At least the agreement between the U.S. “Millennium Challenges” corporation and Armenian government was signed. On the basis of this contract Armenia will get 235 million dollars in the future. It is worth mentioning that before that the U.S. had reminded Armenia for several times that this was directly connected with the democratization level of Armenia, and even later after the referendum of November 27 it seemed that Armenia would not be given that money.
Though this story (or the beginning of this story), like Americans say, had a “happy end”, people are still interested why America doesn’t want to see the numerous violations of democracy in our country and considers the authorities as “elected” while everyone knows that the elections were conducted in fraud and violations. There are two views regarding this. Some people think that the U.S. don’t have enough information to make assumptions because they get information about Armenia from the Ambassador and as they say he cooperates with the Armenian authorities, and the others think that Americans know everything very well and ignore these facts because the president has given promises to them (especially connected with the Karabakh conflict), etc.
First of all let’s try to understand why the Americans should develop democracy in Armenia. Do they like us? Of course there is nothing like that in politics. On the other hand it is easier to manage democratic societies because democratic leaders have to consider the public opinion and thus can’t do whatever they like and in case of using money they can change this public opinion. In other words if most of the Armenian public opinion coincided with the U.S. foreign policy, the U.S. would do their best to develop democracy in Armenia.
This idea is explained in the following way in Armenia: as the U.S. is trying to develop democracy in post-soviet states, and Russia is trying to keep its power over these states, it turns out that all authoritarian states are pro-Russian (Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, etc.), and the democratic ones – pro-American. In fact usually in this kind of cases we dispute the reasons and results. I mean the problem is that the authorities of Armenia are authoritarian and accordingly have to make pro-Russian policy. It is the vice-versa: most of our society is pro-Russian, that is why the Americans don’t want to develop democracy in Armenia.
Let’s imagine such a situation: due to the U.S. efforts Armenia is becoming a democratic state and the authorities are being elected only by public vote… and they are making the same pro-Russian policy because most of our citizens are pro-Russian. Does America want such democracy in our country?
But they wanted to do that in Georgia because the recent times most of Georgians had anti-Russian mood and approach (as well as several days ago as a result of public poll it turned out that they think their number one enemy is Russia). They wanted to do this in Ukraine too, because the situation was the same there. But why should the U.S. develop democracy in the “outpost” of Russia? Even more, in case when most of Armenian citizens and as well as the Government agree with being their “outpost” in the region (we can say it in different ways: “our big brother”, “our partner”, etc.).
By the way, this situation may change in the future. It seems that the Americans want to be more serious and get prepared for the coming elections of 2007 and 2008. And this approach has its explanation: after the gas price increase anti-Russian approach will increase in Armenia and in this case it would comply with the interests of the U.S. foreign policy to develop democracy in Armenia.