chapter 1 Three International Dimensions of Democratization

Laurence Whitehead
1. Introduction
Although the establishment and consolidation of democratic regimes requires strong
commitment from a broad range of internal political forces, we must not overlook the
distinctly restrictive international contexts under which the great majority of really
existing democracies (‘polyarchies’) became established, or were re-established. As a
rough indication consider the sixty-one independent states classified by Freedom
House as ‘free’ in January 1990.1 Thirty of these—beginning with the USA—can
trace their democratic institutions to the processes of decolonization from the British
Empire. In a further twelve their current political freedoms originated with the Allied
victories in the Second World War. Thirteen more states have experienced transitions
from conservative authoritarian rule since 1973. (These were all military allies of the
United States which had sought to legitimize their undemocratic practices by invoking
Cold War justifications.) That leaves only six out of the sixty-one democracies listed
not originating either from decolonization, or from the Second World War, or during
the recent fading of the Cold War. Of these six democracies only three—Sweden,
Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—all geographically insulated and therefore
militarily unconquered—seem to originate from domestic processes entirely separate
from the international contexts just mentioned. The other three all followed rather
distinctive trajectories, but their political institutions were powerfully affected by the
Second World War and the Cold War (Costa Rica, Israel, and Venezuela).
Since January 1990 there have been no further decolonizations, and none of the sixty-
one ‘free states’ have to date surrendered their major political freedoms. On the other
hand, the collapse of Soviet power triggered a fourth wave of democratizations in
Eastern Europe. Subsequently the disintegration of the USSR has created many more
new states, some of which (more speculatively) might be classified as relatively free.
Similarly, changes have occurred in major parts of Africa, particularly in Angola,
Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa itself, Zambia, etc. By January
1995 the Freedom House list of ‘free’ countries had increased by a further fifteen, to
total seventy-six. Nine of the additions were formerly Communist-ruled and located in
East-Central Europe. This cluster reflected the break-up of the Soviet bloc. Another
cluster was beginning to form in post-apartheid southern Africa, although so far only
three new ‘free’ states were listed (Malawi, Namibia, and the Republic of South
Africa). In all these latest processes, however they turn out, a balanced analysis will
have to give considerable weight to the international context in which they are
occurring, as well as to the more strictly domestic forces in play. Indeed in many of
these cases it would be artificial to insist on classifying the strategic actors into
‘domestic’ and ‘international’ categories (consider the Communist Parties, the
Church, UNITA, etc.).
The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to review the major alternative perspectives
available for analysing the international dimension of recent and contemporary
democratizations. The emphasis will be on the contrasting logics of the alternative
perspectives, rather than on the intricacies of any particular instance, or of the overall
historical pattern. However, in weighing up the merits of alternative approaches we
should be guided not so much by the logical rigour of one approach or another (let
alone by its convenience for formal modelling purposes) as by its capacity to
illuminate historical experiences outlined above. These experiences are generally
characterized by contingency, subjectivity, ambiguity, and reversibility, all of which
tend to be suppressed when one resorts to an unduly formal, rational, or ahistorical
mode of interpretation.
The record suggests three main headings under which international factors may be
grouped and analysed: contagion, control, and consent. As will soon become
apparent there is significant overlap between these three, and also important sub-
classifications will be required in order to distinguish between alternative paths and
outcomes. Under these three broad headings a variety of actors, processes, and
motivations have to be considered. In particular one should distinguish between state-
to-state interactions, non-governmental political transactions, and more diffuse social
processes. Also, the

2. Contagion
Let us begin with a really parsimonious interpretation. It requires no consideration of
actors (whether governmental or otherwise), or of their intentions. It needs no
investigation into channels of transmission, and no attribution of primacy to either
internal or external sources of democratization. It sidesteps all qualitative distinctions
between types or stages of democracy. The procedure is first to establish a binary
classification of countries according to some simple and schematic objective tests, and
then to observe the geographical distribution of the countries classified as democratic,
and how it changes over time. As with any parsimonious approach this involves
omitting some detail that may help explain observed variations, but the compensating
gain is that the procedure is clear, it can be replicated or refined by any practitioner,
and it should be possible to establish from the results whether or not the proportion of
the variance remaining unexplained is unacceptably high.
This simple procedure uncovers enough clusters and sequences to eliminate the
possibility of random association, and indeed it provides remarkably strong support
for the strong hypothesis of ‘contagion through proximity’. France–Belgium–the
Netherlands–Denmark–Norway–Germany–Austria–Italy all within five years (and not
counting Finland) constitutes the first sequence. On its own that might be dismissed as
an unrepeatable exception, but then we would have to consider Jamaica–Trinidad–
Barbados–the Bahamas–Dominica–St Lucia–St Vincent–Antigua–St Kitts all within
twenty years (not to mention Grenada and Belize). Another, and different, exception
perhaps, but there was also Portugal–Spain, shortly followed by Peru–Ecuador–
Argentina–Bolivia–Uruguay–Brazil, all within a decade (followed by Chile,
Paraguay, and Haiti shortly after, followed by at least some Central American cases).
Then, after 1989, most dramatically, there was Poland–Czechoslovakia–East
Germany–Hungary–Romania–Bulgaria, all within little more than a year (not to
mention Albania, Slovenia, Latvia, the Russian Republic, or Mongolia the year after
that). Finally, we could add a southern African cluster, which arguably began with the
decolonization of Namibia in 1990, and culminated in the democratization of South
Africa in 1994. Between them those five, restrictively defined, cluster over forty
democratizations, i.e. a remarkably high proportion of the countries under
observation.2 There can be relatively few interesting hypotheses in comparative
politics that would stand up this well to statistical verification. Moreover the
contagion hypothesis can be applied to related but different problems (e.g. sequences
of democratic breakdown such as occurred in Latin America in 1947–9 or 1963–6, or
in West Africa in the mid-1960s), and most strikingly it even has some predictive
power. For example, if Nigeria really were to achieve a successful transition to
democracy we can assert with some confidence that the probability of similar
developments in neighbouring states would be materially enhanced.
These are pleasing results, particularly in view of the extreme simplicity of the initial
hypothesis. But of course they leave unexplained much that should be of interest to
those investigating the international dimension of democratization. For example,
what determines the boundaries of the clusters just enumerated? Why, for
example, were Spain and Portugal not included in the first sequence; why did Guyana
deviate from the second; and why is Yugoslavia an exception to the fourth? Despite
its intriguing predictive possibilities, on its own the contagion hypothesis cannot tell
us how a sequence begins, why it ends, what it excludes, or even the order in
which it is likely to advance. For that we need some account, however schematic, of
the processes involved. Fairly quickly that enquiry will bring us into areas better
studied under the other two headings (control and consent).
But before exhausting the topic of contagion we should relax the most restrictive of
our initial assumptions and consider what mechanisms of transmission might produce
the sequences observed, without involving the intentionality of any actors, either
internal or external.
We are searching, then, for neutral transmission mechanisms that might induce
countries bordering on democracies to replicate the political institutions of their
neighbours. Such mechanisms would have to affect the attitudes, expectations,
and interpretations of the public at large, regardless of whether or not outside
agencies intend to produce this effect, and independent of the strategies and
calculations of those holding political power within. For example, it would appear
that popular attitudes in East Germany were so powerfully influenced by messages
transmitted neutrally from the West that democratization became unavoidable,
whatever governments or political leaders within or without might have wished or
attempted. In turn, information transmitted neutrally about this state of affairs in East
Germany produced analogous changes of attitude within the Czech population with
comparably irresistible consequences for that regime (whatever its rulers desired) and
so on successively. However, when such neutral messages finally reached Belgrade,
although they retained their initial force, they received a very different political
reading, not I would assume because the transmission had become blurred or was
being politically manipulated, but because of a very different Serbian historical
consciousness, shaped by their war against Nazi occupation.
If this interpretation is correct it would help to explain the pattern and limits of the
contagion process. Such neutral transmission mechanisms might also help to
account for the non-participation of Spain in the 1945 wave of democratizations (the
Spanish public could see that to follow France and Italy would involve refighting the
Civil War), or for the exclusion of Guyana from the West Indian sequence of
successful democratizing decolonizations (black opinion in Guyana recognized that
for them such a democracy would mean an East Indian majority). Such transmission
mechanisms should also be considered when seeking explanations for the alternative
paths to democracy selected by adjoining countries. For example (as Charles Powell
demonstrates in Chapter 11), Spain's commitment in the 1970s to a ‘pacted’
democratization was significantly reinforced by the impact on Spanish public opinion
of observing the process of Portugal's democratization through ‘rupture’. Similarly the
highly controlled Chilean process must have been affected to some extent by
observation of what had happened a few years earlier when Argentina, Bolivia, and
Peru had undertaken much more disorderly transitions.
Perhaps the most striking contemporary example of this process at work involves
Cuba, now more isolated than at any time since the revolution, as Grenada, Nicaragua,
Panama, and most of its partners in Eastern Europe have all joined the stampede
towards representative democracy.3 Once again this international current is only one
factor sapping the confidence and cohesion of the Castro regime; as before it would
be artificial to attach a specific weight to this factor viewed in isolation from the other
forces acting on the regime. Nevertheless, we can identify a recurrent international
contagion effect which appears to operate across a wide range of regime types, and to
contribute significantly to many contemporary processes of democratization, just as in
earlier periods a similar contagion effect contributed to successive breakdowns of
democracy.
In order to carry this analysis further, and clarifying its application to specific
countries, one would need to examine the role of the media in magnifying (or
dampening) the domestic impact of external developments. A broader and perhaps
more fundamental consideration would be the way national historical memories may
filter the interpretation of transmissions from abroad. It should never be forgotten that
relatively neutral transmissions of information may just as well serve to promote an
anti-democratic as a pro-democratic contagion. (Consider the international impact of
the information that Franco had rebelled against the Spanish Republic.) The process is
as neutral in its value content as in its mechanics. If so, the contagion theory would
need to explain why in the post-war world, and in particular during the 1980s, it has
been the benign strain of democracy that has proved so virulent, rather than the
hitherto equally contagious influence of authoritarianism. It seems to me that this
puzzle can be resolved without straying from the confines of the contagion approach,
simply by reference to the political and economic success (and therefore
attractiveness) of capitalist democracy in the leading centres—the USA, Western
Europe, and Japan. It was not always so, of course. In the inter-war period, when
these leading countries were attracted to fascism, and when their liberal institutions
seemed under threat as a consequence of the Great Depression, the dominant form of
political contagion was far from democratic.

