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Challenges to Democracy
'The book is written in a systematic, clear and accessible style and provides an excellent introduction to the state of democracy in contemporary postsocialist Europe. . . . Recommended for undergraduate, graduate, research, and faculty collections.' - P. Rutland, Choice The euphoria evidenced in the aftermath of the collapse of communist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s sometimes conveyed the impression that the process of democratization would be achieved without difficulty or tribulation. This book sets out to provide a thorough comparative analysis of the challenges which face the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and considers the impact of political change. Dr...
Between Past and Future
The tenth anniversary of the collapse of communism in Central and Eastern Europe is the basis for this text which reflects upon the past ten years and what lies ahead for the future. An international group of academics and public intellectuals, including former dissidents and active politicians, engage in an exchange on the antecedents, causes, contexts, meanings and legacies of the 1989 revolutions. The contributors address various issues including liberal democracy and its enemies; modernity and discontent; economic reforms and their social impact; ethnicity; nationalism and religion; geopolitics; electoral systems and political power; European integration; and the demise of Yugoslavia.
Democracy and Post-Communism
The collapse of communism was widely heralded as the dawn of democracy across the former Soviet region. However, the political outcome has been much less uniform. The post-communist states have developed political systems from democracy to dictatorship. Using examples and empirical data collected from twenty-six former Soviet states, Graeme Gill provides a detailed comparative analysis of the core issues of regime change, the creation of civil society, economic reform and the changing nature of post-communism. Within these individual cases, it becomes clear that political outcomes have not been arbitrary, but directly reflect the circumstances surrounding the birth of independence. Students of Comparative Politics, International Relations and Russian and Post-Soviet Studies should find this book essential reading.
Governing the Locals
Governing the Locals demonstrates that with the exception of a brief period in 1990-92 when the local soviets fostered mass mobilization, local governments in post-Soviet Russia have actively constrained grass-roots activism. Rather than serving as instruments of the "schooling in civil society," or of "making democracy work"--as the conventional wisdom holds--local governments have been used by the regional authoritarian or ethnocratic regimes as instruments of top down social control. The author suggests that this tendency has been on the rise under President Putin, whose reforms have served to integrate local government into a centralized power vertical potentially facilitating authoritar...
Russian Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century and the Shadow of the Past
Because the turbulent trajectory of Russia's foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union echoes previous moments of social and political transformation, history offers a special vantage point from which to judge the current course of events. In this book, a mix of leading historians and political scientists examines the foreign policy of contemporary Russia over four centuries of history. The authors explain the impact of empire and its loss, the interweaving of domestic and foreign impulses, long-standing approaches to national security, and the effect of globalization over time. Contributors focus on the underlying patterns that have marked Russian foreign policy and that persist...
The Status of Soviet Civil Science
This volume represents one outcome of the initiatives, taken from time to time by the NATO Science Committee, to add to the work of supporting civil science within the Alliance by mounting open meetings or other projects dealing with some topical aspect of science and technology policy. Past examples have included the 20th anniversary meeting of the establish ment of the Science Committee in 1978 which made a review of the achieve ments of the various programmes. It proved to be a valuable opportunity to take stock of the impact of science and technology on Western societies and was a particularly useful occasion for a critical analysis of the changing nature and social role of science and t...
Economic Interdependence and War
Does growing economic interdependence among great powers increase or decrease the chance of conflict and war? Liberals argue that the benefits of trade give states an incentive to stay peaceful. Realists contend that trade compels states to struggle for vital raw materials and markets. Moving beyond the stale liberal-realist debate, Economic Interdependence and War lays out a dynamic theory of expectations that shows under what specific conditions interstate commerce will reduce or heighten the risk of conflict between nations. Taking a broad look at cases spanning two centuries, from the Napoleonic and Crimean wars to the more recent Cold War crises, Dale Copeland demonstrates that when lea...
Ethnic Politics in Europe
This detailed account of ethnic minority politics explains when and how European institutions successfully used norms and incentives to shape domestic policy toward ethnic minorities and why those measures sometimes failed. Going beyond traditional analyses, Kelley examines the pivotal engagement by the European Union, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Council for Europe in the creation of such policies. Following language, education, and citizenship issues during the 1990s in Latvia, Estonia, Slovakia, and Romania, she shows how the combination of membership conditionality and norm-based diplomacy was surprisingly effective at overcoming even significant domes...
Soldiers and the Soviet State
How much power does the Soviet military exert on the politics of the Kremlin? This is one of the most controversial questions in the study of the Soviet Union, here addressed by eight top Western specialists on Soviet politics and security policy. While the authors assert that the civil-military relationship has been less turbulent than often believed, they also point out that Gorbachev's reforms threaten the system of buffers that have until now shielded the military-industrial world from disruption and change. Introduced by Timothy Colton's essay, "Perspectives on Civil-Military Relations," the volume discusses civil-military relations in relation to political change (Bruce Parrott), the K...
