535429

research-article2014
EEPXXX10.1177/0888325414535429East European Politics and SocietiesKulakevich / Understanding the Difficulty for Change in Belarus

East European Politics and

Societies and Cultures
Volume 28 Number 4
November 2014  887­–901
© 2014 Sage Publications
Twenty Years in the Making: 10.1177/0888325414535429
http://eeps.sagepub.com
hosted at
Understanding the Difficulty for Change http://online.sagepub.com

in Belarus
Tatsiana Kulakevich
Rutgers University

Even after twenty years of Lukashenka’s rule, Belarusians still have to struggle for
democracy. However, there has been a modest growth in the number of protesters dur-
ing presidential elections and in the pro-EU mood of the Belarusian population. This
article analyzes the dynamic of this growth through the prism of social movements
literature and such concepts as framing, political opportunity, and mobilizing struc-
tures. The argument is that the weakness of the mobilizing structures and framing
processes at times when political opportunities presented themselves in Belarus
resulted in an absence of large-scale protests and a failure to sustain the development
of social movements in the country. At the same time, Belarus cannot be considered as
being in a static or retrogressive state since transnational flows characteristic of a glo-
balizing world have exposed people to wider flows of information, providing them
with counterframes and resulting in a modest growth in the numbers of protesters and
a change in the preferences of the Belarusian population.

Keywords: 
Belarus; political opportunity; mobilizing structures; social movements;
framing

L ukashenka has been in power for almost twenty years and Belarusians still have
to struggle for democracy. The cult of personality manufactured by his regime
has helped to induce complicity, isolate Belarusians from one another, and restrict
allowable public speech. Yet there have been protests, however weak. For the past
twenty years, the largest number of protesters in any demonstration against the dic-
tatorship has not exceeded forty thousand people. However, despite this strong
presidential grip on power, the number of protesters during presidential elections has
been growing: in 2001, there were about two thousand protesters in the streets, in
2006 the figure reached ten to fifteen thousand, and in 2010, about forty thousand
people came out to protest the rigged elections. In addition, the pro–European Union
mood in Belarus appears to be on the rise. Data presented by the Independent
Institute of Socio-Economic and Political Studies (IISEPS) show that 29.3 percent
of Belarusians were willing to vote for joining the EU in the event of a referendum
in 2006. This number increased by 12.8 percent in 7 years regardless of many years
of anti-EU propaganda by the state media. At the same time, the number of those
favoring integration with Russia fell from 56.5 percent in 2006 to 37.2 percent in
888  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

2013. This number is higher than those who prefer joining the EU, but the pro-
Russian orientation has been slowly weakening. What can explain the modest
growth in the numbers of protesters and the slow but steady change in the geopo-
litical preferences of the Belarusian population? How can one analyze the dynamics
of such changes? The purpose of this article is to address this issue by analyzing the
situation in Belarus under the Lukashenka presidency through the prism of the social
movements literature.
There are three broad sets of factors scholars consider while analyzing the emer-
gence and development of social movements: political opportunity, mobilizing
structures, and framing processes.1 Because the effects of these three factors are
interactive rather than independent, it is essential to emphasize the importance of
studying all three of them together. For example, expansion of political opportunity
only becomes an “opportunity” when it is defined as such by a group of actors ready
to act on that definition of the situation. In their turn, framing processes encourage
mobilization based on a growing awareness of the system’s illegitimacy and vulner-
ability. As a result, well-organized mobilizing structures and propitious framing
processes may mediate the effects of an “adverse” political opportunity and help a
social movement to achieve its goals. Concurrently, the weakness in one (or more)
of these factors makes the movement more vulnerable to challenges from incum-
bents and competitors.
In this study, I will analyze the three factors of political opportunity, framing pro-
cesses, and mobilizing structures in Belarus and argue that weaknesses in the mobi-
lizing structures and framing processes at the times when political opportunities
presented themselves resulted in the absence of large-scale protests and a failure to
sustain the development of social movements in the country. At the same time, the
situation in Belarus cannot be considered as static or retrogressive since in a global-
izing world people are exposed to ever wider flows of information that provide them
with counterframes to the official discourse produced by the state. Additionally, we
can observe a modest growth in the number of protesters and a change in the prefer-
ences of the Belarusian population.
The study differs from existing research on Belarusian politics by relying on the
social movements approach and focusing on the dynamics of the situation. I set out
to observe the evolution of political attitudes and the growth of mobilization. Most
existing works are part of a larger research program on the processes of democratiza-
tion in the former Soviet Union republics and identify similar reasons impeding the
process of democratization in all post-Soviet countries. Among the main reasons are
a monopolized economy, state-controlled media, Russian economic interests, manip-
ulation of historical traditions, and coercive measures employed by the Belarusian
authorities. One such work, edited by Hans-Georg Heinrich and Ludmila Lobova,2
suggests that the authoritarian regime, the monopolized economy and media, and
Russian economic interests have been the decisive factors explaining the country’s
failure to move toward democracy. Kuzio and Fritz review several case studies and
 Kulakevich / Understanding the Difficulty for Change in Belarus  889