3. Control
Thus far we have restricted the analysis to pure contagion effects and neutral
processes of transmission. It is somewhat surprising to find how much can be
accounted for within this very restrictive framework. But in fact we know, both
from the declaratory statements of Western leaders, and from the crude data
summarized in the introduction, that at least in the post-war world, democracy is
not just like a virus which happens to spread from one organism to another
without intentionality. A more appropriate medical metaphor might be to see it
as a vaccine. On this view US forces have acted in the Dominican Republic, Grenada,
Panama, and (in-directly) in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala to innoculate
those polities from contamination by Castroism. Washington has always labelled this
treatment ‘democracy’, and in some of these cases independent observers would
confirm that in due course it became plausible so to describe the outcome. Similar
claims have been made for Greece and Turkey (under the Truman Doctrine), and
could indeed be extended to the NATO alliance in general in so far as membership
was imposed.
However, as the introduction indicated, since 1945 anti-Communism has not been the
only, nor perhaps even the most important, factor motivating some Western
governments to impose democratic institutions on a large number of countries where
they had the power. The British, in particular, set about exporting the Westminster
model of political institutions to most of their former colonies, partly no doubt in
order to make the break-up of their Empire more palatable to domestic public opinion.
(Here the medical metaphor would be a transplant rather than a vaccine.4) As
with the American efforts, the results were at best mixed, and in many cases the
transplant failed to take, or failed to function in the same way as in its original setting.
But this is not the place to dwell on the complications.
The essential point is that approaching two-thirds of the democracies existing in 1990
owed their origins, at least in part, to deliberate acts of imposition or intervention
from without (acts, moreover, that were undertaken within living memory). Given
this, an interpretation which excludes from consideration the roles played by
external actors, their motives, or their instruments of action is bound to produce
a highly distorted image of the international dimension of democratization,
however good its statistical performance may seem. As always, correlation must
be separated from causation. It is not contiguity but the policy of a third power
that explains the spread of democracy from one country to the next.
Thus, the five clusters that appeared to validate the contagion approach in Section 2,
above, can be re-explained in very different terms once we relax our restrictive initial
assumptions, and grant the possibility of explicit external agency.
An extremely simple version of power politics will suffice to account for the four
clusters in a very different way from the contagion approach. The first cluster would
then express Washington's strategy for consolidating its dominance in Western
Europe and Japan following the victories of 1945; the second would reflect an
economically and militarily declining Britain's efforts to perpetuate its political and
commercial influence; the third would express somewhat comparable American
efforts in the more favourable setting of a fading Cold War and continuing US
strength in the security realm; and the fourth would simply be attributable to the all-
round collapse of Soviet power. Even the southern African cluster could be
interpreted in terms of the post-Cold War withdrawal of great-power rivalries.
In this version the speed, direction, limits, and mechanisms of transmission of the
democratization process can be accounted for more satisfactorily than under the
contagion approach. Thus, for example, the boundaries of democratization after
1945 were rather precisely set by the presence of US forces. This would also explain
the observable sequence of regime changes, the speed with which they occurred, and
the main processes involved. Similarly, it was only territories within the British
Empire that experienced attempts to export the Westminster model (e.g. after
Trinidad, Barbados, and St Lucia the contagion skipped over Martinique to Dominica,
then skipped Guadeloupe to Antigua). The order and speed of the march towards
democracy was set by London's timetable for decolonization, and it was this that
largely determined the processes involved. Likewise, developments in Moscow
shaped the order and speed of the regime changes in Eastern Europe, which were of
course bounded by the Soviet sphere of influence (i.e. spreading to Bulgaria, but not
into the Middle East, and reaching less directly into Yugoslavia and Albania).
Somewhat similar claims can be made for the third cluster (i.e. the demise of national
security states within the US sphere of influence), although in this case the degree of
direction from Washington was less apparent, as will be indicated in the next section
of this chapter.
As for the southern Africa cluster, during the Cold War both the apartheid regime in
Pretoria and the Marxist one-party regimes in Luanda and Maputo received
substantial (albeit partly indirect) protection from their respective great-power allies,
but faced armed opposition encouraged by their respective great-power opponents.
After 1989, however, the great powers co-operated through the UN in promoting
policies of reconciliation and democratization. In contrast, in the rest of sub-Saharan
Africa, neither these great-power rivalries nor this subsequent switch to pacification
operated so powerfully.
These, too, seem satisfying results, but we need to recognize the limitations and
paradoxes of this power politics perspective. In particular, how can the relatively
permissive and even altruistic act of democracy promotion be derived from the
self-regarding and centralizing logic of power politics?
As a first step towards resolving this apparent paradox I would suggest that, although
an undifferentiated and single-minded policy of democracy promotion would not be
compatible with the maximization of a dominant state's power resources, a more
selective and contingent policy might be.
The next step would be to look more closely at the various clusters of
democratizations. In two of the five cases under consideration (British decolonization
and Soviet disintegration) the aim of the dominant state at the time was not to
maximize its immediate power, but to create an international environment that would
be relatively less threatening to a former great power in decline in the longer run. In a
third case (southern Africa) the collapsing USSR was also attempting to extricate
itself from unsuccessful entanglements without indignity. In international politics
more broadly conceived, then, there are periods when it may be good policy for a
dominant state to be permissive and decentralizing in the territories it influences or
controls, even though such a situation is hard to express in the terms of strict power
politics theory. This is all the more true if we allow domestic opinion within the
dominant state to affect its foreign policy. The single-minded pursuit of power politics
abroad normally requires fairly unwavering support for a potentially repressive
security apparatus based at home. Domestic interests may feel threatened by such an
apparatus, in which case the pursuit of apparently inexplicable altruism overseas may
reflect a perceived self-interest in détente and the reduction of tension on the internal
front. (Cf. British support for decolonization, or French or Portuguese responses to
colonial wars. Some of Edvard Shevardnadze's declarations as Soviet Foreign
Secretary suggest that similar considerations could be significant even in Moscow.)
However, sustained and effective support for the spread of democracy within a given
sphere of influence would require more than just the temporary ascendancy of
libertarian factions within an imperial power structure. The libertarians would have to
forge and sustain a new foreign policy consensus by demonstrating that the long-run
interests of the society as a whole would best be served by relaxing control over
previously subordinate territories. There are likely to be two main strands to such a
consensus—the security apparatus and its allies will have to be persuaded that the
costs of attempting to sustain the old structures of control have become too high,
and/or the probability of success has fallen too low; and the political class in general
will have to be reassured that the risks and costs of tolerating democratic dissidence
and uncertainty are worth bearing.
It was relatively easy to achieve this consensus in post-war Britain, given the presence
of the United States as a protector and in the last resort a substitute guarantor of order
(the decolonization of Guyana is particularly illustrative here). This goes far towards
explaining the thirty or so democratizations through decolonization referred to in the
introduction. (The French, the Dutch, and the Portuguese also decolonized, using
European integration as a substitute for imperial grandeur, but without sufficient
consensus or control to achieve democratization as well.) By contrast, in the Soviet
case, although taken in isolation President Gorbachev's southern African strategy
could have been rated a success, the security apparatus in Moscow became so alarmed
at the internal repercussions of his decolonizing and democratizing policies in Eastern
Europe that it rallied to the August 1991 attempted coup against him. When that failed
Yeltsin replaced Gorbachev, and the Soviet Union shrank down to the Russian
Federation. Even so, the problem of Russian security remains unresolved, with
destabilizing consequences for fragile democracies within Moscow's reach, especially
since an eastward expansion of NATO and the European Community will be
perceived in Moscow as enhancing the German sphere of influence and marginalizing
the Russians.
The other two clusters of democratizations fall within the US sphere of influence, and
cannot therefore be analysed by reference to the strategies of great powers in decline.
(The wave of democratizations initiated by the Carter Administration may bear some
superficial comparisons with British decolonizations but these are secondary
resemblances only and will not be pursued here.) During the Second World War (as in
the First), Washington made the promotion of democracy a central war aim, and this
contributed to America's victory in at least two important respects. It helped to engage
a very broad spectrum of domestic opinion in support of the war effort, avoiding the
suspicions and divisions that have hampered both earlier and later war mobilizations
(e.g. some incursions into Mexico, and of course the Vietnam War). It also
contributed to America's success in constructing and sustaining the broad international
alliances required for victory. If the European Allies had perceived the USA as just
another great power engaged in empire-building, for example, the cohesion of the
anti-Axis coalition would have been in jeopardy. As it was both allies and enemies of
the US-led alliance were undoubtedly influenced in their war calculations by the
expectation that a victorious UN coalition would respect (or restore) national
sovereignties and would generally favour the establishment (or re-establishment) of
pluralist political institutions in the territories it liberated. If this promise was an
important part of the Western Allies' political capital during the war, it held a
corresponding political weight among the victors' obligations after 1945.5
Fortunately for Washington it proved possible to harmonize these obligations with
America's post-war security interests. But although possible, this was far from
inevitable, and a great deal of effort and ingenuity was required to achieve this
harmonization. For example, the re-democratization of France and Italy was very
much in America's interest, provided the resulting governments were stable, were
locked into the Western security system, and adopted market-oriented economic
policies. But in view of the popular support for the left in these two countries, and the
discredit of many on the right due to their wartime complicities, there could be no
certainty in advance that America's interest would be well served by these
democratizations. The Cold War, the Marshall Plan, and the institutionalization of
NATO all involved active leadership and direction from Washington in order to
reconcile the Allied commitment to democracy with the more traditional priorities of
power politics. Greece and Turkey are of particular significance in this context,
because they occupied the grey area between Western Europe (in which the Allied
commitment to democracy was most salient, and most easy to reconcile with Western
security objectives) and the rest of the world liberated by Western armies (in which
the commitment to democracy was either weak, hypothetical, or absent and imperial
structures of control were re-established). At least as far as Western Europe was
concerned the essential point is that it was both necessary and possible for the Allied
forces to relinquish direct control to new democratic regimes without jeopardizing
their security, and moreover that it was almost impossible even to consider doing
otherwise in view of the pressures on the victors for rapid demobilization and for a
return to peacetime normalcy. Western European experience seemed to demonstrate
that indirect systems of support could stabilize these newly restored democratic
regimes without requiring the maintenance of much overt control.
This sketch of the post-1945 democratizations in Western Europe may seem like
straining to explain the obvious, except that we also wish to consider the post-1973
democratizations within the same framework. It must be acknowledged from the
outset that the degree of external control was markedly less in this cluster than in any
of the other three. After all, in the last resort the Allies had direct military authority at
the outset of the Western European democratizations, as had the British when
decolonization took place. Moscow had similar capacities—and perhaps a greater
disposition to use them—in parts of Eastern Europe (though not in Poland when the
democratization process was allowed the longest gestation period). In contrast
Washington lacked such direct capacity for control over its authoritarian allies in the
1970s and 1980s. Chapters 4 and 5 analyse some of the consequences for US
democracy promotion policies in much of Latin America. (The consequences of
Washington's greater capacity for control in the Caribbean basin are considered in
Chapter 3.) In general the United States possessed indirect systems of influence and
support analogous to those which had helped stabilize and moderate West European
democracies after the 1940s. Through the allocation of aid and other economic
concessions, through gestures of political support or disapproval, and even through
the dense network of military and security ties which bound it to these regimes,
Washington could encourage, redirect, or resist democratizing impulses, even if it
could not strongly control them.
The next section of this chapter deals with international processes of support and
interaction, which is where much of this Carter–Reagan cluster of democratizations
should be studied. But even in this group of regime transitions there are some aspects
that belong under the heading of control. For example, the Carter Administration
proclaimed a general policy of support for democracy and human rights, both within
and outside the US sphere of influence. But the US sphere was very wide, and so the
question very quickly emerged where to begin (and also, implicitly, where to end). In
practice, Washington's initiatives to encourage recent democratizations within its
sphere of influence have been consistently selective and contingent. Carter took the
lead in the Dominican Republic, but not in Iran; Reagan acted on Grenada rather than
Haiti; Bush backed a clean count in Nicaragua, but not in Mexico; and so forth. Some
of this selectivity was due to variations in the strength and characteristics of the
democratizing actors within individual countries. To that extent it cannot be classified
as a product of external control. But considerations of economic and military security,
and calculations of political and ideological self-interest, are also very evident as
factors explaining the order, rhythm, and intensity of Washington's democratizing
initiatives, and to this extent the promotion of democracy has functioned as yet
another component in a world-wide system of alliance control.
Certainly, the element of control is less prevalent in these cases than in the other three
Cold War clusters discussed previously. It may well be that with the ending of the
Cold War, the strengthening of the European Community, and the increasing
prevalence of democratic forms of government around the world, this factor will fade
away in future years. Perhaps 200 years after Kant's initial contribution to the idealist
tradition in international relations6 his prediction that the spread of ‘republican’ (today
we would say ‘democratic’) forms of government would gather such momentum as to
bring about ‘perpetual peace’ (the contemporary phrase would presumably be ‘the end
of history’).7 Or it may be that in the post-Cold War world some regions will come
under increased control by democracy-promoting powers (consider not just the 1994
US invasion of Haiti, but also democratic South Africa's involvement in Lesotho),
whereas other regions may witness the expansion of non-democratic powers. For
example, Hong Kong in 1997, and perhaps eventually even Taiwan, could find
themselves incorporated into a still non-democratic China. Whatever we may
speculate about the future, this section has shown that in almost all the
democratizations that have occurred between the Second World War and the
dismantling of the Warsaw Pact, the strategies of regulation and control adopted by
the dominant states in the system were of critical importance. External agency, in this
sense, represents a major alternative perspective that contrasts with contagion in the
account it provides of the international side of democratization.
4. Consent
There remains a third alternative. Once the role and motivations of strategic actors
have been admitted into the analysis this can hardly be confined to external agency
alone. A comprehensive account would need to incorporate the actions and intentions
of relevant domestic groupings, and the interactions between internal and international
processes (what Pridham,8 borrowing from the idiom of Rosenau, called ‘linkage
politics’). But why do we need a more comprehensive account, with all the additional
complexity and confusion it will involve, when contagion plus control seem to have
served us so well? The answer I would suggest is that the first two perspectives rest
on extremely basic and inadequate conceptions of democratization. To develop a
more elaborate and nuanced understanding of the process would require a more subtle
and complex account of its international dimension. Otherwise there is no escape from
Rousseau's famous paradox about being ‘forced to be free’.
A genuine and securely implanted democratic regime requires the positive support
and involvement of a wide range of social and political groupings, support that must
be sustained over a considerable period and in the face of diverse uncertainties. Such
support must be more or less freely given for the term ‘democracy’ to apply. If so,
then it is clearly a misattribution of responsibility to suppose that any real democracy
could owe its origin mainly to some act of external compulsion or imposition.
This argument brings us back to the central concerns of the Transitions literature,
within which, of course, domestic processes were viewed as primary, with
international factors generally playing no more than a secondary role.9 Invasion, or at
least military defeat as in the Graeco-Turkish conflict of 1974 or the South Atlantic
conflict of 1982, were recognized as exceptions to this generalization, but were
considered accidental and infrequent. This perspective reflected both the limited
geographical range of the Transitions study (southern Europe and South America
have been uncharacteristically peaceful areas of the world since 1945), and its
methodological inclinations (the focus on coalition-building and on strategic
interactions between relatively well-established political forces). Subsequent episodes
in Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Namibia, Angola, Yugoslavia, etc. highlight the
restrictive range of these assumptions. Consequently acceptance of the more elaborate
and sophisticated conceptions of democratization, such as those formulated in the
Transitions literature, still leaves the international dimension in need of reassessment.
Having reviewed the perspectives offered by contagion and control, this section
discusses the ways in which international processes contribute to (or impede) the
generation of the consent upon which new democracies must be based. It
distinguishes between four aspects:
(1) the territorial limits to successive democratizations and their consequences for
established alliance systems;
(2) the main international structures tending to generate consent for such regime
(1) the territorial limits to successive democratizations and their consequences for
established alliance systems;
changes;
(3) the ways in which authentic national democratic actors may be constituted
from relatively diffuse transnational groupings;
(4) the role of international demonstration effects.
Territorial Limits
Recent developments in the USSR and Yugoslavia have thrown into stark relief the
question of the territorial limits to each democratization, an issue that was barely
perceptible to earlier analysts working on Latin America. (With hindsight it could be
discerned at least in relation to Belize, Guyana, and the Falklands, but only in a very
indistinct form.) The issue is in fact quite general. The establishment of national
boundaries is an eminently international act; whereas generating consent for a
representative system of government within those boundaries can be regarded as a
separate, domestically driven, process. So much time has elapsed in most of Latin
America between the completion of the first process and the modern initiation of the
second that this polarity may seem natural. In the interim, powerful and sustained
processes of national integration have differentiated the various adjoining polities
right up to their frontiers. But in most of Europe, not to mention Africa, Asia, or the
Middle East, the definition of territorial boundaries and the forging of national
identities has been much more recent and/or more bitterly contested, and so has
overlapped with (and in many cases redirected) contemporary processes of
democratization.
Consider a few examples. When democratic India invaded the Portuguese colony of
Goa in 1961, it imposed its democracy and transformed the Goanese political identity.
Thirteen years later, when Portugal became democratic, this was extended to Madeira
and the Azores (but not to São Tomé, let alone Macau, Angola, or Timor). When
Greece restored Karamanlis it was after a war in which the national aspiration for
reunion with Cyprus had received a devastating setback (for some, then, this was a
truncated democracy). For the GDR, of course, democratization signified the total
elimination of a separate East German state. The ‘velvet revolution’ in Prague gave
rise to not one, but two separate, democratic states (although the Hungarian minority
in Slovakia might understandably argue that some democracies are more democratic
than others). Most of the British decolonizations listed in the introduction involved
more or less strained decisions about the territorial limits of the new democracies (for
example, Antigua and Barbuda, but not including Anguilla). When the French Fourth
Republic foundered it fell in Guadeloupe as much as in Paris. For that matter the
democratization of Corsica remains an awkward issue in French politics, just as the
democratization of Ulster plagues the British, and Sicily affronts the Italians. In short,
the international processes that are fundamental for the establishment and stabilization
of national boundaries also carry direct and often powerfully disruptive implications
for the composition (and indeed viability) of democratic regimes within those
boundaries. The disintegration of Yugoslavia into a range of states, from fully
democratic Slovenia to genocidally polarized Bosnia-Hercegovina, may be an
extreme case, but it is an extreme case of a widespread phenomenon.
A peaceful international system needs to generate consent (both within and between
nations) for a precisely agreed pattern of inter-state boundaries and security
alignments. Theoretically it may be that democratic states provide the best machinery
for generating such consent, but at least in the transition phase of democratization
there is liable to be a high degree of uncertainty about which substantive policy
outcomes (including security alignments) will enjoy sustained support. The
uncertainty over the future of US bases in democratizing Spain, Portugal, Greece, the
Philippines, and South Korea provides one good comparative illustration of this, and
the prospective alignment of newly democratizing regimes in Eastern Europe in
relation to whatever power structure may eventually be stabilized in Moscow will
provide another. Thus, in practice, the early phases of democratization may generate
insecurity and tension through the state system, rather than the opposite; and in
response the international system may generate resistance to, or conflict over, the
precise forms taken by the democratization process in states with insecure national
identities. This is an international dimension to the democratization process that may
require considerably greater attention than it has received so far.
International Structures of Consent
One strikingly popular remedy for the dangers in question is the creation of regional
blocs usually composed of the more successful democratic states, which then offer to
support, converge with, or even in extreme cases to incorporate newly democratizing
neighbours. In this introductory chapter we will confine the discussion to the
European Community, since it constitutes by far the most long-established and
ambitious example of this approach to the stabilization of some new democracies. (It
is not, in fact, unique: other more recent partial analogues include the Caribbean Basin
Initiative, Mercosur, and the 1994 Summit of the Americas, discussed in Chapter 3
below.) Confining our attention, for the moment, to explicit actions of the decision-
makers in Brussels, the most powerful of these has undoubtedly been the offer of full
membership of the Community to certain European states provided they satisfy a
number of conditions, one of which was the establishment of solid democratic
institutions. The impact of this ‘democratic conditionality’ on the consolidation of
southern European democracies has already been investigated at length;10 and is
considered further in Chapters 10–12 of this volume.
The question of whether similar conditionality may be extended to certain potential
new accessions from Eastern Europe will put this practice to a very severe test,
however, as discussed in Chapter 13 below. Even if the EU does decide in favour of
eventual further enlargement to the east, this will inevitably be a very slow process,
and at least some fragile democracies will be kept waiting indefinitely. Brussels must
therefore face the issue of whether it can devise other powerful instruments that will
reinforce consent for democracy in those countries where accession is a distant or
impossible dream. There are some limited precedents (e.g. EC support for the San
José process in Central America),11 but their impact is very weak compared to the
Community's one big prize. Full membership of the European Union generates
powerful, broad-based, and long-term support for the establishment of democratic
institutions because it is irreversible, and sets in train a cumulative process of
economic and political integration that offers incentives and reassurances to a very
wide array of social forces. In other words it sets in motion a very complex and
profound set of mutual adjustment processes, both within the incipient democracy and
in its interactions with the rest of the Community, nearly all of which tend to favour
democratic consolidation. Mere aid packages or political advisory missions are far
less potent, no matter how well staffed or funded they may be. In the long run such
‘democracy by convergence’ may well prove the most decisive international
dimension of democratization, but the EU has yet to prove that case fully. A second
test seems likely to arise in the Western hemisphere, now that the Free Trade for the
Americas has been established with a 2005 deadline and relatively clear democratic
conditionality.
It remains true that the problem of generating consent for the consolidation of a
democratic regime need not have any very obvious or prominent international
dimension, so long as the territorial limits, international alignment, and relationship
with some dominant democratic bloc of states are uncontentious. But in most cases
one or more of these questions does cause difficulty and becomes entangled with the
democratization process. When this happens the international dimension becomes
unavoidable. For in this case, the various strategic actors whose interactions are
central to a Transitions-type analysis will no longer act according to a purely domestic
logic, unmindful of the external ramifications of their choices. Indeed one could go
further, and propose that in such conditions more than a few of the key strategic actors
may owe much of their success and effectiveness to their skill in interpreting and
reacting to the international repercussions of their actions.

