Peoples and states after 1989: The political costs of incomplete national revolutions

Slavic Review

Volumn 58, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 854-880

  Roeder, Philip G ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0001580697     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2697202     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, 1991), 3-4.
2. Michael W. Doyle, "Liberalism and World Politics," American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (December 1986): 1161.
3. Inis L. Claude, Jr., Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization, 3d ed. (New York, 1964), 48.
4. See, for example, Woodrow Wilson's last public speech, delivered in Pueblo, Colorado, on 25 September 1919, prior to his stroke; reprinted in E. David Cronon, ed., The Political Thought of Woodrow Wilson (Indianapolis, 1965), 514-31.
5. Alfred Cobban, National Self-Determination, rev. ed. (Chicago, 1951), 20.
6. Bruce M. Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold-War World (Princeton, 1993);
7. James Lee Ray, "The Democratic Path to Peace," Journal of Democracy 8, no. 2 (April 1997): 49-64.
8. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (Chicago, 1962), 82-91.
9. See, for example, Milada Anna Vachudova and Tim Snyder, "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.
10. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore, 1996), 16-17.
11. Dankwart A. Rustow, A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization (Washington, D.C., 1967), 120-32.
12. Also see Sidney Verba, "Sequences and Development," in Leonard Binder et al., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton, 1971), 311.
13. J. S. Furnivall, Netherlands India: A Study of Plural Economy (New York, 1944), 446-69.
14. Michael G. Smith, The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Berkeley, 1965), 86.
15. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, 82-91.
16. Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven, 1971), 105-21.
17. Alvin Rabushka and Kenneth A. Shepsle, Politics in Plural Societies: A Theory of Democratic Instability (Columbus, Ohio, 1972), 217.
18. Dahl, Polyarchy, 105-23;
19. Linz and Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition, 33-37.
20. Even some of these are very newly constructed nations; see, for example, Stark Draper, "The Conceptualization of an Albanian Nation," Ethnic and Racial Studies 20, no. 1 (January 1997): 123-44.
21. Robert Kaiser and Jeff Chinn, "Russian-Kazakh Relations in Kazakhstan," Post-Soviet Geography 36, no. 5 (May 1995): 257-73.
22. 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.
23. Vera Tolz, "Conflicting 'Homeland Myths' and Nation-State Building in Post-communist Russia," Slavic Review 57, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 267-94;
24. George W. Breslauer and Catherine Dale, "Boris Yel'tsin and the Invention of a Russian Nation-State," Post-Soviet Affairs 13, no. 4 (October-December 1997): 303-32.
25. Included are countries with populations that exceed one million. The classification of countries as democracies is taken from Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in Thirty-Six Countries (New Haven, 1999).
26. The data on ethnic proportions are from Iu. V. Bromlei, ed., Narody mira: Istoriko-etnograficheskii spravochnik (Moscow, 1988).
27. Dahl, Polyarchy, 1-9.
28. Ian Bremmer and Cory Welt, "Kazakhstan's Quandary," Journal of Democracy 6, no. 3 (July 1995): 140.
29. Lowell Barrington, "The Domestic and International Consequences of Citizenship in the Soviet Successor States," Europe-Asia Studies 47, no. 5 (1995): 731-63;
30. Andrus Park, "Ethnicity and Independence: The Case of Estonia in Comparative Perspective," Europe-Asia Studies 46, no. 2 (1994): 68-87;
31. Pål Kolsto and Boris Tsilevich, "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): 366-91.
32. Eric A. Nordlinger, Conflict Regulation in Divided Societies, Occasional Papers in International Affairs, no. 29 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972);
33. Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven, 1977);
34. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley, 1985).
35. Ian Lustick, "Stability in Deeply Divided Societies: Consociationalism versus Control," World Politics 31, no. 3 (April 1979): 325-44.
36. Arend Lijphart, Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries (New Haven, 1984), 23.
37. 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.
38. Arend Lijphart, "Multiethnic Democracy," in Seymour Martin Lipset, ed., The Encyclopedia of Democracy (Washington, D.C., 1995), 3:856.
39. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 628-51.
40. Also see the debate between Joel Barkan and Andrew Reynolds in Timothy D. Sisk and Andrew Reynolds, eds., Elections and Conflict Management in Africa (Washington, D.C., 1998).
41. Lijphart, "Multiethnic Democracy," 856;
42. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 613-22.
43. Timothy D. Sisk, Power Sharing and International Mediation in Ethnic Conflicts (Washington, D.C., 1996);
44. Ruth Lapidoth, Autonomy: Flexible Solutions to Ethnic Conflicts (Washington, D.O., 1996).
45. Peter Harris and Ben Reilly, eds., Democracy and Deep-Rooted Conflict: Options for Negotiators (Stockholm, 1998). The National Research Council has also recently issued a study of electoral rules appropriate to deeply divided states;