suggest that the Belarusian authoritarian regime is an obstacle for the successful
transformation of Belarusian society.3 Marples identifies the Belarusian govern-
ment’s manipulation of historical traditions to strengthen Belarus’s ties to Russia,
economic stability under Lukashenka, and lack of open media as the main reasons
for the reluctance of Belarusians to fight for democracy.4 Rutland points out the high
level of popular support for Lukashenka and the strong economy as the reasons for
the strength of his authoritarian regime.5
While popularity is a crucial legitimating factor for autocrats, there is no clear
evidence confirming the hypothesis of Lukashenka’s high level of popularity, par-
ticularly recently. As reported by IISEPS, in 2013 only 32.6 percent of the respon-
dents would have voted for the current president in the event of presidential elections,
and 37.6 percent would have given their vote for any other candidate. While for
many years the public tolerated Lukashenka in return for socioeconomic stability or
his perceived ability to act in the best interests of the country based on years of expe-
rience, many Belarusians have no objection to a different person taking over as presi-
dent. Similarly, while it is true that in the USSR it was not possible for citizens to
participate in political life and it is not the case in today’s Belarus either, the question
is why? While strong institutionalization of the nondemocratic system is, indeed, an
important factor in helping autocrats to retain power, it should be noted that the
Georgian, Ukrainian, and Kyrgyz leaders also made considerable efforts to institu-
tionalize their powers and yet the popular challenges in these countries were more
successful during the color revolutions and later. Also, in terms of economic stability
and strong economic performance, the Belarusian president was able to stay in power
despite the major economic crisis in 2011 and poor performance in 2012 and 2013.
The rest of the study is organized as follows. First, I examine the possibility of
change in the moods and attitudes of the Belarusian population through the concept
of framing, but analyze also the weakness of the framing efforts in Belarus and thus
their ability to sustain collective action. Second, I explain the weakness of the pro-
tests by showing the lack of strength of mobilizing structures and the “unfriendly”
political opportunity structure. I conclude by discussing how my findings enhance
general knowledge in the area of democratization and social movements.

Framing

The concept of framing is a great tool to understand the origins of change in the
actions and attitudes of the Belarusian masses. Studied by Inglehart, Gamson,
Tarrow, Tilly, McAdam, and others, and mediating between political opportunity and
mobilizing structures, framing processes are used to generate meanings intended to
mobilize potential adherents or demobilize antagonists.6 Frame analysis focuses on
efforts by leaders and activists to create shared understandings of the world among
the broader audience. Such understandings become parts of a larger belief system
890  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

and help to legitimate and motivate collective action as they generate unity among
the populace or some of its segments. Framing processes are as important for shap-
ing the emergence of collective action as for its ongoing development. The differ-
ence between the two stages is that the initial framing processes tend to be absorbed
less consciously by the “masses,” and the sources of framing are hard to identify as
they are multiple. The later framing processes are far more likely to be shaped by
conscious and strategic contestation between the state and the challengers. In
Belarus, the initial stage of the framing processes was marked by the simultaneous
influence of the two opposing forces. On the one hand, the strategic framing pro-
cesses by the Belarusian government through assurances of a coat, a roof, and a
dinner on a stable basis and the manipulation of culture was successful in dissuading
the majority of Belarusian citizens from active participation in the political life of
the country and led them to develop preferences favoring the government’s line. On
the other hand, globalization, defined as a process of growing interaction and inter-
dependence between economies, societies, and nations across large distances, con-
tributed to the growing access to information and allowed the masses to be exposed
to information outside of state control, which, in turn, led to a gradual change in the
preferences of the Belarusian masses away from the government’s line and created
the basis for the increase in the number of potential protesters. However, the absence
of strong strategic framing efforts from the collective actors representing the move-
ments at their developmental stages has led to inchoate framing processes and failure
of collective actions to sustain themselves.
The framing efforts by the Belarusian government during the twenty years of
Lukashenka’s rule can be usefully analyzed within the Gramscian model of hege-
mony, focusing on elite forging of a single cultural framework from a number of
possible frameworks within society.7 With the collapse of the economic, social, and
political systems of the Soviet Union in 1990–1991, the peoples of the Soviet succes-
sor states placed an increasing emphasis on survival, and some placed more stress on
traditional values.8 For most Belarusians, values such as freedom of speech, freedom
of association, independence of the media, political freedom, and participation in
political life were not a priority. At the top of the list were economic prosperity, social
security, and political stability. Belarusians elected Lukashenka in 1994 as a candi-
date who promised “he would freeze prices, beat inflation, provide jobs for every-
body. He pledged more Government support to the elderly and a brake on privatization,
a program that so far has touched almost no one.”9 Lukashenka was committed to
reunifying Belarus with Russia, and the majority of people liked his vision. They
believed that the collapse of the Soviet Union was to blame for the economic diffi-
culties in the country. People wanted a better life and some stability, and Lukashenka
promised to achieve those goals. Rather than using an opportunity to restructure the
domestic economy through privatization and liberalization, the regime stimulated
GDP growth through Russia’s energy subsidies for Belarus. Because of the steep
discount on Russian crude oil and natural gas, Belarus was able to export refined oil
 Kulakevich / Understanding the Difficulty for Change in Belarus  891