National Democratic Actors

At the outset of most democratic transitions it will be difficult to gauge which of the
hastily constituted new groupings and movements within a given country is likely to
emerge with real structure, support, and staying power. The origins of these emerging
opposition forces typically include a substantial external component (exile clusters,
for example, as illustrated in Chapter 7 on the Chilean case), or social movements
which enjoyed some degree of international protection through the church, the human
rights community, or from a network of fraternal parties overseas. Similar
observations may well apply to the new forces emerging from the disintegrating
authoritarian regime—technocrats closely associated with the international financial
institutions, newspapers aligned with the interests of foreign investors, or possibly
even CIA assets (on the one hand) or KGB nominees (on the other).
In short, at the start of many transitions to democracy it can be artificial and
misleading to classify all the new strategic actors as ready-made strictly domestic
political entities. It is only during the course of the transition itself, and in particular if
consolidation proceeds well, that the national authenticity of the various contending
forces may become fully established. The evolution of such forces from their often
diffuse and semi-dependent origins to fully fledged and unambiguously national
political status is in fact a central part of the democratization process. If it remains
incomplete or is interrupted then the transition will not proceed to full consolidation.
For example, in Nicaragua the Sandinistas had to accept the UNO coalition as an
authentically Nicaraguan movement, not under the control of Washington, and the
Chamorro government had to reciprocate in its evaluation of the Sandinistas, in order
for democratic institutions to become implanted in that society. Likewise for El
Salvador, or indeed for more peaceful experiments such as those in Spain and
Czechoslovakia. (Indeed, even the democratization of the Uruguayan party system
required Blancos and Colorados to shed their Brazilian and Argentine affiliations at
the turn of this century.)
If this is correct then a vital international dimension of many democratizations
concerns the interactive process by which the external supporters of the various
contending political factions step (or are driven) back, relinquishing leverage over
their protégés, and lifting vetoes against their competitors. Clearly the fading of the
Cold War, and the declining incentives for dominant powers to maintain tight control
within their spheres of influence (discussed in Section 3 above), will increase the
frequency of these processes. At least as important may be the proliferation of
democratic regimes, offering reassurance that this kind of experimentation need not
be destabilizing, and providing a denser network of cross-cutting sources of support
for pluralism within each polity.
As we have seen, most democratizations involve the assertion of a clearly defined
national sovereignty, but not all do. In the case of democratization through
incorporation (e.g. Puerto Rico or Guadeloupe) the main strategic actors must shed
their national distinctiveness in order to achieve a fully consolidated regime. Some
would deny that this route can possibly merit the designation ‘democratization’,
seeing it instead as a betrayal of national identity, but I would leave that for the
inhabitants of the territory in question to decide for themselves. What does require
stress, however, is that there are high cultural (and probably also political) costs
involved in pursuing such a route to democracy. Consequently, if it succeeds at all it
will only be after a very protracted process of social adjustment. But then generating
consent for a democratic regime is for the long haul, whether achieved through
incorporation, convergence, or imposition.
International Demonstration Effects
Finally, there remains one more international aspect of democratization by consent,
and it is probably the most fundamental. It concerns international demonstration
effects as they affect the underlying distribution of popular preferences and
expectations. Clearly this involves returning to the topic of neutral transmission
mechanisms already considered in Section 2 above. The emphasis is different here,
however, for now the question is not just how information about the establishment of
democracy in one country increases the probability of the same occurring in a
neighbour—rather it concerns how an almost universal wish to imitate a way of life
associated with the liberal capitalist democracies of the core regions (the wish for
modernity) may undermine the social and institutional foundations of any regime
perceived as incompatible with these aspirations. That is the negative side.
On the positive side it may be (although this is far from certain) that the same
international demonstration effects will also serve to generate the consistent and
broad-based support needed to bolster fragile new democracies. Contiguity is not the
operative variable in this case. Images of the good life in North America or Western
Europe may produce equally powerful effects in the Southern Cone as in the
Caribbean, in Siberia as in the Baltic states.
What may differ with distance is the ease of mass migration to the major centres of
democratic attraction, but if so this will tend to favour the generation of democratic
consent in the more distant locations rather than where mass exit offers an alternative
to the travails of political accommodation. For example, relatively few Chileans went
abroad for political reasons, and most of those always hoped to return. Eventually this
gave rise to patterns of mutual accommodation which can be summed up by the
attitude that ‘despite our differences we are all Chileans, and we will have to learn to
live together’. (See Chapter 7, below.) In contrast, the million plus Cubans who
migrated to Florida may lack the capacity for accommodation with those who stayed
behind, and many of those who left East Germany for West Germany seem ill-
equipped to find much political common ground with those who did not. (No doubt,
part of the difference here reflects the legacy of Communism, but the evidence from
Algeria, say, or Turkey, suggests that that is not the whole explanation and that ease
of migration is also vital.)
As indicated by these examples, and by the contrast between regime-destroying and
regime-creating aspects of these demonstration effects, there is no simple or uniform
process by which the wish to emulate or replicate international liberal capitalist
lifestyles is likely to generate consent for democratization in any given society. But
the potential scope and power of these demonstration effects seems truly formidable,
especially now that the only serious global competitor for international allegiances has
crumbled from within. They are likely to increase in intensity with the further
penetration of mass media geared to the stimulation of consumer wants, and in view
of the prospective advance of regional integration blocs in Western Europe and North
America. They therefore transmit a relentless underlying pressure on unresponsive
and unsuccessful regimes throughout the periphery. This can become a major
international factor in generating consent for democratization, but it can also erode
and delegitimize fragile democratic regimes that fail to deliver the improvements in
accountability and in living standards that the public are taught to associate with
successful liberal democracy.12 In either case it is an international aspect of
democratization that requires systematic attention.

5. Conclusion
This chapter has grouped the international aspects of democratization under three
broad headings: contagion, control, and consent. Although there is inevitably some
overlap between them they have been presented as alternative modes of analysis,
each with a different structure and each highlighting distinctive features.
The main merit of the contagion perspective is that, operating on the most restrictive
of assumptions, and using the simplest possible objective indicators, it proves capable
of accounting for some striking regularities. It is, therefore, an acceptable approach
for some limited purposes, although it may tend to mislead if extended too far.
The control perspective relaxes the previous restriction on the study of actors and their
motivations, but it confines itself to explaining the calculations of the dominant
powers. By so doing it links the politics of democratization and the realist or power
politics tradition in international relations. Given the importance of democratization
processes in contemporary international politics the realist tradition needs to establish
some such link. By incorporating the conduct of dominant powers the control
perspective adds depth to the observations generated by the contagion approach.
It may be of particular value for those seeking to explain how most democratizations
begin, and the timing, sequence, and scope of these initiatives. It is less useful in
accounting for the subsequent fate of these experiments (except under the special
circumstances of democratization-through-incorporation).
To analyse the complexities of the consolidation process requires a third shift of
perspective, to the means by which consent may be generated. This involves a more
sophisticated conception of the democratization process, including distinguishing
between different phases, and alternative paths and outcomes. Naturally, then, it must
consider many more variables than the two previous approaches, and the categories of
analysis become much more complex than before. Instead of using a few simple
indicators it becomes necessary to work with intricate and elusive patterns of strategic
interactions which differ subtly from one case to the next. It is not even possible to
identify the key actors a priori—rather they constitute themselves in the course of the
democratization itself. Small wonder, then, that students of democratization have
tended to concentrate on the internal dynamics of institution-building and mutual
accommodation, regarding the international component of the generation of consent
as generally secondary in importance.
However, this introduction has argued that outside a limited number of South
American cases it can be seriously misleading to marginalize the international
dimensions in this way. We cannot in general assume consensus over the territorial
boundaries within
end p.23
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which each democratization unfolds. We should not disregard the possibility that the
uncertainties of the transition period will raise doubts about the stability of the
regional power balance, and that these international insecurities will feed back into the
democratization process. Part of the process of constituting authentically national
strategic actors will frequently involve their disengagement from earlier dependence
on external protectors. Underlying all these questions of actor-led strategy and
interaction will be a distribution of public aspirations and expectations that may owe
much of its configuration to the operation of international demonstration effects. One
particularly striking illustration of how this may generate consent for democratization
is when it is reinforced by the prospect of full membership of the EU. In summary,
therefore, the international processes contributing to (or impeding) consent typically
deserve sustained attention.
Indeed, whether the appropriate perspective for studying a given issue is contagion,
control, or consent it may be artificial to dichotomize the analysis into domestic and
international elements. Although there will always be some purely domestic and some
exclusively international factors involved, most of the analysis will contain a tangle of
both elements. In the contemporary world there is no such thing as democratization in
one country, and perhaps there never was.

2 The Influence of the International Context Upon the Choice of National Institutions
and Policies in Neo‐Democracies

Philippe C. Schmitter
Few political acts seem more autochthonous than the change from one political
regime to another. This shift to a different set of rules and practices governing the
exercise of citizenship, the access to power, the conditions of competition for office,
and the making of authoritative decisions is not only likely to affect the welfare and
security of almost all persons living in a given territory, but it is usually accompanied
by an increase in political awareness, a resuscitation of collective symbols, and an
assertion of national self-determination. The defunct or deposed regime is frequently
vilified as the product either of foreign imposition or of atavistic conditions. The new
regime presents itself as an updated and more authentic expression of the true
interests and aspirations of the nation. Its proponents, in other words, have an
incentive to play down the role of external actors and the impact of international
forces.
The transition from autocracy to democracy is a special case in point. By one mode
or another, the previous tyrants are overthrown and the event triggers a vast
increase in citizen consciousness—it has been termed a resurrection of civil
society.1 Expectations soar and typically focus on national as well as personal goals.
The people (or, more accurately, their representatives) assemble; they choose new
institutions of self-government and embark on new policies of self-improvement.
Whether they do so rationally by evaluating the full range of possible rules and
selecting those that optimize collective performance and best elicit compliance, or
habitually by reinvoking some time-honoured conception of governance that best
conforms to their sense of identity and obligation, is (for the moment) unimportant.
The implication is still clear: regime change tends to be a domestic affair;
democratization is a domestic affair par excellence.
Admittedly, this leaves out those (not insignificant) cases in which one set of rulers
and rules is defeated in war by foreigners who subsequently impose their preferred
type of regime upon the vanquished. Germany (East and West), Japan, Hungary,
Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania were compelled to take that route in
the aftermath of the Second World War. The outcomes in Italy, Austria, and Korea
(North and South) were similarly, if less directly, imposed. But these are typically
treated as aberrations.2 Even where there is an obvious international element involved
in bringing about the demise of the previous authoritarian regime but which is not
followed by physical occupation of national territory by foreigners (e.g. China,
Yugoslavia, Portugal, Greece, and Argentina), it is almost always presumed that the
choice of subsequent institutions and policies is the product of autochthonous political
forces.
The emergent (but burgeoning) literature on democratization has so far largely
reflected this nativist tendency. One of the most confident assertions in the
O'Donnell–Schmitter concluding volume to the Transitions from Authoritarian Rule
project was that ‘domestic factors play a predominant role in the transition’.3 Not only
does this fly in the face of a substantial (if hardly concordant) literature that stresses
the dependence, interpenetration, and even integration increasingly embedded in the
contemporary world system, but it also seems to clash with some obvious facts
surrounding the more recent transitions that have occurred in Eastern Europe. Would
the astonishingly rapid changes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia,
Romania, and Bulgaria in 1989–90 have even been imaginable, much less gone as far
as they did, without a prior change in the hegemonic pretensions of the Soviet Union?
Would Honecker have been able to hang on to power if it had not been for a switch in
Hungarian foreign policy that allowed East Germans to transit its territory to seek
exile in the West? And who could have conceived of a regime change in Albania—a
polity virtually without a domestic opposition—in the absence of the collapse of the
other Communist regimes?
Perhaps, it is time to reconsider the impact of the international context upon regime
change. Without seeking to elevate it to the status of prime mover, could it not be
more significant than was originally thought? Is it not possible that the early
transitions in southern Europe and Latin America were peculiarly national, and that
those occurring since in Asia, Eastern Europe, and (more tentatively) Africa have
been (and will continue to be) more influenced by their external, regional and global,
contexts? More specifically, to what extent do variations in these contexts—over time
and across countries—impose significantly different constraints upon or open up
significantly different opportunities for nascent democracies? How, why, and when do
they affect their choice of institutions and policies? What, if any, is the impact of
these contextual difference upon the likelihood that these polities will be able to
consolidate some form of democracy successfully?

