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In the conference at New Europe College in Bucharest, on 24 of May, Urs Altermatt analyzed what could be named “the Suisse model”. He underlined the originality of this democracy and talk about the social and political system. His very detailed information is interesting to be analyzed by every European country.
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Radical change, values of the new and the old society, official propaganda are points on which the author focuses in this article. The article presents the change in the Romanian society when the communism was established in Romania.
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Under the scrutiny of qualitative discourse analysis, the 1998 and 1999 reports by the EU on the eastern applicants reveal the two main discursive strategies of the EU towards these countries: inferiorizing them and postponing their admission. These strategies foreclose inclusion of eastern European countries as anything other than second class members of the Union.
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A discourse analysis of public speeches delivered by top EU officials in the year 2000 shows that imperialist discursive means serve to recreate a hierarchical di-vision of Europe. In the context of the European Union’s “eastern enlargement”, these discursive tactics shield and solidify the power imbalance between the EU and the applicant countries.
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The 1997 Country Opinions, issued by the EU Commission, reinscribe the Enlightenment’s dichotomy on eastern and western Europe by constructing the eastern applicants as inferior to the EU and the civilization it is made to stand for. The paper reviews the discursive patterns through which the construction takes place
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The EU–NATO relationship reveals unresolved tensions among five major powers regarding the colonial partitioning of eastern Europe. These recurring tensions may determine the extent of the region’s differentiation within the EU or differential subsumption under the major powers and may also explain the EU’s limited success in state-formation.
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Considers how the concepts of empire and coloniality are applicable to the “eastern enlargement” of the European Union. Provides a comparative-historical definition for both and suggests that detached empire is relevant as a historical memory; contiguous empire and colonial representations of otherness are directly observable in European state-remaking today
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This study shows how the Austrian Freedom Party’s program represents and constructs itself as opposed to the outside world consisting of immigrants and political opponents. After outlining the major challenges of Austrian history since the end of the Cold War with a special focus on the eastern enlargement of the European Union, it documents that the FPÖ’s perception of itself and the immigrants and political opponents reveals colonial tropes.
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The article is dealing with the planned and distorted reform of the (dual) constitution of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the High Commissioner, Wolfgang Petritsch and his giving in to the Serbian side, Republika Srpska, with the fact, that Bosniaks and Croats have no equal rights with the Serbs and with the Commission for the Implementation of Dayton Accord and their approach to this discrimination.
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Romania’s government keeps growing, and this is not helping performance, warns the Politics Section. Many public agencies are created, with various mandates and purposes, but very few are ever dismantled. The result is duplication, poor coordination and more entry points for lobbyists – as is particularly the case with economic policies. Better give up the idea of creating a new Ministry for Enterprises, since it is not likely to bring any improvement, argues the article.
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The government should be more careful in its dealings with local issues, or otherwise it may just create itself more domestic problems, whilst also losing in terms of external image. Recent mistakes and how to avoid new ones are also discussed in the Politics Section.
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The rise of democracy is the most important development in the 20th century. This is a crucial fact to be taken into account when talking about the developing countries: democracies are not performing economically worse than autocracies, and no substantial famine has ever occurred in an independent and democratic country with free press, no matter how poor this country is. But democracy has not only instrumental value, to create wealth and spread social best practices through free communication; it has also intrinsic value for the human life. Moreover, it is a very general concept that can be adapted locally. As a result, particular cultural traditions cannot be used as a ground for rejecting the democratic institutions.
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The transition paradigm relies on five core assumptions: (i) any departure from authoritarianism can be considered a move towards democracy; (ii) democracy unfolds in a predetermined sequence of steps; (iii) elections are a crucial test; (iv) there are no special prerequisites of democracy; (v) the third wave of democratization takes place in coherent, functioning states. In fact, in a way or another, the experience of the last decade proved that these assumptions cannot be taken for granted. As a result, while the number of states qualified as dictatorships has reduced, the intermediary category of pseudo-democracies has swollen. The new regimes display either the syndrome of feckless pluralism, or that of dominant-power politics. Both are stable in the long run and detrimental to the quality of democratic life. If foreign assistance for democratization is to be effective, it must address the specific core syndrome that affects the political system in a country, and integrate the democracybuilding and socio-economic aid.
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Even though the third wave of democratization is over, the empirical data suggest that there has been no reverse wave yet. The global situation has stabilized in a sort of equilibrium, with some new political regimes qualifying as pseudo-democracies: they hold multiparty elections, but the real power lies with unaccountable actors, the minorities’ rights are infringed, media and the judiciary are not independent and there are oblique assaults of the democratic rules by the executives (hollowed democracy). The supremacy of the democratic ideology, the international demonstration effect and foreign assistance, as well as the reduced appetite of the military to seize power contribute to the continuation of this equilibrium.
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An advanced market society is not strictly necessary for the existence of a robust democratic culture, neither is it sufficient. The latter does not emerge automatically from the socio-economic modernization, while the former can also constitute the basis for hierarchical and unequal arrangements. As a result, there is no unique path that links development, the type of political regime and the democratic culture, but three: the Western one, in which democratization and its values preceded and favored the economic modernization; the authoritarian modernization, in which the sequence was reversed; and a third, incremental one, in which all three elements develop slowly and reinforce each other. In consequence, on the one hand, democratization does not have to pass through all the historical stages that define the Western experience, and hence can proceed at a faster pace; on the other, authoritarian reversals are possible anytime in those places where democratic political culture is still weak.
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The existence of a strong civil society, though not a prerequisite for the demise of autocracy and a successful transition, contributes to the consolidation of democracy. Modern democracies are complex institutional arrangements in which the political parties cannot channel all the communication between independent agents and the public sector. A high density of civil society associations is beneficial, but is not an automatic product of capitalism, urbanization and cognitive mobilization it requires explicit encouragement through public policies. While the “Asian societies” are too diverse to allow for non-trivial regional generalizations, it can be said that, overall, their civil societies have been by tradition been dependent on the public authority. In many Asian countries the modernization was a centrally-controlled experiment pursued by the urban elite. The current challenge in the region is to integrate the local civil society with the new political developments at the center, in order to make it a pillar of consolidated democracy.
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The general optimism that followed the third wave of democratization was grounded in the unilinear, stadial notion of democratic consolidation: once the transition is completed, there can be only one way of political development in the new democracies that is, towards the model of the advanced Western societies. In fact, such optimism is unwarranted. Undemocratic games are possible within the formal democratic frameworks, especially in societies with clientelar/particularistic traditions. Vicious equilibria in which the lack of accountability and undemocratic practices can coexist with formal democratic rules are stable in the long run.
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Even though liberalism and democracy are not the same thing, the former containts within itself the seeds of its own democratization. Once the liberal principles were accepted in politics, the property qualifications of voting were gradually removed and the universal suffrage became inevitable. Other barriers, such as the exclusion of women, were also removed subsequently. History proved that decision-making by majorities did not undermine the economic basis of prosperity. If anything, the revival of liberalism in the last two decades signals an even more profound understanding of the concept: limiting the excesses of the democratic governments and protecting individual rights are more important that simply translating public sentiment into public policy.
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