products produced from Russian crude oil at market prices. The GDP growth consti-
tuted the basis of the regime’s legitimacy. At first, it appealed to the interests and
sentiments of Belarusian citizens who were satisfied with the results of the growing
economy while appreciating the need for law and order after the financial hardships
caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic crises in Russia in 1998
and 1999, resulting in a decline in trade with Russia and other CIS countries. Over
time, people got used to the fact that the state claimed to be the guarantor of the cor-
rect functioning of the economic and legal systems. The data collected by IISEPS
show that in 2013, 57.6 percent of the respondents felt that ordinary people have no
influence on the political and economic life of the country and 45 percent of the
respondents blamed the president for the worsening economic situation.
Besides the strategy of stimulating the growth of the economy and presenting
itself as the guarantor of the country’s stability, the government engaged in framing
efforts whose aim was to discourage people from taking collective action. This was
achieved by controlling the educational and media system as well as manipulating
language and state symbols. According to Sewell, authoritative cultural action,
launched from the center of power, “has the effect of turning what otherwise might
be a babble of cultural voices into a semiotically and politically ordered field of dif-
ferences.”10 Such action created a map of the “culture,” telling people where they and
their practices fit in the official scheme of things. An official course called “Ideology
of the Belarusian State” was introduced in schools and state enterprises in 2003 and
continues to be a part of the educational programs today. The ideological position of
the president has also been expressed in his decisions and speeches. All statements of
the president, designed to set goals for Belarusian society and the state, are directed
toward manipulation of shared values, interests, and priorities of the masses. During
the reign of Alexander Lukashenka the Russian language, the state flag, and the coat
of arms became the symbols of power in Belarus, and the Belarusian language
together with the white-red-white flag and the “Pahonya” coat of arms has been
identified with the opposition. In officially controlled newspapers and on television,
Lukashenka has been praised as the “father,” his image has been used as a disciplin-
ary device, generating public dissimulation when citizens acted as if they revered
their leader. By inundating daily life with tired symbolism, the regime exercised a
subtle, yet effective, form of power. And the greater the absurdity of the required
performance, the more clearly it demonstrated that the regime could make most peo-
ple obey most of the time.
This symbolic onslaught was resisted, however, as various groups and individu-
als offered counterframes. The rise of counterhegemonic discourses had several
causes. Chief among them was the influence of the forces of globalization. The
impact of globalization on Belarusian society is well documented. With respect to
the KOF index, which captures the economic, political, and social dimensions of
globalization, Belarus advanced from 33.58 in 1994 to 54.98 in 2013. (The maxi-
mum value is 100 and the minimum value is 1. Higher values denote greater
892  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

globalization.) The social globalization index is designed to capture the expansion