1. Concepts, Theories, and Assumptions

Providing answers to these questions that are valid and generalizable across the large
number and dispersed location of contemporary cases of democratization will not be
easy. It involves challenging one of the most deeply rooted paradigm divides within
political science, that between international relations and comparative politics. It
would also require escaping from the confines of area studies and searching for
commonalities across quite different cultures, historical trajectories, social structures,
economic systems, and levels of development. The existing IR literature is barely any
help, consisting mostly of bland reflections on ‘linkage politics’, ‘penetrated systems’,
‘fusion of domestic and foreign policy’, and, of course, ‘interdependence’.4 The
regional specialization of most of those who work on democratization deprives them
of the knowledge needed to make reliable inter-area comparisons, or encourages them
to generalize excessively on the basis of the cases they know best.
Moreover, the international context is a notoriously difficult variable to pin
down. On the one hand, it is almost by definition omnipresent, since very few polities
in the contemporary world are isolated from its effects. However, its causal impact is
often indirect, working in mysterious and unintended ways through ostensibly
national agents. On the other hand, while it is usually presented in the singular, i.e.
the international context, its actual incidence varies greatly according to the size,
resource base, regional context, geo-strategic location, and alliance structure of the
country involved. Existing IR theory is relatively good at specifying these conditions
at the level of nation-states, but much less well equipped in dealing with phenomena
at the sub-national or supra-national levels. In the simplified world of realists, the only
actors worth mentioning are nation-states and the only relevant actions consist of their
explicit foreign policies: signing treaties; entering into alliances; making diplomatic
protests and threats; voting in international bodies; offering or withdrawing economic
incentives; and, in the last resort, declaring war and making peace. In the complex
world of idealists, a lot of non-state actors: international organizations, human rights
groups, foundations, interest associations, media organizations, transnational firms,
partisan internationale, networks of dissidents, even private citizens have to be taken
into account, and their actions can augment, undermine, and even countermand those
of the states they belong to. As we shall see, there is reason to suspect that this
world beneath and beyond the nation-state has played an especially significant
role in the international promotion of democracy.
In Chapter 1 Laurence Whitehead has ventured again into this murky arena of the
international context (which he prefers to call ‘the international dimension’). In
addition to upgrading his assessment of its importance since his earlier work in the
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule project,5 he proposes a threefold grouping of the
international factors that may impinge upon contemporary democratizations.6 To his
categories of contagion, control, and consent, I would add a fourth: conditionality.
The defining dimensions are simple, even if their implications are not. On the vertical
axis, the key distinction is between unilateral processes of international influence or
power in which one actor intentionally or unintentionally affects another, and
multilateral ones that involve several, often competing, sources of influence or power
and typically work through international organizational rather than purely national
channels. The horizontal axis distinguishes between contexts involving at least the
threat, if not the exercise, of coercive authority (this is usually the exclusive domain
of nation-states, although some international organizations such as the International
Monetary Fund, the IBRD, and the European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development have also acquired some of this capability) and those whose effect
depends on voluntary exchanges. Cross-tabulating these two dimensions produces the
four modal sub-contexts.
Whitehead makes an effort at assigning significance to three of these:
(1) contagion, or the diffusion of experience through neutral, i.e. non-coercive and
often unintentional, channels from one country to another, he finds present
throughout most of the history of democratization;
(2) control, or the promotion of democracy by one country in another through explicit
(1) contagion, or the diffusion of experience through neutral, i.e. non-coercive and
often unintentional, channels from one country to another, he finds present
throughout most of the history of democratization;
policies backed by positive or negative sanctions, he estimates was present in
about two-thirds of the sixty-one cases he considers to be presently democratic;
(3) consent emerges as a more recent category involving a complex set of interactions
between international processes and domestic groups that generates new
democratic norms and expectations from below. In the extreme, this may lead to
an irresistible drive to merge with an already existing democracy (e.g. Germany);
in a milder form, it underlies the desire to protect democracy within a given state
by joining a regional bloc (e.g. the EU).
Conditionality should be added to the other three as the most recent (and, we shall see,
the most rapidly expanding) sub-context for the exercise of international influence. Its
hallmark is the deliberate use of coercion—by attaching specific conditions to the
distribution of benefits to recipient countries—on the part of multilateral institutions.
The locus classicus for this kind of behaviour in the past was (and still is) the IMF,
although democracy was rarely (if ever) one of its stipulated conditions and those that
were imposed were usually kept confidential in order not to offend national
sovereignty (or dignity). More recently, it has been the European Community (and, of
lesser significance, the Council of Europe) that has insisted upon a certain standard of
political behaviour as a condition for membership. Its offshoot the EBRD has been
especially up-front about imposing very specific political criteria before loans will be
granted. While the practice of conditionality seems largely confined to Europe, there
are some signs that other regional organizations, such as the Organization of
American States, the (British) Commonwealth and, even, the Organization for African
Unity, have begun to discuss the issue of collective security to prevent
unconstitutional regime change.
As we turn now to the theoretical domains in which these factors might be brought to
bear, we will try to estimate what (if any) changes have been occurring in
international sub-contexts as the locus has shifted from southern Europe to Latin
America to Eastern Europe over the past two decades and a half. We will be
specifically interested in the extent to which these changes may be promoting or
impeding either the transition from autocracy or the consolidation of democracy.
Grosso modo, there seem to be four ways of conceptualizing the dynamics of
interaction between the international sub-contexts of power and influence and the
varied national cases of democratization. One can adopt a basically functionalist view
and interpret the outcome in terms of an adaptation of the latter to independent and
inexorable trends in the former. Alternatively, the emphasis could be more historically
contingent and focus on the impact of discrete events (or even personalities). Or one
can place primary emphasis on the complex, temporally structured interaction
between cases and assign primary importance to waves of diffusion and
imitation. Or one can take a genetic perspective and emphasize the changing
nature and importance of the international context upon different stages of the
democratization process. None of these four is mutually exclusive; all may
eventually contribute to improving our understanding; each will, however, bring up
different variables and generate different hypotheses, and may even lead one to
different conclusions.

2. Trends
The most prevalent hypothesis linking the international context and democratization is
probably some version of what could be called ‘inverted Kantianism’. Immanuel Kant
suggested that ‘republics’ where governments were accountable to their (restricted)
citizenry were likely to promote commerce in general and international trade in
particular. The development of these exchanges between countries, in turn, would
place restrictions on their aggressive behaviour vis-à-vis each other. Once all polities
had become ‘republican’, the nature of the international system would shift to
‘perpetual peace’.7
History was not very kind to Kant's optimistic scenario. Shortly after he wrote his
little pamphlet (in 1795), one of his republics (France) deprived three others (the
Netherlands, Switzerland, and Venice) of their independence and distinctive
governing form—and transformed itself into an Empire and an autocracy!
Nevertheless, the doux commerce thesis—that trade tends to produce moderate and
accommodative behaviour in both individuals and collectivities—persists.8 In its more
recent versions, however, Kant's causality is inverted. It is argued that the
development of mutual exchanges between citizens in different polities during a
period of protracted peace tends to produce a demand for republican government. Put
in more contemporary terms, increase in international interdependence, especially
forms of ‘complex interdependence’ involving a wide range of types of exchange,
leads to the democratization of national political institutions. For example, an
assumption of this sort must have underlain Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, as well as
European resistance to the US diktat concerning the construction of a gas pipeline
from the Soviet Union.
It is, of course, but a small step from this perspective to inverting the dependency
theory that was used so extensively to explain the demise of democracy and the rise of
bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in Latin America and elsewhere during the 1960s
and 1970s. This would argue that subsequent changes in the content and balance of
(inter-)dependencies between centre and periphery had required countries in the latter
to adapt their domestic institutions (at least formally) during the later 1970s and
1980s, this time to conform to the new functional requisite of open, free, and
competitive politics.
Samuel Huntington has made a quite different, but related point. While rising
interdependence remains the necessary condition, the sufficient one concerns the
distribution of power within that evolving system of exchanges. Only those countries
that are closely affected by existing democracies will be affected: ‘In large measure,
the rise and decline of democracy on a global scale is a function of the rise and
decline of the most powerful democratic states.’9 As we shall see, this perspective
mixes elements of control, i.e. deliberate policy initiatives by the United States, with
the effects of contagion, i.e. the example of successful and prosperous democratic
polities.
In our previous work on transitions, Guillermo O'Donnell and I firmly rejected all
versions of this trendy analysis. It seemed to us that the pattern of external exchanges,
the stage of capitalist development, the extent of asymmetric dependencies, and the
role of major powers in general and the United States in particular varied so much
across the countries of southern Europe and Latin America that we were studying that
it was patently erroneous to interpret democratization as a response to some common
trend or trends toward interdependence. For the period we were examining, it was the
decline not the rise in US power that seemed to open up spaces for political change.
As Terry Karl pointed out subsequently with regard to Latin America, it was precisely
in those countries where the influence of the United States remained the greatest—the
Caribbean and Central America—that the progress towards democracy was the least
advanced.10 Where that major power's option to intervene directly, i.e. militarily, was
limited—the Southern Cone of Latin America or the southern edge of Western Europe
—or where its leaders were significantly divided on what course of action to follow—
the Philippines and Korea—democratization occurred. It has not so clearly followed
from the benevolent armed intervention of the US in Panama or Haiti.
What I did emphasize in the introduction I wrote to the southern European case-
studies was that a specific form of complex, organizationally saturated
interdependence between Spain, Portugal, and Greece (and, to a lesser extent, Turkey)
and the rest of Europe (the European Community in particular) did exert a powerful
and positive influence upon the subsequent processes of consolidation of their
respective democracies.11 The impact upon the timing and nature of their varied
transitions from autocracy was marginal, but once regime change was under way, the
networks of public and private exchange that bound these countries to the rest of
Europe had a profound effect upon the choice of institutions and policies. Ironically, it
was the political weakness (not the strength) of the EC that enabled it to play such a
role. Moreover, while the European Union insists on the democratic bona fides of its
members, it itself does not meet the minimum criteria for being a democracy. Both
these features provide prospective members with greater assurance that they will not
simply be outvoted by larger countries that are already members or be dictated to by
an overweening supra-national bureaucracy.
Subsequent events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have not compelled me to
revise my thoughts about the generic importance of trends. These countries were not
characterized by high levels of international interdependence. Their membership of
Comecon and unconvertible currencies had the effect of both cutting them off from
the mainstream of exchanges within the capitalist world economy and restricting their
mutual interdependence. Granted that there was some tendency for commercial and
personal exchanges with the West to increase (and a strong desire for even greater
increases) and there was the beginning of a mutual recognition process that might
have led to closer EC–Comecon relations, it is none the less difficult to assign much
causal weight to either. Contrary to Huntington's benevolent assumption about the
influence of ‘the most powerful democratic states’, in Eastern Europe,
democratization was triggered (but not caused) by the most powerful autocratic state.
Only by dialectical inversion is it possible to rescue the trend hypothesis: the very
prospect that economic interdependence was increasing rapidly between neighbouring
countries in Western Europe (especially since the signing of the Single European Act
in 1985) could have provided a significant impetus for regime change before the 1992
process would have completed the internal market and left Eastern European outsiders
even further behind.
There is another way of resuscitating the ‘trend to interdependence’ hypothesis that
seems particularly appropriate for Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union: it involves
switching attention from doux commerce to douce communication. What if it were not
the voluntary exchange of goods and services through trade but the unimpeded
transmission of messages through various media that established the basis of
interdependence between political systems? Autocracies might still be able to
control the physical movement of items and people, but they seem to have lost
the capacity to control the flow of information across their borders. Satellite
television, free radio, video cameras, computer networks, facsimile and xerox
machines, and cellular telephones all seem to have ways of getting around national (or
imperial) barriers. Moreover, the content of their messages can be specifically
tuned to the process of democratization by disseminating images of individual
freedom, self-expression, mass collective action, heroic resistance to tyrants, and
so forth. The development of regional and global networks for such
transmissions seems to underlie much of what Whitehead has termed contagion
and consent in the contemporary international context. It connects societies
without the approval or mediation of their governments. With one's neighbours and
the world watching, the cost of repression has gone up and, most of all, the
potential benefit of resistance has greatly increased. Witness the impact of those
images of East Germans trying to climb the walls of the West German embassy in
Prague or crossing the Hungarian–Austrian border in droves. Or those joyous people
astride the Berlin Wall, or that lonely man in front of the tanks in Tienanmen Square,
or Yeltsin haranguing the crowd in front of the Russian Supreme Soviet!
But let us not exaggerate either the reach of this communicative interdependence or its
impact upon democratization. Except for the picturesque street theatre of the
Portuguese Revolution, the transitions in southern Europe and Latin America were
relatively unaffected by it. Perhaps, some regime changes are just less photogenic
than others, or mass publics are less interested in what happens in certain parts of the
world. In some out-of-the-way places, vide Burma and Haiti, the events can be over
before the coverage begins. Nor was extensive and unfavourable media attention
given to mass protests in the early 1980s that were sufficient to bring down Pinochet.
As the Chinese example demonstrates, even with poignant images and ingenious
means of transmission, the formula is not infallible. Power is still an irreducible
component of the international context and coercion is still a resource available to
national autocrats. In other terms, contagion and consent alone are unlikely to be
sufficient to bring about democratization—even in conjuncture with favourable
domestic forces. Often, regime change will require elements of control and
conditionality.

