he sees it, foreign assistance enables small countries in his region to become "donor states" (Marian, personal communication, 2007). The question, however, is with whose agenda?

According to one study: "In Ukraine, it was NGOs, the absolute majority of which operated on Western money, that supplied the velvet ["orange"] revolution with its social and organizational basis. In fact, they paid for the velvet revolution" (Tastenov 2007). And in Kyrgyzstan in the early 1990s, local NGOs relied on foreign sources for almost 100 percent of their funding. This meant that donors were directing the course of development over the needs and demands of local interests (Fiona Adamson, cited in Barker 2006b). Following Kyrgyzstan's 2005 "tulip revolution" that overthrew and permanently exiled Askar Akayev, Edil Baisolov, a local leader of a U.S.-financed (through NDI) coalition of NGOs, said with reference to the United States: "It [the uprising] would have been absolutely impossible for this to have happened without that help" (Smith 2005). USAID claimed credit for helping to create from 1989 to 2000 some 500,000 NGOs in the CEE and Eurasian regions (USAID 2000a).

In Ukraine, three prominent politicized NGOs, the International Center for Policy Studies, the Western Ukraine Regional Training Center, and the Center for Political and Legal Reforms, have highly visible links to Yushchenko. According to a U.S. House Republican from Bush's home state of Texas, Ron Paul, the first was funded by George Soros and the latter two by the U.S. government. Millions of dollars for the Ukrainian election also poured in from USAID through PAUCI. Although the U.S. government and NGOs made a lot of noise about the alleged voting fraud on the Yanukovych side, vote-rigging in Yushchenko-leaning western Ukraine was no less conspicuous. For Kiev-based Freedom House representative Juhani Grossman, U.S. intervention in the political affairs of another country is fair game. If the United States helps Ukraine's pro-Western free trade advocates Yushchenko and Tymoshenko to gain power, the rationale is that it's just a matter of evening the score against alleged vote-rigging by the nationalist leader Yanukovych.

In advance of the recent elections in Belgrade, Tbilisi, and Kiev, IRI helped instigate and choreograph large street demonstrations, as well as design branded symbols of resistance, such as the clenched fist (Traynor, 2004). These uprisings and icons were uncritically reported by the mainstream American media as indicators of a sweeping popular, pro-Western tide. The same media, often as submissively behaved as the controlled press in dictatorships, ignored the massive protests in the United States, Britain, and many other countries on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. (IRI's Iraq program personnel got their training in its CEE programs; NED 2006, 36.) If the subsequent March 2006 parliamentary elections provided any measure of actual Ukrainian voter sentiments, they did not support the U.S. claims, as Yushchenko's WTO-oriented "Our Ukraine" party came in third place and Yanukovych's party came in first. By the summer of 2006, amidst a governing crisis, Yushchenko was forced to ask Yanukovych to serve as prime minister.

As political scientist Mark Beissinger observes, the efforts of external organizations to foment uprisings in countries that do not share their political history or culture, "[a]s the Serbian and Ukrainian cases suggest," based on "a strategy of external encouragement for a broad coalition among opposition forces may indeed aid the overthrow of dictators. But it does not promote stability or predictability in the democratic evolution of post-revolutionary governments." Indeed, U.S. pressure on some countries to accept NDI, IRI, and other political "NGO" programs may be a condition for its continued support, thereby insulating them from regime change. In all the countries that instigated "color revolutions" (more like palace coups), all have shaky political status and some, such as Ukraine, rely for stability on the very individuals the uprisings were designed to overthrow (Beissinger 2006, 23). The demonization of heads of states such as Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia and Akayev in Kyrgyzstan destabilized politicians who just a few years earlier were touted by the U.S. government as liberators, faithful IMF supporters, and pro-Western liberal democrats.

Moreover, those who succeeded the enemies of the U.S. and its neoliberal allies did no more to display democratic convictions than those they vanquished. Mikheil Saakashvili "replaced 'superpresidential' institutions with even more highly concentrated 'hyperpresidential' ones," even attempting to ban all parties opposed to his pro-Western policy agenda (Hale 2006, 312). By November 2007, massive rallies took place in Tbilisi demanding early elections designed to oust the incumbent, the biggest protest in the city since the foreign-assisted removal of his predecessor, Eduard Shevardnadze. There was also a call for the release of "political prisoners" and "prisoners of conscience" (CNN 2007a). This time, there was no U.S. polling or other form of assistance on the side of the popular uprising, although some local polls indicated Saakashvili's imminent defeat by the opposition coalition. Amidst widespread charges of fraud, Saakashvili held an early election in which, backed by foreign observers as well as the services of the American public relations firm, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner (Bahrampour 2008), he claimed victory.

Perhaps the most critical factor in the Serbian, Georgian, and Ukrainian uprisings, in which U.S. government and NGOs played a significant role, was the mobilization of students to take part in massive street demonstrations. The IRI concentrated on youth leadership in the student organization Pora (USAID 1999, 31). [32] Most of the international funding for Pora was channeled indirectly from a Ukrainian NGO umbrella organization, Freedom of Choice Coalition, which in turn was funded by foreign democracy promotion groups (Barker 2006c). Foreign, primarily U.S., democracy promotion groups provided the Ukrainian opposition some $65 million over the two years prior to the 2005 election, which among other things enabled the protest organizers in Kiev to provide marchers with food, clothing, medication, and accommodations for free (Barker 2006c).

The extent of foreign engagement was not immediately transparent. Working with Otpor and Kmara, Ukrainian youth "interacted with and borrowed strategies from both groups," and "Kyrgyzstan, in turn, clearly borrowed from all of these preceding events, right down to youth groups with snappy mobilizing names." Some 75 Kyrgyz activists were sponsored by the U.S. government for training during the Ukraine's "orange revolution," a living regime change workshop also attended by "would-be revolutionaries" from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus (Hale 2006, 316-317; 6 Beachain 2009, 210). [33] Student movements have almost always been at the forefront of modern political uprisings. It is expected, therefore, that domestic and foreign political interests would seek to draw up methods of rebellion in which students could be employed.

Student movements as "political technology" provide opposition elites with decided tactical advantages against those in power. Students can mobilize rapidly for street protests or the hostile takeover of official buildings or other state property, a tactic known as "swarming," a politicized version of "flash-mobs." The development of a Western blogsite, "Le Sabot Post-Moderne (Postmodern Clog), was put in the service of Ukraine's Pora student group in support of the "orange revolution" (Mowat 2005). [34] In the case of Azerbaijan, however, Western foundations chose not to fund a student group, Magam (It's Time), which the American Program on Transitional Democracy regarded as insufficiently "oppositionist" (Lane 2009, 128).

At least one Russian political strategist expressed admiration for local initiatives that went into Ukraine's "orange revolution." Aleksandr Lebedev, an extremely wealthy newspaper owner, conservative member of the Duma, and head of its CIS Committee, as well as co-chair of the Russo-Ukrainian Inter-Parliamentary Commission, noted in early 2005 that:

In the final analysis, it was not the administrative levers and not interference in Ukraine's affairs by one state or another, or for that matter by any other forces, that was crucial there. It was the fact that three million people took to the streets in Kiev that was, in my view, the more important development. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to imagine that three million people could, by means of some sort of political spin, be induced to take to the streets in temperatures that were as low as minus 12 Centigrade and stay there for weeks on end. It was an expression of the will of Kievans and Ukrainians who had flocked to Kiev (cited by Herd 2005, 15).


Lebedev may not have been fully aware in early 2005 of the efforts that U.S. and other Western countries played in organizing the demonstrations that occurred just weeks previous to his commentary. [35] External intervention was more extensive than he perhaps imagined.

The role of the United States and E.U. countries in sponsoring NGOs is likely to have a pernicious effect on democratic tendencies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Robinson and Gindin insist that U.S. support for selective and favored NGOs aligned with Western political, economic, and security interests will generate dependence upon foreign funding sources and undermine local social movements and interest group formations. They find that a true democracy, based on people-centered, mass participatory structures, and an equitable distribution of material, political, and cultural resources, represents a profound threat to U.S. imperial prerogatives. Thus, the ironic "rhetorical banner" of democracy promotion means not the liberation but suppression of organic social and political forces (Robinson and Gindin 2005). It is not an imperialism of direct occupation but rather one that integrates local subaltern allies seeking membership in transnational military, political, and economic organizations.

Belarus is one of the countries in Eastern Europe where Western political intervention made little headway, at least until 2009. It is likely that because the state was credited with developing a stable economy without social convulsion, foreign economic incursions, brash profiteering via neoliberal "shock therapy," or the destruction of the public sector, the highly centralized Aleksandr Lukashenko government retains legitimacy. Even his detractors characterize him as "charismatic." It is also important that nearly a third of Belarus citizens have close family connections in Russia, many with degrees from Russian universities. Thus, positive Russian sentiments remain strong, particularly in the eastern regions of the country. Poland, by contrast, has a large contact base in the West, particularly in Britain and the United States (Naumczuk et al. 2001, 7, 9).

For those governments not sufficiently deferential to the West's global economic and security interests, the holding of elections is not an adequate basis for acceptance into the "democratic" fold. With the defeat of the U.S./E.U.-backed candidate, Aleksandr Milinkievic, and the failure of an Otpor-type youth movement, such as Zubr or the right-wing Young Front, to get traction during the 2006 election, the victor Lukashenko was banned from visiting any of the E.U. states or the United States. [36] This is not the case, for example, for such democratic stalwarts as the heads of state of Egypt, Colombia, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, China, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Equatorial Guinea, Israel, or Indonesia, who enjoy easy access to the State Department, the White House, and the chambers of Parliament.

The United States generally does not accept the notion that the caudillo type leader can operate in the interests of society. Revolutionary leaders like Castro are often caricatured as flamboyant despots. The exception is when the strongman happens to be working in support of U.S. interests (Marcos, Saddam, Noriega, Batista, Somoza, Trujillo, Musharraf, Mubarak, Pinochet, and many others). It would be hard to imagine such allied regimes voluntarily abiding by principles of non-violent political conflict and constitutional transfer of power, and in fact the United States rarely calls upon them to do so, except when cross-class alliances arise to push them out, as in Chile and the Philippines. Such is the pathology of a U.S. foreign policy rooted in "political realism."

In 2008, the international democracy monitoring organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) challenged the U.S. and British governments on the double standard it favorably applies to undemocratic regimes and the negative attention it gives to other countries whose political legitimacy it openly challenges. HRW's executive director, Kenneth Roth, concludes: "It seems Washington and European governments will accept even the most dubious election so long as the 'victor' is a strategic or commercial ally." Thus, Ukraine's Yanukovych is treated as persona non grata, but Pakistan under Musharraf was seen by the Anglo-American alliance as being "on the road to democracy" (Walker 2008). In repressive pro-Western client states and many former military dictatorships that have opened themselves to transnational trade and investment and big power security interests, elections are used by ruling elites and endorsed by their foreign patrons in order to "reap the fruits of electoral legitimacy without running the risks of democratic uncertainty" (Schedler 2002, 36-37).

At the time of the 2001 presidential election in Belarus, the U.S. ambassador Michael Kozak, publicly declared the right of intervention and actively participated in efforts to overthrow Lukashenko under a U.S. project called "Operation White Stork" (Laughland 2009). Kozak had expressed similar views toward the Sandinistas when he was ambassador to Nicaragua from 1990 to 1992. Comparing the two situations, he wrote to the Guardian (London): "Our objective and to some degree methodology are the same .... Twelve years ago, we advised the Nicaraguan opposition that the best way to pursue their political agenda was through participation in a peaceful electoral process; today we are giving the same advice to the opposition in Belarus" (Kozak 2001). That "advice" was also backed by $24 million during the 2000 election campaign, a huge amount of money for a nation of 10 million people with a $4,800 per capita GDP at the time (Peterson 2001). That would be the equivalent of a foreign political infusion in the United States of three-fourths of a billion dollars.

