Human rights groups, international institutions and governments have warned that such a crackdown would bolster radicalism, or that the actions could result in protests and instability. In her testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in February 2015, Audrey Altstadt, professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, noted, “Critics oppose the regime, not the state. But the regime identifies itself with the state and claims that a threat to its own power is a threat to statehood. Under these conditions, endemic corruption, lack of democratic governance, and repression of critical voices undermine the stability of society and therefore put the country at risk.” She later states that the clamp-down on civil society is a “risky and counter-productive strategy for the regime itself.”
Altstadt makes a strong case, but to understand why the Azerbaijani government made these decisions, we need to look at Altstadt’s statement in two parts: 1) “critics oppose the regime, not the state” and 2) the Azerbaijan government’s decisions to crackdown on civil society are “risky and counter-productive.”
State and Regime
Despite Altstadt’s distinction between opposition to the regime and opposition to the state, the situation might not be so clear-cut in Azerbaijan. The president and the parliament are elected, but since the early ‘90s the elections have never passed international standards for being free and fair. Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Index currently lists the country as “Not Free,” receiving low scores on both political rights and civil liberties.
At the center of the system lies a combination of clan and patronage politics, which results in a highly centralized and personalized system and in effect closes the distance between the regime and the state.
This type of system makes it difficult to distinguish where the government ends and the state begins.
Civil Society as a Threat to the State
The Azerbaijan government has woven a narrative similar to that of Russia that the United States is drawing on democracy development programs to create a fifth column in the country. The narrative has the underlying logic that given the state and government are inseparable and opposition groups and parties are “radical” and “anti-Azerbaijani,” any change of regime—democratic or otherwise—would undermine the state. Thus liberal groups and organizations, particularly those receiving funding from the U.S. for democracy development programs have been attacked for their role in undermining the sovereignty of the state.
To fully grasp the narrative, we need to look at its history, which is intimately connected to the threat deriving from the color revolutions in Eurasia and the events of the Arab Spring.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, U.S. and European funding for democracy development programs began to be provided to civil society organizations, founded on the theory that transition to market economics required a concomitant transition to democratic governance. From the beginning, many post-Soviet authoritarian governments had an uneasy relationship with the programs, even going so far as creating GONGOs (Government Organized Non-Governmental Organizations) in order to control the sphere of civil society and maintain low levels of opposition. As many of the fledgling governments became more established, they gave less room for civil society and democracy development programs. Kyrgyzstan’s Askar Akayev is a good example. The Kyrgyzstan government began its movement away from democracy in 1996, when the new constitution codified a strong president and weak parliament. And by 1999 Kyrgyzstan was designated by Freedom House as “Not Free.”
In 2002 and 2003, Azerbaijan was still designated as “Partly Free.” However, in December 2003, the country’s president Heydar Aliyev died. The election of his son, Ilham Aliyev, was followed by violent protests, giving evidence of discontent and a potential weakness in the regime. These events and the Rose and Orange revolutions (in Georgia and Ukraine respectively) demonstrated the susceptibility of the post-Soviet authoritarian regimes to instability, leading the Azerbaijan government to tighten its grip on power. The 2006 Tulip revolution in Kyrgyzstan hammered home this concern about unrest.
The situation was not helped when Azerbaijan’s leadership witnessed the Arab Spring in the Middle East in 2011, the 2012 post-election protests in Russia, the ouster of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine (and the subsequent descent into conflict over Crimea and Donbas) and the 2013 controversy over Ilham Aliyev’s election to a third term.
The crisis in Ukraine and the increasingly aggressive activities of Russia (with the rationale of resistance to the encroachment of the U.S. and Europe) resulted in the leadership of a number of post-Soviet countries growing more concerned about being caught in the middle of a geopolitical struggle that seemed to be occurring in the civil society of post-Soviet space.
In the lead up to the 2013 presidential elections, small protests began to pop up in Ismayilli, Quba and Nardaran causing unease in the Azerbaijani government.
By 2014, the head of the Azerbaijan President’s Cabinet accused the U.S. government of “forming a radical group of protesters.” Just recently, the Azerbaijan newspaper, a publication of the Azerbaijani parliament, published a piece claiming that the United States had created a fifth column in the country.
Crackdowns and Increased Risk
Is Azerbaijan’s government putting itself at risk because of its decision to crack down on groups critical of the regime?
In his book Principles of International Politics, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita points out that on average democratic leaders stay in office for less than four years, while their authoritarian counterparts for roughly nine, suggesting a general increased longevity of authoritarian rulers.
Jack Goldstone et al. have pointed out that “…the risk of instability is lowest in full autocracies and full democracies, other things being equal. By contrast, hybrid regimes—partial autocracies and partial democracies—are substantially more vulnerable to crisis than their more ‘coherent’ counterparts.”
In 2003, Azerbaijan’s Partly Free designation set it squarely among the hybrid regimes, i.e. at higher risk. The options, then, were to move either toward democracy or authoritarianism. Given both Bueno de Mesquita’s point about longevity of leaders in the two systems and the need for stability, the more rational choice in the short-term was to tighten the government’s grasp.
Fragility
But the decision for the short term does not consider the fact that other risks can arise from strengthening the authoritarian elements of government. A highly centralized and personalized authoritarianism can produce fragility in the system in the longer-term. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book Antifragile notes that nonlinear systems—in which most of the volatility can be attributed to one or a small number of events—are highly fragile.
Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton later explained, “The first marker of a fragile state is a concentrated decision-making system. On its face, centralization seems to make governments more efficient and thus more stable. But that stability is an illusion.”
Since the centralized system is able to hold volatility in check for such a long time, it does not have the benefit of self-correction that comes with handling small shocks often—as would be done in a more open system. Without that self-correction, the fragility in the system does not enable the state to handle slightly larger shocks, and the harm from these shocks may be increased exponentially—resulting in a non-linear system. Taleb and Treverton note that Lebanon, because it has constant small incidences of unrest, is better prepared to handle larger protests without sinking into chaos as Syria has.
Similarly, Azerbaijan’s ability to stave off opposition through heavy-handed policies may leave the country vulnerable to slightly larger unrest down the road.
The government may be able to hold volatility in check for now, and may decrease short-term uncertainty by removing opponents from the political field, but with the decline in oil prices, the fall in the value of the manat and the potential for shocks throughout the Azerbaijan economy (which has a low level of diversification)—some coming from Russia’s economic woes—the Azerbaijani government may need to keep Taleb’s and Altstadt’s thoughts in mind, even if the best bet in the short-term seems to be strengthening authoritarian elements of the government.
At the same time, recommendations from international Institutions need to keep in mind the interpretation, logic and the political calculus of the Azerbaijan government. To claim the separation between regime and state is to assume the depersonalization of the state, which is not necessarily the case. With the present form of government in place, the logic of “attacks on the regime are attacks on the state” hold. However, it is specifically this personalized authoritarian state that creates the interconnection, and thus the subsequent risk—not some external power or fifth column.
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