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Simeon Mitropolitski is a Canadian analyst, of Bulgarian origin, and a former syndicated columnist with the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA). He is the author of several hundred articles dealing with hot political and economic topics, both national and international.
He was part of the first group of Bulgarian intellectuals and students that began the opposition movement that finally put an end to the communist regime in this country in 1989, and in 1996-1997 participated in international observation teams during the elections in several Balkan countries - Romania, Albania and Bulgaria.
In 2002 Simeon and his family moved from Bulgaria to Canada where they live now in Montreal, province of Quebec. Simeon is a Master of Political Science from McGill University and a B.A. of Political Science and History.
Global Real Estate Project
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Georgia: Is NATO the only hope?Georgia, a poor economically and unconsolidated politically ex-Soviet republic, looks at NATO as its only hope for bringing some stability into the region. Three years after the opposition forced the former president Eduard Shevardnadze to resign, the country is unfortunately neither prosperous nor calm. Its current administration of Mikheil Saakashvili seems to have inherited some of the features of the former regime, administrative hyper centralization, lack of political consensus over some important issues, and ethnic populism. He may be right by thinking that these 'errors' will be excused by his western friends as far as his country keeps distance from Russia and at the same time doesn't irritate Moscow too much. This western 'silence', however, won't be enough to make the country more open and prosperous. Georgia made a big mistake at the beginning of its independence to opt for a strong presidential office like most other ex-Soviet republics. Just to make it clear, presidential office in the context of post-Soviet life isn't quite the same as the presidential office in the context of American congress system of separation of powers. In Americas, the president is government, but the congress, at least theoretically, but in most cases in practice, is separate, and has huge powers, including the power not to finance governmental programs. This means that in Americas the president is forced to negotiate political agreements with the congress; he simply cannot dissolve the congress within his constitutional powers. Which actually explains why there are so many military coups in parts of Americas when presidents and congresses cannot reach solid compromise. In the post-Soviet context, presidents act within nominally parliamentary systems. The government is to a degree responsible to both the president and the parliament. A stalemate usually is resolved by dissolving the parliament. With a strong president, however, this dissolution eliminates the parliament without eliminating the president. He's a super-president. So he has no interest to see any compromise between his government and the parliament. Time of troubles is his 'finest hour'. To make his power even bigger, he usually makes impossible the existence of strong party system. Within a sea of small and insignificant actors, he's the ultimate boss, the top manager, the head of state and government, responsible for foreign affairs, armed forces and security apparatus. If he decides not to give up the power, nothing short of a political revolution can bring him down. Super-presidents live comfortable lives in post-Soviet states. They enjoy an excellent ideological environment. In a state, usually without clear borders, or clear national identity, or clear sovereignty, or prosperous economy, or all of the above, the strong president must bring peace, order, and prosperity, exactly like in the Hobbes' Leviathan. At the end, as we can see, in most cases, this president makes only one thing, takes as much power as possible for himself, silences opposition and media, takes rid of foreign NGOs, restricts investments, and turns parliament into administrative appendix to government. Some of these features may lack in one or another post-Soviet country, but one thing is beyond any doubt, the social peace under Leviathan has very high price for ordinary people. Three years after the 'rose revolution' in Georgia the regime is only marginally more liberal than it has been before. The country is still not considered to be a liberal democracy. Sending signals from Brussels that Georgia may be invited to join NATO by 2009 are encouraging, but alone they won't be enough to change the domestic political picture radically. The country needs to look at its domestic structures and policy, and why not at its domestic political institutions that produce such unhealthy concentration of power. A good reference for this may be Ukraine, where strong presidential office was recently downgraded to more comfortable levels similar to those of Poland in early 1990s. At the end, Georgia may think about introducing a real parliamentary system.
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