Stephen Cohen compares U.S. hostility toward Belarus and the favorable treatment of other authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and Eastern Europe and sees it as a failed policy. It parallels, he says, the praise given to the corrupt, authoritarian government of Yeltsin in Russia and the denunciation of his far more popular successor, Putin. "Ostracizing Belarus President Aleksandr Lukashenko while embracing tyrants in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan has related it [U.S. democracy promotion] to the thirst for oil. Linking 'democratic revolutions' in Ukraine and Georgia to NATO membership has equated them with U.S. expansionism" (Cohen 2006). Kazakhstan's president (continuously since 1991) Nursultan Nazarbaev was perceived by the United States to be "the best guarantor of Western investments and interests" (Wojciech Ostrowski, cited in Lane 2009, 128). This self-serving double standard only serves to delegitimize Western-backed politicians in the eyes of many local citizens as vassals of foreign power.
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Re: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Ea

Postby admin » Thu Jun 22, 2017 2:17 am

Part 4 of 4

TEMPLATE POLITICS BEYOND EUROPE

The exit po11, a flawed and widely distrusted device in the American electoral context, has become one of the principal weapons of regime change elsewhere. On the eve of the 2007 presidential election in Kenya, as reported in the New York Times, the International Republican Institute held back its USAID-sponsored exit po11 results at the behest of the Bush administration. Based on the testimony of IRI's East Africa director, Kenneth Flottman, the poll had found that the challenger, Raila Odinga, led by six percentage points. The Times reported that the Bush administration wanted the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, who supported its international "anti-terrorist" program, to win the election. The U.S. ambassador in Nairobi, Michael Ranneberger, had publicly spoken out for Kibaki. Flottman declared: "It was clear, in my opinion, that the ambassador was trying to influence the perceptions of the Kenyan electorate, and thus the campaign." After what many credible observers called massive vote counting fraud, Kibaki was declared the winner, which led to extensive violence and more than 1,000 killed. The Times revealed that Odinga had been educated in East Germany and named his son after Fidel Castro, implying that the US. did not trust his brand of politics (McIntire and Gettleman 2009).

In early 2009, IRI hotly challenged the Times report as poor journalism. They insisted that the reason the Kenya poll was not released was that it had methodological flaws. Meanwhile, in Cuba, just prior to the Kenyan election, IRI covertly ran an in-country poll, undertaken by an unnamed group of foreign individuals who did not identify themselves as pollsters, but who found that a majority of Cubans wanted an alternative to the Communist Party and preferred a free market economy. Although it would be extremely difficult to collect reliable results under conditions in which there is deep distrust of US. government behavior toward the country and where polling is restricted without government supervision, IRI did not hesitate to publicly release its poll findings. The Gallup organization, which found very different results in their polling results on similar topics (e.g., 39 percent disapproval of Castro government versus IRI's 79 percent figure) expressed doubts about IRI's "unorthodox" techniques in Cuba (Gomez 2007).

Kyrgyzstan, the largest recipient of U.S. aid in Central Asia (as of 2005), was another target country of the US. democracy promoters. Prior to the 2005 presidential election, the United States turned against the president, Askar Akayev, erroneously believing that the opposition, led by Kurmanbek Bakiyev, would pull away from Russia and strengthen Kyrgyzstan-US. ties. As Akayev was about to be forced out of power (the "tulip revolution") in March 2005, a Bishkek-based project director for Freedom House, Michael Stone, who ran a printing press for the political opposition, declared, "Mission accomplished" [37] (Spencer 2005). Only if pandemic corruption was the objective was he correct.

Stone was widely regarded in Bishkek as the "evil genius" behind the Akayev's ouster. A Russian-language opposition bi-weekly newspaper, Moya Stolitsa Novosti (MSN), of which Stone was in charge, was printed by Freedom House. According to a German party foundation official, US. in-country foundations worked very closely with the State Department in support of the Kyrgyz opposition. On at least one occasion, printing equipment bearing the State Department's logo was donated to a local print shop. "The Kyrgyz authorities would think twice before they would damage or take out of order State Department property" (Buhbe, personal communication, 2008).

When power to the MSN printing plant was cut, the US. embassy intervened and supplied two generators. With the functioning generators in place, Freedom House operated the printing press for dozens of other opposition newspapers as well (Spencer, 2005). One of the turning points, according to Stone himself, was a front page cover of MSN that showed a photograph of a new villa that Akayev was allegedly building for his family, adding fuel to the image of corruption in his government in an effort to discredit him.

A reporter for the Asia Times found that

The whole arsenal of US foundations - National Endowment for Democracy, International Republic[an] Institute, IFES [International Foundation for Election Systems], Eurasia Foundation, Internews, among others - which fueled opposition movements in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, has also been deployed in Bishkek. It generated, among other developments, a small army of Kyrgyz youngsters who went to Kiev, financed by the Americans, to get a glimpse of the Orange Revolution, and then became "infected" with the democratic virus .... Practically everything that passes for civil society in Kyrgyzstan is financed by these US foundations, or by the US Agency for International Development (USAID). At least 170 non-governmental organizations charged with development or promotion of democracy have been created or sponsored by the Americans .... The US State Department has operated its own independent printing house in Bishkek since 2002 - which means printing at least 60 different titles, including a bunch of fiery opposition newspapers. USAID invested at least $2 million prior to the Kyrgyz elections - quite something in a country where the average salary is $30 a month (Escobar 2005).


MSN also published information about the organization of protests in Kyrgyzstan's northern and southern regions. Britain, Norway, and the Netherlands provided additional support "to develop democracy and civil society" in the country (Laughland 2005; Smith 2005), but none acted in such an interventionist way as the US. government, its party institutes, and Freedom House. The German party foundation officials I interviewed in Berlin asserted that their institutions or government would never act in such an interventionist manner.

IRI itself acknowledged its active efforts in the 2005 regime change project: "IRI assisted parties in building internal resources for election observation and for managing campaigns" and "drew upon the experience of political parties in Ukraine to assist with this work. Ukrainian party activists traveled to the Kyrgyz Republic to conduct trainings on campaign management, voter outreach and regional party building." And in November 2005, IRI brought representatives from five Kyrgyz political parties to Ukraine "where they learned about the work of regional offices of Ukrainian parties" (IRI 2007). The US. government had provided other forms of support, including grants to opposition newspapers, money for civil society centers, and funding for the American University in Bishkek. Kyrgyzstan's opposition Osh TV in the southern part of the country "expanded its reach with equipment paid for by the State Department" (Smith 2005).

US. ambassador Stephen Young immediately and openly welcomed Akayev's overthrow. "[T]he United States is proud to have assisted the process," he announced. A joint message to the Kyrgyz people celebrating the transfer of people was issued by the presidents of Georgia and Ukraine. Such declarations further convinced those who viewed the entire affair as cooked in Washington (O Beachain 2009, 210).

Since the "tulip revolution" and under the presidency of Kurmanbek Bakiyev, the Kyrgyz government has become increasingly infested with organized criminal activity, shut down the local (Radio Azattyk) Kyrgyz-language transmission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and announced the closing of the last remaining U.S. military base in the region (subsequently reversed). Higher education degrees are routinely purchased; health care involves bribes to doctors with suspect training, and the legal profession, the courts, the customs service, and the energy sector are fraught with various forms of graft and corruption (Korf 2007). Political corruption is also rampant, with assassinations of politicians occurring frequently in the capital. Kyrgyzstan also has formed closer ties with Russia, which weakens the State Department's hopes for a more hegemonic position in the region.

As in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, the "color revolution" in Kyrgyzstan involved the extensive use of propaganda, which created a false anticipation of social and political change. Criminals enter politics to get immunity from prosecution. Some civil society activists go into politics to launch lucrative careers. Indeed, a new generation of local speculative businesses associated with neoliberal restructuring and professional politics has been created throughout the CEE region. One of the findings in comparing U.S. and European, especially German, democracy promotion efforts is the difference in their assumptions about sovereignty and willingness to directly intervene in the political affairs of Eastern Europe. Albeit in a non-violent way, the United States exercised a high degree of direct intervention with little Congressional or other public oversight, whereas the German political foundations were far more cautious in their efforts and concerned about issues of public accountability at home. The American democracy promoters and several of their grantee NGO "middleman" organizations in Central Europe describe U.S. practices in Eastern Europe as "flexible," which means moving resources at will in service of the mission of regime change, market openings, and military and energy security interests.

But the thrust of neoliberal U.S. intervention in Eastern Europe (as in the Gulf states) has not led to any form of popular empowerment and likely helped set back efforts for social welfare and social justice in the region. The creative uses of propaganda resulted in short-term gains, but in light of the backlash against liberal democracy assistance in the region, possibly a long-term defeat for Western objectives. [38] Russian leaders, with legitimate interests in "near abroad," have reason to feel threatened and encircled by the active U.S. political, economic, and military presence in the region. It also encourages their repression against organic democratic forces in the country, perhaps by intentional U.S. design. In the interests of peace, the Bush administration efforts to place a missile defense system in neighboring Poland and the Czech Republic (subsequently postponed by the Obama administration) did nothing to allay Russian anxiety. Although methods have changed somewhat, the hegemonic attitudes of U.S. foreign policy actors have been remarkably consistent throughout the long history of its imperial conquests. One of the key methods of pursuing hegemony in the region is the sophisticated uses of surveillance and propaganda, technologies and techniques now firmly and systemically rooted in the neoliberal and informational/promotional U.S. economy and political and mainstream culture, as described in Chapter 1.

The chasm between the claims and realities of democracy promotion is taken up for discussion in the following, final chapter of this study.

_______________

Notes:

1. Similarly, the U.S. media became obsessed with providing unverified reports via Twitter about protest events in Iran following the controversial 2009 presidential election - as if journalistic standards were irrelevant when they pertained to the coverage of enemy states. This led one former U.S. government official to observe that: "The US media has studiously ignored all of these highly suggestive facts [regarding actual events in Iran]. The media is not reporting or providing objective analysis. It is engaged in a propagandistic onslaught against the Iranian government" (Roberts 2009).

2. The Polish government at the time bitterly complained about U.S. one-sided interference in the June 1989 election, ranging from American radio propaganda over Munich-based Radio Free Europe, the intervention of the U.S. embassy in Warsaw, the active participation and political instruction of NED-funded grantee institutes, private foreign donations to Solidarity organized with the aid of the U.S. and Western European governments, and the personal political engagement of Poland-born former national security advisor (to Carter) Zbigniew Brzezinski (Tagliabue 1989).

3. Established for economic cooperation in 1991, the Visegrad countries (named after a town in northern Hungary) were formerly part of the Warsaw pact. They joined the European Union in 1999 and the OECD between 1995 and 2001. All are members of NATO.

4. The only national dailies that are fully Czech in ownership are the socialist Pravo (circulation about 200,000, and the Communist Party's Halo Noviny (circulation about 40,000). (Kuras 2002).

5. Havel's former press secretary, Gabriela Dlouha, now director of the Human Rights and Transition Policy Department at the Czech foreign ministry, indicated that of the nine countries on which her office concentrates for bringing about changes in human rights policy, seven are current or former communist party-run states. This, she says, bears the influence of Havel. The foreign ministry's intervention in Cuba on behalf of the Cuban opposition, she notes, is also related to what was once a deep relationship with that country during Czechoslovakia's socialist era. The unequal power relationship between Cuba and the United States and the Cuban resentment of superpower intervention provides a small country like the Czech Republic with a "niche" opportunity to influence a political "transition" in that country (Dlouha, personal communication, 2007). One might ask whether Czech intervention in the Caribbean, so far from its real sphere of interest, is simply a way of cultivating good relations with the U.S. government.

6. Aside from his famous daughter, Korbel's most famous protege was his student at the University of Denver, Condoleezza Rice. Albright was a doctoral student of Zbigniew Brzezinski at Columbia University.

7. Hill & Knowlton had previously managed public relations for the al-Sabah royal family of Kuwait during the first U.S. Persian Gulf invasion, a propaganda feat well described in Stauber and Rampton (1995), Chapter 10. Hill & Knowlton was managed by G. W. Bush's friend and advisor, Craig Fuller.

8. According to a New York Times account, Clinton's secretary of state, Warren Christopher, acted like a "politician passionately endorsing a candidate at a campaign whistle-stop" during his visit to Russia just before the December 1993 parliamentary election. Christopher supported Yeltsin's suspension of parliament in September of that year (Sciolino 1993).

9. In 1996, a group of American consultants, including a team that had previously worked on Pete Wilson's gubernatorial campaign in California, went to work on the Russian presidential campaign for Boris Yeltsin. Unfortunately for Russia (Sussman 2005), Yeltsin failed to require a non-disclosure agreement from his American advisors, which resulted in an embarrassing cover story in Time magazine that made the Russian president look sadly dependent on foreign patronage (Vuijst 2008a). The American campaign advisors pushed a hard line anti-communist strategy, creating a false choice between going back to Stalin or going forward with Yeltsin (Steele, personal communication, 2008).

10. Shock therapy also had the early support of conservative Central European economists, including Poland's Leszek Balcerowicz and the Czech (currently president) Vaclav Klaus, "experts [who] were integrated into transnational networks of exchange" (Brier 2009, 347).

11. One analysis found that USAID was reproducing a similar template in Moldova as it had in other Eastern European countries, including an "Internet Access and Training Program." According to USAID, the program provides "free access to the internet and to extensive training in all aspects of information technology." Such support has been found to be effective in instigating "Twitter revolutions" (Trabanco 2009).

