DEVELOPING DEMOCRACY: THE 2003 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS IN AZERBAIJAN
I. Azerbaijan: An Independent Country
The Republic of Azerbaijan is a part of a land mass collectively known as Transcaucasia. It is located is Southwest Asia and strategically situated north of Iran, west of the Caspian Sea, and south of the Dagestan Republic of Russia. Nearby is the republic of Armenia located west of the country. The latter country noted had a distinguishing mark on the history of Azerbaijan particularly in armed conflicts. The Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic has also joined the Azerbaijan as it separated from Armenia. Along with this is the Nagorno-Karabakh. Baku is considered as the capital of the nation. (Ismailzade, 2002)
The country was recognized by formerly as Albania particularly after its conquest during the Fourth century by Shapur II. Consequently, Mongols overran it and was divided after the fall of Timur into several principalities during the fifth century. The territory of the present Azerbaijan was acquired by Russia from Persia through the treaties of Gulistan (1813) and Turkamanchai (1828). (Ismailzade, 2002)
The country declared its independence from the Soviet Union in August of 1991 and consequently joined the Commonwealth of Independent States. In the succeeding year, Abulafaz Elchibey, leader of the Popular Front Party, was elected president. Nonetheless, he was deposed by the parliament a year later succeeding a military recalcitrance. Consequently, the leader of the Azerbaijan Communist party from 1969 to 1982, Heydar Aliyev, assumed power and was confirmed in office by an election. The development of the country’s oil resources through agreements with Russia and several Western oil companies for development of oil fields in the Caspian Sea was the fundamental thrust of his presidency. Although Ailyev seeks the betterment of his country through strengthening the economy, his attempt to be reelected in office in the November 1995, elections of Azerbaijan were condemned by outside observers as rigged. Nevertheless, the voters elected a new parliament that was dominated by Aliyev’s party and approved constitutional changes that expanded his power. Thus, he was reelected in 1998. (Ismailzade, 2002)
With the independence acquired by Azerbaijan in 1991, and the consequent practice of democratic processes such as suffrage and elections, it is a continuing conundrum whether the country has really acquired the virtues of democracy. Recently, the country conducted its 2003 national elections, however, the process is peppered with allegations similar to its previous elections, rigged and dirty. This study will present a discussion on the citizen’s account of the recent democratic exercise and consequently analyze the situation on the Azerbi’s practice of democracy in general.
II. The Azerbi’s Pursuit of Democracy
Azerbaijan democracy in its almost a decade of independence attempts to reflect a kind of democracy. There are several facets of democracy that have sprouted from several literatures. Nevertheless, participatory democracy is probably the most thoroughly egalitarian form of democracy, the one that the Azerbaijan government seeks to acquire. It aims at something much more ambitious than simply universal suffrage and the right to influence and select leaders. (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986) It aims, ideally, at a self-managing society in which there are no political leaders, in which political equality means not only equal rights but equal effective political power, and in which the word “prerogative” would fade from use altogether, and “privilege” would be used only in association with dinner invitations. Participatory democratic theorists, and particularly those who attempt to put the theory into practice, have tended to be extremely suspicious of inequality or authority in any form.
Similarly, the theoretical issue on the case of the Azerbi government was articulated by John Stuart Mill (1965) in Principles of Political Economy: he noted that a democratic constitution, not supported by democratic institutions in detail, but confined to the central government, not only is not political freedom, but often creates a spirit precisely the reverse. In order for democracy to be effective, he says, large parts of the social system and not just the government must be structured democratically. A command economy is an undemocratic economy. This has yet to be done in the case of the young republic of Azerbaijan.
This reflects that the expectations for populace in a democratic system vary from those for people living with other type of rule in many ways. In acquiring a genuine participative government and democratic system, the whole political milieu along with the citizen are required to come by several assumptions. The first is that citizens must tolerate their fellow citizens’ efforts to participate in politics, even if the latter’s views diverge sharply from the norm. The second is that citizens can and do participate in their own governance. Similarly, the significance of the tolerance of the citizens in the efforts of the opponents of the existing status quo to influence the political system, democracies similarly require a significantly elevated level of political participation among its populace.
