Source. Grigory Ioffe, Understanding Belarus: Economy and Political Landscape, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 56, no. 1, January 2004, pp. 85-118
This is the last in a series of three articles in successive issues of Europe-Asia Studies in which Professor Ioffe (Radford University) challenges dominant views about Belarus and the Lukashenka regime. The first two articles focused on the linguistic situation in Belarus and the evolution of Belarusian identity, the weakness of which he attributes to powerful historical factors rather than any deliberate policy of assimilation on Russia's part.
Here the author discusses other aspects of the political and economic situation in Belarus. He argues that many Western and liberal Russian commentators present this situation in an unfairly negative light. While things are indeed very far from ideal, they are actually not so bad by the standards of the post-Soviet region -- and this is the most relevant context for comparison.
Thus most assessments of Belarus' economy are full of "doom and gloom." Nevertheless, the economy has been growing since 1996 and has almost returned to the 1990 level of industrial output. By and large, Lukashenka kept his main pre-election promise of 1994: he restored economic ties with Russia and thereby got Belarusian enterprises back on full capacity work schedules.
Professor Ioffe marshals some impressive figures from the CIS Statistical Yearbook for 1999:
* Belarus' GDP was up to 84 percent of its 1991 level, the second smallest decline in GDP among CIS countries. (Uzbekistan fares best on this indicator.)
* Belarus produces 70 percent of all the buses manufactured in the CIS, 60 percent of the tractors, 50 percent of the TV sets, 30 percent of the trucks, and 25 percent of the shoes.
* Belarus accounts for over half the world output of electronic microchips for watches.
* Agricultural output declined by only 32 percent in Belarus, as against 40 percent in Russia and 43 percent in Ukraine.
* Belarus is ahead of all other post-Soviet states in per capita output of meat, potatoes, milk, butter, and cooking oil.
The UN ranks Belarus above all other post-Soviet states (and some East European countries too) on its Human Development Index (Human Development Report for 2001).
Moreover, the international migration statistics for 1998-2000 show Belarus as the only country in the post-Soviet region with in-migration from every other country in the region exceeding out-migration to that country. While net immigration from the rest of the CIS is only about 20,000 per year, it does suggest that something real does underlie the statistics. There are people who "vote with their feet" for Belarus. Besides a tolerable standard of living, the country offers them relatively good infrastructure and social benefits and a low level of social tension and ethnic nationalism.
Whether the economic revival is sustainable is, of course, another matter. The author acknowledges that to some extent it is based on Russian subsidies in the form of low gas prices. Another problem is the scarcity of investment to renew the aging capital stock. But this hardly makes the revival a "myth" as some analysts call it.
Professor Ioffe also acknowledges Lukashenka's authoritarian tendencies, and attributes them to the legacy of peasant mores in a country that industrialized very late. But he asks whether Lukashenka is really any more authoritarian than the presidents of half a dozen other post-Soviet states. He finds parallels with oriental despotism, such as the definition of the regime as "sultanism," peculiarly inappropriate. He points out that citizens of Belarus have free access to opposition and Russian media that not merely criticize but "mock and humiliate" Lukashenka, and that many people are not afraid to express disapproval of the president to a stranger. Just contrast this with the situation in places like Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan!
The author observes that corruption in Belarus remains at relatively low Soviet levels and is less rampant than in Russia, Ukraine or even Poland. He wryly notes how one author attempts to expose Lukashenka's corruption by revealing that he has a special extra-budgetary fund and has used it to build a new house for his mother, repair his wife's house, buy himself suits, and give presents. How many people in countries throughout the world would be only too glad to have leaders whose corruption is on such a modest scale!
Why then does Lukashenka get such a bad press in the West? Why is he shunned by Western politicians who are happy to welcome despots from the Caucasus and Central Asia? Surely it has nothing to do with human rights. Professor Ioffe suggests two reasons:
* Lukashenka frustrated Western expectations that Belarus would reorient itself geopolitically from Russia to the West, although these expectations were unfounded to begin with.
* The West relies for its information about Belarus on a few opposition-minded and insufficiently objective intellectuals and on even more biased and out-of-touch Belarusian ИmigrИs.
Allow me to suggest three more:
* The double standard on human rights in different parts of the world is linked to the belief in the superiority of European civilization, and in some cases indeed to white racism. You can't expect Asiatics to respect human rights -- if some of them do, it's a miracle -- but Europeans are supposed to live up to higher standards. (1)
* Lukashenka's success in reviving the Belarusian economy without large-scale privatization is ideologically unpalatable to the supporters of private capitalism.
* Belarus has no oil.
Note
(1) I am indebted for this point to my colleague Terry Hopmann at Brown University -- not that he put it in quite these terms!