Why Ukraine and Georgia have not used the "window of opportunity"?. Neo-institutional analysis of transformational stagnation in Georgia and Ukraine

Abstract

The Cases of Ukraine and Georgia are examples of post-soviet countries where political attempts to overturn semi-authoritarian regimes have been staged through the two “colour revolutions”, the Rose Revolution in Georgia and The Orange Revolution in Ukraine. But both states failed to carry out fully democratic reforms, upheld most of the features of formal democracy while keeping informal methods of rule that characterized Kuchma’s and Shevernadze’s era (that breed arbitrary and corrupt power) and thus missed the “window of opportunity” that they were offered. Both Ukraine and Georgia face two different powerful actors, analysed through the lenses of neo-institutional theory: the EU, where formal democratic institutions channel and shape the political rule and the core state of the former Soviet Union, Russia, where in spite of the existence of similarly democratic institutions, the political regime rules through informal channels and ignores such institutions. Given this situation, external leverage can be more effectively applied by Russia due to her “soft power”, namely the attracting factor of his economy and social and information power that help her preserving the historical legacy (“path dependency”) of similar institution building in these countries. When necessary, as in Summer 2008 in the war against Georgia, Russia may apply “hard power” to thwart attempts to put into question Russia’s primacy. Therefore, neither Ukraine nor Georgia could achieve the same level of democracy and independence as the Baltic countries did.