This prerequisite is currently present in the political arena of Azerbaijan. At present, the nation has close to forty political parties. Although some might be considered as pawn organizations, it still ensue the existence of a multiparty system with more or less five dominant parties. This shows a positive sign for the Azerbi’s pursuit for democracy. Similarly, in a referendum on the 24th of August 2002, the government abolished the proportional representation system of elections to the parliament, thus leaving all 125 seats in the legislative body for the single-district, first-past-the-post races. This political action will be a symptom of the consolidation of parties and the disappearance of smaller ones. And parliament itself, while still struggling for independence from the executive branch, has developed a solid legislative basis. (Ismailzade, 2002)
Moreover, there are also approximately 400 active non-governmental organizations (NGOs) recognized by the government in almost every field. (Ismailzade, 2002) Consequent to the abolition of official censorship in 1998, print media has been fully liberalized. In the capital city of Baku alone, several dozen newspapers and magazines are sold in circulation containing commentaries on political issues and otherwise. Similarly, Internet access has been mostly control-free. Although, the broadcast media has been under a significantly tight state control, a new draft law on public television was finally submitted to parliament in September, and there are hopes that it will provide television access for all political parties and interest groups.
In addition, the four major opposition parties–the Azerbaijan Democratic Party, the Musavat (Equality) Party, the Popular Front Party and the National Independence Party–will most likely contest in every election. Nevertheless, they are characterized as weak and fragmented. They are center right parties, advocating a market economy and democratization, but voters find it hard to distinguish among them. (Ismailzade, 2002) Each of the said parties claim to have the almost 50,000 members and branches across the country, but the most recent unified demonstration of these parties on the 27th of October 2003 in Baku gathered only 10,000 supporters. Moreover, these parties are characterized as predominantly personality based preferably than having an orientation on a party platform. These operate mainly in Baku, due to the fact that the authorities are severely limiting their activity elsewhere. The smaller opposition parties–such as the Civil Solidarity Party (represented in parliament), Adalat (Justice), Tereggi (Progress), the Social-Democratic Party (Vahdat), and the Communist Party–resemble what Azerbaijanis call “five brothers uniting around their father.”
III. The 2003 Presidential Elections and Public Opinion
When you ask the average Azeri what he thinks of Azeri democracy, the most frequent reply is: “We are lagging behind Georgia, but at least are not as bad as Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.” (Ismailzade, 2002) Although taking into account many indicators, Azerbaijan has pulled far ahead of its Central Asian neighbors, but things are not as good as they might be. For the time being, at best, Azerbaijan can be described as neither democracy nor dictatorship. It has made significant progress toward nation building, certainly since 1993, when it faced civil war and ethnic separatism. Aliev has managed to establish political stability and economic recovery and prevent fragmentation of the state. Yet the process of democratization is slow and difficult, and often comes only under international pressure.
In October of the year 2003, the country conducted its national elections where Ilham Aliyev, the former Prime minister and the son of the former president, have realized the predictions of a considerable number of observers. Nevertheless, the elections were hindered with mass voting infringements, hostility and numerous set of circumstances of ballot box staffing, which lead the Aliyev Jr. to accrue nearly 80% of the electoral votes, while his adversary Isa Gambarov from the rival Musavat Party received less than 20%. The announcement of Aliyev’s conquest was without delay resulted to the prevalence of mass demonstrations, public acts of disobedience, numerous riots and violence on the streets of Baku, where thousands of Isa Gambarov’s faction scorch cars, tires, ruined windows of nearby shops, throw stones at police stations, police vehicles and public buses. Consequently, the hostility is mitigated when the Azeri riot police who dispersed them with the water cannons and chased them with strikes of police clubs calms down the protesters. Regardless of vociferous allegations by international spectators about the deception and vote rigging in the presidential elections, Ilham Aliyev assumed the role of the Azeri chief executive and well thought-out a most important concentrated effort against political nonconformists who challenged his legitimacy in the Azeri parliament and on the streets of the Azeri capital. Even though the Russian President Vladimir Putin has sent his congratulations to the newly elected Azeri president.