12. Foreign media assistance is linked to the commercial restructuring of media holdings in the CEE region, most of which is controlled by outside interests. The result, as one observer has noted, is that:

Western-owned media groups that are reasonably well behaved at home, have had free rein in the unregulated 'Wild East.' Loose reins have their effects. Academics, members of broadcasting and press councils critical of media operators are regular victims of character defamation (Harcourt 2003, 339).


13. Beyond Europe, one of NED's first successful tests of non-violent intervention occurred in the Philippines, where, in 1986, the United States withdrew support for the Marcos dictatorship and helped organize an election that would bring a pro-American, liberal democratic leader, Corazon Aquino, to power and force Marcos into exile. NED later came under greater scrutiny in Congress when it was found in 1989 to be surreptitiously funding Nicaraguan opposition candidate, Violeta Chamorro. Critics accused NED of partisan meddling, after which its leaders promised to restrict the organization to civil society-building in the future (Conry 1993).

14. In 1991, bent on secession from Yugoslavia, the Croatian government hired an American PR firm, Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs, to "develop and carry out strategies and tactics for communication with members of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate as well as with officials of the U.S. government including the State Department, the National Security Council and other relevant agencies and departments of the U.S. government as well as with American and international news media." Ruder Finn carefully constructed an image of the Serbian authorities in Croatia in an attempt to equate them to the Nazis (Johnstone 2002, 68-70). The United States recognized the independence of Croatia a year later.

15. One of the company's principals, Mark Penn, was then an advisor to President Bill Clinton and joined Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign as her pollster and "key strategic adviser." Penn is also CEO of the transnational PR firm Burson-Marsteller, a consulting company with a history of work for repressive regimes in political hotspots. (See Sussman 2005, 103-104, 140, 143.)

16. Peter Ackerman, for example, while on the AEI board lauded the symbolic actions of Otpor in his made-for-television documentary, "Bringing Down a Dictator." He later became more actively involved in the region through his strategic non-violent action training organization, the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.

17. Shevardnadze had been foreign minister under Gorbachev during the last years of the Soviet Union, and, thus had generally good relations with Moscow.

18. A British conservative author, John Laughland, writes that British imperial policy after the First World War interfered in Georgia and the Russian civil war for very much the same reason: protection of the Buku-Batami railway, which carried oil from the Caspian to the Black Sea (Laughland 2008).

19. Among Saakashvili's Western consultants were John McCain's foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann (Laughland 2008). Symbolic of a "bipartisan" U.S. show of support, Hillary Clinton and John McCain teamed up in 2005 to nominate the neoliberal presidents in Georgia and Ukraine, Saakashvili and Yushchenko, for the Nobel Peace Prize.

20. After the "rose revolution," Rustavi-2's former head, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, went on to become president of the chamber of commerce and trade. In 2008, he criticized Saakashvili's handling of the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

21. The World Bank, which shares a common value with the European Union in seeking the economic integration of Eastern Europe measures political stability by "perceptions of the likelihood that the government will be destabilized or overthrown by unconstitutional or violent means, including domestic violence and terrorism." In its 2008 calculations, Serbia received a score of 28, Georgia 16, and Ukraine 44. A score of 50 would be mid-range. It ranked Germany at 86, France at 67, and Britain at 66. The Scandinavian countries scored at the higher ranks (World Bank 2009). There is a certain irony in the Bank's emphasis on constitutional means of governance, since all three countries experienced regime change through the use of externally-supported destabilization tactics.

22. Aside from the support of foreign government agencies, such as USAID, Yushchenko also benefited from the support for regime change that came from private or semi-private organizations including NED and its party foundations, Soros's Kiev-based International Renaissance Foundation (part of OSI), Freedom House, the Carnegie Foundation, and the German Marshall Fund (Lane 2008, 547, n. 9).

23. Media policy varies considerably in the CEE region. In the Czech Republic, for example, there is no limit on foreign ownership, which has enabled foreign interests to dominate the country's media markets. The leading station, in both entertainment and news programming, TV Nova, has a 99 percent American ownership share. As of 2004, the controlling interest of its parent company, Central European Media Enterprises, which is based in Bermuda, is the former U. S. ambassador to Austria and Hungary, Ronald Lauder. (Harcourt 2003, 326). CME also has major television holdings in Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, and Hungary.

24. British historian Mark Almond comments on how "people power" has become an American brand, which privileges the United States government to sanctify what is and what is not a revolutionary struggle. The uprising of millions of Mexicans against what they believed was the fraudulent election of Felipe Calderon was ignored as "people power," whereas, he argues, smaller uprisings against heads of state of whom the United States disapproves are depicted by U.S. political elites as "revolutionary" (Almond 2006).

25. American consultants are now central to Ukrainian politics. Andrew Wilson found that subsequent to the 2004 election, Ukraine's "bigger parties hired fewer Russian political technologists and more US K Street consultants. I leave you to judge whether that is progress" (Wilson 2009).

26. Helvey had been a U.S. military attache at the American Embassy in Rangoon and returned to the border area several times in attempts to effect regime change in that country. He also was an advisor to the Chinese anti-government religious organization, Falun Gong.

27. Boot argued in a Financial Times op-ed that what the United States needs in Iraq is an administrative institution similar to the British Colonial Office or the India Office, which he wistfully describes as "two institutions [that] ran large swaths of the world with a handful of bright, honest, industrious civil servants" (Boot 2003).

28. His prime minister was Yulia Tymoshenko, known as the "gas princess" for the great wealth she previously acquired from the energy sector. She was a leader of the "orange revolution" but was forced to resign in September 2005 after less than nine months in the post.

29. Playing both sides of the aisle, Manafort's partner, Peter Kelly, was a fundraiser and senior political advisor to Bill Clinton.

30. The New York Times reported that Yanukovych appeared poised to win the 2010 presidential election, marking the final defeat of the "orange revolution." the Yushchenko candidacy, with a tiny fraction of the popular votes according to polls, was being advised, as of January 2010, by the Clintons' strategist Mark Penn, while Tymoshenko now had the former firm of Obama advisor, David Axelrod, in her camp. Yanukovych was sticking with Republican consultant Paul Manafort. If the United States didn't get its way in permenantly deposing Yanukovych, at least the American consulting industry was still involved in the power play (Levy 2010).

31. The Philippines has perhaps the largest array of heterogeneous NGOs, numbering in the tens of thousands, in the Third World, and much of their activities have to do with grassroots social movements, which are on the whole less funded, that gave rise to them. (See, for example, Hilhorst 2003.)

32. Pora and another Ukrainian youth group, Znayu, in turn, served as training seminar hosts for Russian students in hopes of inciting an "orange revolution" in Russia (Wilson 2009, 379). Pora has since dissolved as a youth organization and split into two factions, one of which became an NGO and the other, briefly, a political party.

33. The action names adopted by the student movements in the four countries are suggestive of a propaganda style of politics transferred from the core propaganda economies of the West. Kyrgyzstan rebels drew from their tutors in choosing "Kel-Kel" ("Come on! Come on!") as their slogan, similar to Georgia's Kmara! ("Enough"), Ukraine's Pora! ("It's Time!"), and Serbia's "Otpor" ("Resistance"). Kyrgyzstan youth also followed Ukraine's color theme (orange) with the choice of yellow and pursued common election monitoring methods (Hale 2006, 316).

34. On a much more extensive scale, an international social network for Twitter was set up to encourage protest in Tehran following the contested Iranian presidential election in 2009. Google, Facebook, and Apple's iPhone concurrently released translation tools for Persian (Farsi) and English language blogs, websites, news articles, and text messages to support the opposition's street demonstrations. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were active commercial services used by the opponents of the Ahmadinejad government.

35. In late 2008, Lebedev and former Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, who are co-owners of an independent Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, decided to form a new political party to challenge Putin's political vehicle, United Russia.

36. The U.S. and E.U. governments called much attention to what they considered the unbelievably high poll results (82 percent) for Lukashenko, even though they were able to find even higher results fully credible for candidates they supported: Saakashvili in Georgia (97 percent) in 2004, Bakiev's 89 percent "landslide" in Kyrgyzstan in 2005, Shevardnadze in Georgia at 92 percent in 1992 when he was still on the State Department's good list, and Aliev's 93 percent in Azerbaijan in 1993 (Almond, 2006).

37. In 1989, a pirate television station in Leipzig, East Germany, Kanal X was put on the air with the aid of Freedom House, which made available its transmitter (Hoffman 2002). Meanwhile, within the United States, the FCC was putting pirate broadcasters out of business for operating without a license.

38. As one indication of the backlash, in 2006, the government of Uzbekistan asked unwelcome organizations, including Freedom House, to leave the country. That year Zambia also threw out Freedom House, accusing the organization of being run by individuals with CIA and other intelligence agency backgrounds (Harare Sunday Mail 2006).
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Re: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Ea

Postby admin » Thu Jun 22, 2017 2:28 am

CHAPTER FIVE: PROPAGANDA IN LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES

We have 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. In this situation we cannot foil to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will allow us to maintain this position of disparity.

-- GEORGE F. KENNAN, 1948


REVOLUTION AS A MARKETING DEVICE

The passage through Central and Eastern Europe in this study has been an attempt to relate the political economy of communications to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. In Chapter 1, I discussed the promotional characteristics of the current U.S. economy that derive from its accelerated conversion to an informational mode of development (as manufacturing activities and employment get relocated "offshore"). Apart from the widespread popular use of communication technologies, their most valorized functions are connected to the selling of commodities that are made elsewhere and financial and business services. As such, the new political economy requires an increased emphasis on such occupational skills and habits as marketing, advertising, public relations, sales management, and a range of other promotional enterprises. The technological and organizational infrastructure that is now integral to the trans nationalized economy permeates almost every pore of political, economic, social, and personal existence, rendering a "post-modern" universe of symbols recombined and reconstructed for new but ephemeral meanings and the promotional task at hand (e.g., rebellious song lyrics from one era used to sell luxury goods in another).

In the broader context of a pervasive industrial, commercial, capitalist economy, promotional culture has entered public life as never before. Older notions of propaganda do not suffice to explain the applications of advertising, marketing, public relations, and other forms of selling, because societies, especially in the West, and most particularly in the United States, have never before experienced the current level of promotionalism in social, political, and cultural interaction and the tools that are now available for that purpose. The key to this analysis is that propaganda is no longer simply a tactic employed for specific commercial or state projects but is rather systemic. Promotional tasks are now embedded in most aspects of daily life via broadcasting, computer software, Internet, cell phones, iphones, Twitter, email, chat rooms, and the seemingly unending hybrid technologies and programs that are being sold (or given away) for communicative exchange. Almost all forms of electronic communication are accompanied by some form of advertising, turning citizens into not only consumers but also uncompensated promoters of commodities and services.

This systemic basis for promotional culture has deeply penetrated formal politics, public policy, public administration, and foreign policy, usually rationalized as serving the public's informational interests. But politics organized through media-driven "public opinion," which is typically the way public participation is constructed, is a sacrilege against the ideal of a rational, deliberative, participatory democracy. The energy and ingenuity mobilized in developing a brand campaign in support of a politician and then polling the results are not genuinely about seeking the public's interest in policy outcomes as much as testing the effectiveness of propaganda, creating a momentum for the candidate and using the results of the poll to influence the "voting" outcome. In the United States, and more commonly in other countries, electioneering and other types of campaigns have become a matter of winning by any means necessary. In politics, as in commerce, the United States is a nation of sellers and, with its neoliberal allies, has tutored other nations, with varying degrees of success, to follow in its footsteps.

For defenders of imperial power, it is incumbent on the United States and other like-minded states (the European Union) to bring the doctrine of "market democracy" to countries that have jettisoned either single-party state socialism (communism), as in Central and Eastern Europe, or authoritarian nationalism, such as the former military dictatorships in Latin America. With a now well-choreographed "revolutionary" template, which employs a wide range of hard (covert and deceptive) and soft (public diplomacy) propaganda, the United States seeks to secure openings in these and other regions for political, military, and economic security and power advantage. And despite the disastrous consequences of its interventions, whether by military means, as in the Middle East, or by non-violent methods, as in Eastern Europe, it continually presses its way into what it regards as strategic areas. America's imperial ambitions, articulated plainly by Woodrow Wilson (see epigraph in Chapter 2), who cloaked intervention in the benevolent lexicon of "uplifting" nations, have never really changed. Democracy promotion remains the official rationale in the pursuit of state interests.

Even as the United States was undergoing a hollowing of democracy at home, with the growing concentration of corporate commercial ownership of media and informational structures, diminishing affordability of higher education, the decline of health indexes and at least 46 million people without insurance, a general reduction in real wages, and numerous other indicators of a decimated public sphere, G. W. Bush was extolling "Democracy promotion" as his administration's foreign policy catchphrase. Toward this rhetorical gambit, his vice president, advisers, and various cabinet officials employed leading promotional talents from advertising, PR, marketing, and the mainstream media to plant news reports in both foreign and domestic media despite established legal proscriptions on such government behavior.

