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Three Books to Help You Understand Nations in Transit 2024 [1]

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Date: 2024-07

In April 2024, Freedom House launched the latest edition of Nations in Transit, our annual report evaluating the state of democracy across a 29-country region stretching from Central Europe to Central Asia. For the 20th consecutive year, the report measured an overall decline in democratic governance within this region.

A contributing factor to this ongoing decline is the dramatic reordering taking place within the region as countries coalesce into opposing blocs—one committed to liberal democracy, and one rejecting it. Moscow’s ongoing attempt to destroy Ukraine and the Azerbaijani regime’s inhumane conquest of Nagorno-Karabakh accelerated this reordering.

Between the two poles are Hybrid Regimes, countries where democratic institutions and rights exist, but may be fragile or threatened. Nations in Transit now counts more Hybrid Regimes—11 total—than any other type. But not all Hybrid Regimes are the same—some are democratizing, some autocratizing, and some appear trapped in a cyclical pattern between those opposing sides. For the first time, this year’s report categorized the Hybrid Regimes based on which of those three trajectories they’re on.

Below are three books spotlighting a country on each of those three paths: Ukraine (democratizing), Hungary (autocratizing), and Armenia (cyclical). In addition to helping you understand our new nomenclature, each book provides essential context for the present state of governance in these countries and how it came to be.

Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States

By Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel

2024, Polity Press

On the morning of February 24, 2022, as Russian missiles screamed toward Kyiv and troops advanced on Ukraine’s sovereign borders, Vladimir Putin sat in front of a camera and attempted to justify his “special military operation.” As he explained it, the invasion was an attempt to spare the Russian people from a genocidal Ukrainian regime, led by neo-Nazis and supported by the United States and its “empire of lies.”

Where did that narrative come from?

In Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States, authors Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel explore the precursors to the Russian military’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, focusing on the opposing trajectories these two countries have followed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

After the USSR collapsed, most Russian leaders assumed Ukraine would always be under their control. That assumption aligned with the worldview of many Russians, like Putin, who falsely believe that Ukraine has no unique history and in fact, is inherently part of Russia.

The authors underscore that this worldview is groundless and that the countries’ histories are unique. This reality became more apparent in the post-Soviet era as Ukraine democratized and Russia autocratized, two trends the authors say accelerated in 2014 with Ukraine’s Revolution of Dignity and Russia’s military invasion of Crimea. By February 2022, Ukraine’s status as a “democratizing hybrid” was clear. And Putin, threatened by democratic progress, is now engaged in a desperate attempt to stop it.

With Ukraine’s future, European democracy, and world history in the balance, Nations in Transit 2024’s primary policy imperative is clear: Ukraine must win this war, on its terms.

Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary

By Zsuzsanna Szelényi

2023, Hurst

Viktor Orbán was once young and democratically minded. His party—Fidesz—was an acronym for the same: the Federation of Young Democrats. When he and his Fidesz colleagues were elected to parliament in 1990 they aimed to transform Hungary, which had recently emerged from decades of communist rule.

Thirty-four years after that election and 14 years into his second stint as prime minister, Orbán and Fidesz did transform Hungary, but not into a liberal democracy. Instead, Orbán’s far-right government has consolidated control over the country’s media, judiciary, and other institutions, while hounding their critics under ever more restrictive laws. Meanwhile, the prime minister and his allies are getting richer by rigging the economy to fill their own pockets. As a result, Hungary is categorized as an “autocratizing hybrid” in this year’s Nations in Transit.

Few narrators are as qualified to tell the story of Orbán’s illiberal pivot as Zsuzsanna Szelényi, an early member of Fidesz who was elected with Orbán in 1990, left the party after its pivot, and was later reelected to parliament as a member of the opposition. In Tainted Democracy: Viktor Orbán and the Subversion of Hungary, Szelényi explains how Orbán and Fidesz wrote the “21st century autocratic playbook” by opportunistically shifting their political ideology, eroding systems of checks and balances, leveraging religion and immigration as divisive political tools, and dismantling press freedoms.

As a result, Hungary’s Democracy Score has experienced the largest decline among the 29 countries analyzed by Nations in Transit over the past two decades. While all seven indicators that make up the overall Democracy Score have deteriorated, none have declined more sharply than National Democratic Governance. That decline specifically reflects the extraordinary concentration of political power under Orbán during his rule and the extent to which state resources are being funneled to his cronies.

Armenia’s Velvet Revolution: Authoritarian Decline and Civil Resistance in a Multipolar World

Edited by Laurence Broers and Anna Ohanyan

2020, Bloomsbury Publishing

In April 2018, a nonviolent protest movement made up of thousands of Armenian citizens forced the resignation of the country’s entrenched authoritarian leader, Serzh Sargsyan, and helped install the protest’s progenitor, Nikol Pashinyan, as his replacement.

How did the protesters’ strategy of nonviolent civil resistance succeed? Could it help activists spark democratic transitions in other countries? These are some of the questions that Laurence Broers, Anna Ohanyan, and eight other contributing authors explore within their expansive anthology on what became known as Armenia’s Velvet Revolution.

Armenian civil society, which endured brutal crackdowns in the Sargsyan era, nevertheless kept alive the nation’s long-standing protest culture. In 2018, they unleashed it with tactics that were disruptive enough to be impactful, but deployed strategically so they forestalled a violent counterresponse from the authorities. This helped the movement quickly reach the critical mass that forced Sargsyan to back down.

Since then, Armenia has improved its Democracy Score. However, the Pashinyan government’s path toward true democratic reform has been uneven. Under Pashinyan, the government has taken steps to break up the corrupt networks that had run the country since independence in 1991 and create better governance. But reforms have been undermined as Pashinyan has consolidated decision-making power and made increasingly volatile, ad hoc choices. These trends have been exacerbated by the crisis over Nagorno-Karabakh, an unrecognized territory that Azerbaijan conquered in 2023, driving out the entire ethnic Armenian population, most of whom have fled to Armenia. As a result, Nations in Transit 2024 categorizes Armenia as a “cyclical hybrid.”

Nation in Transit’s authors insist that it’s possible to break this cycle “if citizens and governments are provided with the tools and incentives to thoroughly root out antidemocratic legacies.” In the case of Armenia, this seems like a natural extension of the Velvet Revolution.

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[1] Url: https://freedomhouse.org/article/three-books-help-you-understand-nations-transit-2024

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