3. Events
No one would deny that major unforeseen occurrences in the international
environment have historically had a significant impact upon regime changes in
general and democratization in particular.12 Machiavelli's term for this was fortuna,
and he confidently assigned 50 per cent of the variance to it. Whatever its proportional
contribution in the contemporary setting, we have seen evidence of its role in recent
transitions.
The most obvious event is war and, especially, defeat in war. The Portuguese, Greek,
and Argentine cases were all affected by unsuccessful efforts by non-democratic
rulers at projecting military power beyond their national boundaries—and one could
claim that the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan played a significant role in
bringing about the demise of its autocracy.
Second in importance was the change in the international system brought about by
decolonization, especially the interconnected events that followed in the aftermath of
the Second World War. With the surface of the globe now virtually covered by at
least nominally sovereign and self-governing states, there doesn't appear to be much
room left for this class of events. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union's (unexpected)
willingness to let its Eastern satellites go it their own way in 1988–9 was roughly
analogous to the break-up of the British, French, Dutch, and Belgian colonial empires
after 1947—even if it was accomplished in a more mutual and peaceful fashion. The
event underlying both defeat in war and decolonization in this case was the dramatic
realization by the rulers of the Soviet Union that they could no longer sustain their
level of international commitments and retain their status as a major power.
It is not yet clear what impact the subsequent collapse of the entire bipolar structure of
the international system will have upon the consolidation of democracy in those
countries which have undergone a transition, or upon the pressure for regime change
in those autocracies that remain in power in Africa, Asia, and, especially, the Middle
East. Cuba is obviously an immediate case in point, but there are others which have
lost their ability to play the major powers off against each other. Conversely, those
which have been liberated by Soviet decolonization—including Russia, the Baltic
States, and other ex-Soviet republics—seem to be able to call upon a greater degree of
international solidarity and financial support than has been the case since the United
States aided in the reconstruction of the fledgling democracies of Western Europe
after the Second World War.13
4. Waves
Any plotting of the dates when democracies were founded or when they have
significantly expanded their practice of citizenship and/or their degree of
accountability would reveal a strong tendency towards temporal clustering. There are
a few democracies which have followed more idiosyncratic trajectories and timed
their changes in seeming disregard for what was happening to their neighbours the
United States, Chile, Uruguay, Great Britain, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Canada, New Zealand, and Australia14—but most of them can be placed in one or
other wave of democratization.
The first, 1848, was quite spectacular but ephemeral. Most of those affected
returned to their previous mode of governance or to an even more autocratic
regime in short order. The second major outbreak of democracy corresponded to the
First World War and its aftermath.15 This time not only were new countries carved out
of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire and the disrupted Russian Empire, but all of
them turned to democracy initially.16 The Weimar Republic replaced the German
Reich. Moreover, very important extensions of the franchise and inclusions of new
parties into government occurred in those Western European polities that were already
partially democratic. The third wave came in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Not only were numerous previous democracies liberated to revert to their previous
status and new democracies established in West Germany and Italy, but the process of
regime change spread far beyond Europe through the process of decolonization in
Asia and Africa. Japan and South Korea were given democratic institutions by a
withdrawing occupying power. In Latin America numerous dictators, frozen in power
by the war itself, were overthrown.17
We are currently in the fourth wave of democratization. It began quite unexpectedly
and originally in Portugal on the 25 April 1974 and does not yet seem to have crested.
Compared to previous ones, it has the following peculiar characteristics.
1. It has been much more global in its reach. It began in southern Europe, spread to
Latin America, affected some Asian countries, and literally swept through Eastern
Europe. Moreover, from Mongolia to Mali, and Madagascar to Mexico, important
changes are still in progress. Only the Middle East seems immune, although even
there some change has been occurring in Tunisia and Algeria. Cuba and Serbia
stand out in their respective neighbourhoods. (See also Chapter 14, below.)
2. As a consequence of the former, it has affected far more countries and been more
thorough in its regional impact. Some parts of the world that were previously
almost uniformly autocratic are now almost equally democratic. Cuba and Serbia
stand out in their respective neighbourhoods. (See also Chapter 14, below.)
1. It has been much more global in its reach. It began in southern Europe, spread to
Latin America, affected some Asian countries, and literally swept through Eastern
Europe. Moreover, from Mongolia to Mali, and Madagascar to Mexico, important
changes are still in progress. Only the Middle East seems immune, although even
there some change has been occurring in Tunisia and Algeria. Cuba and Serbia
stand out in their respective neighbourhoods. (See also Chapter 14, below.)
3. It has suffered far fewer regressions to autocracy than in the past. Twenty-seven
years after it began, the only clear reversals have come in Burma and China.
Thailand seems a rather special case of persistent pendulation in regime type. Haiti
is a particularly telling example. Its initial experiment with free and contested
elections of uncertain outcome resulted in a reassertion of military power. The
democratic trajectory resumed after a short interlude, but again met with a violent
overthrow by elements of the armed forces—the outcome of which is not yet
certain.
Observing this bunching together of historical and contemporary experiences does not
explain their occurrence. The most obvious hypothesis is that the waves of
democratization are produced by a process of diffusion. In Whitehead's terms,
contagion is the most plausible explanation in the international context,
especially when no simultaneous external event is present that could otherwise
explain the coincidence.18 The successful example of one country's transition
establishes it as a model to imitate and, once a given region is sufficiently saturated
with this mode of political domination, pressure will mount to compel the remaining
autocracies to conform to the newly established norm.
This hypothesis is particularly appealing for the explanation of the contemporary,
fourth, wave because, on the one hand, the countries affected have not suffered the
impact of any common exogenous event such as a world war and because, on the
other, the ensuing development of complex communicative interdependence
provides greater assurance that the mechanisms of diffusion are working. In fact,
the latter observation presents a complication in testing for contagion or diffusion.
Previously, the main empirical proof for its presence hinged on geographical
propinquity. An innovation was supposed to reach nearby units before it reached those
further away. Hence, the observation that democratization in the current wave began
in southern Europe and then leap-frogged to Latin America without first affecting
North Africa or Eastern Europe that were closer at hand would have constituted a
disconfirmation. However, when one considers that modern systems of
communication are not so spatially bound and may not even be culturally confined,
then the observation is much less damaging. Given the extraordinary simultaneity and
omnipresence of these systems, it should be no surprise when its messages are
received and responded to in Mongolia before Mali or Mexico.
With this prima facie plausibility in mind, we can turn to the development of further
hypotheses. For example, the wave notion leads to the likelihood that the
relevance of the international context will increase monotonically with each
successive instance of democratization. Those coming later in the wave will be
more influenced by those that preceded them. Whether they can be expected to
learn from mistakes made earlier is perhaps less predictable, but there may be
an advantage to delayed democratization—just as it has been argued that late
development had its advantages.
One of the reasons for this momentum effect in the contemporary context has less to
do with contagion than with what Whitehead called consent. Each successive case
has contributed more and more to the development of formal non-governmental
organizations and informal informational networks devoted to the promotion of
human rights, the protection of minorities, the monitoring of elections, the
provision of economic advice, and the fostering of exchanges among academics
and intellectuals—all intended to further democratization. When the first cases of
Portugal, Greece, and Spain emerged, this sort of international infrastructure hardly
existed. Indeed, some of the key lessons were learned from these experiences and
subsequently applied elsewhere. By now, there exist an extraordinary variety of
international parties, associations, foundations, movements, networks, and firms ready
to intervene either to promote or to protect democracy (see Chapters 8 and 9 below).
This suggests a second hypothesis: the international context surrounding
democratization has shifted from a primary reliance on public, inter-governmental
channels of influence towards an increased involvement of private, non-governmental
organizations—and it is the concrete activity of these agents of consent, rather
than the abstract process of contagion, that accounts for the global reach of
regime change and the fact that so few regressions to autocracy have occurred.
For, however superficially attractive the process of contagion may appear, it rarely
bears closer scrutiny. Take, for example, the case of Portugal and Spain. Despite their
geographical and cultural proximity and the temporal coincidence of their transitions,
it is very implausible to assert that Spain embarked upon its regime change in 1975
because of the prior events of 1974 in Portugal. In fact, the Spaniards had long been
waiting for the death of Franco which was the specific triggering event—not the
Portuguese Revolution. In many ways, they were much better prepared for
democratization than their Portuguese neighbours because they began preparing for it
much earlier. At most, it could be claimed that Spain learned some negative lessons
about what to avoid during the transition and, therefore, had a relatively easier time of
it than might otherwise have been the case. I suspect that detailed evidence of
diffusion from southern Europe to Latin America or Asia or Eastern Europe would be
just as difficult to provide. Of course, Spain (and, more recently, Chile) seems to have
offered a model of successful transition to late-comers and, therefore, encouraged
them to venture into uncertain terrain, but this is a long way from being able to claim
that Spain actually caused others to change their regime type.
Where the argument for contagion or diffusion is more persuasive is within specific
regional contexts. The unexpected (and highly controlled) transition in Paraguay
seems to have been influenced by the fact that the country was surrounded by nascent
democracies, although Chile under Pinochet held out successfully against such
pressures during the 1980s. Pinochet even dared to use the example of the poor
performance of Chile's recently democratized neighbours as an argument for voting
‘Sí’ in the plebiscite that would have perpetuated him in power for another eight
years! The fact that he lost that plebiscite suggests (but does not prove) that Chilean
citizens
were influenced not just by their own democratic tradition but also by the wave that
had engulfed their neighbours.
Eastern Europe may provide the best possible case for contagion, even though the
initial impetus for regime change was given by an exogenous event, i.e. the shift in
Soviet foreign and defence policy vis-à-vis the region. No one can question the
accelerating flow of messages and images that went from Poland to Hungary to the
DDR to Czechoslovakia to Romania to Bulgaria and, eventually, to Albania, or the
impact that successive declarations of national independence had upon the member
republics of the Soviet Union.
This leads to a third and final sub-hypothesis, namely, that the really effective
international context that can influence the course of democratization has
increasingly become regional, and not binational or global. Both the lessons of
contagion and the mechanisms of consent seem to function better at that level.19
Stages, Phases, and Sequences
Democratization proceeds unevenly as changing sets of actors employ different
strategies to accomplish different tasks. The process may not always be continuous,
gradual, linear, or cumulative, but virtually all attempts to model it refer to the
presence of stages, phases, or sequences. The most common distinction has been
between a shorter, more intense, uncertain, and eventful period of transition and a
longer, less heroic, more dispersed, and deliberate period of consolidation—the
contrast between an initial, exciting ‘war of movement’ and a subsequent, prosaic
‘war of position’.
From this staged or phased notion of regime change comes one of the most important
general hypotheses linking the international context to domestic political outcomes:
regardless of the form (control, contagion, consent, or conditionality) that it takes,
external intervention will have a greater and more lasting effect upon the
consolidation of democracy than upon the transition to it.20 Part of the explanation
rests on the likely structure of opportunities. During the first phase, the probability of
exercising a marginal influence over the outcome may be greater than later when
things have calmed down, but the sheer pace of change—coupled in some cases with
its unexpectedness—leaves outsiders without the critical information they would need
to intervene effectively and without regular channels of influence through which to
operate. The rapid pace of internal change tends to out-run the decision-making
capacity of most external actors.21 Moreover, some foreign governments will have
been discredited for the realist policies they pursued in relation to the previous
autocracy; others whose actions may prove more acceptable within the country can
have difficulty in deciding which fractions to support in a context of divided social
groups and ephemeral political alliances. To the extent that the transition is related to
processes of national liberation and assertiveness, the intromission of foreigners can
be especially unwelcome—even if, in this period of high uncertainty, weak domestic
political forces may be sorely tempted to look for outside support.
The situation changes once consolidation is under way. The relevant domestic actors
have been reduced in numbers and variety, and their positions and resources are better
known. The national borders and identities will have been asserted, if not definitively
established.22 Those foreigners who find it in their interest to intervene can do so with
greater deliberation and selectivity. The potential marginal impact may have
diminished, but so has the risk of backing the wrong forces. Moreover, the modus
operandi is likely to change from covert actions by foreign governments that are
intended to seize upon a target of opportunity in order to influence a particular event
through specific inducements or sanctions, e.g. trying to encourage an autocrat to step
down peacefully,23 or to change the outcome of a founding election,24 towards more
open and long-term attempts, often by non-governmental actors, aimed at supporting
sets of institutions, e.g. the encouragement of opposition parties, trade unions
independent of state authority, or legal organizations ensuring access to justice or the
protection of civil rights. These external efforts to penetrate domestic civil society
(and even to create a regional or global civil society) may have begun when the
regime was still autocratic, but they rarely—if ever—seem to have contributed much
to its demise. Whether they can do better to enhance the likelihood of consolidation
remains to be seen. The evidence from southern Europe is encouraging in this regard,
but one can question its relevance elsewhere, since the regional context provided a
unusually rich and multi-layered set of non-governmental exchanges and a powerful
incentive for accepting them, i.e. not just full and formal entry into the European
Community, but participation in a very vibrant and lucrative European civil society.
Democratizers in Latin America have no such prospect and, much as those in Eastern
Europe may aspire to integrate with the rest of Europe, the prospect of an immediate
positive response is becoming increasingly remote.
The new development in this area is conditionality, especially when practised through
multilateral diplomacy and international organizations. Here, the idea is to use the
fulfilment of stipulated political obligations as a prerequisite for obtaining economic
aid, debt relief, most-favoured-nation treatment, access to subsidized credit, or
membership in coveted regional or global organizations. The foreign conditioners
should manipulate these incentives—at least in theory—in such a way as to encourage
the locals to sustain the momentum of their political transformation and help them
over specific critical thresholds: acceptance of existing sovereignties; supervision of
free elections; amnesty for political opponents; adoption of specific institutions;
refusal to allow non-democratic parties into governing alliances; resistance to military
pressures; and tolerance for partisan rotation in power.25 Not only can any or all of
these be made conditional, but domestic politicians may even welcome this
interference in internal affairs as an excuse for arguing that their hands are tied and
they must go ahead with decisions that may seem unpopular at the time. Moreover, a
judicious application of it could be useful in the especially difficult context in which
several institutional transformations are simultaneously clamouring for attention. By
providing incentives for tackling certain issues first—say, holding elections before
removing price controls or privatizing state holdings—the external conditioners could
help to ensure a more orderly transition. This assumes, of course, that they have an
adequate theoretical understanding of the situation to enable them to determine what
should precede what; and that the external institutions at different levels and
functional domains are not pushing different priorities and emitting contradictory
signals.26
Of course, conditionality in economic and monetary matters has long been a feature of
the post-war international context, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) being its
most active practitioner. What is new is the tying of policy responses to political
objectives.27 Moreover, precisely because of its novelty and its blatant disregard for
traditional notions of national sovereignty, there seems to be a propensity for hiding
its manifestations behind the façade of multilateral institutions. It seems easier to
justify conforming to explicit requests to establish specific political institutions or to
perform specific political acts when they come from an international, especially an
appropriately regional, organization than when they are demanded by a single
government. This effort at multilateral conditionality began with the very first
transition in the current wave, but it has gathered momentum as the focus of regime
change shifted from southern Europe to South America to Asia to Eastern Europe and,
now, to Africa. In part, this may be a reflection that the more recent neo-democracies
are more vulnerable in their trading, investment, and indebtedness patterns; in part, it
seems to have emerged from an independent process of the accumulation of
precedents and organizational capacities at the regional or global levels of the world
system.
During a critical phase of the Portuguese transition, an extensive multilateral effort
was mounted to ensure that its outcome would conform both to the country's previous
alliance commitments and to Western standards of democracy and public policy. This
involved mobilizing the formal institutions of NATO (and Portugal's momentary
exclusion from its Nuclear Planning Group), the European Community (with a
critically timed emergency loan in the autumn of 1975), and the International
Monetary Fund (with massive balance- of-payments support), as well as a variety of
unilateral (and less public) interventions by the United States and the Federal
Republic of Germany. According to one well-informed source, even superpower
concertation was brought to bear when President Ford informed Secretary-General
Brezhnev at their Vladivostok Meeting that détente was off unless the Russians
stopped assisting the Portuguese Communist Party in its (apparent) bid for power.28
But most expressions of conditionality have been less dramatic and improvised. By
far the most important for southern Europe and, now, for Eastern Europe is the firm
policy that only democracies are eligible for full membership of the European
Union.29 Needless to say, neither this provision of the Rome Treaty, nor the
subsequent Birkelbach Report (1962) of the European Parliament defines precisely
what operative criteria are involved. Geoffrey Pridham has suggested that these seem
to be (1) genuine, free elections; (2) the ‘right’ electoral results, i.e. a predominance of
pro-democratic parties; (3) a reasonably stable government; (4) leadership by a
credible (and pro-European) figure; and (5) the inauguration of a liberal democratic
constitution.30 None of the three southern European applicants were formally admitted
to full membership until they had crossed most, if not all, of these hurdles. Which is
not to say that their respective democracies were then reliably consolidated. Portugal
still had significant, constitutionalized military intromission in policy-making and
unstable minority governments; Spain had a weak governing coalition and even
suffered an attempted military coup after applying for entry.
Greece is, perhaps, the country that made most intensive use of EC conditionality to
assist its unusually rapid transition and consolidation (see, however, Chapter 12
below). Karamanlis anchored his entire strategy upon rapid and full entry into the
Community and openly proclaimed that this decision rested on political not economic
grounds.31 This was no doubt facilitated by the strong role the EC (and the Council of
Europe) had taken in opposition to the regime of the Colonels, but it should be noted
that it was a policy which did not meet with universal approval in Greece. Moreover,
Karamanlis coupled his European ploy with a (temporary) withdrawal from NATO.
EC officials and member governments responded quickly by unfreezing the
association agreement, sending a flock of visitors, and providing emergency aid. They
also seem to have pressed for a rapid convocation of national elections.32 In the cases
of Portugal and Spain, the responses of both democratizers and integrators concerning
full membership were much more hesitant and lengthy. In the cases of Eastern
Europe, where EC entry was placed immediately at the top of the policy agenda by
newly elected presidents and prime ministers, the lack of enthusiasm (not to say,
veiled opposition) of the twelve member states has been increasingly apparent.33
Why this specific form of conditionality has had such an impact is worth exploring
further—even though (alas!) no similar regional arrangement exists elsewhere in the
world to promote the consolidation of democracy. First, EU membership is expected
to be permanent in nature and to provide access to an expanding variety of economic
and social opportunities far into the future; second, it is backed up by ‘complex
interdependence’, an evolving system of private transnational exchanges at many
levels and involving many different types of collective action (parties, interest
associations, social movements, sub-national governments, etc.); finally, it engages
lengthy, public, multilateral deliberation and is decided unanimously in the Council of
Ministers and by an absolute majority in the European Parliament. This enhances the
reputation or certification effect beyond the level attainable via unilateral recognition
or bilateral exchanges where other criteria (i.e. security calculations) may override the
democratic ones.34 More than any other international commitment, full EU
membership has served to stabilize both political and economic expectations. It does
not directly guarantee the consolidation of democracy; it indirectly makes it easier for
national actors to agree within a narrower range of rules and practices.
NATO conditionality, for example, has been a good deal less effective. Not only were
the authoritarian regimes in Portugal, Greece, and Turkey ‘members in good standing’
of the alliance, but newly democratized Greece found it expedient to leave the
organization—for a brief period. Spanish membership in NATO was much more hotly
contested internally than its EC application, and only squeaked through by a narrow
margin in a national referendum (and, then, only after the Socialist Party changed its
position). Nevertheless, several observers have suggested that the engagement of
national militaries in NATO—the external security role, the base agreements, and the
funds for modernization and professionalization that are linked to this process—has
facilitated the establishment of civilian control over the armed forces in the aftermath
of regime change.35 Again, the absence of such incentives in the functioning of the
Rio Treaty in Latin America or after the collapse of the Warsaw Treaty Organization
in Eastern Europe points to greater difficulties in these areas.
The members of the Organization of American States (OAS) may, however, be
breaking new ground with regard to multilateral conditionality. At their annual
meeting in Santiago in June 1991, the foreign ministers of its thirty-four member
states—momentarily, all representing democratic governments—agreed to meet in
emergency session ‘to adopt any measures deemed appropriate’ to restore democracy
if one of their number were to be overthrown by non-constitutional means. The coup
in Haiti, following only three months later, provided an almost perfect case for testing
their resolve. The OAS did meet in response to the overthrow of Jean-Bertrand
Aristide and voted unanimously to send a high-level mission to Port au Prince, as well
as to apply comprehensive diplomatic and economic sanctions. Eventually, after much
delay and backstage manœuvring, in September 1994 a Washington-orchestrated
international operation culminated in the landing of 20,000 US troops, which were not
in the end resisted. On 15 October President Aristide was reinstated in office, to serve
out the residual fourteen months of his term, and Haiti embarked on yet another shaky
effort to institutionalize competitive electoral politics. The continuing uncertainty in
that country makes it difficult to assess what the final outcome will be, but for the first
time there exists, at least in embryo, a system of international collective security that
claims to protect countries (specifically, democracies) not only from external military
aggression but also from internal political overthrow. Were it to become effective—
and to be extended to other regions of the world—the entire international context of
democratization would be radically transformed.
But why this sudden flurry of attention of collective efforts at ensuring or, better,
promoting the consolidation of democracy—especially when previous unilateral or
multilateral efforts at making the world safe for democracy met with such a lack of
success? It is tempting to refer to the standard variables of interdependence and
internationalization, perhaps with a side reference to the growing regionalization of
IGOs and NGOs. Moreover, in certain of these regions, democracy at the national
level has become the norm not the exception.
While these broad parametric trends and waves no doubt contribute something to the
desire to impose conditionality, its feasibility would seem to hinge on major changes
in the system of global security. The end of the Cold War and, with it, the loss of
external support for anti-capitalist and autocratic experiments in development has
meant that regime changes no longer threaten the global balance of power.
Democratic superpowers, such as the United States or Europe collectively, no longer
need fear that the uncertainty of transition will be exploited by the sinister external
forces of world Communism, aimed at undermining their security. On the one hand,
this seems to leave insiders freer than before to choose their own institutions and
follow their own policies—but only within the narrower constraints imposed by
economic interdependence and international norms—on the other, it leaves outsiders
freer to intervene when those norms are transgressed or when the interests of
interdependence are violated, especially in those régimes d'exception where the effort
can be orchestrated multilaterally.
Appendix: Propositions and Hypotheses
To facilitate further discussion and research on the impact of the international context
upon contemporary democratization, I conclude with an inventory of propositions-
cum-hypotheses that are implied by the above analysis. They are neither exhaustive
nor inclusive. One could certainly add to them and systematize them further. They are
offered as inductive generalizations based on a restricted set of cases and a restricted
period of time, not as confirmed empirical findings or invariant deductive
conclusions. For, if there is one overarching lesson to be gleaned from the
contemporary international context for democratization, it is that this context is
subject to rapid change in both the magnitude and direction of its impact!
I. All contemporary regime changes are affected to a significant degree by the
international political context in which they occur, even if:
A. This context does not dictate or determine the timing, type or outcome of the
transition process.
B. The impact of the international context is normally mediated through national or
sub-national actors and processes.
II. Transitions to democracy are more affected by this context since they involve a
greater number and variety of actors with a wider range of public and private contacts
to that environment. Moreover, once the transition has begun, even more numerous
and novel channels of exchange open up as a side-product of the change in regime.
III. The significance of the international context tends to increase over time in the
course of a ‘wave of democratization’ because:
A. Those cases coming later will be influenced (positively and negatively) by
their predecessors (especially those in the immediate vicinity);
B. As the wave progresses, new international institutions and arrangements will be
formed and apply their efforts to those that follow, ergo:
1. Over the course of successive democratizations in a wave, the
nature of the international context will shift from primarily
governmental and public action toward an increasing role for non-
governmental and private institutions.
2. Also, there will be a tendency for the mode of action to change from
uni- or bilateral actions towards multilateral efforts.
C. As the number of democratizations increases and is, therefore, geographically
more dispersed, the role of actors in the international context will become
increasingly explicit—overt rather than covert—and will seek open legitimation,
both nationally and internationally.
IV. The most effective context within which external actors can influence democratic
processes at the national level is increasingly regional, because:
A. Cultural and geographical propinquity will encourage the formation of
denser and tighter networks among neighbouring countries.
B. The contemporary patterns of international interdependence, influenced by the
formation of common markets, free-trade areas, and economic blocs, are
themselves becoming increasingly regionalized and these multilateral efforts
indirectly promote the formation of regionally based NGOs—parties, interest-
groups, or movements—that can play a significant role at the national level.
C. Moreover, where such regional trading and policy-making organizations exist and
where they restrict membership to democracies, they alone can have a very
significant impact, especially upon the processes of consolidation.
V. Existing democratic states tend to believe that it is in their national interests (as
well as their national ethos) that other states become democratic, because:
A. Democracies pose less of a security threat to each other.
B. Democracies tend to establish more reliable, extensive, and varied trading
relationships with each other.
C. Democracies, however, may fail to act upon their intrinsic preference for other
democracies when:
1. The cost of actual intervention is excessive;
2. The risk of failure is too great;
3. The concern for possible changes in national security is significant due
to: (a) possible defection from an alliance to neutrality; (b) a
possible shift to an opposing alliance; (c) possible change to protectionist
or discriminatory economic or social policies that would negatively
affect national producers.
VI. Transitions towards democracy either occur during or tend to provoke serious
crises in a country's international economic relations, which, in turn, tends to make the
consolidation of democracy more difficult. This is not to argue that:
A. Disillusionment with economic performance, even where severe and involving
international complications, necessarily dooms the regime change to failure,
rather:
B. Citizens are less likely (in the present international context) to come to believe
that an alternative form of political domination (i.e. some form of autocracy)
would perform better in the international economy and would be more likely to
focus their negative evaluation upon the government or party in power than upon
the regime type.
VII. The extent of influence that the international context will have over the processes
of regime change varies with:
A. the size of country
B. its geo-strategic location
C. its vulnerability to specific external flows such as:
1. indebtedness payments
2. critical energy or raw-material imports
3. easily substitutable or subsidized exports.
VIII. The extent of external influence will vary with the stage, moment, or sequence
of the process of regime change.
A. Its potential marginal impact will be greatest during the transition, but this is when
such an influence will be the most difficult to bring to bear effectively.
B. It will be easier and less risky to bring external influence to bear during the
consolidation, but this is when the immediate marginal impact will be lower (and
less visible).
IX. The greater the stalemate between internal political forces, the higher the
likelihood that one or another of them will be tempted to appeal for external support
to break that stalemate, although foreign powers may prove reluctant to get involved
in such a situation.
X. The more that the contending internal forces disagree over basic foreign policy
objectives, the greater the incentive for foreigners to intervene, since the outcome is
more likely to produce policy differences that could affect their interests.
XI. In the contemporary international context, the more open and penetrated the
national economy and the more complex its interdependencies, the more likely it is
that regime change—once it occurs—will be towards democracy, and the more likely
that it will result in the eventual consolidation of democracy. This is not to argue:
A. that in an increasingly interdependent world system all regime changes will be in
the same direction, or
B. that similar levels or degrees of interdependence will necessarily produce (and
reproduce) similar domestic political institutions.
XII. The presence of a powerful democratic superpower (or powers) in the regional
environment of a given country will have less of an impact upon the consolidation of
democracy than the presence of a viable, expanding multilateral international
organization.
XIII. The consolidation of democracy will leave most polities more, rather than less,
dependent upon the international context.
XIV. However, the citizenry of these nascent democracies will be more rather than
less inclined to accept the interference of foreign actors in their political (as well as
economic and social) existence.
XV. Indeed, in certain parts of the world, e.g. Europe, the dispersion and
consolidation of democracy opens up the possibility of the formation of a
regional civil society that may precede (and eventually precipitate) the formation
of a regional polity that will institutionalize democracy at a supra-national level.
(Even Europe is still far from this outcome (pace the neo-functionalists), but its
emergence is worth simulating, and, where possible, stimulating.)

