Wiley CHATHAM HOUSE Democratization in Central and East European Countries Author(s): Mary Kaldor and Ivan Vejvoda Source: International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 73, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 59-82 Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Royal Institute of International Affairs Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2623550 Accessed: 11/01/2015 05:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. 9 STOR Wiley and Royal Institute of International Affairs are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-). http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 147.251.4.41 on Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:28:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Democratization in central and east European countries MARY KALDOR AND IVANVEJVODA The political systems that characterize the ten newly democratizing countries of central and eastern Europe are examined. Drawing a distinction between formal and substantive democracy, the authors discuss the development of key facets of democratic practice in the countries of the region. A final section draws out some of the policy implications of their findings for governments and European institutions. The misery of Eastern Europe's small nations...causes such great suspicion and irritation in Western European observers. [This] leads many people to conclude that the entire region...should be abandoned to its fate...This region's inability to consolidate itself is not due to its inherently barbarian nature, but to a series of unfortunate historical processes which squeezed it off the main course of European consolidation...We should not give up on the idea of consolidating this region if for no other reason than for the fact that today, after 30 years of great confusion, we can clearly see the course of consolidation; after the passing of mutual hatreds, occupations, civil strife, and geno- This article is a revised version of a text originally written as a project report for the European Commission in Brussels. This research project was undertaken in collaboration with the European Commission and the Council of Europe, by the Sussex European Institute, University of Sussex. The aim of the project was to assess the process of democratization in those CEECs eligible for EU membership and the extent to which these countries met the political criteria for membership. The ten central and east European countries studied in the project were Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia and Bulgaria. The project coordinators commissioned a paper on each of these countries by researchers from the respective countries. The country reports (an integral part of the project report) were written by Andras Bozoki (Central European University, Budapest, Hungary); Martin Butora (University of Trnava, Slovakia); Kestutis Girnius (Vilnius, Lithuania; RFE, Prague); (Zdenek Kavan (University of Sussex, Brighton, UK), co-author on the Czech Republic; Rumyana Kolarova (University of Sofia, Bulgaria); Marcin Krol (Graduate School for Social Research, Warsaw, Poland);Tonci Kuzmanic (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia); Alina Mungiu Pippidi (University of Bucharest, Romania); Martin Palous (Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic), co-author on the Czech Republic; Andris Runcis (University of Riga, Latvia; and Jiiri Ruus (University of Tartu, Estonia). In the article and the footnotes we refer to these ten "country reports' and use examples from them to illustrate some of our arguments. Tables 1 and 2 are an attempt to summarize some of our findings. They are 'snapshots' of the current state of affairs up to November 1996, and like all such succinct presentations are an oversimplification. The framework of the tables is ours, while the content of the 'boxes' draws on the country reports and on interviews with their authors. We would like to thank all of the abovementioned colleagues as well as Karoly Gruber, assistant on the project, for a truly collaborative effort. Responsibility for the article, of course, lies entirely with ourselves. International Affairs 73,1 (1997) 59-82 59 This conlcnl ilownlomlcil fmin 147.251.4.41 on Sun. I I Inn 2015 05:28:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Condilions Mary Kaldor and Ivan Vejvoda cidal wars...We must make sure only that heavy-handed and violent attempts at solutions do not return the filthy tide toward our region. Of course consolidation can also be thwarted; after all, it is not an elemental process that irresistibly takes over a region, but a delicate, circumspect, and easily derailed human endeavour facing the forces of fear, stupidity and hatred. However, it should be emphasized that the consolidation of this region is feasible.1 The countries of central and eastern Europe (CEEC) finally seem to be on the 'course of European consolidation'. Despite the optimism of the Hungarian historian, Istvan Bibo, after the Second World War, expressed in the passage from 1946 quoted above, they were pushed off course, yet again, for more than 40 years. Now the CEECs are in the seventh year of'consolidation' and there exists something to be consolidated.The political stabilization of the region and the consolidation of the newly emerged democratic regimes of the CEECs is, in spite of the many challenges they are facing, not only feasible but an ever-growing reality. In the search for democratic institutions, rules and procedures the main internal obstacle remains the absence of a democratic political culture, while externally the key question is the willingness of the West to provide