After the Elections, on the Eve of Crisis: Analysis and Forecasts from the Belarusian Yearbook 2010

Belarusian Yearbook. A collection of review and analytical materials on the development of the situation in the Republic of Belarus. – Minsk, 2010. – 438 pp. / compiled and edited by A. Pankovsky, V. Kostyugova.

Review prepared by Tatsiana Chyzhova, a researcher at the Political Sphere Institute

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This year saw the publication of the third annual collection of the Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies (BISS) and the expert community website Nashe Mnenie – Belarusian Yearbook 2010. Thirty articles present the results of an analysis of political, social, cultural, and economic processes in Belarus in 2010, outlining the main trends in the domestic situation and the country’s position in the foreign political and economic arena.

As in the two previous collections (for 2008 and 2009), the articles in this edition are grouped into such basic sections as “The State”, “Foreign Policy”, “Society”, and “The Economy”. In addition, the 2010 edition introduced an additional section, “Elections”. It contains only two articles, but the very theme of the presidential election (especially the events of 19 December 2010) and its political and economic consequences is one of the cross-cutting topics and is addressed in one way or another in most of the texts. Other leading cross-cutting themes include the processes of liberalization, Belarus’s economic problems and the authorities’ strategies for solving them, the factor of external relations in domestic politics and the reverse factor – the warming or “freezing” of external relations depending on the actions of the Belarusian authorities at the national level.

The section “The State” addresses such aspects of domestic politics as the work of the security agencies, the Presidential Administration, the Council of Ministers, the functioning of the legislative and local authorities, and the problem of modernizing military armaments. For the most part, it records trends that have long become routine for the Belarusian authorities: their centripetal orientation, the concentration of most levers of Belarusian politics around the Presidential Administration amid the increasingly decorative role of parliament, the diminishing role of the prime minister and the Council of Ministers in managing the economy, the authorities, and so on. At the same time, despite this centralization of power, an opposite trend also emerges: the lack of coordination in the actions of state structures, which, according to the compilers of the collection, indicates a crisis of governance in Belarus (p. 7).

Two articles in the collection’s section “Elections” examine the tactics of the authorities and the opposition during the pre-election period and on election day (pp. 61-73), and assess the mood and political preferences of the electorate, noting the official recognition of a split in Belarusian society (pp. 74-82). Assessments of the presidential election are dominated by the absence of surprise at the course and result of the electoral process, but the scenario of the authorities’ actions during the mass protest on 19 December 2010 is recognized as entirely unexpected and unmotivated. As noted above, most of the authors of the collection addressed the situation surrounding the events in Minsk on election day in one way or another and commented on their negative consequences.

The analysis of Belarus’s international relations presented in the section “Foreign Policy” is pleasing in its “multi-vector” character. Separate articles address almost all directions of Belarus’s relations. The first place is occupied by the issue of economic relations and practical benefits for Belarus from various allies; the second by the image of our country in the eyes of its western neighbors, its dependence on relations between the authorities and the opposition, as well as the concrete material gains and losses for the Belarusian economy on the eve of the crisis that are connected with this image. Regional cooperation between Belarus and the countries of Eastern Europe (including in connection with the Eastern Partnership program) is also a separate and interesting theme.

The section “Society” is the largest in volume (more than 200 pages) and the most heterogeneous in content. Among the leading themes of the section are:

1) Belarusian NGOs – European cooperation, the role of civic initiatives during the election campaign (the mobilization campaign, internet activity, acts of solidarity with political prisoners), and religious associations in Belarus;

2) political parties in Belarus – legal conditions, tactical decisions during the elections, the degree of participation in the elections, and manifestations of activity after them;

3) Belarusian media and social media;

4) the cultural and educational policy of the Belarusian state (education, science, culture, sport).

The collection notes the further escalation of the conflict between the state and the informal civic sector, connected both with the deterioration of legal conditions for their existence and with the intensification of repressive measures against civic activists and journalists, with the growth of state control over all sides of public life and its entirely probable expansion into the private sphere (through monitoring internet activity). The role of the state in cultural and educational policy is assessed mostly as negative (bureaucratization, strengthened control in the absence of overdue changes).

The section “The Economy” is also thematically diverse. It covers such topics as Belarusian macroeconomic indicators (noting the “inflation” of GDP in 2010 after the crisis year of 2009), the state of domestic industry, assessments of the welfare of the population, the problem of foreign trade (the usual negative trade balance), financial policy, the foreign exchange market and the country’s banking sector, and so on.

The latest Belarusian Yearbook turned out to be somewhat larger in volume than the analogous 2009 collection thanks to the appendix printed at the end of the book, “BISS Trends”, a quarterly analysis devoted to “assessing the most significant political, economic, social, foreign-policy, and cultural trends in contemporary Belarus” (p. 366). The 2010 collection presents five corresponding issues.

Among the most significant recent trends are point-by-point privatization of enterprises against the background of declarations about “economic liberalization”, attempts to improve relations with the EU, cooperation with the IMF, still contradictory relations with Russia, the search for ways of “reconciliation” with civil society by reducing the level of repression (although at the same time the “liquidation of NGOs and political parties undesirable to the authorities and the creation of obstacles to their activities” is seen as entirely probable – p. 426), and the “clearing” of the landscape of informal Belarusian culture alongside demonstrative point-by-point Belarusization. As can be seen, the predictions were quite cautious (and in some cases contradictory). Some of them came true (apart from forecasts concerning foreign-policy relations, cooperation with the IMF, and “reconciliation” with civil society).

Overall, the Belarusian Yearbook for 2010 can be described as informative and diverse, claiming to offer a comprehensive analysis of Belarusian reality. The texts included in it generally maintain a certain quality standard, although differences in the depth of analysis are inevitable. In particular, there are enough articles that present many interesting facts on the basis of which the authors build their conclusions, but the statements made are not supported by sources of information. As a result, some of the texts acquire a more journalistic than expert-analytical character: they are interesting to read, but it is hardly appropriate to cite them.

A common theme in many articles of the collection is the statement about the need for “reforms” (above all economic reforms), while it remains unclear what this word means for each author. Such an abstract attitude toward reforms is, in principle, characteristic of almost all Belarusian independent journalism, but it seems undesirable in scholarly and analytical texts. The publication may be useful for researchers of contemporary Belarus, journalists, civic and political activists, foreigners interested in Belarusian issues, and university students in the social sciences.