13 Democracy and Decolonization: East-Central Europe

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Laurence Whitehead
1. Introduction
The comparative analysis of democratization processes was a flourishing branch of
political science well before the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, on 10 November
1989. That event, its timing, and the transformations through East-Central Europe
which it symbolized, were unforeseen not only by virtually all academic observers,
but also by world statesmen, foreign ministries, and media commentators. Certainly
the available stock of democratization theory was not capable of predicting—or even
of strongly suggesting—the course, speed, or sequencing of political developments
that converted all the six non-Soviet members of the Warsaw Pact from Communist-
ruled regimes into polities operating under more or less competitive electoral systems
within about a year. Fortunately such predictive power is not an essential requirement
of useful work in comparative politics.
This chapter is based on the assumption that, with the benefit of hindsight, it can still
be helpful to re-examine the political upheavals of 1989 deploying the categories and
hypotheses distilled from earlier experiences of democratization. But equally, these
preexisting analytical tools may have to be revised or refined in the light of East-
Central European experiences. Initial approaches to the theory of democratization
derived from a restrictive range of Latin American and southern European processes
which took place within a securely bipolar world, with the result that the international
dimension was downplayed and conceived in a restrictive manner. Even with regard
to those earlier processes some reconsideration
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may be called for, given the heightened prominence of international influences
apparent in many subsequent cases of regime transition.
However, before the 1989 democratizations can be invoked to justify a possibly
wholesale reconstruction of previous analytical work, we need to consider whether
these processes do indeed belong in the same classificatory schema as the earlier
processes. Participants in the events of 1989 certainly invoked the same vocabulary—
of democratization, human and civic rights, the rule of law, and clean and open
elections—as their Latin American and southern European predecessors; and indeed,
they drew on powerful and long-standing shared traditions of enlightenment
liberalism. To some extent they even made explicit cross-references to non-
Communist democratizations. Nevertheless, the regimes they were dismantling
(single-party-ruled command economies) were very different in structure from the
conservative capitalist authoritarian regimes on which most theorizing was based.
Transition to a market economy was viewed as an integral (possibly even the
dominant) component of democratization. Social structures (universal welfare
provision, absence of a strong autonomous civil sphere, or of market-related
professional associations) and geopolitical settings were also very different.
The first question to consider, therefore, is whether such key analytical terms as
‘democratization’, ‘consolidation’, and ‘transition’ carry substantially different
connotations when deployed in the East-Central European context. This topic is taken
up in the second section of the chapter. Then the third section turns to a key feature of
the international context that differentiates these from earlier experiences—the
persistence for over forty years of a Soviet military veto over full democratization,
and the reasons why that veto was lifted in the late 1980s. The fourth section turns to
other distinctive features of the international environment, that can be grouped
together under the heading ‘the role of the West’. It considers the various influences
flowing from ‘the West’, and their effects in shaping the course and content of local
democratizing impulses. The fifth section reflects on the interactions that took place
once the transitions got under way, and relates this to comparative debates on the
prospects for democratic consolidation. The conclusion draws together these
arguments about the relative weight of various types of international influence on the
East-Central European democratizations, and reflects on the implications for pre-
existing analysis.
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2. Democratization in East-Central Europe: The Local Terminology
In the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, it is understandable that
East-Central European conceptions of democracy should be viewed essentially as an
expression of popular resistance to imposed Communist rule. However, such an
immediatist perspective is likely to cloud the possibilities of locating the 1989–90
democratizations in a broader comparative framework. Certainly, forty years of living
under a Soviet military veto against political reforms that would challenge the legal
monopoly on power exercised by ruling Communist parties (together with vetoes
against neutralism, privatization, and various freedoms of expression) constituted a
profound political learning experience distinctive to this region and common
throughout it.1 By 1989 democracy in East-Central Europe was universally equated
with the dismantling of an externally imposed system of Communist rule, based
philosophically on the suppression of private property. Citizenship rights were
therefore intimately identified with ownership rights. Indeed, in the prevailing local
terminology the re-establishment of a market economy was viewed as a core
ingredient of democratization, and was regarded as indissolubly linked with other
distinctive aspects of the regime transition, such as the dismantling of Communist
structures of political control, the repudiation of Soviet hegemony, and the reversal of
international alliances. This is a radically different agenda from that associated with
the earlier democratizations of conservative authoritarian regimes. Indeed, it is almost
exactly the opposite to what democratization was initially thought to involve in the
first of the southern European transitions (i.e. in Portugal in 1974).
Nevertheless, despite some extremely divergent local connotations of the terminology,
some major comparisons between, say, East-Central and southern Europe, remain
intact. Such comparisons suggest, for example, that even when such political rigidity
is imposed for more than forty years (forty-six in the case of Salazar's Portugal, for
example), pre-existing democratic memories and traditions may well persist and retain
the power to affect the course and content of an eventual redemocratization.
Moreover, such comparisons also suggest that such a very long period of authoritarian
imposition will typically include a variety of different stages, interrupted experiments,
lost opportunities, and so forth, which are also likely to contribute to the specific form
and social meaning of democratization in each country. Furthermore, of course, the
comparative
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literature reminds us that typically not all the forces which emerge in the course of
dislodging an entrenched anti-democratic regime are themselves inherently
democratic (there is also scope for considerable diversity of view over the nature of
any democratizing project); and that not all the power-holders in existing regimes
typically remain united in defence of a foundering status quo.
It is important to recall that the countries of East-Central Europe had a rich and
diverse political history which long antedates the arrival of the Red Army in 1944–5.
European liberal values were as well established in eighteenth-century Poland as in
many parts of the West; and after 1848 Austrian and German liberalism achieved
wide if uneven diffusion in other parts of the region. As liberalism spread eastwards it
stirred up subordinated nationalisms, and these two processes did much to undermine
the Habsburg and Tsarist empires. However, the international political forces that
most powerfully shaped regional democratic potentialities before the imposition of
Soviet control were, of course, the two world wars. Six of the present states came into
existence as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, that is under the supervision of the
victors of the First World War, and initially all were to some extent influenced by
their international sponsors to adopt liberal constitutional forms of government. Such
international actors also backed plebiscites to define the new borders and sometimes
promoted minority rights through treaty provisions. Czechoslovakia and Estonia both
established conventional democratic regimes which lasted for twenty years, until cut
down by foreign aggression. Both the initiation and the destruction of these fragile
inter-war experiments in democratization were substantially influenced by
geopolitical forces beyond their domestic control. This set an enduring pattern,
whereby local democratic actors would naturally formulate their strategies having
strong regard to their likely international repercussions; and whereby external powers
would be watchfully assessed and rated not only according to their stated sympathies,
but more importantly according to their real capacities and inclinations to supply help
(or to create difficulties) in times of trouble.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War there were some indications that
post-Versailles regional experiments in democratization might be given something of
a second chance. The Yalta Agreement did, after all, provide for the holding of free
elections in all the countries liberated from Nazi occupation, as well as for the
negotiating of spheres of influence and the redrawing of national boundaries. Such
elections were in fact held, and at least in certain cases (most clearly in
Czechoslovakia in May 1946) they
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were indeed reasonably free. Even where the reality of Soviet control was made more
explicit, it would be a mistake to overlook the long-term significance of the three-year
period (between early 1945 and the Prague coup in February 1948) during which
varying degrees of limited pluralism and non-Stalinist experimentation were tolerated,
in deference to Moscow's residual commitments to the wartime alliance. For example,
in January 1947 the then Secretary-General of the Polish Communist Party (Wł adysł
aw Gomuł ka) could still write that ‘we have completely rejected the collectivisation
of agriculture . . . our democracy is not similar to Soviet democracy just as our
society's structure is not the same as the Soviet structure’.2 Eight months later the
Cominform was launched in Poland with ‘the consolidation of democracy’ given as
one of its stated aims. (It is curious to find such an early use of this term of art,
bracketed with ‘the eradication of the remnants of fascism’, and ‘the undermining of
imperialism’.3)
It was, of course, no kind of pluralist regime that the Cominform was about to
‘consolidate’. On the contrary, only five months later the Prague coup led to the
fusion of the Socialist and Communist parties, and the adoption of a Soviet-style
constitution guaranteeing a political monopoly to the new ruling party. Similar
transformations in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and so on ensured that a uniform
variant of ‘people's democracy’ was rapidly consolidated throughout Soviet-
controlled Eastern Europe, an externally under-written system of centralized political
and economic control which survived with only limited variations for the next forty
years. Thus, we see that on four successive occasions in the first half of the twentieth
century it was major shifts in the global balance of power (i.e. processes essentially
external to East-Central Europe) which either initiated (1919, 1945) or terminated
(1938, 1948) regional experiments in democratization.
Following the Prague coup, for about forty years a Soviet military veto blocked
further such experiments and imposed a rather standardized form of Communist
political and economic organization. Although (outside the Baltic republics) the inter-
war state system was largely resuscitated, and each people's democracy acquired its
own national structure of government enjoying internationally recognized sovereign
status, in many respects this was a semi-imperial system of power, with essential
decisions requiring if not clearance then at least the tacit approbation of Moscow.
(Later in this chapter we will examine the democratizations of 1989 by comparison
with earlier experiences of decolonization leading to democracy.)