In this instance, democracy is displayed in Azerbaijan through public opinion. Although “public opinion” is a concept with a fairly long and rich history, (Noelle-Neumann, 1993) it became an integral component of political analysis only in the nineteenth century. With the rise and stability of the democratic state, commentators increasingly began to see “the public” or “public opinion” as an important and legitimate focus in the study of politics. The role and place of the public became key because democracies were supposed to represent and be accountable to their people. Similarly, Bryce (1888) examined what one might call the “constitution of public opinion”; that is, he discussed the extent to which public opinion formation and expression were influenced by classes, groups, and leaders. What is interesting, however, and somewhat revolutionary in Bryce is that he was one of the first authors to routinely discuss public opinion in terms of the aggregation of individual opinions (similar to the aggregation of votes) rather than solely in terms of sociological and organic groupings. It is not that Bryce did not understand public opinion as partly an organic and group-driven process. Indeed, he was aware of the influence of church leaders, reformers, parties, and classes on the opinions of individuals. (255-67) Rather, he conceived of public opinion as an individual phenomenon for normative reasons; he saw individualized public opinion as in keeping with democratic theory, viz., “one man, one vote.” As will become evident later, Bryce’s idealized conception of public opinion as the aggregation of individual opinions would become the dominant understanding of public opinion shortly after the introduction of the public opinion poll. Another major aspect of this facet of public opinion that Bryce dealt with was the Tocquevillian problem of the tyranny of the majority. Bryce acknowledged that individuals were often influenced by majority sentiment; however, he chose to see the dominance of majority opinion as a “fatalism of the multitude” as opposed to Tocqueville’s more vile “tyranny of the majority.” Whereas Tocqueville thought that the reason individuals gave in to majority opinion was because they were afraid of the social derision and ostracism that would be the result of their objections, Bryce supposed that people generally considered the majority to be correct and that they thereby accommodated their opinions. (297-306) Finally, Bryce discussed the influence of public opinion on the processes of government. This facet of public opinion seems to have been the most important for him. In introducing his analysis of public opinion, he said, “before I proceed to describe how it works upon the government of the nation and the States, it may be proper to consider briefly how it is formed, and what is the nature of the influence which it everywhere exercises upon government.”(209) For Bryce it seemed most important to understand public opinion within the democratic political system, rather than simply apprehend public opinion per se.
Another significant democratic aspect of the post 2003 elections in Azerbaijan is the presence of the civil society in voicing out their public opinion. The economic structure, a realm of reality where passions, interests and calculations prevail, tends to invade both the political society and the civil society. Economic powers permanently try to influence both the state and public opinion. Usually the state does not give priority to the defense of people’s views but becomes an instrument of economic powers. Thus the civil society is under great economic pressure. Moreover, political actors, aware of the dynamism of certain social movements or people’s organizations, try to exercise them. These actors of the civil society then lose their autonomy and become like appendixes of the political agents. The “free associations”, no longer free, begin to lose the confidence of the people. In recent years, civil society has been posited as the preferred vehicle to replace corrupt and incompetent states, deliver social goods and services, fortify civil and political liberties, promote economic prosperity, restructure outmoded economies, and consolidate fragile and fledging democratic institutions. (Putnam, 1993) Among these claims, the last one is the most trumpeted and widespread. Operating from the assumption that a vibrant and robust civil society is either a prerequisite or a requirement for charting a successful passage from dictatorship to democracy, the strengthening of civil society has become a priority for a large cast of actors engaged in the promotion of democracy abroad. Paradoxically, the presumed positive association that has been drawn between a strong civil society and successful democratization may well be the most problematic conventional wisdom about civil society. Civil society is commonly regarded to represent “the realm of organized social life that is voluntary, self-generating, largely self-supporting, and bound by a legal order or set of shared values.” (Diamond, 1999) This realm is populated by a vast and diverse constellation of intermediary organizations formed by members of society outside of their households with the purpose of advancing their interests. A consensus on what organizations or groups belong within the boundaries of civil society, however, remains elusive. Nevertheless, most scholars of civil society tend to focus on a wide and diverse set of social organizations and institutions whose explicitly stated purpose does not involve the pursuit of political power; hence political parties are usually excluded from organizations traditionally circumscribed by definitions of civil society. Organizations convention ally regarded as part of civil society include grassroots and loosely organized groups such as churches, neighborhood associations, and private charities as well as national and highly hierarchical organizations such as employers’ groups and trade unions. In the case of Azerbaijan, these civil society are regarded with a certain extent of freedom to voice their opinion and conduct mass demonstrations in the assumption that they would not engage in anarchic conduct.
