Throughout the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe, and later in the Balkans, reformism and democracy tended to go hand in hand. Governments which were more respectful of democratic norms also tended to be more reformist. (By ‘democracy' I mean respect for human rights, media freedoms and opposition parties. And by ‘reformism' I mean the implementation of reforms such as fighting corruption, cutting red tape, improving the business climate, modernising state institutions like police, customs, tax inspectorates or the border guards.)
The world was a simpler place in the nineties; Meciar, Tudjman and Milosevic were undemocratic and non-reformist whereas Dzurinda, Mesic, and Djindjic were both reformist and democratic. The good and the bad guys were obvious; the black was clearly distinguishable from the white. And the EU's approach to these governments was shaped by this unbreakable link between reformism and democracy.
But it seems that the Eastern neighbourhood is different. There is much more grey than black and white. Categorising the likes of Yuschenko, Timoshenko, Saakashvili, Putin and Medvedev is more difficult. The link between being reformist and being democratic is much more blurred. Some are reformist but less democratic; some are more democratic but less reformist; and some are neither reformist nor democratic.
Think of the following examples. ‘Orange Ukraine' in 2005-2010 was the most democratic post-Soviet state with a vibrant media, lively parliament and vociferous opposition. But it was hardly reformist. Few deep reforms were even tried, let alone successfully implemented. The successive governments either did not want or could not fight corruption and try to reform state institutions like the police or customs. The elites were too divided. This prevented political monopolisation, but also made it too difficult to push for reforms which were not backed by a large political consensus. What made Ukraine democratic also made it non-reformist.
Georgia was the opposite of Ukraine. It has been the most reformist state in the post-Soviet state in the last 20 years. The state budget increased something like 20 times since Saakashvili came to power in 2004. The sources of increased revenues were the fight against corruption, radically improved tax collection, and significant inflows of foreign investments (due to the cutting of red tape, improvement of business climate and persistent courting of foreign investors). The police has been reformed and corruption drastically reduced. The Georgian police force is amazingly efficient and non-corrupt by post-Soviet standards (even though it can be quite politicised). Georgia is also near the top of the World Bank's costs of doing business rankings. No other post-Soviet state (the Baltics aside) have managed to modernise from such a low base as successfully as Georgia did.
But Georgia's achievements on the democratic front have been less clear-cut. Politics is monopolised, the opposition is virtually absent from the parliament; it is often vilified and sometimes harassed (though parts, but not all, of the opposition have also had questionable dealings with foreign intelligence, exiled oligarchs and allegedly prepared coup d'etats). The media is less free than a few years ago. There are fewer ‘independent' or ‘opposition' TV channels. Certainly, the November 2007 events (police clashes with protesters left 500 people wounded and the police smashed the Imedi TV station) have not re-occurred. The government kind of learned the lessons. In spring 2009, protesters blocked Tbilisi city centre for months in a row almost without any incident with the police. A visible improvement from 2007. But then the situation has not reverted to the pre-2007 status quo ante either. There has been no visible worsening of the democratic situation in Georgia, but no visible improvement either. And there is also widespread talk of Saakashvili continuing as a prime minister after his term expires in 2013 (under a revamped constitution that beefs up the PM's powers). So Georgia seems to be a clear cut case of a state that is reformist, but less pluralist than ‘Orange Ukraine'.
Whereas divided politics made Ukraine pluralist, but too divided to implement difficult reforms; Georgia's single-party government with large popular support is strong enough to push for reforms, but there are fewer checks on it and less space for political pluralism. The international ratings capture this. Georgia's is 12th in the World Bank's Cost of Doing Business ranking (proxy indicator for reformism), and Ukraine is 147th. But in the Ecomomist Democracy Index Georgia is 103rd when it comes to democracy, and Ukraine at 67th place (before Yanukovich I assume) scored better than Montenegro. In the end, the EU got fed up with both Ukraine's democratic non-reformism and Georgia's semi-democratic reformism. The EU developed a ‘Georgia fatigue' and a ‘Ukraine fatigue', i.e. became disappointed and uninterested.
This disconnect between democracy and reformism is not unusual. Think of ideas such as ‘enlightened authoritarianism' or ‘the Singapore model'. They both imply reformism without democracy. Also think of the ‘reformist' Morocco, and ‘pluralist', ‘divided', but often politically stuck, Lebanon. But this disconnect between ‘reformism' and ‘democracy' still creates problems for how the EU thinks of its neighbours. Most of the EU hopes to see its Eastern partners being both democratic and reformist. But this might be a bit too much. The EU should probably lower the expectations bar. At the end of the day the majority of EU's neighbours, both East and South, are neither reformist nor democratic.
This is not to endorse the model of undemocratic reformism. I do not buy the argument that ‘authoritarian modernisation' China-style is something that should or could be emulated in the EU's neighbourhood. Too many authoritarian states extol the ‘Chinese modernisation' argument domestically or internationally, explicitly or implicitly, to explain their non-democratic non-reformism. Perhaps ‘authoritarian modernisation' is a model that has succeeded in a number of cases (Singapore, China, South Korea), but in 90 per cent of the cases authoritarianism is used to crush decent and benefit from corruption, rather than modernise. Most of EU's partners fall in those 90 percent, and are likely to do so for the foreseeable future.