46. see Ben Reilly and Andrew Reynolds, Electoral Systems and Conflict in Divided Societies (Washington, D.C., 1999).
47. David Chapman, Can Civil Wars Be Avoided? Electoral and Constitutional Options for Ethnically Divided Countries (London, 1999).
48. Also see Tibor Varady, "Minorities, Majorities, Law, and Ethnicity: Reflections of the Yugoslav Case," Human Rights Quarterly 19, no. 1 (February 1997): 9-54.
49. Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Refrained: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1996).
50. 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.
51. Joseph Richard Goldman, "Consociational Authoritarian Politics and the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution: A Preliminary Note," East European Quarterly 19, no. 2 (June 1985): 241-49;
52. Pierre L. van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York, 1981).
53. 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.
54. Ronald G. Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Stanford, 1993);
55. Katherine Verdery, "Nationalism, Postsocialism, and Space in Eastern Europe," Social Research 63, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 79-83;
56. Bogdan Denitch, Limits and Possibilities: The Crisis of Yugoslav Socialism and State Socialist Systems (Minneapolis, 1990), 78.
57. Robert Hislope, "Intra-Ethnic Conflict in Croatia and Serbia: Flanking and the Consequences for Democracy," East European Quarterly 30, no. 4 (January 1996): 471-94.
58. Sharon L. Wolchik, "The Politics of Ethnicity in Post-Communist Czechoslovakia," East European Politics and Societies 8, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 163.
59. Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and the Destruction of Socialism and the State (Cambridge, Eng., 1999), 87-88.
60. Carol Skalnik Leff, "Democratization and Disintegration in Multinational States: The Breakup of the Communist Federations," World Politics 51, no. 2 (January 1999): 212-13.
61. Wolchik, "Politics of Ethnicity," 153-58;
62. Martin Butora and Zora Butorova, "Slovakia: The Identity Challenges of the Newly Born State," Social Research 60, no. 4 (Winter 1993): 709;
63. Ronald J. Hill, "Managing Ethnic Conflict," Journal of Communist Studies 9, no. 1 (March 1993): 57-73.
64. Philip Selznick, The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics (Glencoe, 1960), 2.
65. Anton Bebler, "Yugoslavia's Variety of Communist Federation and Her Demise," Communist and Post-Communist Studies 26 (March 1993): 72-86.
66. An instructive comparison is the opposite extreme in which ethnopoliticians have no institutionally based leverage over the central government; see, for example, Zoltan Barany, "Ethnic Mobilization and the State: The Roma in Eastern Europe," Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (March 1998): 308-27.
67. Philip G. Roeder, "Soviet Federalism and Ethnie Mobilization," World Politics 43, no. 2 (January 1991): 196-232.
68. The set of dyads is derived from Bromlei, Narody mira.
69. Ted Robert Gurr, ed., Minorities at Risk Project at ww.bsos.umd.edu/ cidcm/mar (consulted 23 July 1998);
70. James Minahan, Nations without States: A Historical Dictionary of Contemporary National Movements (Westport, Conn., 1996).
71. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI Yearbook: World Armaments and Disarmament, annual editions (New York, 1987-98);
72. Peter Wallensteen and Margareta Sollenberg, "Armed Conflict and Regional Conflict Complexes, 1989-97," Journal of Peace Research 35, no. 5 (September 1998): 621-34.
73. 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).
74. 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.
75. 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.
76. 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)
77. and International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Voter Turnout from 1945 to 1997: A Global Report an Political Participation (Stockholm, 1998).
78. The coefficient estimate on ethnoconstitutional crises is marginally significant, but the diagnostic runs show that it is not robust.
79. 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.
80. 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 Robert K. Furtak, The Political Systems of the Socialist States: An Introduction to Marxist-Leninist Regimes (Brighton, Eng., 1986),
81. 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 O 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.
82. 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.
83. The source of the data is Minahan, Nations without States,
84. and Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union: Communism and Nationalism, 1917-1923, rev. ed. (New York, 1968).
85. In these data all regimes are classified as soviet, parliamentary, presidential, semipresidential, or transitional. These classifications are based on Gerald Easter, "Preference for Presidentialism: Postcommunist Regime Change in Russia and the NIS," World Politics 49, no. 2 (January 1997): 184-211;
86. Timothy Frye, "A Politics of Institutional Choice: Post-Communist Presidencies," Comparative Political Studies 30, no. 5 (October 1997): 523-52;
87. 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.
88. 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.