Πηγή: CRAG
11/7/2011
Template Revolutions: Marketing U.S. Regime Change in Eastern Europe
Gerald Sussman and Sascha Krader
Portland State University
Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture (2008)
Images and captions added by Color Revolutions and Geopolitics
Introduction
The dissolution of Soviet power throughout the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Central Asia excited a new kind of Western intervention, a ‘soft imperialism’ described in official lexicon as ‘democracy promotion’. In the late 1990s and into the next decade, Western mass media routinely represented the serial political upheavals that took place in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe and Central Asia as legitimate struggles of ‘people power’ democracy over tyranny. The Western allies, particularly the United States, actively encouraged political mobilisations in the region that sequentially deposed Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia, and invalidated the election of Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine. Foreign electoral intervention was a means of politically engineering their replacement by pro-Western politicians who, in the name of democracy, presumably would carry out ‘reforms’ in concert with state and commercial interests of the United States, the European Union, the WTO, and NATO.
By the time of the Milošević overthrow initiative in 2000, the State Department already had in place a ‘revolution template’,1 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 nonmilitarist and cost-effective option for vanquishing left-wing and nationalist heads of state.2 So-called democracy assistance consisted of a fluid package of funding and other support mechanisms designed essentially around marketing principles to effect rapid regime change and political and economic ‘shock therapy’ in selected countries whose governments the State Department regarded as impediments to a global market-based political order. These efforts relied heavily on techniques and technologies of modern propaganda, largely drawn from U.S. political practice.
The principal institutional actors in U.S.’democracy promotion’ consist of the State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the National Endowment for Democracy. NED was created in 1983 as a nominally private, Congressionally funded organization that would assume some of the regime change functions, but with more flexible and transparent means, as those used by the then discredited CIA. One of NED's founders told the Washington Post that ‘A lot of what we [NED] do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA’. Relative openness was seen as a better formulation for pursuing U.S. national interests (Ignatius 1991). Democracy promotion in Central and Eastern Europe, starting with Poland and East Germany, became one of central tropes in a renewed U.S. effort by the Reagan administration to roll back the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact alliance.