of various networks of cooperation. It is expressed as the spread of ideas, informa-
tion, images, and people by capturing personal contacts, information flows, and
cultural proximity. The Belarusian social globalization index grew from 36.05 in
1994 to 61.91 in 2013. Even though Belarus is not very advanced in social global-
ization, the impact of this process on the society is undeniable. The volume of inter-
personal contacts and dealings has increased, and according to a World Bank report
(www.worldbank.com), the number of mobile cellular subscriptions (per 100 peo-
ple) increased from 5 in 2002 to 112 in 2012. Similarly, the number of internet users
(per 100 people) increased from 9 in 2002 to 46.9 in 2012. In addition, Belarus is
highly urbanized. According to the World Bank, in 2012 the urban population
accounted for 75 percent of the total population. It is now widely accepted that
urbanization is as much a social process as economic and territorial. It transforms
societal organizations, the role of the family, demographic structures, the nature of
work, and the way we choose to live and with whom. It also modifies domestic roles
and relations within the family and redefines concepts of individual and social
responsibility. In the case of Belarus, urbanization has led to the agglomeration of
the population in areas considered to be true centers of progress that offer multiple
options to residents, including access to new technologies and to various areas of
activity. The population has been on the move. The sharp decline in the number of
visas issued for the citizens of Belarus, as a result of the inclusion of Poland,
Lithuania, and Latvia in the Schengen area in late 2007, has reversed. As a result of
the sustained increase in the number of visas issued by the consulates of EU coun-
tries in 2008, the figures almost reached pre-2007 levels in 2011 (Figure 1).
Regardless of anti-EU propaganda by the state media, the change in opinion of the
Belarusian masses in favor of joining the EU was reported by IISEPS: while 29.3
percent of Belarusians were willing to vote to join the EU in the event of a referen-
dum in 2006, this number increased by 12.8 percent in 7 years.
Economic globalization, characterized by long-distance flows of goods, capital,
and services as well as information and discourses that accompany market exchanges,
and political globalization, defined as a diffusion of specific governmental policies,
have intensified, as recorded by relevant indexes. But globalization in these two
areas has grown at a slower pace than social globalization. The index of economic
globalization grew from 35.58 in 1994 to 51.61 in 2013 and the index of political
globalization rose from 24.84 in 1994 to 49.78 in 2013. The lower growth of these
indexes reflects the slowing down of social mobilization and can be explained by the
fact that the immediate aims of the Lukashenka state were those of reinforcing its
present power base and substantially increasing its legitimacy in the eyes of its
Western neighbors during the global economic crisis; the uneven, wavering spirit of
Belarus–Russia relations; the Russian–Georgian War, etc. The government took this
path in the belief that it had to adjust to internal and international pressures, and also
because this strategy was consistent with some of its own ideological premises. All
 Kulakevich / Understanding the Difficulty for Change in Belarus  893

Figure 1
Number of visas issued by consulates of EU countries in Belarus

Source: Yeliseyeu, Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies, 7 July 2012.11 Available at http://www.
belinstitute.eu/images/doc-pdf/english_research_yelis.pdf.

these events got Lukashenka and his team wondering how to keep control and main-
tain Belarusian stability. Over the years, the Belarusian regime has made very well
thought-out tweaks to the political as well as the economic landscape, without having
to institute real changes. The tweaks were not systemic and thus safe for the govern-
ment. The opposition was still kept away from the real political processes: the parlia-
ment was 100 percent opposition-free. The laws were still repressive, and the
government could cancel temporary liberties at any point. On the other hand, while
in reality the government did not mean to loosen its power, the economic tweaks
together with the forces of globalization exposed the population to alternative
possibilities.
Beginning in 2008, the Belarusian government had made small steps toward eco-
nomic liberalization, improving conditions for private business and making some
moves toward privatization. These came as the regime was feeling pressured by the
effects of the global financial crisis as well as by increasing Russian energy tariffs. As
a reaction to worsening conditions, Belarus had undertaken some economic reforms
and improved business conditions for private entrepreneurs. In 2008 and 2009, presi-
dential decrees established favorable conditions for doing business in rural areas and
small towns. They simplified the procedures and waived certain taxes for small enter-
prises there. Directive No. 4, signed on 30 December 2010, laid out a detailed vision
for microeconomic liberalization across the whole country. Its pro-market spirit
caused high expectations in the Belarusian business community and among local and
international experts, but the government’s contradictory policies during the eco-
nomic crisis of 2011 buried all these expectations completely. It seemed that even
after the return of Russian subsidies in 2012, liberalization was off the agenda but on
894  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

