Lessons from Europe

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 28-41

  Berman, Sheri ^a  

^a USA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846782605     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2007.0000     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. Robert A. Dahl, "The Democratic Mystique: How the United States Misconstrues Central America," New Republic, 2 April 1984.
2. Some classic "preconditionist" works are Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960);
3. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971);
4. and Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).
5. Dankwart Rustow, "Transitions to Democracy: Toward a Dynamic Model." Comparative Politics 2 (April 1970): 352.
6. Larry Diamond, Promoting Democracy in the 1990s: Actors and Instruments. Issues and Imperatives (New York: Carnegie Corporation, 1995). 60-61.
7. For an explanation of the "Big Bang" approach by one of its advocates, see Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Putnam, 2004). For Barnett's brief definition of the "Big Bang," see www.thomaspmbarnett.com/glossary/ htm.
8. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).
9. Francis Fukuyama similarly argues that "weak or failed states are the source of many of the world's most serious problems" and believes that societies characterized by such a state are incapable of sustaining well-functioning democracies (or economies). Francis Fukuyama, State Building: Governance and World Order in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004).
10. Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
11. Mansfield and Snyder, Electing to Fight, 3, 265.
12. Outside the West, the East Asian "tigers" - especially South Korea and Taiwan-have been touted as exemplars of this developmental type that purportedly leads to stable democracy. Some have posited that in these cases, all the preconditions for democracy (such as the rule of law, a strong state, and economic development) were in place before the transition occurred. In addition, many have given credit for the establishment of these preconditions to the authoritarian regime that preceded the transition, thereby lending credence to the view that robust authoritarian regimes are better than weak democratic ones at promoting the infrastructure of democracy. The most obvious problem with these cases is their anomalous nature: For every South Korea there is a North Korea, and for every Taiwan there is a Zimbabwe. In other words, there are many more examples of predatory, illiberal authoritarian regimes dead set on holding on to power and exploiting their societies than there are of authoritarian regimes laying the foundations of democracy and then peacefully wafting themselves onto the dust heap of history. As with the European cases, a lack of historical perspective also often characterizes analyses of these countries. South Korea's political history, for example, did not begin in 1972, when Park Chung Hee became dictator; in the years after the Second World War, the country experienced the Korean War (which among other things was a bloody civil war) of 1950 to 1953; a democratic but short-lived Second Republic (1960-61); and a period of at least partial democracy after 1961. Thus it seems odd to portray South Korea as having followed a gradual, liberal political-development path under the beneficent stewardship of an authoritarian regime. A similar tendency tends to pop up in the case of Chile, another relatively successful third-wave democratizer: Much of the credit for both economic and political success is given to the authoritarian regime under Augusto Pinochet that preceded it. This ignores Chile's long, pre-Pinochet history of democracy, as well as the fact that its state had long been considered one of the strongest and most effective in Latin America. See Arturo Valenzuela and Lucía Dammert, "A 'Left Turn' in Latin America? Problems of Success in Chile," Journal of Democracy 17 (October 2006): 66-67.
13. The literature questioning the still commonly held idolization of English political development is large. Two good places to start are David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, Peculiarities of German History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984);
14. and George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
15. As cited by Adam Gopnik, "Headless Horseman: The Reign of Terror Revisited," New Yorker, 5 June 2006, 80.
16. In particular, the Revolution decimated the French nobility and dispossessed the Catholic Church of its land and greatly diminished its power.
17. Gordon Craig, Europe, 1815-1914 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1989), 132.
18. Sheri Berman, "Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic," World Politics 49 (April 1997): 3, 49.
19. Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967);
20. Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911 to 1914 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975);
21. and Eckert Kehr, Battleship Building and Party Politics in Germany, 1894-1901 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1983).
22. Whether such concerns actually drove German foreign and military policies during the summer of 1914 is hotly disputed; on the controversy, see John A. Moses. The Politics of Illusion (London: George Prior, 1975).
23. Hence Moore titled his classic discussion of English political development, "England and the Contributions of Violence to Gradualism." This was the first chapter in his seminal work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon, 1966).
24. The scale of the bloody turmoil that England and the rest of Britain experienced was vast. Historian Simon Schama estimates that by the time what he calls "the first round of the British wars" was over in 1660, the loss of life due to the strife (including those who perished from hunger or disease) throughout England, Scotland, and Wales was at least a quarter of a million. Adding an estimated 200,000 people who died in Ireland through similar war-related causes leads Schama to conclude that "the toll of life, expressed as a proportion of the 5 million population of the British archipelago, is still greater than Britain's losses in the First World War (1914-18)." Schama, A History of Britain, Volume 11: The Wars of the British, 1603-1776 (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 13.
25. Diane Purkiss notes that "One in four of all men served in the armies on one side or the other [in the English Civil War], which suggests that a majority of able-bodied men was involved." Purkiss, The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain (New York: Basic Books. 2006). 3.