The First and Last Color Revolution Part I

Tbilisi police shut down downtown Tbilisi during U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's visit July 2009, conveniently dismantling opposition tent city protest in the process.

Georgia is a nervous place.

They’ve been on the brink of war (and once at war) with the most powerful country in the region, their only powerful allies seem to be pulling back from them and to boot, every other country in the former Soviet space that has a similar recent history as them has tossed out it’s pro-Western government in some manner or another and has fallen back into the orbit of Georgia’s all-powerful archenemy, Russia.

At least the food is good.

Below is the first of a couple of pieces I have done on the fall of the color revolutions — an article that appeared in the May issue of the Washington Diplomat. More to come!

TBILISI, Georgia — As popular democratic movements and peaceful transitions of power began popping up across the post-Soviet space earlier this decade, Western powers and pro-democracy groups rejoiced as years of efforts to democratize former Soviet republics seemed to be bearing fruit.

But as violent protests toppled the government of Kurmanbek Bakiyev in Kyrgyzstan last month, the second of three promising democratic movements was definitively reversed and the outlook for the spread of democracy in the region darkened. In addition, a realization began to set in that the wave of so-called “color revolutions” were far more complex than the often black-and-white prism through which the world saw these local political movements.

In 2003, a protest movement in Georgia overthrew its president after fraudulent elections in the “Rose Revolution.” Similar events followed with the “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004 and the “Tulip Revolution” in Kyrgyzstan in 2005.

Each movement peacefully toppled an incumbent administration after international monitors found the government had falsified elections results to maintain power.

Many Western analysts saw these events as a sign of flourishing democracy in the region and a momentum shift that would bring more ex-Soviet satellites out of Moscow’s orbit.

Today, however, such hopes have dimmed. The political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine and Georgia has led many in the West to bemoan that the widely heralded color revolutions merely ushered in a revolving door of corrupt apparatchiks riding public anger to take charge, until they became as hated as their predecessors.

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