IV. Discussion
Given the political environment of Azerbaijan as well as its recently concluded election, one could conclude that the country provides a democracy with limited freedom. Although civil liberties are present on the accession of the citizen, the country’s political institutions significantly affect these liberties. In the case of Azerbajian, participatory democracy has tended to focus almost exclusively on politically structured inequalities, particularly on class. Of course, these are some of the most pervasive and damaging forms of inequality, so it is hardly surprising that an egalitarian theory focuses on them. The result of the focus on political inequality has been that participatory democratic theorists generally assume that all inequalities are pernicious. My claim, however, is that there are some unavoidable but perhaps non-pernicious institutional inequalities. That is, some inequalities are a necessary by-product of institutional structures themselves. Even if there were no political inequality of any sort, I argue, there would still be some institutional inequalities.
We can distinguish three kinds of institutional inequalities in the case of Azerbaijan. First, there is what we might call bureaucratic inequalities. These are the hierarchies of authority and responsibility that become necessary in any large-scale social institution, whether it be a factory, a university, a social service agency, or a government department. The paradigm case of bureaucratic inequality is that between administrators and staff. A thoroughly participatory society without any politically structured inequalities still would need managers, department heads, supervisors, presidents, and so on, even if these positions rotate among members of the various institutions. Once a society becomes too large for face-to-face interactions, institutional structures become necessary. Furthermore, as Amy Gutmann (1980) says, “We need bureaucracies and professionals (among other reasons) in order to help ensure that universal norms once legislated, are applied evenhandedly across communities.” The evenhanded application of norms and policies is required not only in the state but also in larger institutions and organizations.
We might call the second sort of institutional inequality informational inequalities–those based on the possession of specialized knowledge. The paradigm informational inequality is that between experts and those needing their expertise: for example, professors or teachers and students, doctors and patients, auto mechanics and customers. Even in a society without social inequalities, people will specialize and develop expertise, which leads to inequalities in knowledge and hence in power. But since these inequalities are not necessarily tied to membership in particular social groups, they do not necessarily entail political inequalities.
The third sort of institutional inequality involves what is called temporal inequalities. These inequalities are based on length of experience in and long-term commitment to a particular organization. The paradigm example of temporal inequality here is between the staff of an organization and the consumers of its service: for example, between social workers and clients, or between teachers and students. With respect to institutions, consumers and students are relatively transient, whereas social workers and teachers are relatively permanent. (Friedrich, 1975) Thus, staff and consumers will have different sorts of commitment to a given institution, and they will place different sorts of long-term and short-term demands on it. The inequality here is a result of both the staff members’ temporal commitment and their access to inside information that goes along with employment. Because of the amount of time that staff spend at an organization, they have access to information that more casual users, such as consumers, lack. This is different from expert knowledge–though certainly staff often possesses that too. Because of their relatively permanent status, staff can influence long-term organizational policies more than consumers can. In addition, institutional policies may have long-term effects on the daily lives of staff, whereas these policies may affect consumers only in the short term. Hence staff will tend to have different, and sometimes greater, interests in policy decisions than consumers do. Once again, though, temporal inequalities are not necessarily tied to membership in particular social groups; they are by-products of institutional structures.
