Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-13T03:56:51.411Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Peoples and States after 1989: The Political Costs of Incomplete National Revolutions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Peter H. Solomon
Peter H. Solomon*
Affiliation:
The Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

As communism was collapsing, both the discipline of political science and American foreign policy were becoming captivated by two concepts—the third wave of democratization and the democratic peace. The third wave of democratization is the "worldwide movement to democracy" that occurred in more than thirty countries during the decade and a half that began with the Portuguese coup of 1974. The democratic peace is the special peace that develops among liberal states "because they exercise democratic caution and are capable of appreciating the international rights of foreign republics."

Type
Film Review
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 58 , Issue 4: Special Issue: Ten Years after 1989: What Have We Learned? , Winter 1999 , pp. 883 - 884
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Huntington, Samuel P., The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, 1991), 3–4 Google Scholar.

2. Doyle, Michael W., “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (December 1986): 1161 Google Scholar.

3. Claude, Inis L..Jr., Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization, 3d ed. (New York, 1964), 48 Google Scholar. See, for example, Woodrow Wilson's last public speech, delivered in Pueblo, Colorado, on 25 September 1919, prior to his stroke; reprinted in Cronon, E. David, ed., The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson (Indianapolis, 1965), 514–31Google Scholar.

4. Cobban, Alfred, National Self-Determination, rev. ed. (Chicago, 1951), 20 Google Scholar.

5. Russett, Bruce M., Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold-War World (Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar; Ray, James Lee, “The Democratic Path to Peace,” Journal of Democracy 8, no. 2 (April 1997): 49–64 Google Scholar.

6. Mill, John Stuart, Considerations on Representative Government (Chicago, 1962), 82–91 Google Scholar.

7. See, for example, Vachudova, Milada Anna and Snyder, Tim, “Are Transitions Transitory? Two Types of Political Change in Eastern Europe since 1989,” East European Politics and Societies 11, no.1 (Winter 1997): 1–35 Google Scholar.

8. Linz, Juan J. and Stepan, Alfred, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, 1996), 16–17 Google Scholar.

9. Rustow, Dankwart A., A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization (Washington, D.C., 1967), 120–32Google Scholar. Also see Sidney Verba, “Sequences and Development,” in Binder, Leonard et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, 1971), 311 Google Scholar.

10. Furnivall, J. S., Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy (New York, 1944), 446–69Google Scholar.

11. Smith, Michael G., The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley, 1965), 86 Google Scholar.

12. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 82–91.

13. Dahl, Robert, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, 1971), 105–21Google Scholar.

14. Rabushka, Alvinand Shepsle, Kenneth A., Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability (Columbus, Ohio, 1972), 217 Google Scholar.

15. Dahl, Polyarchy, 105–23; Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 33–37.

16. Even some of these are very newly constructed nations; see, for example, Draper, Stark, “The Conceptualization of an Albanian Nation,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 20, no. 1 (January 1997): 123–44Google Scholar.

17. Kaiser, Robert and Chinn, Jeff, “Russian-Kazakh Relations in Kazakhstan,” Post-Soviet Geography 36, no. 5 (May 1995): 257–73Google Scholar. Also see Andre Liebich's brief survey of eastern European nation-states in “Getting Better, Getting Worse: Minorities in East Central Europe,” Dissent 43, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 84–89 Google Scholar.

18. Tolz, Vera, “Conflicting ‘Homeland Myths’ and Nation-State Building in Postcommunist Russia,” Slavic Review 57, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 267–94Google Scholar; Breslauer, George W. and Dale, Catherine, “Boris Yel'tsin and the Invention of a Russian Nation-State,” Post-Soviet Affairs 13, no. 4 (October-December 1997): 303–32Google Scholar.

19. Included are countries with populations that exceed one million. The classification of countries as democracies is taken from Lijphart, Arend, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, 1999)Google Scholar. The data on ethnic proportions are from Bromlei, lu. V., ed., Narody mira: Istoriko-etnograficheskii spravochnik (Moscow, 1988)Google Scholar.

20. Dahl, Polyarchy, 1–9.

21. Bremmer, Ianand Welt, Cory, “Kazakhstan's Quandary,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 3 (July 1995): 140 Google Scholar.

22. Barrington, Lowell, “The Domestic and International Consequences of Citizenship in the Soviet Successor States,” Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 5 (1995): 731–63Google Scholar; Park, Andrus, “Ethnicity and Independence: The Case of Estonia in Comparative Perspective,” Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 2 (1994): 68–87 Google Scholar; Kolstø, Pål and Tsilevich, Boris, “Patterns of Nation Building and Political Integration in a Bifurcated Postcommunist State: Ethnic Aspects of Parliamentary Elections in Latvia,” East European Politics and Societies 11, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 366–91Google Scholar.

23. Eric A. Nordlinger, Conflict Regulation in Divided Societies, Occasional Papers in International Aflairs, no. 29 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972); Lijphart, Arend, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven, 1977)Google Scholar; Horowitz, Donald L., Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, 1985)Google Scholar.