Chapter 2 focused on the historical armed and covert intrusions and official propaganda of the United States within and beyond its hemispheric spheres of influence. The Cold War provided a frame for a broad range of legal and extra-legal interventions in the world, including the use of political and economic destabilization efforts and even assassination in the mission to achieve unchallenged world domination. In the Cold War narrative, the Soviet Union was cast as a satanic force in a Manichean drama, which Reagan, drawing on his limited vocabulary and library of, mostly film, knowledge, articulated as the "evil empire." Confronted on all sides by furiously hostile external military, political, economic, and propaganda pressures - and facing the internal contradictions of premature state-centered socialism and corruption - the Soviet Union collapsed with hardly a shot being fired. But the presumed end of the Cold War did not lead to peace dividends for American workers (in wages or in kind) who had built the arsenal of economic and military power that overwhelmed the Warsaw Pact states. Instead, it led to the abandonment of the American working class, the deterioration of midwestern rustbelt industrial areas, and a concurrent concentration of wealth and power unseen since the 1920s. In very short order, the United States went from being the biggest lending nation to the biggest debtor nation.

In a declining state, "necessary illusions" (Chomsky 1999), sustained by electronic means of thought control, are employed to maintain the legitimacy of its power base. The "professionalization" of political and electoral events helped naturalize the formation of a plutocracy, as a discouraged public increasingly turned from activism and civic engagement to becoming spectators of highly crafted political dramas, a process well described by Murray Edelman (1988), Putnam (2001), and others. Serious news reporting has been drowned out by profit-centered news practices, by the high-decibel sensationalism of the tabloid media, and by spin masters who dominate the crafting, focus, and language of political debates. At the same time, the profound influences of promotionalism have migrated from commerce and a commodified form of politics to the foreign policy arena. While there are certain constraints on the U.S. government's direct use of propaganda at home (largely bypassed through its envoys in the media), there are virtually no such controls in its foreign policy pursuits. Stewards from the "perception management" industry have found it profitable to expand their trade overseas, following the lead of the State Department and DoD.

Since the Second World War, no other region has preoccupied U.S. state planners more than the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. The struggle of "free" versus "captive" nation states was a parable central to U.S. foreign policy liturgy up to the early 1990s. The eventual collapse of state socialism and the capitalist succession led to economic crises and political instability in those regions. Many blame the headlong rush to open markets in which the sell-off of state industries, the slashing of government social spending, and adoption of other "shock therapy" economic prescriptions were seen as the source of the problem. But for the West, "exorcising the legacies of communism in the Second World often required changing the very nature of recipient institutions, including those of banking, industry, international trade, social security, and health care" (Wedel 2001, 21) as well as fundamental changes in law, social policy, and public administration.

USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), other U.S. and Western European agencies (discussed at length in Chapter 3), and private groups helped precipitate in Eastern Europe a series of urban rebellions and non-violent coups, known as the "color revolutions," against entrenched power. This in turn contributed to a resurgence of Russian nationalism and state power, rooted in a fear of encirclement, and a resumption of tensions between Russia and the United States over the latter's interventions in the internal politics of the region. Russia, together with the trade-associated Commonwealth of Independent States of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Tajikistan, have taken actions against foreign political aid programs. All of them distrust U.S. political assistance as a Trojan horse designed to subvert their national and economic sovereignty. Such a backlash has already spread to several African, Asian, and Latin American states as well (Carothers 2006a). The Shanghai Cooperation Organization, made up of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, also organized as a defensive alliance against Western power in the region, seeks "cooperation in political affairs, economy and trade, scientific-technical, cultural, and educational spheres as well as in energy, transportation, tourism, and environment protection fields" (Engdahl 2006).

In the Eastern European uprisings, as discussed in Chapter 4, symbolic protest activities took center stage in attempts to force incumbents out of power. Posters, buttons, logos, graffiti, slogans, the recruitment of visible student activists, revolutionary-sounding lexicon, media stratagems, and the branded trope of "color revolution" all provided a sense that the momentum was more than just a political campaign - rather, a transformative movement. But in reality, it was not a social movement of any kind inasmuch as the organizations set up for regime change largely dispersed once the main objective was achieved, and no set of principles for social change was ever put forward other than a vague articulation of" democracy." The principal targets of democracy studied herein, are still ranked low even on the 2008 pro-business democracy index of the Economist magazine: Serbia ranked 63rd, Georgia 104th, and Ukraine came in 53rd (Economist 2008). Although in each case there certainly had to be an adequate level of latent public dissent for the coup to succeed, the critical factor was the creative use of symbolic representations and the skillful deployment of political tactics in achieving the short-term regime change objective. The specific forms of propaganda were fortified by American training in techniques and the presumption of U.S. backing for the opposition and its willingness to playa "big brother" interventionist role: Given the residual hostilities of many of the opposition toward Russia and the former Soviet Union, this role carried a lot of weight.

THE MEANING OF DEMOCRACY

Elections by themselves do not signify democracy inasmuch as many dictatorships hold demonstration elections, often with rigged results, simply to indulge the Western states with a show of legitimacy that justifies foreign political support and economic and military assistance. Americans, argues one Hungarian political scientist, tend to conflate elections with democracy, an outlook he finds "counterproductive," inasmuch as the disappointment that citizens feel when electoral outcomes do not bring deep-rooted social change leads to public complacency and cynicism. Genuine democracy is grounded in citizen engagement at political, economic, and social levels (Agh, personal communication, 2007). Indeed, the electoral outcomes in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine did little to raise the standards of democracy. As one close observer noted:

The [color revolution] coups neither liberalized nor democratized the countries' [Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine] political systems. In fact, after the revolution and regime change, aims and interests polarized to lead to political purges and splits. The Color Revolutions made the far from simple geopolitical realities even more complicated .... they lead to political destabilization, economic decline, and disillusionment" (Tastenov 2007).


His conclusion is that" democracy" is used merely as a "rallying cry" to whip up public emotions for regime change and to serve the interests of foreign and domestic elite groups seeking ownership rights, finance, and other forms of capital. However, despite the manipulative purposes of such propaganda, the fact that the compelling language of democracy is relied upon for their ends provides some encouragement in that it reflects the universal appeal of democracy as a system of governance (compelling even repressive states to employ its legitimating power, as in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Somali Democratic Republic, and [Western Sahara] Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic), even if its precise meaning is equivocal. It is in the disconnection between the promise and delivery of democracy that propaganda uses are required to prevent widespread cognitive dissonance.

But as Gandhi once suggested, democracy cannot be imported or imposed; it must arise organically. In a genuine democracy, the force of its example would be sufficient to ignite revolts in other countries where overweening authoritarian regimes stubbornly cling to power against the popular will. For democracy to ultimately succeed, the United States and the rest of the would be better served if the former sought to influence that direction by emulation rather than by imposition or efforts aimed at reproduction.

The neoliberal conditionality that the United States levies on its overseas assistance to political development coerces recipient states to mirror their priorities to those of the donor state. For the United States, in particular, democracy is defined primarily in terms of the target states' "comparative hospitality to foreign capital" (Ralph 2000, 207) and their readiness to accept a "transnational metropolitan-based master discourse of consumer democracy" (Murphy 2003, 72). On the other hand, the United States often does not insist on a political set of pre-conditions for dispensing assistance, as in its 2003 military aid and arms package to Saudi Arabia ($1.1 billion), Egypt ($1.0 billion), Kuwait ($153 million), United Arab Emirates ($110 million), and Uzbekistan ($33 million), all listed as undemocratic in the State Department's annual human rights report (Deen 2005). The problem with the absence of democratic conditionality demands by the United States in the Eastern European regimes that it supports, says one European political scholar, is that it discourages political change. Leaders of those states feel less compelling reason to join the European Union, he says, in the face of the social and political conditions that that organization imposes on membership (Agh, personal communication, 2007). Germany and Scandinavia have similar objectives in their overseas assistance programs but act on them with considerably more restraint, more public accountability, and with long-term geopolitical and social planning. But even in northern Europe, one finds that "social protection has increasingly lost its former purpose and institutional underpinnings, and become 'subordinated to the overriding objective of neoliberal competitiveness'" (Baastian Van Apeldoorn cited in Bohle and Greskovits 2007, 445).

The various educational, political, cultural, constitutional, legal, and civic training programs of the US. "democracy promotion" community, notwithstanding some of the more liberal intentions of its civil society projects, frequently have "promoted core standards of free-market liberalization, increasing trade and freeing the flow of US. goods, service[s], and capital" (Kennedy and Lucas 2005, 316). The "war on terror" of both the Bush and Obama administrations provides the larger global rationale for intervention. In the US. media coverage of the supposed democracy building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, what have been ignored are the structural objectives of US. and E.U state and corporate interests both within those countries and in the larger expanse: the control of the energy resources in the Eurasian corridor, militarization of the entire region in the service of Western state power and the US. military-industrial complex, the defense of the Israeli sub-imperial military and intelligence network (through which radical Arab movements within the region are contained and repressive ones are protected), and global economic integration and the broad objectives of transnational corporate market diffusion throughout the region.

What the findings in this study have shown is that the revolutionary and democratic attributions of the "color revolutions" in the countries discussed herein were indeed neither revolutionary nor democratic - but rather, according to British scholar David Lane, simply "post-modern coups" (Lane 2009). Revolution, says Lane is "an ideology on which is predicated a fundamental replacement of the political class and socio-economic system," nothing less than the overthrow of the state and class structures. Such a course was not the plan of the "color revolutions." A specialist on Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, Lane argues that the style of politics the United States and European Union seek to attach to Eastern Europe is an extension of their own allied political order: "Policies of' democratization' abroad are an important part of the neo-conservative value of creating an international order of values associated with American (and its allies') ways of doing things." Such an order gives its highest priority not to social development and enfranchising citizens but to legal protection of private (i.e., corporate) property, commercial media, trans nationalized markets, opposition to state regulation, and economic and security integration within the European Union and NATO (Lane 2009, 115, 118; SkocplI 1979).

There is no solid evidence that Eastern Europe is significantly better off since the series of coups. Apart from ongoing corruption and political instability, the CEE region as a whole has experienced serious polarities of income since the disintegration of socialism (Harvey 2005, 17). Moreover, using a regression analysis, James Scott and Carie Steele found little evidence that foreign democracy assistance or trade liberalization had anything to do with democratization. A better indication of democratization, they discovered, was steady improvement in national wealth, health, and education. "Rather than promoting democracy," they conclude, "NED grants seem to be associated with worsening situations (in terms of democracy) ... [whereas] improvements in human development are the most promising contributor to progress toward democracy" (Scott and Steele 2005, 451).

There is an underlying and prevailing set of fictional assumptions behind overseas democracy promotion and claims made to the original democracy brand, which are further predicated on the notion that the United States is a morally and politically advanced civilization. Such a construct is open to serious challenge, inasmuch as the relative degree of freedom in the United States is the outcome of an extensive history of conquest, repression, and violence against indigenous peoples and nations beyond its shores, not to mention stark corruption. The land confiscations from Native Americans and from Mexico disenfranchised millions of people as did the institutions of slavery, racism, and segregation. Many lives were lost or destroyed and hopes betrayed by attacks on those attempting to organize labor unions. Women had no federally assured political representation rights for the most part until 1920. Colonial and imperial invasions and sponsorship of repression abroad continue to the present day. Billions of dollars are spent on U.S. government subsidies paid to the U.S. market system with taxpayers' money. State-supported monopoly corporations make a mockery of the tenets of independent and competitive capitalism of theorist Adam Smith. In short, the freedom that Americans enjoy has come at the expense of millions of pillaged people in many nations. American freedom is thus a form of subsidy paid by those without such freedom to protect American citizens from the latent repressive character of a heavily policed corporate market system, which unchecked is relentless in pursuit of profits at almost any human cost. Indeed, corporate capitalism is incompatible with strong, citizen-based democracy - and environmental security.

There is a convention in critical analysis of institutions to suggest a list of corrective policy reforms. But under present arrangements, reforms in foreign policy would have to be enacted or supported by those" domestic" interests that have the greatest influence in steering U.S. actions abroad. These include the transnational businesses and specific industries, such as those in military weapons sales, energy, fast food, media and advertising, airlines, computers and electronics, and others. The free-wheeling privileges of global corporations, none of which is protected in the Constitution, are vast and has caused enormous damage both to the lives of the majority of American citizens (with high unemployment and underemployment and declining real income and purchasing power) and to the physical environment. Therefore, the most realistic way of discussing the requirements for a foreign policy based on respect for political and cultural sovereignty abroad and raising the standard of living for people in poorer countries is first to look at the participatory structure in the United States that determines these policies and the quality of democracy of American life that it wishes to showcase for all the world to see and possibly emulate.