help through this precarious phase during which the danger of a relapse into forms of totalitarianism, authoritarianism and populism lurks in the background. Time is a crucial factor in this process of'democratic invention',2 as is the international political and economic environment. An overwhelming but simplistic popular perception in the CEECs after 1989 was that democracy was synonymous with a 'return to Europe'. In fact, the geographical barriers imposed by Yalta were not the only ones to be overcome. The political, economic and psychological practices that evolved during the 40 years of communism were going to prove a far greater impediment to an early 'return' than seemed to be the case in 1989. Moreover, the trials and tribulations of democracy in the West have a direct impact on the image and influence of democ-ractic ideas in the CEECs. While it is generally argued that the institutional, formal prerequisites for democracy have been broadly fulfilled in the ten CEECs under consideration, it is more difficult to assess in such a clear manner the level of consolidation of democratic behaviour, or of the fledgling democratic political culture, that has been attained. It seems that, whatever their mutual differences, all CEECs have gone beyond the point of a return to the ancien regime, though in some (in particular, Slovakia and Romania) there have been menacing signs of a willingness on the part of the democratically elected majorities to transform themselves into a contemporary variant of what Tocqueville called regimes of 'democratic 1 Istvan Bibo, 'The distress [misery] of east European small states', in Democracy, revolution, self-determination: selected writings, ed., Karoly Nagy (Social Science Monographs; Boulder, CO, Oxford: Atlantic Research and Publications, High Lakes; New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 2 Claude Lefort, L'invention democratique—les limites de la domination totalitaire (Paris: Fayard, 1991). 60 This content downloaded from 147.251.4.41 on Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:28:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Democratization in central and east European countries despotism'.3 The question arises as to whether these two particularly fragile new democratic polities will find the internal political energy and the necessary external support and pressure to overcome these difficulties. Some authors contend that we are only witnessing a 'mirage of democracy' where there is 'reason to suppose that the post-communist world finds a suitable option in a semiau-thoritarian order...[in which the CEECs] may embrace somewhat harsher and more centralised political practices than can be found in Western democracies'.4 In this article, we put forward the argument that the political systems which characterize the CEECs constitute a particular variant of democracy that is specific to this part of this world; we argue that it is possible to talk about a sui generis post-communist political model which is influenced by the legacy of communism and, at the same time, by both the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary Western democracy. In order to develop this argument, we draw a distinction between formal and substantive democracy which enables us to assess critically the process of democratization in terms of both formal criteria and what we consider to be substantive features of democracy. The result is a more differentiated understanding of the process of democratization as it is experienced by individual CEECs. Our conclusions about the extent to which individual CEECs fit this model of democratization are based on a research project in which individual case-studies of ten CEECs were undertaken (for details see unnumbered footnote above). In the final section, we draw out some of the policy implications for governments and European institutions. In October 1992 Elemer Hankiss, Hungarian sociologist and first post-1989 Director of Hungarian state television, commented that, if 1989 was the annus mirabilis, then 1990 was the annus esperantiae, 1991 the annus miserabilis and 1992 the annus desillusionis or realismis.Wc are now four years into the awakening of CEECs to the realities of their new situation in which the brave new democracies continue to recast their politics, economies, culture, law and education while at the same time confronting the great burden of the totalitarian past; meanwhile the 'West' and 'North' are beset by questions about the 'end of politics' and of'democratic deficit'. One may ask whether the seventh year of experience of new regimes in the CEECs is too soon to make meaningful assertions as to the foundations of democracy in these countries. Lijphart, for example, formulated one of the criteria for determining 'whether a political system can be called democratic—that is whether it is sufficiently close to the democratic ideal' as that 'it must be reasonably responsive to the citizens' wishes over a long period of time'. This criterion,'persistence of democratic rule', was defined in temporal terms as 'at least thirty to thirty-five years'.5 The CEECs have by this criterion only 3 Alexis de Tocqueville, De la democratic en Amerique (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1981), vol. II, p. 386. 4 Charles Gati,'The mirage of democracy', Transition 2: 6, 22 March 1996, pp. 6-12, 62. 5 Arend Lijphart, Democracies:patterns of majoritarian and consensus government in twenty-one countries (New Haven, CN, London:Yale University Press, 1984), p. 38.The first criterion, as defined by Lijphart, was the existence of political rights and civil liberties. 