24. Lustick, Ian, “Stability in Deeply Divided Societies: Consociationalism versus Control,” World Politics 3I, no. 3 (April 1979): 325–44Google Scholar.

25. Lijphart, Arend, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries (New Haven, 1984), 23 Google Scholar.

26. In addition to the constitutional prescriptions, which describe distributions of decision-making powers, these authors often prescribe various policies such as proportional allocation of expenditures. In this article I address only the constitutional issues.

27. Lijphart, Arend, “Multiethnic Democracy,” in Lipset, Seymour Martin, ed., The Encyclopedia of Democracy (Washington, D.C., 1995), 3:856 Google Scholar.

28. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 628–51. Also see the debate between Joel Barkan and Andrew Reynolds in Sisk, Timothy D. and Reynolds, Andrew, eds., Elections and Conflict Management in Africa (Washington, D.C., 1998)Google Scholar.

29. Lijphart, “Multiethnic Democracy,” 856; Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 613— 22.

30. Sisk, Timothy D., Power Sharing and International Mediation in Ethnic Conflicts (Washington, D.C., 1996)Google Scholar; Lapidoth, Ruth, Autonomy: Flexible Solutions to Ethnic Conflicts (Washington, D.C., 1996)Google Scholar.

31. Harris, Peter and Reilly, Ben, eds., Democracy and Deep-Rooted Conflict: Options for Negotiators (Stockholm, 1998)Google Scholar. The National Research Council has also recently issued a study of electoral rules appropriate to deeply divided states; see Reilly, Ben and Reynolds, Andrew, Electoral Systems and Conflict in Divided Societies (Washington, D.C., 1999)Google Scholar.

32. Chapman, David, Can Civil Wars Be Avoided? Electoral and Constitutional Options for Ethnically Divided Countries (London, 1999)Google Scholar. Also see Varady, Tibor, “Minorities, Majorities, Law, and Ethnicity: Reflections of the Yugoslav Case,” Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 1 (February 1997): 9–54 Google Scholar.

33. Brubaker, Rogers, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1996)Google Scholar.

34. The concept of ethnoconstitutional crisis is both narrower and broader than the various definitions of nationalist conflict. Its virtue is its precision. Moreover, it forces us to focus on the core issue of nationalism.

35. Goldman, Joseph Richard, “Consociational Authoritarian Politics and the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution: A Preliminary Note,” East European Quarterly 19, no. 2 (June 1985): 241–49Google Scholar; van den Berghe, Pierre L., The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York, 1981)Google Scholar.

36. Of course, Tajikistan has suffered through a severe civil war, but the ethnic claims of the Pamiris and Gorno-Badakhshan autonomous oblast have played only a minor role in this.

37. Suny, Ronald G., The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993)Google Scholar; Verdery, Katherine, “Nationalism, Postsocialism, and Space in Eastern Europe,” Social Research 63, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 79–83 Google Scholar; Denitch, Bogdan, Limits and Possibilities: The Crisis of Yugoslav Socialism and Stale Socialist Systems (Minneapolis, 1990), 78 Google Scholar.

38. Hislope, Robert, “Intra-Ethnic Conflict in Croatia and Serbia: Flanking and the Consequences for Democracy,” East European Quarterly 30, no. 4 (January 1996): 471–94Google Scholar.

39. Wolchik, Sharon L., “The Politics of Ethnicity in Post-Communist Czechoslovakia,” East European Politics and Societies 8, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 163 Google Scholar.

40. Bunce, Valerie, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 87–88 Google Scholar.

41. Leff, Carol Skalnik, “Democratization and Disintegration in Multinational States: The Breakup of the Communist Federations,” World Politics 51, no. 2 (January 1999): 212–13Google Scholar.

42. Wolchik, “Politics of Ethnicity,” 153–58; Butora, Martin and Butorova, Zora, “Slovakia: The Identity Challenges of the Newly Born State,” Social Research 60, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 709 Google Scholar; Hill, Ronald J., “Managing Ethnic Conflict,” Journal of Communist Studies 9, no. 1 (March 1993): 57–73 Google Scholar.

43. Selznick, Philip, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (Glencoe, 1960), 2 Google Scholar.

44. Bebler, Anton, “Yugoslavia's Variety of Communist Federation and Her Demise,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 26 (March 1993): 72–86 Google Scholar. An instructive comparison is the opposite extreme in which ethnopoliticians have no institutionally based leverage over the central government; see, for example, Barany, Zoltan, “Ethnic Mobilization and the State: The Roma in Eastern Europe,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (March 1998): 308–27Google Scholar.

45. Roeder, Philip G., “Soviet Federalism and Ethnic Mobilization,” World Politics 43, no. 2 (January 1991): 196–232 Google Scholar.

46. The set of dyads is derived from Bromlei, Narody mira.

47. Ted Robert Gurr, ed., Minorities at Risk Project at www.bsos.umd.edu/cidcm/niar (consulted 23 July 1998); Minahan, James, Nations without Slates: A Historical Dictionary of Contemporary National Movements (Westport, Conn., 1996)Google Scholar.

48. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook: World Armaments and Disarmament, annual editions (New York, 1987–98)Google Scholar; Wallensteen, Peter and Sollenberg, Margareta, “Armed Conflict and Regional Conflict Complexes, 1989–97',” Journal of Peace Research 35, no. 5 (September 1998): 621–34Google Scholar.

49. In addition, it should be noted that the state of the country's economy had no significant effect. The measure of the state of the economy is the country's gross domestic product per capita for the previous year. These data are measured in U.S. dollars at constant 1990 prices and are taken from United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Information and Policy Analysis, Statistical Division, Statistical Yearbook, annual editions (New York: 1993–97).

50. The independent variable is the minority's proportion of the country's total population in 1985. In these data the largest minority in fact constitutes 40.6 percent of the country's population and the smallest constitutes less than 1.0 percent. (The proportion of the majority or titular group of a country is set to zero in the numerator, but not in the denominator. Thus, the lowest value is actually zero.) These data are derived from Bromlei, Narody mira.

51. Cultural heterogeneity is operationalized as a dichotomous variable based on the major language spoken by the ethnic group and the official language of the central government. When the two belong to the same linguistic phylum and group, they are classified as ethnically homogeneous dyads; otherwise, as diverse dyads. See the argument in Raymond W. Basch, “The Effects of Ethnic Separation on Democratization: A Comparative Study,” East European Quarterly 32, no. 2 (June 1998): 221–42.

52. Democratization is operationalized by the Freedom House's (1999) index of political liberties and the inclusiveness of the regimes. Specifically, the Freedom House index is weighted by the proportion of adults registered to vote and transformed so that it ranges from 7 (most democratic) to 1 (least democratic). The sources of data are the annual editions of Freedom House, Freedom in the World: Political Rights and Civil Liberties (New York, 1987–1996) and International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Voter Turnout from 1945 to 1997: A Global Report on Political Participation (Stockholm, 1998).

53. The coefficient estimate on ethnoconstitutional crises is marginally significant, but the diagnostic runs show that it is not robust.

54. In the pooled cross-section-time-series analysis, this is transformed so that countries coded as 4 on the 7-point Democratization Index are assigned the lowest score and countries coded as either 7 (most democratic) or 1 (least democratic) on the democratization index are assigned the highest scores. Specifically, the transformed democratization index in the third equation is the absolute value of the remainder from the original democratization index minus 4. This “curvilinear” specification offers a better “fit” to the data in the third equation than does the original index.

55. Two variables operationalize ethnofederalism. The first is a dichotomous variable that indicates whether the state is federal or at least includes some autonomous regions within it—that is, either symmetrical or asymmetrical federalism. The second is a dichotomous variable that indicates whether the ethnic group within the specific ethnopolitical dyad has been granted a first-order or a second-order autonomous region. These data are from Furtak, Robert K., The Political Systems of the Socialist States: An Introduction to Marxist-Leninist Regimes (Brighton, Eng., 1986)Google Scholar, and the annual editions of The Europa World Yearbook (London, 1987–98). Ethnic groups without first- or second-order autonomy in a federal or asymmetrically federal state are coded 1 on the first variable, but 0 on the second. Ethnic groups with either first- or second-order autonomy are coded 1 on the first variable as well as on the second.

56. The estimator for autonomy is quite robust, but the estimator for federalism is not. If the true value of the latter is zero, then the third line in table 6 would be identical to the second, the second value in the first line would be unchanged, but the first and third values in the first line would be higher. I report the values returned by the original equations so that I do not knowingly overstate the effect.

57. The source of the data is Minahan, Nations without States, and Pipes, Richard, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917–1923, rev. ed. (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

58. In these data all regimes are classified as soviet, parliamentary, presidential, semipresidential, or transitional. These classifications are based on Easter, Gerald, “Preference for Presidentialism: Postcommunist Regime Change in Russia and the NIS,” World Politics 49, no. 2 (January 1997): 184–211 Google Scholar; Frye, Timothy, “A Politics of Institutional Choice: Post-Communist Presidencies,” Comparative Political Studies 30, no. 5 (October 1997): 523–52Google Scholar; and Furtak, Political Systems of Socialist States. They indicate the status of the regime on 1 January at the beginning of the time period—either the period 1990–1995 or each year from 1987 to 1996.

59. Two alternative specifications fail to yield significant results. First, in none of the equations is semipresidentialism significant. Combining elements of both parliamentarism and presidentialism, semipresidentialism neither facilitates escalation of ethnopolitical conflict, like parliamentarism, nor deters it, like presidentialism. Second, in order to explore the possibility that presidentialism's success is due to its association with authoritarianism in such areas as Central Asia, an alternative measure of authoritarian presidentialism (weighted by the Freedom House index of political liberties) was substituted. The resulting coefficient estimate is not statistically significant.