Thus, in the first place, without belittling the reforms of this system achieved (in
Hungary) or attempted (in Czechoslovakia in 1968, or in Poland and the USSR during
the 1980s), it is important from a comparative perspective to remember that the ruling
parties retained their legal monopolies on power until 1989 or 1990. Just as the
political transition in Spain had to await Franco's death (even though at the social
level preparations for such change had long been under way), so the Communist
rulers of this region had to acknowledge that their system was not immortal before
negotiations over the construction of an alternative regime could begin. Until such
negotiations began there was no way of assessing either the real strength and
intentions of the various contenders for power or the substantive bases on which a
new regime might be constructed. Thus, in January 1989 the Solidarity movement
was legalized in Poland, at about the same time that the Hungarian Party decided to
abandon its leading role, and accept multi-party elections. Then, in the June 1989
elections Solidarity scored an overwhelming victory (though power-sharing continued
to reserve the most strategic ministries for the hands of the Polish Communist Party).
In October the Hungarian Party changed its name to the Hungarian Socialist Party and
explicitly abandoned its Leninism. Then in November 1989 the Czech and German
parties respectively lost their political monopolies through mass protests. Finally, in
February 1990 the CPSU abolished clause 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which had for
so long formally guaranteed the party's leading role in Soviet society.
If we are to extend the terminology developed in the Latin American and southern
European academic literature on democratization to these East-Central European
processes, we would have to say that there could be no transition to democracy before
the ruling party relinquished its legal claim to a monopoly of political representation.
From this standpoint, prior to February 1990 perestroika and glasnost could only be
classified as episodes of liberalization, and not of democratization in the Soviet
Union. Similarly, although the Hungarian Communists may have demonstrated an
exceptional capacity both for economic reform and for the protection of human rights
long before 1989, they too would have to be classified as no more than liberalizing
authoritarians prior to 11 January 1989.4 Whether the Polish transition to democracy
began just before, or just after, the Hungarian move is a matter of controversy
between democrats in the two countries. It depends whether the bench-mark is the
legalization of Solidarity in January or the Round Table talks in March. In any case,
Jaruzelski's reformism did not concede the
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principle of popular sovereignty before the end of 1988. Similarly, although the 1968
‘reform Communism’ of Alexander Dubçek in Czechoslovakia included the abolition
of censorship, and the secret election of party officials, it did not explicitly extend to
abandonment of the leading role of the party, and for this reason comparativists
should hesitate to apply the term ‘democratization’ to it.5
At first glance it may seem rather pedantic to worry whether liberalization turned into
a transition to democracy in 1989, or a year or two earlier. It is hardly surprising that
in East European parlance, processes that an outsider might regard as mere
liberalization were sometimes regarded as the beginnings of democratization. Well
before the explicit surrender of Communist Party monopoly control over the state,
such control was de facto in retreat. To those accustomed to living under a supposedly
monolithic system it was striking to witness the emergence of a significant degree of
constitutionalism, a strengthening of the rule of law (except in the most sensitive
areas), and increased evidence of limited pluralism at the élite level. Nevertheless,
from a broader comparative standpoint these would all be regarded as characteristics
of the liberalization of an authoritarian regime, perhaps foreshadowing an eventual
transition to democracy, but still in principle controlled and reversible, and therefore
not yet a democratization.
The issue of precisely when the transition began is quite critical, bearing in mind Judy
Blatt's observation6 that a distinctive feature of the East-Central European
democratizations is that they were accompanied by sweeping transitions in the
direction of a market economy, and a wholesale rejection of the Soviet model of the
command economy. By contrast, of course, so long as the dominant logic was only
that of liberalization, and not democratization, the associated goals were to reform the
command economy and to refound Soviet hegemony rather than to destroy them. In
fact at the political level these democratizations were inextricably entwined with
movements of national affirmation, and with a comprehensive reorientation of
alignments and identities from East to West. In comparison, the authoritarian regimes
of Latin America and southern Europe always regarded themselves as fully identified
with Western civilization, even though they may have suffered limited estrangements
from some Western governments and institutions because of their human rights
violations. The essential point here is that the democratizations under study took place
in the context of the longer and larger process of decolonization which has now
shattered the entire Soviet empire. Old political communities reasserted their long-
suppressed sovereignties, and new national
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identities were also asserted, in a manner more reminiscent of African and Asian
independence struggles than the democratizations of southern Europe and Latin
America. Some fragments of the former empire were well placed to invoke
democratic values and aspirations as a guiding principle for national emancipation;
other constituent elements of the former empire relied on alternative organizing
principles. In any case, processes of decolonization both precede and extend the
democratization episodes under study in this volume. From a comparative perspective
it is important to seek precision over the starting-point of these democratic transitions,
not least because they were so pivotal to the broader and more protracted process of
dismantling the Soviet empire.
Although the two break-points of 1948 and 1989 both seem unusually clear, abrupt,
and uniform through the East-Central European region, it by no means follows that
Moscow-imposed uniformity blotted out all manifestations of democratic potential
across the region and over the entire intervening forty-one years. On the contrary,
Soviet policies were of course highly variable in intention and uneven in impact. In
part, no doubt, this variability was due to differences in the levels of resistance (and
the forms of collaboration) encountered by Moscow in the six distinct and even
competitive countries under consideration. As the comparative study of authoritarian
regimes has already taught us, too much emphasis on shared patterns of regime
control may well conceal more than they reveal about the underlying development of
democratic potentialities when considering six distinct nations (or nine including the
Baltic states) over a forty-year period. As we have already shown, there are some
important and distinctive common features shared by these East-Central European
Communist regimes. But once these obvious and basic points have been noted, the
distinctive (sometimes interacting) political trajectories of these regimes would also
require attention in order fully to reconstruct the various paths to democratization
taken in the late 1980s (a task beyond the scope of this chapter).
This variety of interacting trajectories was also, however, in no small measure due to
differences of interpretation and even of strategy within the top levels of the Soviet
leadership. In fact from the death of Stalin onwards the leaders of the CPSU were
engaged in a concealed, but more or less continuous, process of debate over how to
restabilize and legitimize their own political system within the USSR. The questions
posed to Moscow by the restless regimes within its security perimeter—how much
pluralism could be tolerated, what controls over the intelligentsia and the media were
most
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appropriate, how much historical veracity could be allowed, etc.—all these merely
presented in more dramatic form dilemmas that already existed within the USSR as
well. CPSU responses to satellite demands for liberalization were unsteady, in part
because leaders in Moscow were divided about how to respond to such demands from
within the USSR itself. This interconnectedness between concessions in the semi-
colonies, and the pressure for reforms at home, set up an iterative pattern whereby
experiments in one country stimulated imitation in others. And when such
experiments ran out of control the resulting backlash also spread from country to
country. Thus, for example, the frustrated democratic rebellions of 1956 were in part
triggered by Moscow's vacillating attempts to de-Stalinize within the USSR; and the
backlash against the Prague Spring of 1968 dammed up the impetus for reform not
only in Czechoslovakia, but also designedly in the Soviet Union.
Consider the key events of 1956 which gave rise to a reform-minded (or liberalized)
variant of Communism in Poland and Hungary. Under Malenkov's protection in June
1953, Imre Nagy assumed the Hungarian premiership, curbing the secret police,
relaxing policy towards the farmers, and promoting a ‘consolidation of legality’. His
policies of liberalization stimulated an intense debate among Hungarian intellectuals
about how far democracy could progress in a Communist state, and about to what
extent a people's democracy could reach sovereignty within the Soviet bloc. But in the
spring of 1955 Khrushchev's stand against Malenkov was followed by the dismissal of
Nagy from the Hungarian premiership and an attempt to reassert Communist
discipline. Nagy responded by writing a report for the Central Committee, advocating
Hungarian independence, neutrality, and active coexistence between countries with
different systems. In short, a key Hungarian Communist openly advocated policies
akin to those of neighbouring Yugoslavia (which had been expelled from the Soviet
bloc for its nationalist deviations in 1948). Although Nagy did not at this point
advocate an end to the Communist Party's monopoly of power, his arguments went
beyond the limits of what was tolerable in Khrushchev's Russia, both on questions of
bloc security, and on the issue of political liberalization.
Although from 1953 to 1955 the strongest impulse for reform took place in Hungary,
there was also a parallel process under way in Poland. Following the dismissal of
Nagy, leadership of the revisionist movement passed to Gomuł ka, whose credentials
as a reform Communist preceded the split with Yugoslavia. In June 1956
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there were workers' riots in Pozna ′ n, in response to which in July the Central
Committee of the Polish Party invited Gomuł ka to argue his case. Gomuł ka
subsequently described two main issues under consideration as ‘(1) the problem of
Poland's sovereignty and (2) the problem of democratisation within the framework of
the socialist system’.7 On 19 October 1956, in very tense circumstances, Khrushchev
endorsed Gomuł ka's approach to these questions, and he was restored to the post of
Secretary-General of the Polish Party. Soviet troops were then ordered back to their
barracks, and the Polish Party proceeded to carry through a wide range of reforms
(decollectivization of agriculture, religious toleration, an enhanced role for
parliament, and many other measures of liberalization). But the quid pro quo for
Soviet endorsement of these measures was that the Polish Communist Party should
regain its power, and that Polish–Soviet security ties should remain undisturbed. Thus
the Polish crisis of October 1956 underscored the connection between continued
subordination to a Russian-dominated alliance system and Moscow's veto over
democratization.
The Hungarian uprising of early November 1956 underscored the same connection in
a different way. On 20 October 1956 the Hungarian press published the full text of
Gomuł ka's statement accompanying his reappointment to lead the Polish Party. This
produced a climate of intense mobilization within Hungary, under which conditions
Nagy was appointed Prime Minister. In the following week of intense factional
conflict and popular agitation a nationwide demand developed for complete national
emancipation. Particularly in the countryside (where no Soviet forces were stationed,
and where the local security apparatus had mostly disintegrated) the demand was for
general and free elections to be held within two months, with the participation of
multiple parties, and the return of Soviet troops, not just to their bases, but to their
fatherland. On 30 October Nagy responded by announcing the restoration of a multi-
party system and the formation of a four-party coalition government (‘like in 1945’).
The following day he called for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, and for Hungary's
departure from the Warsaw Pact. But rather than acquiesce to the establishment of a
neutral, democratic, and no doubt non-Communist Hungary, Moscow used all
necessary force to impose a regime (under János Kádár) that would operate within the
same constraints as those reluctantly accepted by Gomuł ka in Poland.
The crushing of the 1956 Hungarian uprising is, of course, remembered throughout
East-Central Europe as a watershed event, demonstrating the limits of Soviet
toleration of dissent in the

