Protesters throw stones at police during a rally held by supporters of EU integration in Kiev December 1, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Gleb Garanich
Why Ukraine’s Euromaidan Is Not Spreading To Other Post-Soviet States -- Farid Guliyev and Nozima Akhrarkhodjaeva, Washington Post
Large-scale protests, like Euromaidan or the Arab Spring, tend to occur in waves clustered in time and space through the processes of cross-country political contention or diffusion, defined by Della Porta and Tarrow as “the spread of movement ideas, practices, and frames from one country to another”. The Euromaidan protest was a sustained demonstration against what was perceived as highly corrupt and personalistic rule of Yanukovych, who was impeached by parliamentary majority after fleeing the capital Feb. 22. The events in Kiev drew attention of opposition activists in Azerbaijan, Russia and Belarus. Several weeks after Yanukovych’s ouster, Mustafa Nayem, one of the protest organizers tweeted: “The biggest danger for Vladimir V. Putin is that Ukraine’s revolution will eventually spread toward Russia.”
Yet, the Euromaidan protests did not spark similar political activism in other post-Soviet semi-autocratic regimes. Why not? After all, only nine years ago, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution was activated by a regional, if not global, tide of electoral revolutions.
There are two key insights from social movement literature that may explain why Euromaidan is not (likely to be) spreading.
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My Comment: What happened in Ukraine is not a model that most up-and-rising democratic countries want to emulate. You do not overthrow a democratically elected President using guns .... and then after evicting his supporters from Parliament .... voting to have him impeached. This is the rule of the mob .... and not surprisingly .... the political/economic crisis shows no signs of letting up in Ukraine. The lesson in Ukraine is clear to everyone else in the former Soviet states .... there are consequences for your actions .... and most of the time if you overthrow your government they are not good.
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