7 May 2012, the president signed Decree No. 6 yet again, significantly lightening the
financial and administrative burden for businessmen in rural areas and small and
medium-size towns. Moreover, in the situation of stagnating GDP, melting currency
reserves, a devaluating ruble, and no money to pay debts, on 10 October 2013 the
Government and National Bank issued a plan for structural reforms to the Belarusian
economy, focusing on the contraction of direct lending programs, budget reform, tax
reform, privatization, and further liberalization of the economy. Considering that
Belarusian government has had serious problems with transforming its own strategies
and decrees into consistent policies, many experts believe that the government and the
National Bank designed the plan of structural reforms mainly to persuade interna-
tional lending organizations to open new credit lines for Belarus, with no intention of
actually implementing the reforms. However, despite the constantly failing macroeco-
nomic policy, there have been successes due to microeconomic liberalization. In the
“Doing Business” survey published by the World Bank, Belarus has shot up from the
91st position in 2009 to the 63rd in 2013 out of 189 countries. Already it is ranked
11th among the 26 countries in Europe and Central Asia, which is nearly twice as
good as Russia (ranks 21st) and Ukraine (ranks 23rd).
A similar situation can be observed with foreign direct investment in Belarus,
which is recognized as an indication of economic globalization in the sense that
foreign investment has often been an important avenue for the transfer of skills and
technology. Despite the Government’s inconsistency, its poor macroeconomic pol-
icy, and opposition to reform from within the political elite, foreign investment in
Belarus was steadily growing up until 2011. The low responsiveness of foreign
investments to political developments became obvious in the second half of 2011.
With inflation exceeding 100 percent in 2011, the country could not expect to
receive considerable amounts of foreign investment or to revive the activity of
local entrepreneurs. However, despite the sharp decline in foreign direct invest-
ment in Belarus in 2012, the inflow of investments into Belarus in 2012 still
exceeded the level of 2010 (Figure 2). While the Belarusian economy was playing
catch-up after a disastrous crash in 2011 and the state was trying to achieve a
higher stability for Belarusian laws and the economy, it is safe to say that the
masses were already being exposed to the information outside of their state’s con-
trol and began acquiring new knowledge. This produced a fertile ground for the
creation of counterframes providing an alternative to the government’s line and
preparing the basis for change in the preferences of the Belarusian masses. The
populace was thus better prepared to take collective action at times of expanding
political opportunities. While such changes in attitudes and behavior, resulting
from spontaneous and uncoordinated cultural evolution, were enough to mobilize
people for some action, more decisive, coordinated framing efforts had to be devel-
oped to prepare people for political contests between insurgents and the state. But
this dependence of the framing efforts combined with the weak mobilizing struc-
tures contributed to the loss of the opportunities for change.
 Kulakevich / Understanding the Difficulty for Change in Belarus  895

Figure 2
Foreign direct investment, net inflows (balance of payment, current
U.S. dollars)

Source: www.data.worldbank.org.

Political Opportunity

Globalization forces played their role in the development of “alternative counter-

cultures,” preparing the ground for the acceptance of interpretive frames that would
move people away from the government’s ideology and generate moderate changes
in the attitude and behavior of Belarusians. But the successes of cultural change and
modest reframing are harbingers of mobilization success; they are not enough to
explain the failure of the movements in Belarus to sustain themselves. To do this, we
need to return to the concepts of political opportunity and mobilizing structures.
Political opportunity presents an approach of social movements that argues that
exogenous factors enhance or inhibit movement dynamics toward political protest.
The political opportunity approach provided an extensive conceptualization of the
political environments that social movements face thanks to the works of the politi-
cal process theorists such as Kriesi, McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly, and Kitschelt.12 These
researchers claim that social movements are developed by political constraints and
opportunities unique to their national context. There has been disagreement over
what counts as a political opportunity: mere changes in the institutional structure or
also people’s perceptions of these opportunities. I will employ Tarrow’s definition
here, which includes both cultural and structural interpretations. He defines political
opportunities as those “dimensions of political environment that provide incentives
for people to undertake collective action by affecting their expectations for success
or failure.”13 The role of political opportunity changes depending on the stage of the
collective action: while initially political opportunity is independent of the actions
of movement groups and is purely shaped by the external political environment,
after the onset of collective action it becomes a product of the interaction of the
movement with its environment. Because of the weakness of organizational struc-
tures and, in turn, the lack of conscious reaffirmation of the framing processes by the
collective actors representing the movements in Belarus, potential political opportu-
nities were rarely interpreted as “opportunities” and did not lead to an ongoing
development of social movements in the country.
It is not surprising that the political opportunity for mobilization in Belarus can be
noticed primarily during presidential elections: in 2001, there were about two
896  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