Institutional inequalities confer authority, power, and responsibility on individuals. No matter how accountable we make people with institutional authority, and no matter what sorts of protection we put in place to ensure that they act responsibly and do not abuse their power, institutional inequalities cannot be avoided. Some such inequalities will be necessary in any large-scale industrialized society, even a thoroughly egalitarian and participatory one. Once an institution grows beyond a certain size, structures of authority and responsibility become necessary; hence bureaucratic inequalities necessarily arise. Institutional inequalities make a significant difference in people’s abilities to participate at all in various organizations, or to participate as equals. Moreover, they affect individuals’ commitments to these institutions. They are real inequalities, and they are unavoidable. They are not necessarily pernicious, though, unless they are based on irrelevant characteristics or unless the authority they confer is abused. Because institutional inequalities historically have been linked with political inequalities, participatory democratic theory–and even more, participatory democratic practice–has been extremely suspicious of inequality or authority in any form.
Another aspect of Azerbaijan democracy is the presence of its civil society. In the case of Azerbaijan, the development and consolidation of civil society is related to processes oriented to the construction of democracy in modern societies. Democracy does not depend only on forms, laws and juridical procedures, but receives its substance and driving force from social movements and people’s associations which act as political groups or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). These associations are the actors of the civil society. If “democracy” is a universal claim today, the issues are what kind of democracy — direct or indirect, representative, participatory, limited, under tutelage, federative, centralized, “bourgeois” or “popular”, economic or only socio-political — and how this is related to the sectors of bureaucrats, technocrats and the “political industry” which influence processes of decision-making. To affirm the claim for “government of the people, by the people and for the people”, the people must be organized not only politically but also socially. The area of social reality where this organization is shaped is the civil society. Where civil society is strong, the possibilities for wider democracy are also strong. Moreover, during the last ten years, international monetary institutions, many powerful governments, which finance development cooperation and several cooperative church and private agencies, have supported the NGOs rather than the social movements. Both belong to the civil society; however, when NGOs are reinforced, the civil society becomes more formal and it loses its dynamism. It is easier to control NGOs, especially when they depend on funds from governmental, intergovernmental or semi-governmental agencies, than to control social movements. Through this kind of management of civil society it is possible to limit the democratic aspirations of the people. In addition, within civil society lie great potentials of popular forces, which can be channeled to resist oppression and injustice. On the basis of this observation, civil society cannot be understood only as a thing, but must also be seen as a very important part of the social process. But civil society is not always a source of popular resistance. In many, perhaps even most cases civil society is the basis of legitimating of the powers that be. The orientation of civil society is the result of a conflictive process in which ideologies play a very important role. That is, civil society is also a field of conflicts: it can be progressive or conservative. Its thrust depends on the resolution of contradictions, which involve economic powers, political forces, and ideological constructions of different kinds. The problem is how to give a clear drive to civil society.
With the considerably young age of Azerbaijan as a republic, the presence of inequality of its political institution and limited democratic liberties are not unanticipated. Although there are still glimpses of the former soviet in its political culture, the country’s effort to acquire a total democratic society through public participation is an indication that democracy is within the country’s reach.
References
Bryce, J. (1888) The American Commonwealth, Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan and Co.
Diamond, L. (1999) Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Friedrich, C. J. (1975) “Participation without Responsibility: Codetermination in Industry and University,” in J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (eds.), Participation in Politics. New York: Lieber-Atherton, pp. 195-212
Gutmann, Amy. (1980) Liberal Equality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 212.
Ismailzade, F. (2002) Democratization trends in Azerbaijan: half empty or half full? Russia and Eurasia Review, Vol. 1, Issue 2.
Mill, J.S. (1965) Principles of Political Economy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p. 944
Noelle-Neumann, E. (1993) The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion, Our Social Skin, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Putnam, R. (1993) Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rothschild, J. and Whitt, J. Al. (1986) The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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