First, is democracy a worthy pursuit? It certainly is, but democracy promotion needs to begin at home. The 1983 National Endowment for Democracy was in part modeled after the postwar German democracy promotion program lodged within that country's party foundations (stiftungen). With the defeat of the Nazi regime, it was the state's view that Germans, particularly German youth, needed to be educated about democracy, and the German government initially focused its attention on that objective and continues to support democracy education domestically. Although American citizens have successfully fought for the expansion of political, economic, and social democracy on many fronts, there remains a serious democracy deficit. Elections and peaceful intra-elite transfer of power do not by themselves constitute a democratic polity.

A DEMOCRACY INDEX

Beyond the inflated assumptions, what is the actual state of U.S. democracy? Franklin Roosevelt's proposal in his 1944 State of the Union speech for a "second bill of rights" and the subsequent international adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 went a long way toward prescribing the conditions that would form the basis of democracy. Few of the proposals in these documents were ever adopted. Following are but a few considerations regarding America's current democracy index:

1. Political Participation. Representative democracy is an essential but not adequate measure of a democratic state. The U.S. Congress is hardly a truly representative body, as it is not made up of typical Americans. Its members are far wealthier on average. Sixty-two percent of the Senate and 39 percent of the House are millionaires or multi-millionaires (less than one percent of Americans are in that economic category). Members of Congress are also very disproportionately white and male. Moreover, they commonly invest their wealth in blue-chip corporations, which creates fundamental conflicts of interest with their public governing responsibilities (Open Secrets 2008). Given their socio-economic status, it is no wonder that their range of public policy considerations is very narrow and that they debate "conflict" only in simplistic cultural debates rather than on serious issues of class, gender, and racial marginalization.

Participation in American elections is among the lowest of the industrialized countries, with turnouts in most recent federal election cycles hovering around 50 percent, which in most countries would establish their illegitimacy. State and local election turnout ratios are far lower. Low voter turnouts tend to correspond with high income inequality (Gudrais 2008). The mainstream media, including the respected New York Times, pace the election discourse with regular reports on which candidate has raised the most money and who's ahead in the polls. Low turnouts are almost never treated by the mainstream media as controversial. In part, this is because the problem of non-voting occurs mainly among people who have the least amount of ownership of the political system. Also, the mainstream media have a symbiotic relationship with political consultants, professional propagandists, and corporate funders, all of whom feed off each other to raise the costs of elections, by far the most expensive in the world, transform them into a network of business transactions, and isolate the vast majority of voters from exercising significant power over the selection of candidates and the campaign process overall.

2. Free Speech. In the United States, there is considerable free speech but little power to be heard. Rational voices are constantly drowned out by the highly amplified cacophony of unsophisticated, mostly poorly educated, and self-serving on-the-air commentators in a media/informational system that is driven by ratings and the advertising dollar. The mainstream media flood audiences with sensationalism, diversions, falsehoods, and celebrity worship, while indoctrinating them with symbols that intensify their false sense of national, often chauvinistic or xenophobic, pride and the desire to consume. Public broadcasting, which increasingly follows the same news agenda as the commercial media, is increasingly funded by and beholden to corporations and wealthy individuals and thereby lacks critical independence to speak up on behalf of the majority or social minorities. Unlike the BBC, it is a weak alternative to the mainstream commercial media.

The essential democratic aspects embodied in the First Amendment, namely public protest, citizen free speech, and an independent press, are undermined by a government that shows little interest in challenging what amounts to the concentrated ownership of public speech. The World Bank's "Worldwide Governance Indicators" rank the United States 31st on the index of "voice and accountability," which "measures the extent to which a country's citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media" (World Bank 2009). Almost all of Western Europe, as well as Canada, Australia, Iceland, and Puerto Rico, is ranked ahead of the United States. Further eroding the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment protections against "unreasonable searches and seizures," the Bush regime escalated the level of citizen surveillance, thereby eroding the presumed right to privacy and to political dissidence. The passage of the Patriot Act, which provides for arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention, and torture of suspects loosely identified as enemy combatants, seriously undermines Constitutionally-protected core civil liberties. The Act also provides for "free speech zones," which allows local police to set up cordoned areas in which dissent is permitted that are physically removed from the events at which citizens wish to protest.

The availability of the Internet represents a degree of potential support for or even extension of free speech rights. However, it would be naive to assume that present rights of access will necessarily remain intact or that anything close to a majority of people are using the Internet for political education or radical social change. Already, the telecommunications industry is planning to develop tiered access in the way that cable television is delivered, which is being challenged by the demand for "net neutrality" (guaranteeing that the Internet network will continue to function as a public carrier without price discrimination). Another concern that has to be addressed by believers in "electronic democracy" is the reality of government and industry surveillance and the fact that anyone's web use can easily be monitored, which has stifling effects on dissent. With such unfettered opportunities for government spying, would people with connections to radical organizations dare to post ideas and information online? Does the Web force conformity to structural inequality and permit dissent only within virtual "protest zones"-and confined to what Chomsky calls "the spectrum of thinkable thought"?

3. The Rights of Working People. During the Reagan administration, the White House encouraged union-busting attacks on organized labor. Unionization rates have fallen precipitously since the 1970s, currently at 12 percent in the United States (compared to 18 percent in Japan, 13 percent in Britain, 19 percent in Australia, 20 percent in Germany, 33 percent in France, and 53 percent in Italy). Neoliberalism has had profound negative impacts on working people, as new international trade agreements and the World Trade Organization encourage corporations to relocate good-paying manufacturing jobs to countries with the lowest labor costs (a privilege often subsidized by U.S.-funded police and paramilitary apparatuses). Neoliberal policies found a powerful advocate in the presidency of Bill Clinton, who proudly proclaimed in a New York Times op-ed: "How We Ended Welfare." His approach, preceding G. W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism," was to have the poor turn more to charitable relief than to government assistance.

One consequence of neoliberal restructuring and the end of the welfare state is that Americans now have to work more hours and have less leisure and vacation time than citizens from almost every other major industrial country. Organized labor in the United States has no corresponding power to alter this trend, although the AFL-CIO has reported growing unionization rates in recent years. Many businesses are actively engaged in eliminating the right of American workers to join unions through a simple sign-up mechanism and engage in harassment or firing of union organizers, an abuse of worker rights not seen in any other major capitalist country. America's "freedom agenda" would be better served by devoting more of its energies at home to what Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed as the freedom from want and fear.

4. Equal Opportunity. There are huge disparities, which have gotten wider in the past 30 years or so, between the wealthy and the poor, such that the United States has become the most class stratified of the leading industrial states. The poverty rate reached 13.2 percent, almost 40 million people in 2008 - including 14.1 million children with a 19 percent poverty rate, expected to rise to 26.6 percent by 2010 (Pugh 2009, A4). There is a highly disproportionate percentage of African Americans and Latin Americans in prison. (With 4 percent of the world's population, the United States incarcerates 25 percent of the world's prisoners.) The representation in government and the pay scales in employment are much lower for these ethnic groups than their counterparts of northern European ancestry. Growing inequality is extended beyond income into access to health care, higher education, and decent affordable housing. And although certain gains have been made along racial, sexual, and gender lines, there remain significant forms of inequality for women, including the effects of wage and salary discrimination and occupational glass ceilings, people of color, and gays, lesbians, and the transgendered. African Americans and Latin Americans have significantly higher rates of infant mortality and shorter life spans than whites or Asians. For people of color, barriers to advanced education represent another serious form of structural and institutional racism.

5. Public Administration. Perhaps no other event in recent years reveals the wanton disregard for the poor and people of color than the extremely slow response of the federal government to the victims of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans. This disaster also highlighted the historic segregation of the city, which intensified the tragedy. Despite having the most expensive health care system in the world (and 29th among 30 OECD countries in public health expenditure), the United States has the worst health care delivery program of any of the leading industrial states. Up to 3.5 million Americans are estimated to suffer homelessness. U.S. institutions of higher education, which are inadequately funded by federal and state governments, are also on average the most expensive in the world. American university graduation rates were once the highest among the OECD countries. Now they fall in the middle (Gudrais 2008). Tax policy, which favors the affluent, is another reflection of the underlying plutocratic character of American politics and society.

6. Constitutional Law. The Bush government's policies, in particular, revealed a wanton disrespect for basic principles of civic administration. Violations of constitutional law include: the secret policy of "extreme rendition" (kidnapping of "terrorism" suspects who are then kept in prisons overseas), the authorization of the use of torture against such suspects, the use of presidential "signing statements" to avoid compliance with established laws, the illegal suspension of habeas corpus, the firing of federal attorneys on political grounds, the use of the National Security Agency and private telecommunication companies for warrantless domestic electronic surveillance on American citizens, the bypassing of Congress in effectively declaring war and the illegal invasion of a sovereign country, deeper restrictions placed on Freedom of Information Act requests, Patriot Act requirements placed on librarians to turn over to federal authorities book-lending information on patrons, the contracting of a private database company to compile and store data on citizens, the censoring or blocking of Environmental Protection Agency and other government agency reports, the refusal of White House cabinet members to testify before Congress, and a host of other depredations against civil rights.

7. Relations with Other Countries. The United States continues to violate the sovereignty of other nations through violent, mostly unilateralist means, through invasion and occupation, and by the indirect means of military assistance, armament sales (from $12 billion in FY 2002 to $32 billion in FY 2008), and support for state repression. Despite Barack Obama's pledge to substitute negotiation for military force in U.S. foreign relations, his administration started off in the same direction as that of his predecessor, leading to escalating violence in Afghanistan, with no clear political or social objective. It started off with a different tone, but it is too early (late 2009), as of this writing, to determine if the substance differed significantly. There is much to be learned by comparing Western European and U.S. democracy and the way that the former states conduct their foreign relations, but the United States has one of the lowest rates of imported culture and media attention to world events, which limits the way that its citizens can educate themselves about other countries and about democratic alternatives.

Looking at the overall public sphere in the United States, where public enfranchisement, debates, and deliberative democracy are supposed to occur and contribute to a robust egalitarian social order, the indicators are discouraging. Authors such as Putnam (2001) have noted the decline of "social capital" in the United States, by which he means community, social, and civic engagement. Compared to the conception of government in the New Deal and Great Society eras, government is now widely regarded, to cite Ronald Reagan, as "the problem." This has resulted in a corresponding decline in social welfare (though not warfare), as the cost of health care, housing, and education has risen far beyond what most Americans can afford. Health care cost is the leading cause of bankruptcies in America.

The above descriptions are intended to convey the idea that the United States, while admirable in certain important ways, does not live up to its world image as a strong democracy. In fact, it appears headed in the opposite direction - toward a more authoritarian political and social order. The disconnect between images that it fosters about itself abroad and the realities of growing inequality at home makes the practices of domestic and externally-directed propaganda all the more necessary. In an intensely electronic media-saturated and largely unregulated selling society, promotional culture becomes the dominant form of social control. A society that is egalitarian in character and therefore democratic has little reason to resort to propaganda, as citizens presumably would have accurate information to understand their personal and collective interests and the consequences of domestic and foreign policy.

It is hard to be prescriptive about the conduct of U.S. foreign policy, because the change that is needed resides first and foremost in a radical restructuring of American society. By "radical," I mean the assumption of democratic rights, public participation, and equal enfranchisement of all of its citizens. Therefore, for the United States to be a source of positive influence in the world, it is important that democracy building is first undertaken within its own sovereign boundaries. Similar to way their German counterpart stiftungen initially undertook democracy promotion, the NDI and IRI and other "democracy" foundations need to focus their efforts on educating Americans about how political, social, and economic inequities came to exist and work to establish a high level of citizen engagement in all spheres of public policy. This requires a critical understanding of Americans' own history and patterns of injustice and white skin privilege that formed in what was from the outset a multi-ethnic society and which became institutionally entrenched. A democratic ideology requires a reconstitution of power and, with democratic leadership, a turn toward the development of the human potential of all its residents as well as the physical and social quality of the environment in which they dwell. This may seem like a pipe dream, but the only way that America can educate for democracy abroad is to be a model of democracy at home.
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Re: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Ea

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Part 1 of 2

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Re: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Ea

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PERSONAL COMMUNICATION (CITED IN TEXT)

Agh, Attila (2007). Professor, Institute of Political Science, Corvinus University, Budapest, September 17.

Bjornlund, Eric (2005). Principal, Democracy International, Washington, D.C., June 17.