thousand protesters in the streets, 2006 was marked by approximate ten to fifteen
thousand, and in 2010, as noted above, about forty thousand people came out to pro-
test the rigged elections. The framing processes by the Belarusian government
intended to demobilize the government’s antagonists, and credible threats in Belarus
sufficed to ensure the compliance of most citizens. In coercive compliance, people
obey because they fear being punished. As a result, an abusive or unrestrained state
such as Belarus presents a classic collective action problem, in which a group can
benefit from cooperation, but the lack of individual incentives to engage in the
actions necessary for this cooperation prevents the goal from being attained. The
fraudulent elections, in turn, presented the way to overcome the collective action
problem in Belarus, since it is more difficult to remove officials after they have been
sworn into office and have gained the legal authority to rule, and because regimes are
generally more vulnerable during the electoral cycle, decreasing the likelihood of
repression. Additionally, because elections come with a limited time frame, they also
eliminate the free rider problem associated with collective action problems, since
individuals realize that if enough protesters do not appear in a very short period, then
the opportunity to confront the regime will be lost.14 The growth in the number of
people gathering to protest the abuses of power by the regime can be explained by
the outrage resulting from stolen elections when the regime has recently engaged in
electoral fraud and by the exposure of the Belarusian masses to the forces of global-
ization.15 The exposure of the Belarusian masses to wider avenues of information can
be observed in their awareness of events that were not supported by the government.
According to IISEPS, while only 69.4 percent of the population answered yes to the
question whether they were aware of the protests against the rigged presidential elec-
tions taking place in the capital of the republic right after the announcement of the
results in 2006, people answering affirmatively to the same question in 2010 grew to
92.1 percent. In addition to this growing awareness of ongoing protests, the moods
of the masses in Belarus suggest an increasing readiness to express their attitudes
openly. According to the survey conducted by the Axiometrical Research Laboratory
NOVAK in February 2012, 69 percent of the respondents answered positively to the
question whether they thought the citizens of Belarus would have been more politi-
cally active had they not feared that they might lose their jobs. The moderate growth
in the number of protesters during presidential elections can also be explained by the
fact that individuals were more likely to engage in protest activity because they
expected large numbers of people to participate.16
For the Belarusian case, it is also useful to examine two other highly recognized and
politicized events that can be perceived as possible political opportunities for mobiliza-
tion in Belarus: the Chernobyl Way protests, devoted to commemoration of the
Chernobyl accident in 1986 and blaming the Lukashenka regime for agricultural
exploitation of the contaminated territories, and the Freedom Day protests, celebrating
the proclamation of the Belarusian People’s Republic in 1918, usually accompanied by
mass opposition rallies, and not recognized by the incumbent regime. However, after
 Kulakevich / Understanding the Difficulty for Change in Belarus  897

Figure 3
Number of protesters during Chernobyl Way and Freedom Day protests in
Belarus

Source: www.svaboda.org; www.novychas.info.

the presidential elections in 2006, the number of protesters during these events started
to fade, with a moderate growth on Freedom Day during the past 3 years (Figure 3).
Such a decrease is not surprising considering the growth in the section of the Belarusian
population afraid to express their political views from 32.2 percent in 2006 to 40.5
percent in 2010, as reported by IISEPS on their website. Nevertheless, while the num-
ber of protesters on these oppositional dates decreased, the political opportunity during
presidential elections together with the rising awareness of the wrongdoings of the
regime contributed to the mobilization of a higher number of protesters.

Mobilizing Structures

While political opportunity and framing processes shape the prospects for collec-
tive action, their influence is dependent on the mobilizing structures through which
groups seek to organize. According to McAdam, mobilizing structures are “those
collective vehicles, informal as well as formal through which people mobilize and
engage in collective action.”17 Departing from the sociological assumptions that
shared grievances and an agreement as to the possible means of dealing with them
are sufficient preconditions for emergence of social movements, resource mobiliza-
tion and political process theories emphasize yet another factor: mobilizing struc-
tures. Mobilization processes have both formal and informal dimensions and both
need to be studied. While the simple availability of “unstructured” mobilizing
resources is often enough to get a collective action off the ground,18 it is essential for
the collective actors representing the movement to be able to create a structure capa-
ble of representing and sustaining the movement. The existence of democratic oppo-
sition in Belarus has been sufficient to initiate emergent movements at times of
expanding political opportunities; its polarization, however, resulted in its inability
to set in motion framing processes that would have further undermined the legiti-
macy of the government and would have helped control the broad political environ-
ment to prevent the shifting fortunes of the movements under way.
Belarus has experienced the emergence of both formal and informal collective
vehicles through which people have mobilized for collective action. However, history
898  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

