Virtual politics

[herr7]

Czyli objaśnienie spraw polskich, ukrainskich, białoruskich i nie tylko.
Demokracja wymaga sceptycyzmu i własnego osądu na zwykle skomplikowane
sprawy, jakie dotyczą polityki, państwa czy społeczeństwa.

www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1744422,00.html
Big idea

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Virtual politics

James Harkin
Saturday April 1, 2006
The Guardian


If you feel too confused about current political events in Ukraine or Belarus
even to offer a dinner-party opinion, don't fret. According to Andrew Wilson,
an academic at London's School of Slavonic and East European Studies, we are
perfectly right to be a little perplexed, because nothing is as it seems. In
his book Virtual Politics, Wilson argues that much of what passes for
democratic participation in most of the countries of the former Soviet Union
is entirely fake, a carefully choreographed performance designed to maintain
the political status quo.


A decade ago, most political scientists liked to talk animatedly about "post-
Soviet transitions to democracy" as though this were a natural process in
which they might lend a hand. Nowadays, their mood is more circumspect. After
a brief flurry of popular protest in Russia and its neighbours after the
implosion of the Soviet Union, Wilson argues, political elites entrenched
their position and democratic impulses ossified into scorn for politics of
all stripes. In a world in which a return to totalitarianism is considered
unacceptable, says Wilson, virtual politics "is the way that elites seek to
manage, manipulate and contain democracy".
How does it all work? The democratic process, according to Wilson, is
choreographed by a cadre of "political technologists" - many of whom learned
their craft as apparatchiks in Soviet times. Whole parties and politicians
are launched as TV projects, and then dropped as soon as they outlive their
usefulness; electoral rolls are tinkered with; fake opinion polls and
sociological surveys are drummed up to intimidate and demoralise
opponents; "shell parties" are regularly constructed out of thin air, or real
parties cloned to confuse the electorate. The politicians are usually only
avatars, says Wilson, like the easily clickable icons of cyberspace.

For the most part, Wilson's ire is directed at authoritarian governments in
Moscow, Minsk and Kiev, but it might just as easily apply to the "movements
within civil society" that are sponsored not by Russia but by Europe and
America. Western commentators, for example, became curiously dewy-eyed when
Viktor Yushchenko won the Ukrainian election from the pro-Russian Viktor
Yanukovich in the "orange revolution" of 2004. Now that the party of his
former opponent has triumphed in this week's parliamentary elections,
however, many of them are lost for words. Likewise, last week's re-election
of President Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus was widely and rightly condemned
as fishy by western governments, but it is often forgotten that he has a good
deal more popular support than his opponents. In this new phoney war,
democracy and civil society are the plaything not only of the FSB (the
successor to the KGB), but of the CIA and MI6, too.

Such is our inability to see through the political fog, according to Wilson,
that the study of post-Soviet politics might soon revert to something similar
to Kremlinology - the painstaking study of Soviet announcements and rituals
that was used to divine what was really happening in the corridors of Soviet
power. One way out of the shadows might be to agree a ceasefire on claims
that one's own political clique is the authentic voice of "civil society" - a
scoundrel concept if ever there was one.