20th Birthday Parties
Lots of nations in this neck of the Eastern European/Central Asian woods are celebrating 20 years of independence this month. (Kazakhstan’s big day is today.)
Policy wonks and analysts are having something of a field day trying to figure out what, exactly, the Former Soviet States have achieved over the last two decades, where they have yet to improve and what we’re all supposed to learn from this.
While of course the political and economic climate of say, Tajikistan, is vastly different than that of Azerbaijan, the answer seems always to veer to the same general (rather non-committal, but fair) two-part answer:
1) the FSU, taken as a whole, has come a remarkable, rather unbelievable, distance, given the violence and turmoil that sacked this region in the early 1990s; and
2) pretty much everyone’s got a long way to go before achieving legitimate democratic rule with all the attending accoutrements (respect for human rights; genuine elections; space for public debate, etc.).
This essay by Tom DeWaal gives us more or less that same two-part reading (his dichotomy of choice is “professionalism and stagnation”) regarding the nations of the South Caucasus: Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. It’s worth a read.