shows that neither type was able to create an enduring organizational structure for the
protests to survive. The reason has been the polarization and weakness of the organi-
zations planning and carrying out collective actions. Informal actions of protest in
Belarus have been sporadic and largely born out of environmental opportunities with-
out the support of strong organizational structures. The economic crisis of 2011, the
stagnating economy in 2012–2013, and the exposure of the Belarusian masses to
larger amounts of information and wider possibilities to organize led to several infor-
mal collective expressions of protest. They include the silent protests, the campaign
“Stop Gasoline,” and the online currency exchange activity, when a student from
Minsk replaced the National Bank by determining the dollar exchange rate in the
country for six months at the time of the currency crisis. His website http://prokopovi.
ch/, allowed citizens to buy and sell currency when it was not in exchange. Similarly,
in 2013 the media and civil society demonstrated massive disapproval of the presiden-
tial initiatives to top up the budget by introducing an exit fee of $100 when crossing
the border to discourage shopping abroad; a tax on the unemployed, with the intention
of collecting about $280 from each Belarusian citizen working in the shadow econ-
omy or employed abroad; and an automobile tax making all car owners pay $15–100
a year. For instance, dissatisfied citizens launched an Internet petition against the exit
fee, receiving almost twenty-seven thousand signatures. Although the government
had to back away from the exit fee initiative and even publicly repudiated the idea,
most of the protest campaigns failed to achieve their goals and were unable to grow
into sustained movements that could challenge the government.
Any study of “formal” protests, or protests organized by transparent social move-
ment organizations (SMOs), must begin with a brief analysis of the role of the
Belarusian political opposition. It is, after all, the democratic opposition that is
expected to raise the cost of authoritarian rule and persuade passive supporters of the
regime that the elites’ hold on power is not as secure as they believe. The majority of
the opposition forces in Belarus support complete removal of the current regime and
a radical change of the entire political system to a democratic one. While an active
opposition has been able to maintain some degree of independent existence in
Belarus, its freedom to operate has been severely curtailed as the government has
used all the tools of state coercion at its disposal to demobilize, marginalize, or crimi-
nalize the opposition’s activities. These techniques include persecution and repres-
sion of opposition members through detentions, threats, and imprisonments. The
government seeks to neuter any potential challenges in advance before they can
become a serious threat.
While the nondemocratic regime in Belarus has its undisputed leader, President
Lukashenka, the forces opposing him have been far from a homogeneous group. At
the end of the 1990s, the Coordinating Council of Democratic Forces had succeeded
in uniting the majority of the anti-regime actors of the period during the run-up to the
2001 elections. During the 2006 presidential elections, the majority of anti-regime
actors were brought together under the banner of the United Democratic Forces.
 Kulakevich / Understanding the Difficulty for Change in Belarus  899

However, after the elections, the coalition broke down, partly due to the shallowness
of such a union. By the 2010 presidential elections, there was not even a pretense of
presenting a united opposition front or an agreed single alternative candidate to stand
against Lukashenka. To date, the opposition is divided. Each group privileges a dif-
ferent dominant strategy in challenging the regime: “sanctions” or “dialogue.” In
April 2013, the leader of the movement “For Freedom” A. Milinkevich, the leader of
the civil campaign “Tell the Truth” U. Neklyaeu, and the chairman of the Belarusian
Popular Front A. Yanukevich issued a joint statement that called on the EU to resume
a full-fledged dialogue with the Belarusian government. In their opinion, coopera-
tion with the EU would help Belarusian society to modernize and begin democratic
reforms. The rest of the opposition camp represented by the chairman of the United
Civil Party A. Lebedko, the coordinator of the civil campaign “European Belarus” U.
Kobets, and the Co-chairman of the Belarusian Christian Democracy V. Rimasheuski
criticized the idea of a dialogue with the EU authorities. On 18 April 2013, Charter’97
reported on its website that U. Kobets compared Lukashenka’s modernization of
Belarus with the modernization of the concentration camps: “You can paint a fence
and plant roses around the perimeter of barbed wire, but this camp will not change its
essence,” he said. The absence of a common position on this and other issues makes
it impossible to agree on successful development and implementation of a common
strategy. The October of 2013 confirmed contradictions among the democratic forces
in anticipation of the local elections in 2014 and the presidential ones in 2015 with
two clear blocks emerging—the People’s Referendum and Talaka—that have almost
no common ground. While Talaka proposes to choose a single candidate in the 2015
presidential election via primaries and will talk to voters about the need for political
reform, the People’s Referendum prefers to hold a Congress of Democratic Forces,
which will choose a future presidential candidate and will appeal to voters with mes-
sages about fulfilling everyday needs. Several organizations decided not to join
either of these two blocks. Among those are the Belarusian Christian Democracy, the
Social Democratic Party, and nearly all the leaders of the European Belarus group.
Under the regime’s persistent pressure and the latest warnings to refrain from getting
involved in counter-activities in the light of the events in Ukraine, one can hardly
expect the opposition to be able to create an attractive strategy for change.
Because the political party leaders have been in opposition for almost a decade
and often much longer, with differences of opinion in areas such as historical legacy,
the market economy, language, and geopolitics, it is not surprising that public sup-
port for the opposition in Belarus has been weak. IISEPS reports that while in 2009
only 25.2 percent of the respondents would have voted for a candidate from the
opposition in case of the presidential elections, this number decreased to 13.6 percent
in 2013. Overall, the lack of organized opposition has made it very hard if not impos-
sible to wage and sustain collective action that would generate frames powerful
enough to initiate the process of reshaping the broader political landscape. As Gene
Sharp states in his famous book-length essay on the generic problem of how to
900  East European Politics and Societies and Cultures