6l This content downloaded from 147.251.4.41 on Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:28:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Mary Kaldor and Ivan Vejvoda achieved a fifth or a quarter of the 'required' temporal experience. However precarious it may appear, we consider that it is nevertheless worthwhile to make a preliminary assessment about whether a genuine process of democratization is under way. On formal and substantive democracy Ever since democracy became the subject of political philosophy and political theory there have been varying definitions and usages of the term.6 For Tocqueville, democracy had essentially two meanings: one was as a political regime defined by the rule of the people, with all the institutional and procedural mechanisms that had been specified by earlier theorists of democracy; the other was as a condition of society characterized by its tendency towards equality. This social, societal democratic condition, the Tocquevillian 'habits of the [democratic] heart' (much in the sense of a Hegelian Sittlichkeit), meant that democracy could not be reduced to its formal, institutional aspects.7 In this article, we distinguish between formal (procedural) democracy and what we call substantive democracy.8 Formal democracy is a set of rules, procedures and institutions which we attempt to define below. We consider substantive democracy as a process that has to be continually reproduced, a way of regulating power relations in such a way as to maximize the opportunities for individuals to influence the conditions in which they live, to participate in and influence debates about the key decisions which affect society. We take it as given that the formal character of democracy is the indispensable presupposition of the democratic social condition. Attempts to represent the 'social condition' as the pre-eminent 'substantive' value have, in fact, through an overemphasizing of the idea of'community', under various guises, led in the twentieth century to the modern political form of totalitarianism. This image 6 See e.g. Juan J. Linz, Tlie breakdown of democratic regimes: crisis, breakdown and reequilibration (Baltimore, MD„ London, 1978), p. 8:'Unfortunately, there is no meaningful, accepted typology of competitive democrat-ics, nor any accepted measure of the degree of democracy. Only the distinction between democracies based on majority rule and those that Lijphart calls 'consociational' has gained wide acceptance.' See also George Orwell,'In the case of a word like democracy not only is there no agreed definition but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides...The defenders of any kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning' in Selected essays (Baltimore, MD: 1957), p. 149, quoted in G. Sartori, Democratic theory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962), p. 3. 7 In a different vein in his early writings Marx expressed a scathing criticism of early nineteenth-century democracy, considering that formal, bourgeois democracy was insufficient, indeed a veil cast over relations of exploitation, and that a more socially equitable and just society (socialism) in the future would deliver real, substantial 'rule of the people': see 'On the Jewish question', in Karl Marx, Early Writings (NewYork:Vintage Books, 1975), pp. 146—7. 8 The debate between a proceduralist, formal approach to democracy and a substantive and/or normative approach has been for long a mainstay of political theory. A variety of authors address these issues. Most recently, for example, Jürgen Habermas, Between facts and norms: contributions to a discourse theory of law and democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996; originally Faktizität und Geltung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992) has taken the proceduralist side, while Ronald Dworkin, Freedom's law: the moral reading of the American constitution (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) takes the substantive side. 62 This content downloaded from 147.251.4.41 on Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:28:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Democratization in central and east European countries of a finally'real' democracy, as totalizing community, has been the political form from which the CEECs have emerged. 'All those who want to replace formal democracy with so-called substantive democracy, and thereby reunify state and society in a totalising way, surrender democracy as such.'9 On the other hand, the existence of formal mechanisms and procedures, which represent an a priori safeguard against abuses of power, is a necessary condition, but by no means a sufficient condition for democracy in a substantive sense. Democracy is a set of formal institutions, a way of redistributing power and a way of life. When distinguishing between formal and substantive in this article, we separate out for analytical purposes the institutional and procedural aspects from the way they are implemented, from the practices and 'habits of the [post-communist] heart'. Compliance with formal criteria There have been many attempts to define the criteria for democracy. We have assembled our own list of formal criteria adapting a set of'procedural minimal conditions, originally drawn up by Dahl:10 1 Inclusive citizenship: exclusion from citizenship purely on the basis of race, ethnicity or gender is not permissible. 2 Rule of law: the government is legally constituted and the different branches of government must respect the law, with individuals and minorities protected from the 'tyranny of the majority'. 3 Separation of powers: the three branches of government—legislature, executive and judiciary—must be separate, with an independent judicary capable of upholding the constitution. 