Routledge Handbook of Democratization

Jeffrey Haynes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136513329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This exciting new handbook provides a global overview of the process of democratization, offering chapter by chapter discussion at both the country and regional levels and examining the interaction between the domestic and external factors that affect the progression of countries from authoritarian to democratic rule.

Bringing together 29 key experts in the field, the work is designed to contrast the processes and outcomes of democratic reform in a wide range of different societies, evaluating the influence of factors such as religion, economic development, and financial resources.

It is structured thematically into four broad sections:

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• Section I provides a regional tour d'horizon of the current state of democratisation and democracy in eight regions around the world

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• Section II examines key structures, processes and outcomes of democratisation and democracy

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• Section III focuses on the relationship between democratisation and international relations through examination of a range of issues and actors including: the third and fourth waves of democracy, political conditionality, the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union and the Organisation of African States

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• Section IV Examines the interaction between democratisation and development with a focus on poverty and inequality, security, human rights, gender, war, and conflict resolution.

A comprehensive survey of democratization across the world, this work will be essential reading for scholars and policy-makers alike.

Part I Democratization – the Regional Picture

1 Central and Eastern Europe

Paul G. Lewis

DOI: 10.4324/9780203148433-1

The Regional Pattern of Democratization

From the end of the Second World War and the Yalta Agreement of 1945, Central and Eastern Europe fell – or, in the case of the Soviet Union itself, remained – under communist rule and was thus subject to an authoritarian system of government. Various popular uprisings or reform movements were crushed by Soviet military intervention (East Germany 1953, Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968), some states removed themselves – partly or wholly – from Soviet influence (Yugoslavia, Albania and Romania), while the Polish leadership put an end to the conflicts of the Solidarity period and preserved one-party rule by declaring a domestic state of war in 1981. Authoritarian rule of somewhat different kinds was nevertheless maintained for some 40 years, and the regional picture only began to undergo significant change with the accession to power in the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985.

In the Soviet Union there was soon much talk of glasnost’ (openness) and perestroika (reconstruction), and political life gradually began to open up. In 1990 the leading role of the party was expunged from the constitution, and the communist power monopoly thus formally abolished, while diverse reform measures and processes of more radical change were already under way in the countries of Eastern Europe, as it had gradually become clear that the Soviet Union under Gorbachev was no longer committed to maintaining communist rule by force. The basic decision seems to have been taken in late 1986, although there is much uncertainty about the date and when the information was conveyed to the leaders of the satellite countries.

Various measures of liberalization were undertaken after this date, particularly in Poland and Hungary, the nations that led the reform movement. Moves to establish independent political parties were thus taken in Hungary in 1988, and in Poland a referendum was held in late 1987 on economic reform proposals, and steps taken the following year to reinstate the Solidarity trade union and involve it in a new stabilization programme. It soon became clear that a broader process of democratization was under way throughout the region. The key public events that marked the early stages of this process took place in 1989 and included, in May, the dismantling of parts of the barbed-wire fence that formed the Iron Curtain from the Hungarian side, the holding of semifree elections in Poland during June and the breaching of the Berlin Wall in November. By the end of the year, the authoritarian regime had collapsed in these countries (as well as in Czechoslovakia), and the transition to democracy was clearly under way.

Free, competitive parliamentary elections were held in Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Hungary in 1990 (although not in Poland until 1991), as well as in Bulgaria and Romania – although in the latter case, in particular, there were doubts as to the fairness of the election. The Soviet Union itself began to break up in 1991, and free national elections were held in Estonia and Lithuania in 1992. Competitive elections in what were soon to become the successor states to Yugoslavia had already been held in 1990, so the transition to democracy in Central and Eastern Europe got under way with amazing speed once the possibility of peaceful change opened up and the leading nations took the first steps. The pace of change was such that democratic opposition forces were sometimes ill-prepared and outmanoeuvred by established power-holders, as in Serbia, thus blocking prospects for further reform and delaying the process of more fundamental regime change for some years.

But it was not just because of the political astuteness of former communist leader Slobodan Milošević that democratic change encountered particular obstacles in Yugoslavia and its successor states. Democratization in Central and Eastern Europe was part of a broader, or multifaceted, process of change. It was pointed out at an early stage that the post-communist region faced a triple transition, one involving not just regime transformation but also marketization and fundamental economic reform as well as processes – in many cases – of state formation or even nation-building (Offe 1991). These were processes that were hardly unproblematic in themselves but their mutual interaction could have highly negative consequences, not least for democratization. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Yugoslavia, where Milošević set out to create a greater Serbia as the communist federation underwent rapid disintegration. The ensuing war involved Croats and Bosnians, lasted for several painful years and delayed the prospects for peaceful political change for a yet longer period. In Serbia, for example, Milošević was only ousted in 2000 and the path to democratic change finally opened. The unification of Germany and the dissolution of the Czechoslovak federation (into the Czech Republic and Slovakia) also changed state borders, although to far less deleterious effect. The demise of the Soviet Union produced yet more independent states, but this was a process that – in the core European area at least – did not involve any major border disputes.

