‘Sovereign democracy’

“I still don’t like this term…playing up one feature of a full-fledged democracy…is excessive and even harmful, because it is disorienting.”

• Dmitry Medvedev on ‘sovereign democracy’

Sovereign democracy was the cornerstone of Russia’s ideology under former President Vladimir Putin.  The term defined Russia’s political system by its difference to the West, a genuine ideological alternative to European or North American notions of democracy. Yet throughout his meteoric rise to the presidency, Dmitry Medvedev has consistently opposed the use of the term, and there are no signs that sovereign democracy will remain a fixture of Russian official discourse.  

To speculate on the prospects for sovereign democracy in Medvedev’s Russia, it is worth studying the provenance of the term.  The Kremlin’s political mastermind, Vladislav Surkov, coined the phrase in a speech to the ruling United Russia party in February 2006. 

• Surkov asserted that the Russian nation should determine the sources and uses of state authority, which would be tools for meting out material equality and social justice -- an unusual dish of Soviet socioeconomic aspiration with a dash of Western-style popular sovereignty.  
• Russia would advocate bolstering state sovereignty in international relations, a stance consistent with Moscow’s objections to a perceived Western interventionism.  A sovereign democratic state would remain accountable to its citizens, though perhaps not in the same way as Western democracies. 
• It would also have supreme authority over its economic security and foreign policy orientation -- a key distinction from the new NATO members and alliance aspirants like Georgia, which Russia perceives as having given the alliance -- and thus the United States -- too much sway over their national strategies.

Yet Surkov’s concept was criticised by Medvedev, who was First Deputy Prime Minister at that time.  Medvedev disagreed with the fusion of two seemingly incompatible concepts (‘sovereignty’ and ‘democracy’) and appeared to resist the implication that the DNA of democracy in Russia was somehow different from elsewhere.

When Medvedev speaks of common values between Russia and Europe -- as he did in a much-publicised interview ahead of June’s EU-Russia summit -- he speaks only of ‘democracy’, with no caveats or qualifiers.  There is even speculation that Surkov cooked up ‘sovereign democracy’ solely as bait for Medvedev, who could have used his opposition to the terminology to portray himself as a champion of unadulterated democracy.  However, that may give the Kremlin too much credit for managing Medvedev’s rhetoric years before he assumed the presidency.

Sovereign democracy became the object of occasional ridicule; it was mocked as a virtuous euphemism for autocracy.  By touting democracy as a fundamental tenet of Russian policy -- as Medvedev has done -- he risks drawing attention to what some Western observers perceive as a yawning gap between rhetoric and reality. 

It is too early to tell whether Medvedev’s incremental liberalisation will bring Russia closer to Western notions of what it means to be a democracy.  Yet whether for substance or for show, the rhetorical shift is already underway.