MODERNIZATION WITHOUT THE CITIZEN
1. A State Without the Citizen
The elections held on June 7 once again confronted many Armenian voters with the absence of a real political alternative — a reality with which they chose, however reluctantly, to reconcile themselves. The country’s most important political process once again exposed not only the chronic weakness of political competition and institutional safeguards. It also showed that Armenia is not a modern state.
A modern state is not defined by the number of renovated schools or the length of newly built roads, nor by the scale of digitalized services or the expansion of social programs, especially when such expansion becomes visible only during an election period. Such changes may indicate infrastructural and administrative modernization, but they do not, in themselves, amount to a qualitative transformation of the state. The existence of markets, a private sector, investments, banks, and various services is a necessary but insufficient condition for “normality” in the Western sense to which the government, reproduced by the latest elections, so insistently appeals.
A country that effectively lacks an independent judiciary, a parliament formed through genuinely competitive elections, and effective mechanisms of parliamentary oversight over budgetary spending, the army, the police, and the security services is not a modern state. In a truly modern state, the services it provides are understood not as a favor granted by those in power, but as a form of realizing the inalienable rights of citizens. Such a state sees the citizen not as a subject to whom something may be permitted, but as a responsible member of the political community, endowed with the right to demand, challenge, and exercise oversight.
The Armenian state has once again failed to affirm the idea that citizens are co-authors of statehood and participants in its development, and that their demand for greater accountability and active participation is not a threat to democratic stability but a necessary condition for strengthening it.
For decades, the state has been building democratic institutions and mechanisms while simultaneously fearing the very citizen those institutions are meant to form. It wants modern universities, but instead of cultivating critical thinking and encouraging academic freedom, it dismisses dissenting academics. It wants courts, but not justice; a judicial system, but not an arbiter between the authorities and the citizen. It needs parliament as a source of legitimacy, but not as an independent body of popular representation and oversight of the executive. It recognizes elections as a procedure for affirming power, but not as an instrument of accountability to citizens or of rotation in office. It wants a society, but not a citizen; a population, but not a political community.
Anyone who behaves not as a “grateful” recipient of state services but as the bearer of inalienable rights is perceived by the system as a violator of order — a subject who threatens “stability” and lays claim to an authority that, in our political culture, is regarded as the exclusive monopoly of those in power. The aspiration to demand legality, participation, and respect for human dignity not as a request addressed to the authorities but as a citizen’s right provokes a furious reaction from senior officials and government propagandists. A mechanism is then set in motion to pacify “impostors” and “traitors,” through which the authorities seek to control, restrict, and neutralize those who claim a role in shaping the national will: political and public figures, journalists, judges, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens with an active civic position.
Particularly alarming is the political degradation unfolding before our eyes, which has already ceased to trouble society. It is perceived as the price of stability, as an inevitable “side effect” of a difficult geopolitical situation, as the lesser evil. Yes, the institutions are weak — but now is not the time to demand more. Yes, the courts are not independent — but that was the case before as well. Yes, political leaders are cynical, spit in the face of the citizen whose hands are tied, and publicly allow outright vulgar abuse — but they promise peace. Yes, the election result is contradictory — but the alternative is worse. Yes, rights are violated — but the state must be “strong.” In this way, society gradually gives up not only resistance, but also the sense of civic dignity — the capacity to perceive its rights as the foundation of civic subjectivity.
The particular path of the Republic of Armenia’s development — the 1988 Spitak earthquake, socio-political upheavals, wars, and the national catastrophe of 2020–23 — has contributed to the formation, in public consciousness, of an understanding of the state as a self-sufficient value before which the interests of society and of the individual are treated as secondary.
In recent years, a tradition of extreme personalization of the state has taken root, stemming from the very nature of power and reproducing it. In such a system, representatives of the regime orient themselves not toward the citizen, institutions, norms, and procedures, but toward the leader, on whom not only their personal well-being depends, but also the stability of the patronage networks they have built.
The demand for public participation, an important element of civic culture in developed societies, has never occupied a significant place in Armenia’s hierarchy of public priorities. Traditionally, expectations of the state have been reduced not to demands for participation and accountability, but to the desire that it not intrude too harshly into a person’s private space. The reverse side of this attitude has been a voluntary alienation from participation in public affairs, expressed not only in electoral passivity but also in deep skepticism about the possibility of civic influence over power.
2. Elections Without Accountability
Western politicians and experts, guided by considerations of geopolitical expediency, avoid acknowledging the authoritarian character of the current regime in Armenia. Their attitude toward our country today is determined not so much by the maturity of its institutions as by Armenia’s role in the strategic confrontation between the West and Russia.
Nevertheless, if external assessments are dominated by the factor of geopolitical expediency, understanding the mechanism by which power is reproduced inside the country requires examining how Armenian voters perceive the meaning of elections. In democratic societies, elections function first and foremost as a mechanism of accountability: the citizen assesses the authorities’ performance and, depending on that assessment, either confirms their mandate to govern or withdraws it. The voter thus acts as an auditor of public authority, asking a simple question: what has happened in the fields of security, welfare, freedoms, and rights during this government’s time in office?
In Armenia’s political practice, however, elections largely perform a different function. Instead of serving as a mechanism of accountability, they have become an instrument for reproducing and strengthening loyalty and established networks of influence. For a significant part of society, politics is defined less by competition between programs and ideas than by confrontation between personalities, influence networks, and patronage relations. In such a system, voters act not as subjects assessing the government’s performance, but as members of a “tribe,” supporting their members and rejecting outsiders.
The consequence of this logic is a substantial weakening of democratic mechanisms of control and accountability. When voting becomes an expression of group belonging rather than an assessment of the government’s record, elections cease to perform their democratic function and instead serve to reproduce existing informal networks of influence. That is why, after the elections that have taken place, Armenian voters must answer the following question: are they bearers of narrow group loyalty, or citizens who judge power by the results of its actions?
The problem revealed by the recent elections is not limited to the counting of votes. They showed that Armenian society remains in a condition in which the citizen rarely perceives himself as the source of power. As long as rights are understood as concessions granted by the authorities, public and political participation as a risk, and a minimal space of civic autonomy as sufficient freedom, elections will serve not as a mechanism of accountability and rotation in power, but as a means of reproducing power and reinforcing a flawed system.
The main question is not how the authorities mastered their own reproduction, but what must be done so that power — to use the formulation of the 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln — is truly of the people, accountable to the people, and for the people.
Armen Martirosyan
Member of the Supreme Council of the Republic of Armenia (1990–95)
Member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia (1995–99)
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Armenia