4 Elected power-holders: power-holders, i.e. members of the legislature and those who control the executive, must be elected. 5 Free and fair elections: elected power-holders are chosen in frequent and fairly conducted elections, in which coercion is comparatively uncommon, and in which practically all adults have the right to vote and to run for elective office. 6 Freedom of expression and alternative sources of information: citizens have a right to express themselves without the danger of severe punishment on political matters, broadly defined, and a right to seek alternative sources of information; moreover, alternative sources of information exist and are protected by law. 7 Associational autonomy: citizens also have the right to form relatively independent associations or organizations, including independent political parties and interest groups. 8 Civilian control over the security forces: the armed forces and police are politically neutral and independent of political pressures and are under the control of civilian authorities. 9 A. Heller.'On formal democracy', in J. Keane, Civil society and the state (London: Verso, 1988), p. 131. 10 R. Dahl, Dilemmas of pluralist democracy (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 11. 63 This content downloaded from 147.251.4.41 on Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:28:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Mary Kaldor and Ivan Vejvoda Table i summarizes the findings from our study about the extent to which the CEECs meet the formal criteria of democracy as defined. The material is based on our individual case-studies. By and large, we find that the ten CEECs do meet the formal criteria for democracy. All ten have democratically ratified constitutions. Some are already refining and amending their post-1989 constitutions so as to attain higher democratic standards. Constitutional courts play an important role in this sense and have proven themselves to be a major institutional democratic actor in the present transformations. Only Latvia and Estonia do not fully meet the criterion of inclusive citizenship.11 In both countries substantial ethnic minorities, especially Russian-speaking people, lack citizenship primarily for procedural reasons, even though the citizenship laws do not explicitly exclude minorities. In the Czech Republic, Roma people do not automatically qualify for citizenship because, after the split of Czechoslovakia, they were classified as Slovaks; they have had difficulty acquiring citizenship for procedural reasons, particularly a clause (since removed under international pressure) that those eligible for citizenship must have no criminal record during the previous five years.12 Apart from these citizenship problems, the key formal criterion of existing and guaranteed democratic civil liberties (human rights), in particular for minorities, has been met in the CEECs. However, in none of the CEECs is the rule of law fully implemented. Although this is a criterion that is difficult to gauge fully with respect to an ideal-typical rule of law, it can nonetheless be said that the individual citizen in the CEECs is in a variety of ways (with marked differences among the countries) still grappling with the practical use of formal legal guarantees that have been enshrined in statute, as a result of weak judiciaries and/or inadequate machinery for law enforcement. Hence, there exists a continued sense of individual insecurity in a number of the countries under review.13 The separation of powers between legislative, executive and judiciary branches is more or less in place. In Slovakia, there have been attempts by the government to constrain the power of the President, which to some extent were countered by pressures from opposition parties, civil society and European institutions. In Poland, President Walesa on occasion abused his position to interfere in the functioning of government. In Romania, former President Ilescu played a very powerful role and insisted on standing for a third period in office, although this appears to be contrary to the constitution. In the Baltic states, the weakness of the judiciary—a Soviet inheritance—makes it difficult 11 See Andris Runcis, Democratisation in Latvia country report, MS, 199tí; Jiiri Ruus, Democmtisation in Estonia, country report, MS, 1996. 12 Martin Palous and Zdenek Kavan, Democracy in the Czech Republic, country report, MS, 1996, pp. 9-11. 13 See the section below on 'Administration' and individual country reports: Alina Mungiu Pippidi, Romania—from procedural democracy to European integration, country report, MS, 1996; Martin Butora, The present state of democracy in Slovakia, country report MS, 1996; Rumyana Kolárova, Democratisation in Bulgaria: present tendencies, country report, MS, 1996; also those on Latvia and Estonia cited in note 11 above. 64 This content downloaded from 147.251.4.41 on Sun, 11 Jan 2015 05:28:14 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Democratization in central and east European countries Slovenia < A/B < < < < < < Slovakia < co co < < < < co Romania < U y co < < co < co Poland < CO co < < < < < Lithuania < y co < < < < < < Latvia U co < < co < < < Hungary < co < < < < < < Estonia u U CO < < co < < < Czech Republic CD co < < < < < < Bulgaria < U 3 < < < < CO < Inclusive citizenship Rule of law Separation of powers Elected power-holders Free and fair elections Freedom of expression and alternative information sources Associational autonomy Civilian control of the armed forces/security services . 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