Blaievic, Igor (2007). Director, Human Rights and Democracy, People in Need, Prague, September 11.

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Broom, Philippa (2008). Director, International Office, British Conservative Party, Westminster Foundation for Democracy, London, November 17.

Buhbe, Matthes (2008). Head, Department of Central and Eastern Europe, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Berlin, November 12.

Bungarten, Pia (2008). Director, Division for International Dialogue, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Berlin, November 12.

Carothers, Thomas (2005). Vice President for Studies, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., June 13.

Craner, Lorne (2005). President, International Republican Institute, Washington, D.C., June 17.

Dlouha, Gabriela (2007), Director, Human Rights & Transition Policy Department, Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Prague, September 13.

Fischer, Gudrun (2008). Project Coordinator, Southeast Europe/Eastern Europe/Caucasus. Heinrich Boll Stiftung, Berlin, November 13.

Franko, Tina (2007). Development Officer, Transitions Online, Prague, September 13.

French, David (2008). Chief Executive, Westminster Foundation for Democracy, London, November 2I.

Fukuyama, Francis (2005). Director, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, International Development program and member of board of directors, National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, D.C., June 15.

Georgiev, Ivo (2008), Desk Officer, Central and Southeast Europe, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Berlin, November 14.

Grabow, Karsten (2008). Project Coordinator for Party and Parliament Consultancy, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Berlin, November 11.

Gromadzki, Grzegorz (2007). International Cooperation Program Director. Batory Foundation, Warsaw, September 5.

Jirak, Jan (2007). Deputy Chair, Centre for Media Studies, Charles University, Prague, September 10.

Kucharczyk, Jacek (2007). Director, Institute of Public Affairs, Warsaw, September 6.

Kulik-Bielinska, Ewa (2007). Information and Development Director, Batory Foundation, Warsaw, September 5.

Marian, Jan (2007). Consultant, Prague Security Studies Institute, and Executive Director of Civic Belarus, Prague, September 11.

Melia, Thomas (2005). Deputy Executive Director of Freedom House and former Vice President of NDI, Washington, D.C., June 16.

Momkes, Klemens (2008). Head, International Office, Christian Democratic Union (Germany), Berlin, November 12.

Pajic, Catherine (2005). NDI Deputy Director for Central and Eastern Europe program, Washington, D.C., June 13.

Pieklo, Jan (2007). Executive Director, PAUCI (Polish-Ukrainian Cooperation Foundation), Warsaw, September 3.

Sattar, Nabila (2008). International Projects Manager, Labour Party, Westminster Foundation for Democracy, London, November 19.

Sharp, Gene (2008). Founder and Senior Scholar, Albert Einstein Institution, Boston, November 24.

Spengler, Frank (2008). Deputy Department Head, International Cooperation, Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Berlin, November 11.

Steele, Jonathan (2008). Columnist and foreign correspondent, Guardian, London, November 19.

Szymanski, Adam (2007). Analyst, Polish Institute of International Affairs, Warsaw, September 6.

Tamm, Sascha (2008). Head, Department, Central, South East, and Eastern Europe, Friedrich Naumann Stiftung. Berlin, November 10.

Thomas, Robert (2008). Advisor on Eastern Europe, International Office, British Conservative Party, Westminster Foundation for Democracy, London, November 17.

Treadwell, Susan (2007). Deputy Director, Open Society Institute, Budapest, September 18.

PERSONAL COMMUNICATION (NOT CITED IN TEXT)

Bzonkova, Radka (2007). Head of European Projects, People in Need, Prague. September 12.

Kiss, Balazs (2007). Director, Centre for Political Communication, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, September 17.

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Trampota, Tomas (2007). Professor, Centre for Media Studies, Charles University, Prague, September 10.
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Re: Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Ea

Postby admin » Fri Jun 23, 2017 12:16 am

INDEX

Abkhazia, 124, 177n20
Ackerman, Peter, 96-97, 108, 144, 177n16
Acxiom Corporation, 39, 29n2
Adesnik, David, 79, 107
AFL-CIO, 46, 84, 93, 94, 119n10, 120n13,
128, 192
Agh, Attila, 125
Ahmadinejad, Mahmud, 40, 105, 120n14,
179n33
Akayev, Askar, 166, 167, 172, 173-174
Albania, 75, 123
Albert Einstein Institution, 104, 107, 108,
155, 177n16
Albright, Madeleine, 27, 84, 88, 103, 132,
142, 143, 149, 165, 176n6
Aliev, Haidar, 151, 179n35
Allen, George V., 67
Allende, Salvador, 35, 41, 93
Almond, Mark, 178n24
American Bar Association, 48, 58, 63, 107,
153
American Center for International Labor
Solidarity (Solidarity Center), 46,
84, 93
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
50
American Enterprise Institute, 46, 131
American Political Foundation, 45, 64n7
Anholt, Simon, 26-27
Aquino, Corazon, 177n13
Arbenz Guzman, Jacobo, 40, 41
Arendt, Hannah, 12
Ashcroft, John, 27, 40-41
AT&T, 21, 87
Atwater, Lee, 162
Azerbaijan, 148, 151, 168, 170, 171, 179n35

Baisolov, Edil, 166
Baker, James, 152-152
Bakiyev, Kurmanbek, 172, 174
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, 149
Balcerowicz, Leszek, 176n10
Bamford, James, 74-76
Barber, Benjamin, 99
Batista, Fulgencio, 40, 106, 170
Batory Foundation, 163-164
Baudrillard, Jean, 11-12
BBC World Service, 106
Beers, Charlotte, 98-99
Beissinger, Mark, 104, 106, 140, 154, 167
Belarus, 152, 164-165, 168-171, 184,
Bell, Daniel, 11
Bernays, Edward, xx, 3, 34
Beveridge, Albert, 33, 34, 78
Biden, Joseph, 64n2, 72, 147
Bjornlund, Eric, 85-86
Blackwater USA, 13, 52, 88,
Blair, Tony, 41
Blum, William, xv, 40, 46, 47
B92 Radio (Serbia), 145, 146
Bolsheviks, 34, 39
Boot, Max, 156, 160, 178n27
Brady, Robert, 12
"Brand America" campaign, 24, 98
Brand, Ulrich, 13
Brandeis, Louis, 30n10
Britain, xxi, xxv, 2, 4, 17, 19, 23, 30n7, 38,
45, 61, 70, 70 78, 82, 89, 109, 110,
114, 115-110 126, 129, 132, 133,
135, 144, 151, 156, 165, 167, 170,
173, 177n18, 177n21, 178n20 191
Broom, Philippa, 116
Brown, John, 30n8, 98
Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 59, 96, 103, 151,
175n2, 176n6
Bulgaria, 125-126, 133, 135, 140, 141,
142
Bush, George H. W., xviii, 8, 79-80, 84,
118n2, 120n18, 130 149, 162
Bush, George W., xvi, xix, xxiiin3, 7, 8, 9,
21-24, 20 28, 30 41, 42, 49-54, 60.
64n1, 65n5, 69, 71-73, 74-77, 79,
82, 83-86, 88, 92, 98, 112, 118n4,
119n0 119n9, 120n18, 124, 129, 140,
149, 151, 152, 154, 156, 161, 166,
171, 175, 176n0 183, 187, 191, 192,
193
Butler, Smedley, 35

Calderon, Felipe, 177n24
Carey, Alex, 10
Carlyle Group, 103
Carnoy, Martin, 13
Carothers, Thomas, 58, 60, 61, 62, 85,
104, 109, 166,
Carter, Jimmy, 23, 44, 48, 61, 65n8, 79,
103, 151, 175n2
Carville, James, 18, 119n11,
Casey, William, 23, 43, 165
Castellanos, Alex, 31n11
Castells, Manuel, xx, 11, 13
Castro, Fidel, 40, 58, 86, 97, 146,
165, 170, 172
Center for International Private Enterprise
(CIPE), 46, 84, 91-92
Central and Eastern European Law
Initiative (CEELI), 48, 58, 107, 153
Central European University, 101
Chalabi, Ahmed, 118n3
Chamorro, Violeta, 48, 177n13
Chandler, David, 125
"Charter 77" (1977), 132
Chavez, Hugo, 40, 41, 49, 69, 78,
86-87, 93
Cheney, Richard, 49. 52. 54. 65n15, 71,
75, 76, 151, 158, 161
Chevron, 46, 4088, 90, 151, 161
Chile, 10, 35, 41, 60, 61, 81, 93, 170
China, 26, 27, 36, 38, 41, 43, 61, 65n17, 69,
90, 120 170, 178n26, 185
Chomsky, Noam, xx, 1, 14, 15, 30n5,
183, 191
Christian Democratic Party (Germany),
110-111, 114
Christman, Daniel, 92
Christopher, Warren, 136, 176n8
CIA. See United States Central
Intelligence Agency.
Civic Forum, 132
Clark, Robert, 102
Clark, Wesley, 103, 149
Clarke, Victoria, 74, 77
Clinton, Bill, xviii, 43, 51, 69, 75, 84, 85,
88, 119n11, 124, 135, 140, 145,
162, 176n8, 177n15, 178, 191-192
Clinton, Hillary, 60, 99, 105, 177n15,
177n19
Cohen, Stephen, 136, 137, 157, 171
Cold War, xviii-xxii, 1, 34, 36, 37-42,
46, -47, 49, 63, 69, 105, 112, 117,
124, 126-129, 149, 183
Anti-communism, and 36, 39, 43, 46-47,
82, 80 103, 120n16, 121n23,
126-129, 142, 176n9
"Color revolutions," xix-xxi, 26, 71,
104-108, 110 129, 136, 140,
142, 147, 149, 153, 157, 159, 167,
174, 184-187
Committee on Public Information, 34
Commonwealth ofIndependent States
(CIS), 124-125, 130, 184
Communist Party (Cuba), 172
Communist Party (Czechoslovakia), 132
Communist Party (Czech Republic), 175n4
Communist Party (Poland), 126, 128, 130
Communist Party (Portugal), 20n23
Communist Party (Russia), 136-138
Communist Party (Soviet Union), 133
Conservative Party (UK.), 115, 116. 135.
Consumerism, 3-11, 14, 19, 21, 22, 63, 99,
138, 182, 186
Containment policy, 34-38
Coughlin, Charles, 20
Craner, Lorne, 85-86
Crawford, Gordon, 61, 62
Crusade for Freedom, 38, 42, 64n5
Cuba, xxii, 28, 37, 40, 50, 56, 64n4, 95,
97, 132, 146, 172, 175n5,
Czech Republic (and former
Czechoslovakia), xxi, xxv, 26, 27,
30 50 80 90, 106, 124, 129, 130,
132, 137, 163, 164, 175, 175n4,
175n5, 176n10, 178n23

Daschle, Tom, 27
Daugherty, William E., 38
Davenport, Rory, 138
Davis, Elmer, 20
Davis, Rick, 162
Demes, Pavol, 142-143
Democracy assistance, xv, xxi, xxvi, 35, 36,
45, 48, 54, 56, 60-63, 69, 71, 73,
70 79, 80-82, 88, 90-91, 98.103,
104, 100 109, 111, 112, 119n10,
120 129, 131, 139-139. 145, 154,
160, 174, 188
"Democracy promotion," xiv-xxii, xxiiin3,
1, 23, 34, 30 41, 45-48, 54-64,
69-70, 79, 83, 85, 87-93, 100,
104-100 109-118, 119n9, 128-131,
135, 139-140, 158, 160, 163,
168-175, 183, 187-189, 194
Democratic Opposition of Serbia, 144
Democratic Party (US.), 14, 16, 27, 45,
47, 49, 50, 54, 72, 75, 82-86, 97,
110, 111, 119n11, 142, 147
Doherty, Ivan, 91
Deutch, John, 42
De Vries, Jack, 17
Die Linke, 114
Dindic, Zoran, 142
Dlouha, Gabriela, 175n5
Donohue, Thomas, 92
Draskovic, Vuk, 142, 147
Dresner, Richard, 133-135
Duffey, Joseph, 43
Dulles, Allen, 39-40
Dulles, John Foster, 39-40
DuVall, Jack, 97

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 39, 44
Electioneering, xv, 14, 15, 17, 132, 137,
139, 140, 182
Ellul, Jacques, 9
Ernst and Young, 26
European Radio for Belarus (ERB),
164-165
European Union (E.U), xv, xvi, xxi, 62,
90, 110, 111-112, 117, 124, 125, 129,
131, 140 156-164, 169, 170, 175n3,
177n21, 179n35, 182, 187-188
Evans, Donald, 151

Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front
(FMLN), 114
Fascell, Dante, 45
Federal Communications Commission
(FCC), 6, 179n36
Fischer, Joschka, 142
Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy,
30n8, 96, 100
Flottman, Kenneth, 171-172
Foley, April, 72-73
Folson, George, 49
Ford Foundation, 102, 106, 121n20
Foucault, Michel, 125
Foundation for Defense of Democracies,
120n18
Freedom House, xvi, 46, 61, 64n3,
65n7 77, 91, 94-97 104, 106,
10~ 108, 112, 126, 141, 142,
148-149, 154, 156, 164, 167,
172-173, 178n22, 179n36,
179n37
"Free market" (as propaganda), xviii,
4, 5, 9, 10, 14, 17, 29n4, 43, 47,
48, 54, 55, 61, 64n3, 69, 72, 78,
79, 87, 92, 102, 103, 107, 109, 110,
125, 131, 138, 151, 159, 165, 172,
182, 187
Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), 90, 111,
113, 114, 115, 121n23, 160
Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, 111, 112,
121n24
Fukuyama, Francis, 84, 112
Fuller, Craig, 118n2, 176n7

Gaidar, Yegor, 136
Gallagher, Maggie, 51
Gallup poll, 38, 138, 172
Gandhi, Mohandas, 108, 144, 15, 186
Garrett, John C., 76
Gates, Robert, 76
Gelbard, Robert, 145, 147
Georgia, xvi, xxi, 26, 64n2, 68, 71, 90,
90-97 104-108, 117 123-124,
139, 144, 147, 148-155.159,
16~ 168, 171, 173, 174, 177n18,
177n19, 177n20 177n21, 179n32,
179n35, 185, 186
Gephardt, Richard, 27-28, 82
German Marshall Fund of the United
States, 126, 142, 143, 165, 178n22
Germany, xvii, xviii, xxi, xxv, 10, 27,
29n4, 45, 72, 90, 110-11~ 121n22,
121n23, 121n24, 121n25, 124,
126, 130, 142, 160, 164, 172,
173-174, 177n21, 179n36, 187,
189, 191, 194
Gershman, Carl, 82
Gindin, Jonah, 169
Giuliani, Rudy, 27, 28
Global Electioneering, xv, 215
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 177n17, 179n34
Gore, AI, 31nll, 152
Gramsci, Antonio, xx, 22, 125
Greenberg, Q:tinlan, and Rosner, 88, 90,
91, 168,
Greenberg, Stanley, 119nll, 162
Grossman, Juhani, 149, 167
Guckert, James (aka Jeff Gannon), 51
Guillon, Edmund, 30n8
Gyurcsany, Ferenc, 133

Hadley, Stephen, 71, 76
Haiti, 85
Hanns Seidel Stiftung, 111, 114
Harkin, Tom, 48-49
Harvard University, 73, 101-102, 136
Havel, Vaclav, 132, 175n5
Heinrich Biill Stiftung, 111, 113-114
Helvey, Robert, 108, 143, 155, 159,
178n26
Herman, Edward, 30n5
Hersh, Seymour, 118n3
Hill & Knowlton, 74, 133, 118n2, 176n7
Hoffman, David, 106-107
Hook Steven, 59
Hughes, Karen, 98-99
Human Rights Watch, 147, 170
Hungary, xxi, xxv, 27, 42, 57, 72, 73, 79,
94, 104, 124, 125, 129-131, 133,
135, 142, 143, 159, 163, 175n3,
178n23, 185
Hussein, Saddam, 10, 40, 53, 73, 118n2,
118n3, 119n5, 170
Hyde, Henry, 42, 128
Hyperindustrialism, 7

Iliescu, Ion, 87
International Center on Nonviolent
Conflict (ICNC), 96-97, 108,
142, 177n16
International Foundation for Election
Systems (IFES), 173
International Institute for Democracy and
Electoral Assistance, 30nlO
International Military and Education
Training program (IMET), 36
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 62,
125, 135, 136, 141, 154, 167
International Republican Institute (IRI),
46, 49, 79, 82, 83-92, 98, 104,
109, 111, 114, 116, 11~ 119nl0,
125-126, 131, 133, 135, 137,
139-143, 14~ 154, 158, 159, 162,
167, 168, 171-173, 194
International Research and Exchanges
Board (IREX), 106, 107, 126
Internet, 6, 16, 17, 29n2, 31n12, 52, 146,
165, 176n11, 182, 191
Internews, 106, 153, 173
Irakli, Alasania, 155
Iran, 35, 37, 39, 41, 59, 79, 83, 95, 97, 105,
108, 112, 120n14, 120n18, 124,
142, 153, 175nl, 179n33
Iraq, xvii, 8, 9, 13, 24, 35, 41, 46, 49, 50,
51-54, 65n11, 65n12, 71, 73, 75,
76, 7~81, 83, 88, 97-99, 114, 118n3,
118n5, 120n18, 124, 158, 161, 167,
178n27, 187
Israel, 10, 87, 89, 103-104, 119n11, 120n18,
123, 145, 170, 187

Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 127-128, 163
Johnson, Chalmers, 35-36
Johnson, Lyndon, xvii, 44, 50
Jones, James L., 120n17
J. Walter Thompson, 98, 120n15

Kazakhstan, 94, 141, 168, 170, 171,
184, 185
Kennan, George F., 38-39, 62
Kenya, 171-172
Kennedy, Liam, 42, 47, 187
Kerry, John, 17, 54, 152
Kibaki, Mwai, 171, 172
Kinsey, Dennis, 30n9
Kinzer, Stephen, 40
Kirkland, Lane, 93, 128
Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 79, 82, 96, 128
Kissinger, Henry, 27, 62, 93, 103, 120n17,
149, 151
Kitsmarishvili, Erosi, 177n20
Klaus, Vaclav, 176nl0
Klein, Naomi, 83, 136
Kmara, 71, 144, 148-149, 153-154, 168,
179n32
Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 111
Korbel, Josef, 132, 176n6
Kosovo, 124, 141, 145, 14~ 148
Kosovo Liberation Army, 75
Kostunica, Vojislav, 142, 144, 147
Kozak, Michael, 170, 171
Kramer, David, 73
Krauthammer, Charles, 157
Krueger, Brent, 77
Kuchma, Leonid, 154, 156-158, 164
Kushlis, Patricia, 52
Kyrgyzstan, 68, 94, 104, 166, 167, 168,
172-174, 179n32, 179n35, 185, 186

Labour Party (U.K.), 115
Lane, David, 60, 160, 187
Lauder, Ronald, 130, 178n23
Laughland, John, 177n18
Lebedev, Aleksandr, 169, 179n34
Liberty Institute (Georgia), 153
Limbaugh, Rush, 19, 20
Lincoln Group, 52, 65n14, 75, 118n5
Lippmann, Walter, 3, 13, 22, 29n3, 30n6,
50, 62
Lombardi, Vince, 25
Lott, Trent, 27
Lucas, Scott, 42, 47, 187
Lukashenko, Aleksandr, 40, 73, 110, 117,
148, 164-165, 169-171, 179n35
Lynch, Jessica, 53
Lyon, David, 6

Major, John, 115
Manafort, Paul, 162, 178n29,
Manifest destiny, 131
Marcos, Ferdinand, 60, 62, 108, 162,
170, 176n13
Marian, Jan, 165, 166
Marie, Aleksandar, 148-149
Marovic, Ivan, 144
Marxian analysis, 7, 13, 23, 26, 28, 45, 68,
120n16
Matveeva, Anna, 89
McCain, John, 16, 28, 82, 84, 86, 97, 123,
149, 162, 177n19
McCann-Erickson, 99
McCarthy, Joe (Harvard University), 101
McCarthy, Paul, 45-46
McCarthyism, 36, 101, 143
McFaul, Michael, 79, 107, 121n21, 126, 160
McKinley, William, 33, 34, 49-50, 64n1
Meany, (}eorge, 93
Medvedev, Dmitry, 64n2, 139
Melia, Thomas, 65n8, 77, 78, 109
Mercer, Kristan, 61
MeCiar, Vladimir, 126
Miles, Richard, 149-151, 154
Milinkievic, Aleksandr, 170
Military-industrial complex, xix, 34, 36, 55,
149, 187
Milosevic, Slobodan, xvi, xvii, xxi, 40, 75,
96, 140-148, 152-155
Modernization theory, 16, 55, 58, 91, 94,
136
Moldova, 73, 105, 120n19, 139, 176n11
Morris, Dick, 119n11, 158
Mossadegh, Mohammed, 35, 39, 41
Mott Foundation, 90
Mousavi, Hossein, 120n14
Moya Stolitsa Novosti, 172
MPRI, 75, 123
Murdoch, Rupert, 131
Murphy, Patrick, 186
Musharraf, Pervez, 106, 170

Narochnitskaya, Natalya, 159
National Democratic Institute (NDI), 46,
84-91, 92, 103, 104, 109, 111, 114,
116, 110 125, 126, 130, 131-132,
133, 130 139, 141-142, 151, 154,
158, 163, 166, 160 194
National Endowment for Democracy
(NED), xv-xvi, xx, 21, 23, 24,
43-49, 45, 65n065n9, 81-90 104,
106-108, 115, 116, 119n10, 120n13,
120n14, 126, 120 128, 132,
139-146, 148, 151, 154, 156, 160,
164, 165, 173, 175n2, 176n13,
178n22, 184, 188, 189
"National Security Decision Directive 77,"
24-25
Nazarbaev, Nursultan, 171
Neoliberalism, xviii, xx, 11-13, 18, 21-22,
26-29, 42, 54, 59, 60, 62, 64n3,
65n16, 68, 89, 94, 103, 106, 110,
114, 119n11, 125, 129, 130, 135-136,
145, 148, 165, 167, 169, 174, 175,
177n19, 182, 186, 180 191-192
defined, 5-9
Netherlands Institute for Multiparty
Democracy (NIMD), 116-117
Nicaragua, 25, 29n4, 35, 41, 44, 48-49,
79, 166, 171, 176n13
Niccolo M (Russian political consulting
firm), 133, 138
Nixon, Richard, xvii, 44, 120n15
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
xxi, xxii, xxv, 13, 22, 47, 62, 70,
79, 80, 81, 83, 84, 89, 103, 104,
108, 110, 111-116, 120n14, 120n18,
125, 126, 129, 139, 140-141, 145,
148, 153, 158, 163-171, 173, 174,
178n30, 178n31
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), xvi, xvii, 37, 38, 62, 90,
103, 120n19, 124, 130, 131, 136,
130 141, 142, 147, 149-151, 155,
163m 164, 171, 175n3, 188
Nye, Joseph, 102

Obama, Barack, xvi, 14, 16-17, 19, 28,
50, 5060, 64n2, 82, 103, 105, 112,
118n4, 119n6, 120n17, 121n21,
124, 175, 187, 193
Odinga, Raila, 171, 172
Off, Carol, 159-159
"OK '98," 126
Olins, Wally, 26
Olof Palme International Center, 117
Open Media Research Institute
(OMRI), 106
Open Society Institute (OSI). 46, 101-104,
106, 126, 142, 146, 148, 151,
153, 154, 178n22. Also see
George Soros.
"Operation Iraqi Freedom," 50, 77
Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe (OSCE), 120n19, 124
Organization of Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD),
56, 5062, 175n3, 192-193
Ortega, Daniel, 41, 48, 49, 93
Osgood, Kenneth, xx
Ostrovsky, Alexei, 139
Ottaway, Marina, 62, 166
Otpor, 71, 107-108, 142-144, 147-149, 153,
154, 168, 170, 177n16, 179n32