destroy a dictatorship From Dictatorship to Democracy, “In order to increase the

chances for success, resistance leaders will need to formulate a comprehensive plan
of action capable of strengthening the suffering people, weakening and then destroy-
ing the dictatorship, and building a durable democracy.”19

Conclusion

By analyzing the transformations of attitudes and moods in Belarus over a time

span of about twenty years and by studying some examples of Belarusians’ collec-
tive behavior through the social movements literature, this study shows that the
weakness of the mobilizing structures and framing processes at times of expanding
political opportunities resulted in the failure of collective actions to sustain them-
selves. Belarus is still a long way from being a democratic state due to the control
of economic, political and social life by the government. However, it is undeniable
that the associative fabric of Belarusian society has been growing hand in hand with
the rise in its exposure to foreign cultural influences and, therefore, to a more open
and tolerant culture. Thus, the simultaneous processes of sociocultural change and
political and economic liberalization have contributed to the moderate growth of
mobilization during presidential elections and have induced a modest change in the
political preferences of the Belarusian masses.
I provide a new perspective on the ongoing political process in Belarus and con-
tribute to the literature on democratization and social movements in Belarus. While
I present evidence of modest changes in the popular attitudes and patterns of mobili-
zation, I also identify new reasons for the failure of democratization in that country.

Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Prof. Jan Kubik for his insightful comments and suggestions for
this essay.

Notes
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Political Opportunity, Mobilizing Structures and Cultural Framings (New York: Cambridge University
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 2. Hans-Georg Heinrich and Ludmila Lobova, Belarus: External Pressure, Internal Change
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang), 2009.
  3. T. Kuzio, Aspects of the Orange Revolution VI: Post- Communist Democratic Revolutions in
Comparative Perspective (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2007); V. Fritz, State-Building: Study of Ukraine,
Lithuania, Belarus and Russia (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007).
  4. D. R. Marples, “Outpost of Tyranny? The Failure of Democratization in Belarus,” Democratization
16, no. 4 (2009): 756–76.
 Kulakevich / Understanding the Difficulty for Change in Belarus  901

  5. P. Rutland, “Belarus: The Last Dictator,” Analysis: A Central European Review 2, no. 4 (2006):
59–70.
 6. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western
Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); W. Gamson, Talking Politics (New York:
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  7. D. Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (Chicago:
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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 36.
  8. Ronald Inglehart and Wayne E. Baker, “Modernization, Cultural Change and the Persistence of
Traditional Values,” American Sociological Review 65 (2000): 19–51.
 9. New York Times, July 17, 1994.
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(2007–2011),” Belarusian Institute for Strategic Studies 2012, http://www.belinstitute.eu/images/doc-
pdf/english_research_yelis.pdf.
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Mobilization; H. Kitschelt, “Political Opportunity Structures and Political Protest: Anti-nuclear
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13. S. J. Tarrow. Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective (1994):85.
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Bulldozer/Rose/Orange/Tulip Revolutions,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 2 (2007): 259–76.
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Revolutions,” Perspectives on Politics 5, no. 3 (2007): 537–53.
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Choice 61, no. 1 (1989): 41–74; R. Goldstone, “Similarity, Interactive Activation, and Mapping,” Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20, no. 1 (1994): 3–28.
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18. Ibid.
19. G. Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (Boston:
Albert Einstein Institution, 2003); C. Boix and S. C. Stokes, “Endogenous Democratization,” World
Politics 55, no. 4 (2003): 517–49; J. McCarthy and M. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social
Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (1977): 1212–41; Y. Preiherman,
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economic-liberalisation-belarus-yet-again-9358; E. Selbin, “Revolution in the Real World: Bringing
Agency Back In,” in Theorizing Revolutions, ed. John Foran (London: Routledge, 1997), 123–36; A.
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Tatsiana Kulakevich is a PhD Student in the Department of Political Science and a Graduate Associate
at the Center for European Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. She grounds her
research in comparative politics and international relations, with a regional focus on Eastern Europe.