While the process of democratization has been relatively straightforward in some areas, in others it has been considerably more complicated. Twenty years after the beginning of the process, the record of post-communist democratization in Central and Eastern Europe has therefore, not surprisingly, been a mixed one, although in simple terms the pattern is quite clear. According to the ratings of the US-based Freedom House (http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=1), all the former communist countries that are now members of the European Union were ‘free’ in 2009 (i.e. Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, as well as parts of the now united Germany), as were Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia and Ukraine. Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia and Moldova are ‘partly free’, implying substantial but not complete democratization (Puddington 2010).

According to the slightly different ratings of Nations in Transit, eight of the new EU members are also now regarded as consolidated democracies, excluding only Bulgaria and Romania. Russia, however, is no longer transitional and now has a consolidated authoritarian regime, as has Belarus. Most of the partly free countries (the exception is Bosnia) are also seen as semi-consolidated democracies (Nations in Transit 2009). So the bulk of Central Europe has democratized successfully, and things are now moving in a positive direction in much of the West Balkans.

Key Features of Democratization in Central and Eastern Europe

What accounts for the stronger current of democratization in the countries to the west (and to some extent the north) of the region? A number of explanations are readily apparent. From what has already been stated, two main factors – location and the role of the ‘West’ (in practice the effect of potential membership of the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)), and the impact of border disputes (the established idea that in order to become a democracy a territory has first to become a coherent state) – are obvious candidates. Throughout the post-communist world, it has been argued, ‘there is a positive correlation between distance from the West and regime type’ (McFaul 2002: 241). Where the initial balance of forces was unfavourable to democratic reformers, the attraction of EU and NATO membership gradually strengthened the hand of reformers by providing incentives to change and deepen democracy. Serbia has already been mentioned in passing in this respect, and Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia may also be placed in this category. Anti-communist mobilization was certainly sufficient to bring down Romanian communism and eliminate President Nicolae Ceaus¸escu and his wife, but, at least partly in consequence of the relatively totalitarian rule of the communist period, was unable to provide new leaders or any organizational basis for democratic change. It took time for these features to emerge, and many observers agree that the attractions of EU membership played a major part in bringing this about (Morlino and Sadurski 2010).

The observation that a polity (generally a state) needs defined borders for a democratic regime to emerge and put down strong roots is not a recent one, and has long been accepted as a major condition for successful democratization. The wars of the Yugoslav succession in the 1990s provide strong evidence of this, and it was only when they were resolved that the alternative attractions of Western integration began to exert a stronger influence. In contrast to Serbia, democratic challengers did well in the first free elections to be held in the Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina but, as independent states, they were soon drawn into the bitterest conflict seen in Europe since the Second World War. Much of the responsibility for this can be attributed to the political ambitions of Milošević, who adopted a strongly nationalist orientation towards the end of the communist period. Only Slovenia was able to escape the post-communist conflicts and make a rapid transition to democracy.

However, it must also be recognized that the Yugoslav state had never had a settled history. Established in 1918 and formalized at the Versailles Conference, there were bitter conflicts between its constituent nationalities before, during and after the Second World War. Equally, while Franjo Tudjman did well in the Croatian free elections of 1990, his political orientation was a strongly nationalist one that did little for democratic change and much to perpetuate the conflict with the Serbs, in which Bosnians were also involved and suffered much destruction at the hands of both other groups. While the war is now over, though, and Tudjman’s legacy may well be withering following his death more than a decade ago, the political travails of Bosnia continue and in 2011 it remains subject to the authority of a high representative appointed by the United Nations (UN). Once the Bosnian conflict was over, Macedonia – another constituent republic of the former Yugoslavia – also saw the outbreak of major ethnic violence, in 2001, when an uprising of part of the Albanian minority came near to leading the country into civil war. After a recurrence of violence during the 2008 parliamentary elections, though, the political situation has stabilized as the EU came to exert greater influence. While a far less extreme case, the establishment of a separate Slovak state in 1993 also strengthened the position of Vladimir Mečiar, a nationalist with strong ties to the communist regime, whose behaviour raised doubts about his (and the country’s) democratic commitment. This was a development that prompted the EU to adopt a more sceptical attitude to Slovakia than the other seven post-communist candidates (Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia), which joined the Union in 2004.

While there is general agreement that Slovakia, Bulgaria and (particularly) Romania were slower to take the transition path than Poland, Hungary and th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction—Jeffrey Haynes
• PART I Democratization – the regional picture
• PART II Democratization and governance
• PART III Democratization and international relations
• PART IV Democratization and development
• Index