Pajic, Catherine, 90-91
Palin, Sarah, 20
Palmer, Mark, 96, 104-105
Parry, Robert, 25, 44
Parsons, Talcott, 55
Paul, Ron, 82, 166
Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates,
99, 142, 177n15
Pardew, James, 145
Perloff, Richard M., 30n9
Pew Research Center, 24
Philippines, 33, 34, 36, 50, 60, 62-63, 93,
120 162, 166, 170, 176n13, 178n30
Pieklo, Jan, 112, 164
Pinochet, Augusto, 61, 81, 108, 170
Poland, xxi, xxv, 21, 26, 27, 37, 46, 57, 63,
79, 102, 112, 114, 124, 126-132,
130 141, 161, 163-165, 170, 175,
175n2, 176n10
Poland-America-Ukraine Cooperation
Initiative (PAUCI), 164, 166
Political realism, 35, 70, 79, 170
Political technology, 133, 138, 161, 168,
178n25
Popovic, Srdja, 108, 143
Popper, Karl, 120n16
Pora, 71, 148-149, 168, 178n31, 178n32
Pozner, Vladimir, 133
Powell, Colin, 71, 73, 98, 152
Professionalization (of politics), 16-19, 113
133, 137, 184
Political advertising and, 17-19, 31n12
Political consulting and, 15, 20, 22,
30n9, 45, 85, 88, 90, 109, 119n11,
132, 135, 137, 138, 139-140,
142, 158, 190
Political polling and, 6, 9, 16-21, 24, 54,
56, 58, 71, 90, 104, 133, 138-142,
144, 146-140 151-152, 154, 156,
158, 162, 168, 171-172, 177n15,
179n35, 182, 190
Project Democracy, 25, 43-44
Project for a New American Century,
73, 79, 97
Project Truth Policy Group, 25, 43
PRopaganda (Russian political consulting
firm), 133 1
Propaganda (systemic), xix-xx, 1-2, 4, 9, 1~
29, 175, 182 I
advertising and, xviii-xx, 2-15, 17-19, ,
21, 31n12, 42, 52, 75, 88, 99, 102,
132-133, 138, 149, 153, 181-183,
189, 190
branding and, xviii-xix, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11,
12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 26, 98-99, 138,
140-141, 143-144, 149, 159-160,
160 178n24, 182, 185, 188
defined, xx, 9, 175, 182
lobbying and, 2, 9, 16, 17, 21, 27-28, 36,
76, 82, 88, 89, 92, 103, 138, 151, 1
mainstream media and, xvii, 4, 5, 9, 10,
15-16, 18-19, 20, 22, 23, 30n6, 34,
37, 40-42, 50, 53-54, 76-77, 99,
104-100 123, 159, 183, 190
marketing and, xvi, xviii-xx, 1-12, 14,
15, 10 19, 21, 26-2029n1, 40, 72,
80 97- 99, 118, 132, 141, 143-144,
148, 157, 181, 182
political, xvi, xviii-xxi, 3, 4, 9-29, 29n2,
30n4, 30n9, 31n11, 31n12, 34-36,
38-46, 58, 69, 72-73, 77, 85, 87, 88,
90-91, 97, 99, 104, 109, 113, 119n11,
125, 132-133, 135, 137-145, 158,
160, 161-162, 168-169, 172-173,
178n24, 179n32, 181-185, 190-191
promotional culture and, xxvi, 3, 5, 21,
182, 194
public diplomacy and, xv, xix, 8, 14, 17,
23-25, 30n8, 42-45, 95, 98-102,
119n6, 182
public opinion research and, xx, 1, 11,
13-16, 24, 25, 28, 30n6, 50-54, 73,
92, 112, 118n5, 156, 158 182
public relations (PR) and, xviii, xx, 2-4,
8-10, 12, 14-16, 1021, 25-2034,
44.51.54. 65n13, 74, 76, 81, 82,
90, 98-102, 109, 118, 118n5, 119nll,
132-133, 138, 143, 168, 176n7,
177n14, 177n15, 181-183
"reality TV" and, 5, 18, 77
video news releases (VNRs) and, 51
Proximity theory, 22
Putin, Vladimir, 64n2, 117, 124, 136,
137-139, 171, 179n34
Putnam, Robert, 184, 194

Quigley, Kevin, 131, 163

Raddatz, Martha, 158
Radio Free Asia, 43
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 38,
41, 42, 43, 106, 145, 146, 158, 165,
174, 175n2
Radio Marti, 24, 43, 64n4, 146, 165
Ralph, Jason, 186
Ranneberger, Michael, 171
Raymond, Jr., Walter, 25, 43-44
Reagan, Ronald, 23-25, 29n4, 43-50, 54,
64n6, 68, 79, 82, 84, 91, 95, 103,
120n12, 120n14, 120n18, 127-128,
162, 165, 183, 191, 194
Regan, Patrick, 59
Regulska, Joanna, 129
Rendon Group, 74-75, 76, 118n3, 118n5
Republican Party (U.S.), 20, 27, 28, 42, 47,
50, 54, 72, 82, 84-86, 92, 96, 98,
111, 119n11, 152, 161-162, 166
Rice, Condoleezza, 71, 148, 151, 161, 176n6
Rich, Frank, 8
Ridge, Tom, 54
Rieffer, Barbara, 61
Riordan, Shaun, 70
Robinson, William, xvi, 23, 47-48, 89, 169
Romania, 27, 87, 119n11, 120n19, 126, 130,
133, 135, 140, 141, 142, 178n23
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 35, 41, 189, 192
Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 111, 121n23
Roth, Kenneth, 170
Rove, Karl, 18, 42, 71-72, 98
Rumsfeld, Donald, 52, 71, 73, 74, 76, 81,
82, 96, 97, 149
Russia, xviii, xix, xxi-xxii, xxiii, 1, 21,
34, 37-39, 42, 48, 60, 63, 68-70,
73, 80, 92, 102, 104-106, 110,
112, 114, 110 120n19, 123-124,
129, 130-133, 135-140, 146,
148-149, 152, 156, 157, 159,
161-162, 165, 168-175, 176n8,
176n9, 177n18, 178n25, 178n31,
179n34, 184-185, 187
Rustavi-2 (Georgia), 153-154, 177n20
Rustow, Dankwart, 55-56

Saakashvili, Mikheil, 106, 116, 117, 123,
124, 151, 151-155, 159, 160 168,
177n19, 177n20, 179n35
Sabatini, Chris, 87
Sachs, Jeffrey, 136
Saffron Brand Consultants, 26
Salter, Jared, xviii
Sandinistas, 44, 48-49, 171
Schor, Juliet, 66n17
Schramm, Wilbur, 38, 39
Schroder, Gerhard, 114
Scott, James, 127, 188
Schudson, Michael, xix
Scowcroft, Brent, 49, 120n17, 151
Semerad, Kate, 44
Serbia, xvi, xvii, xxi, 26, 69, 71, 94, 96,
105, 107-108, 110 123-124, 130,
141-150, 153-155, 158, 159, 163,
160 168, 173, 174, 177n14, 177n21,
179n32, 185, 186
Sese Seko, Mobutu, 60, 162
Shanker, Albert, 118n5, 127-128
"Shared values initiative," 99
Sharp, Gene, 107-108, 143, 155
Shevardnadze, Eduard, xvi, xxi, 96, 149,
151-154, 167-168, 177n10 179n35
"Shock and Awe," 50, 77, 79
"Shock therapy," xviii, 54, 83-84, 103, 105,
135-136, 169, 176n10, 184
Sikorski, Radoslaw, 130-131
Silberstein, Tal, 119n11
Slovakia, 26, 29, 30, 140, 141, 178n23
Slovenia, 30, 178n23
Smith, Adam, 136, 188
Smith-Mundt Act, 52
Social Democratic Party (Germany),
111, 114, 121n23, 121n25
Social Democratic Party (Sweden), 117
Solidarity (Solidarnosc), 46, 127-128,
164, 175n2
Somoza, Anastasio, 35, 79, 106, 170
Soros, George, 46, 101, 102-104, 120n16,
126, 128 142, 146, 148, 151, 159,
163, 164, 166, 178n22
philanthropic foundations of, xvi, 104,
121n20, 153, 154
South Ossetia, 123, 124, 177n20
Soviet Union. See U.S.S.R.
Stalin, Joseph, 61, 176n9
Stanzel, Scott, 72
Steele, Carie, 127, 188
Steele, Jonathan, 129, 146, 155, 156
Steinmeier, Frank, 114
Stevanovic, Milan, 144
Stewart, Jon, 104
Stone, Michael, 172
Strategic Marketing (Serbia), 144
Summe, Jack, 52-53
Sweeney, John, 93-94
Szamuely, George, 61-62

Tadic, Boris, 147
Taft, William H. IV, 96
Tajikistan, 184, 185
Tastenov, Alisher, 141, 153, 160, 166, 186
Teller, Edward, 103
Thatcher, Margaret, 45, 68, 127
Tillman, Patrick, 53-54
Transitions Online, 106, 146
Transnational corporations (TNCs), 9, 10,
26, 20 61, 70, 78, 94, 140, 187
Transparency International, 78
Trujillo, Rafael, 35, 106, 170
Truman, Harry, 35, 38, 39, 44, 64n6
Turner, Graham, 101, 102
Tutwiler, Margaret, 98
TV Marti, 43, 64n4, 146, 165
24 Hours (Georgia), 154
Twitter, 19, 105, 146, 153, 175n1, 176nll,
179n33, 182
Tymoshenko, Yulia, 161-162, 167,
178n28

Ukraine, xvi, xxi, 21, 26, 28, 48, 58, 60,
63, 64n2, 65n16, 68, 71, 73, 90, 94,
96, 104, 106, 108, 112, 114, 116,
117, 130, 139, 140, 144, 148-150,
152, 154-164, 166-171, 173-174,
177n19, 177n21, 178n25, 178n31,
178n32, 185-186
United Fruit Company, 40
United Kingdom. See Britain.
United States,
Agency for International Development
(USAID), xvi, 43-48, 54-55, 58,
60-64, 64n065nl0, 65n16, 69,
77-78, 80-81, 84, 86-88, 94, 95,
100, 106-107, 109, 112, 115, 119n9,
120 130, 131, 136, 140, 141, 144,
140 148, 153, 154, 158, 163-166,
171, 173, 176n11, 178n22, 184
Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI),
69, 80, 107
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), xx,
23-25, 29n4, 35, 38, 39, 41-46,
48, 51.59. 64n5, 64n065n8, 65n9,
74-75, 89, 93, 94, 90 102, 118n3,
118n4, 118n5, 120n14, 120n18, 128,
139, 142, 151, 165, 179n37
Congress, 5, 10, 18, 20, 23, 25, 27, 35,
42, 43, 44, 46, 40 50, 53, 54, 64n6,
72, 74, 75, 79, 81, 82, 83, 88, 92,
95, 98, 99, 106, 118n3, 119n8, 174,
176n13, 189, 190, 193
Support for East European Democracy
Act (SEED), 48, 79, 80
Department of Defense (Pentagon),
29n2, 34-35, 36, 43, 46, 50-53, 71,
73-7081, 86, 90118, 119n5, 123,
143, 148, 184
Office of Strategic Influence, 74, 76
Department of State,
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights,
and Labor (DRL), 73
Bureau of International Information
Programs, 92
Bureau of Public Diplomacy and Public
Affairs (PDPA), 98-99
Office of Reconstruction and
Stabilization (ORS), 83
US. Information Agency (USIA),
24, 43, 45, 46, 52, 95, 126, 132
Voice of America (VOA), 24, 38, 42,
43, 106, 143, 145-146
National Security Agency (NSA), 44,
50, 193
National Security Council (NSC), 23, 25,
43, 44, 46, 51, 71, 80, 95, 120n17,
121n21, 128, 165, 177n14
Office of Public Diplomacy, 23, 44,
45, 48
Office of Strategic Services, 35, 38
Office of War Information, 20, 38, 42
Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
83, 189
University of Southern California (USC),
10 24, 30n8, 92, 100,
US. Chamber of Commerce (USCC),
28, 46, 92, 95, 162
US. Institute of Peace, 96, 106
US.A. Patriot Act, 191, 193
US.S.R. (Soviet Union), xvi, xviii, xxixxii,
1, 21-25, 29n4, 36-46, 49, 56,
68, 79, 93, 94, 103-100110, 115,
120n13, 124-128, 131, 133, 135-
130 139, 140-140 153, 150 163,
177n10 179n34, 183-185
Uzbekistan, 104, 148, 179n37, 184, 185, 186

Van Apeldoorn, Baastian, 187

Walesa, Lech, 128-129
Warsaw Pact, xviii, xxii, 21, 68, 103, 106,
100 110, 129, 131, 175n3, 183
Weber, Max, 55
Weber, Yin, 82
Wedel, Janine, 47, 184
Weinstein, Allen, 45
Westminster Foundation for Democracy
(UK.), 106, 114, 115-116, 117, 142,
146, 148
Wick, Charles, 95
Wickers, Robert, 133-135
Williams, Armstrong, 51
Wilson, Andrew, 178n25
Wilson, Woodrow, 34, 63, 64nl, 183
Wolfowitz, Paul, 71, 96
Wollack, Kenneth, 85, 88-89
Woolsey, James, 96, 97, 120n18, 165
World Bank, 21, 62, 83, 87, 106, 125, 135,
152, 154, 159, 177n21, 190-191

Yabloko Party (Russia), 137, 138
Yalta conference, 38, 126
Yanukovych, Viktor, xvi, xxi, 40, 116, 152,
156-158, 161-162, 166-160 170
Yeltsin, Boris, xviii, 68, 120n13, 133,
135-130 171, 176n8, 176n9
Young, Stephen, 173-174
Yushchenko, Viktor, 28, 60, 106, 116,
156-162, 166-160 177n19, 178n22

Zhvania, Zurab, 152-153
Znayu, 149, 178n31
Zubr, 71, 165, 170
Zwerdling, Daniel, 7
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