Doing the Democracy Dance in Kazakhstan: Democracy Development as Cultural Encounter

Twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union, the USSR’s successor states have not made the smooth transition to liberal democracy that many in Europe and the United States had once expected. The Baltic states and most eastern European countries have transitioned to the status of “sustainable democracies,” but the rest of the Soviet Union’s successor states sit more along a continuum of autocracy than of democracy.1 While there have been some “democratic breakthroughs” in these states, such as the evolution of competitive electoral systems in Ukraine, Moldova, and Kyrgyzstan or the spotty liberal reforms undertaken in Georgia, even these most politically liberal post-Soviet states remain unstable democratizing regimes at best. Most observers agree that their democratic reforms are tenuous and that the states are constantly at risk of being pulled back into the more solidly authoritarian sphere of their neighbors. As Michael McFaul suggests of the post-Soviet political evolution, “instead of stable, liberal democracies, this transition path produced unconsolidated regimes, wavering between democracy and dictatorship.” 2 The reasons that the former Soviet Union has experienced this trajectory of political development are many and complex, and a robust literature seeks to provide explanations. Some authors stress that the former Soviet states, unlike eastern Europe, have no historical experience with democratic institutions and processes and, thus, have been slower to change.3 Others have emphasized the Soviet legacy’s role in fostering a weak and deferential civil society, which is consequently unable to either hold governments accountable or advocate for reform.4 Still others focus on the lack of political will to reform, or the presence of active resistance to such reforms, among these states’ elites.5 Although these explanations vary in their emphases, they generally blame the region’s lack of progress