post-Stalinist era. Equally significant, however, was the increased scope for reform
allowed within such brutally imposed limits. Khrushchev's memoirs are revealing
about the confused attitudes towards political freedom that existed in the higher
reaches of the Soviet system after the dismantling of Stalin's apparatus of
intimidation. According to Khrushchev, ‘the rift which developed (in 1960) between
the Soviet Union and Albania stemmed mainly from the Albanians' fear of
democratisation’. Following Moscow's break with Albania he claimed to ‘stand all the
more firmly for those principles of democratic leadership which the Albanians could
never accept’. Khrushchev's attempt to explain those principles was a muddle: ‘A
democratic leader must have a good mind and he must be able to take advice. He must
realise that his position of leadership depends upon the people's will to have him as
their leader, not on his own will to lead the people . . . In other words he is not above
the Party but is the servant of the Party, and he can keep his position only as long as
he enjoys the Party's satisfaction and support.’8
Later, in 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and then again in 1981 in Poland, the ultimate
constraints that had been evident in 1956 were demonstrated yet again, albeit in
somewhat different circumstances. In short, between early 1948 and late 1986 the
security and integrity of the Soviet bloc system was shown to rest ultimately on
Moscow's willingness to use the Red Army (if all other instruments of control failed)
both to maintain the cohesion of its alliance structure, and also in an inextricable
conjunction to block any threatened dismantling of the Communist Party's practical
monopoly over formal rights of political representation throughout the region. The
CPSU invariably barred what we have loosely termed decolonization, and it also
limited internal reforms to what we should label liberalization without
democratization, because from Moscow's standpoint these were two aspects of a
single integrated process—‘de-Sovietization’, or ‘de-Communization’—rather than
two separable issues.
The implied parallel with West European colonialism would naturally have been
rejected for one set of reasons; and the liberal theory underlying the language of
democratization would have been rejected for a second set of reasons. Although
Soviet political terminology is now mainly of antiquarian interest, it is as well to note
that the citizens of the post-Communist regimes of Eastern Europe frequently share an
unspoken assumption, inherited from pre-perestroika days, that democracy entails a
pro-Western geo-political orientation, and that it necessarily involves a repudiation of
state socialism. These are distinctive ideas that were incubated
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in Eastern Europe by forty years of bitter experience. Prior to 1948, East Europeans
were perhaps just as likely as Latin Americans or southern Europeans to make an
analytical distinction between liberal political democracy, on the one hand, and
commitment to a market economy system, on the other. They might also (like the
Czechoslovak democrat and patriot Eduard Benes in 1947) hold that political
democracy could be compatible with a pro-Soviet strategic alignment. It is a
historically contingent, rather than logically necessary, feature of the polities of East-
Central Europe that, at least for the present generation, democratization has acquired
unusually prescriptive connotations both as to economic system and as to international
orientation. It is a recurring problem in comparative politics that apparently standard
terminology frequently carries strong overtones in one setting that are either absent, or
resonate differently, in the next. The analyst must therefore guard against twin
dangers of distortion. One source of distortion can arise when local realities are
interpreted through an inappropriately rigid and insensitive application of a general
terminology; a second equally serious distortion would arise if, for example, the
whole spectrum of democratic transitions were to be subsumed under the parochial
optic of East European anti-Sovietism. There can be no absolute defence against these
twin distortions. The best defence is to be explicit about the contingent and local
connotations of more general categories, and to specify the shade of meaning intended
at each point.
3. Why Moscow Lifted Its Veto on Democratization
Using the conventional terminology of the transitions literature, we would have to say
that it was not until very late in 1988 that liberalization (within the framework of a
continuance of the Communist system of rule) began to give way to democratization.
However, it would now appear that the most crucial shift in the international context
—Moscow's decision to lift its military veto over the unfolding of indigenous political
processes—may have occurred, and even been announced, as long as two years
earlier. Thus, according to Alex Pravda, ‘it appears that by the autumn of 1986 the
Gorbachev leadership had decided to distance itself from the last-resort use of force
associated with their predecessors’ treatment of East European crises'.9 In the previous
section we saw how, as a result of the Soviet military actions of 1956 and 1968, the
issue of democratization had become deeply entangled with the issue of what may
loosely be termed decolonization within the informal Soviet empire
end p.367
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in Eastern Europe. From a comparative perspective, therefore, we need to consider
how distinctive this decolonization–democratization link may have been.
In Chapter 1 I argued that thirty of the sixty-one independent states that might
conventionally be classified as ‘democracies’ in January 1990 established such
regimes in association with processes of decolonization. In a formal sense the
Communist regimes of East-Central Europe were not of course ‘colonies’, but rather
independent sovereign nations recognized as such, for example, through their
membership of the United Nations. As we have just seen, however, until November
1986 Moscow kept them under quite a strict system of informal control (stricter, for
example, than the restraints on various francophone republics in West Africa, which
are also recognized as members of the United Nations, although periodically reliant
on French paratroopers, and more constantly reliant on economic supervision from
Paris). In particular, Moscow imposed a more constraining limitation on the scope for
domestic political expression than is typical of most neo-colonial regimes in the Third
World.10 In that sense, therefore, it may be permissible to analyse the political
consequences of the lifting of Moscow's military veto on East-Central Europe's
regime transformations by analogy with the more formal decolonizations that
sometimes pres-aged democratization in other parts of the world.
From a comparative politics perspective it would be misleading to rely on too narrow
and formalistic a conception of decolonization. As John Darwin has pointed out with
reference to the British Empire, direct rule was only the most overt manifestation of a
much broader structure of imperial controls, which included other kinds of legal
concessions, military and demographic provisions, economic advantages, and socio-
cultural arrangements. Indeed, British imperial authorities sometimes sought to avoid
the costs of explicit direct rule, believing that the main benefits of colonial domination
could better be achieved by other means. Likewise, therefore, the decision to grant
formal independence is not necessarily to be equated with decolonization in a broader
sense. Indeed, Darwin's interpretation of the decolonization of the British Empire
bears some striking similarities to the subsequent collapse of the Soviet bloc, in that
imperial policy-makers tended to believe they could revitalize their threatened
positions of dominance by relinquishing the more objectionable instruments of
control. ‘For much of the time, we may suspect, those who “made” colonial policy’ in
London ‘were guessing, hoping, gambling—and miscalculating’11—just like their
later counterparts in Moscow.
end p.368
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In reality, of course, the post-war termination of British colonial rule
did not proceed as a carefully planned rolling programme . . . the actual outcome was
largely unexpected and thoroughly unwelcome from a British point of view . . . The
rapidity of British withdrawal arose from . . . uncertainties about their ability to check
disruptive elements and restore political discipline without losing the co-operation of
moderate politicians on whom they depended, were compounded by the fear that
confrontation might occur in a number of colonies simultaneously.12
While this was going on ‘British opinion was shaped by a variety of expectations, but
one of the most important was the belief constantly reiterated by British leaders, that
come what may, Britain would remain a great world power’.13 In the event, however,
in South Asia, the Middle East, and then in Africa, Britain lost her special position
with startling speed. It is this, far more than the formal transfer of sovereignty, which
indicates the true nature of the changes implicit in the term ‘decolonisation’. In each
region, the British found that the effort to move to a less formal kind of superiority
proved unworkable in practice.14
The parallels with Gorbachev's failed attempt to shift the basis of Moscow's
ascendancy within its post-war sphere of influence are notable.
At one level we can view all such decolonizations as conscious strategies for the
divestment of a certain type of direct power and responsibility chosen and pursued by
imperial decision-makers. This level of analysis requires careful attention, even if the
results are unforeseen and the underlying causes are distinct. In the Soviet case this
involves analysing the motives and actions of an extremely small group of Moscow
power-holders. Between 1985 and 1989 we need to consider above all the political
trajectory of Mikhail Gorbachev.
It was by no means a foregone conclusion that he would become Secretary-General of
the CPSU on the death of Chernenko in March 1985 (the Politburo voted 4 to 4, until
Gromyko broke the tie), nor that once in office he would promote such a
comprehensive break with the past. What needs to be explained is why, given the
enormous concentration of power in the hands of the new Secretary-General, he
subsequently came to relinquish ever more of it. In 1989 his power-base shifted from
the party to a newly empowered Presidency, but the erosion of strength continued
until finally, sixand-a-half years later, the entire Soviet structure of command and
control had been dismantled, not only in East-Central Europe, but
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within the USSR as well. With hindsight it can be seen more clearly than at the time
that Gorbachev's major decisions concerning his European allies were all largely
predetermined by the positions he was developing on East–West disarmament, and in
relation to his central concern—the reform and liberalization of Communist rule in the
USSR. Those positions were not uniquely his. (Their antecedents could be traced back
to Khrushchev, and to a lesser extent to Andropov; and for a considerable period they
were reinforced by such prominent party figures as Shevardnadze and Yeltsin;
together with such influential constituencies as the intelligentsia, parts of the media,
and local bureaucracies, e.g. in Leningrad and the Baltic republics.) But his authority
was essential to sustain and develop them. Given the centralized nature of the Soviet
system it was extremely problematic for conservatives (i.e. those who favoured
preservation of the apparatus of control) to defy an incumbent Secretary-General who
was prepared to use his position to push the cause of reform. Gorbachev may have
been misguided, over-confident, inconsistent, and opportunistic at various points, but
he was never disposed to abandon that cause. Indeed, each time his innovations
encountered resistance he identified the opposition as his conservative enemies, and
therefore took further liberalizing steps in order to reinforce his campaign against
them. Given that this was the underlying thrust of his leadership, it was almost
certainly never open to him to practise open repression or to ally with the forces of
conservatism in Eastern Europe. To do so would always have been to liquidate his
platform for reform within the USSR. It is perhaps unsurprising that democrats in
East-Central Europe took quite a long time to recognize this reality, and even longer
to feel sufficiently confident of its permanence to act out its implications. 15
The sequence of events in Moscow was schematically as follows. Even before
Chernenko's death, in December 1984, Gorbachev had established a strong following
in the Central Committee, with a bold speech advocating glasnost, and even using the
term ‘democratization’.16 On assuming supreme leadership he immediately (April
1985) launched a programme of economic reform (perestroika). By June 1986, in the
wake of Chernobyl, he was appealing to the intelligentsia and the media for
assistance, saying that ‘restructuring’ was going very badly, and that ‘a society cannot
exist without glasnost’ (‘openness, publicity, visibility’). One of his advisers, a former
speech-writer to Khrushchev, commented that ‘the press will be the method of
democratic control, not control by administration but control with the help of
democratic institutions’.17 (All this

preceded the November 1986 meeting at which Pravda believes the CMEA
governments may have been told that Moscow was fors-wearing the last-resort use of
force to control them.) By January 1987, recalling how the party apparatus had
‘broken Khrushchev's neck’, Gorbachev turned explicitly to demokratizatziya, which
initially ‘applied only to the Communist Party to mobilize the rank and file members
to offset the power of the party bureaucracy’.18 By 1988 the campaign had escalated
further. In June of that year Gorbachev proposed a constitutional reform, to create
directly elected Soviets and a strong elected President, both seen as instruments to
advance the cause of reform and overcome conservative resistance. In perestroika he
asserted that ‘everything which is not prohibited by law is allowed’ and this was then
reinforced by the promotion of zakonnost (the law-governed state).19 In short, by the
end of 1988, when the East-Central European transitions began, Gorbachev had taken
huge steps towards dismantling the Communist Party's monopoly of power in the
USSR.
Prior to 1989 it seems fairly certain that policy-making in Moscow was based on the
assumption that a successful programme of economic and political reform could
rescue some essentials of the Communist system by liberalizing it. (‘Everything must
change so that everything can stay the same,’ as Lampedusa's Sicilian aristocrat
would say.) This was expected to apply both within the USSR and to those European
allied regimes which were agile enough to reform and thereby legitimize themselves.
In short, the Dubçek model of reform Communism was still thought to be viable, and
the real threat to the survival of some variant of liberalized socialism was thought to
come from the inflexibility of the conservatives. As we now know, this was all an
illusion, a fact that became apparent rather rapidly as the transitions of 1989 gathered
momentum. By mid-year the Polish elections had administered a crushing blow to the
Polish Workers Party, while the Tienanmen Square massacre had demonstrated that
repression could still be effective. On 9 October 1989 the East German government
attempted a similar show of force against unarmed demonstrators in Leipzig, only to
be told that Russian troops would provide no back-up and that Moscow was opposed
to such actions. Once it became clear throughout Eastern Europe that Gorbachev's
repudiation of force would remain intact, even in extremis, the last external barrier to
transition (the fear of a reversal in Moscow) was removed. On 5 December the
Warsaw Pact publicly apologized to the Czechoslovak people for the invasion of
1968. With hindsight all this may seem self-evident, but on the information available
to them at the time
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all political actors in the region were bound to fear that the international conjuncture
might suddenly turn against democratization, just as it had done on so many occasions
in the past. After all, hindsight also tells us that on 8 December 1991, as a direct
consequence of Gorbachev's leadership strategy, the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union would itself be dissolved. Given that fact, and the contingent nature of many
leadership decisions taken since 1985, it would be ahistorical to regard Moscow's
passivity in the face of the 1989 revolutions as natural, let alone inevitable. A Soviet
backlash could never be entirely discounted, particularly since Russian troops
remained stationed throughout the region, and even though such an extreme change in
policy would probably have come too late to salvage anything of the old order, it
would most certainly have disrupted all the processes of non-violent regime transition,
and might even have thwarted their democratic content. The timing, course, and
texture of these democratizations would certainly have been different if Gorbachev
had reverted to type at this crucial stage.
This focus on decision-making in Moscow helps to explain the speed, direction,
limits, and mechanisms of the East-Central European democratization process. It also
invited further comparisons with the British experience of decolonization, which, we
have argued, contributed to the establishment of about half the democracies in
existence on the day the Berlin Wall came down. In both the British and the Soviet
cases, the aim of the dominant state at the time was not to maximize its immediate
power, but to create an international environment that would in the longer run be
relatively unthreatening to a former great power in decline. In international politics
more broadly conceived, then, there are periods when it may be good policy for a
dominant state to be permissive and decentralizing in the territories it controls, even
though such a situation is hard to express in the terms of strict power politics theory.
This is all the more true if we allow domestic opinion within the dominant state to
affect its foreign policy. The single-minded pursuit of power politics abroad normally
requires fairly unwavering support for a potentially repressive security apparatus
based at home. Domestic interests may feel threatened by such an apparatus, in which
case the pursuit of apparently inexplicable altruism overseas may reflect a perceived
self-interest in détente and the reduction of tension on the internal front. (Compare
British support for decolonization, or French or Portuguese responses to colonial
wars. Eduard Shevardnadze's declarations point to a similar pattern in Moscow.)
end p.372
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Neither British nor Soviet decolonizing strategies were formulated in an international
vacuum. In both cases the dominant authorities had to consider not just the pressures
and demands arising within the colonial or dependent territories that they still
controlled, but also (and for the purposes of this chapter more crucially) the
standpoints and policies of great power rivals and of the international community
more generally. In the post-war period British policies were profoundly affected by
the requirements of the USA and by the United Nations' commitment to the principles
of the self-determination of nations. Similarly, in the 1980s, Moscow's strategy was
heavily constrained by the pressure of demands from the West—not just the USA, but
also Western Europe and an array of international organizations. To these pressures
we shall now turn.
4. The Role of the West
Clearly, in general, the liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America
exerted a range of long-term pressures on the Soviet bloc which helped nurture
democratic aspirations in East-Central Europe, and which eventually contributed to
Gorbachev's decision to risk decolonization. But any systematic analysis of the role of
international factors in stimulating democratization in this region must carefully
specify which pressures were most significant; how, when, and where they produced
their main effects; and in what historical context they were embedded and
constrained. Just as the record of Soviet policy towards the region extends over a long
period and contains a variety of distinct phases, with a differential impact on the
various countries concerned, so also the policies (in the plural) and influences
emanating from the West require disaggregation. Such a deconstruction of the record
is required in order to pierce the veil of Western selective recall about the Cold War,
as well as to help us situate the East-Central European democratizations in their
comparative context, and to clarify the part played by international factors in such
processes. Such a reevaluation is also necessary if we are to understand certain
distinguishing features of the regional democratization experience—the speed of the
demonstration effects; the remarkably limited resort to violence; the association
between democratization and rejoining the West.
This chapter is, of course, too brief to accomplish all these tasks. It can only survey
some of the major issues and suggest some
end p.373
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provisional interpretations. A convenient starting-point is provided by David Deudney
and G. John Ikenberry, who have sketched out one influential viewpoint concerning
the West's role in spurring changes within the Soviet bloc. They distinguish between
the causes of the Soviet crisis, which they describe as primarily domestic, and causes
of the Soviet response to its crisis (most particularly the foreign affairs response)
which they say ‘derive from external sources’. ‘Many commentators have emphasised
the role of Western state policy’, they note, ‘and particularly American containment
policy, in inducing Soviet change.’ However, they consider it important to assess the
‘full set of environmental factors . . . some of which have been long in the making and
some of which are not a reflection of government policy’. They distinguish no fewer
than eight dimensions of international influence, ranging through various types of
military and economic pressure to the strength of international organizations and a
final catch-all, ‘the character of global society and culture’.20 After tracing the way all
these factors may have affected Moscow's choices of response to the crisis in the
Soviet system, they conclude that since the 1950s ‘although the West has grown
militarily and economically powerful, it has presented the Soviet Union with a more
benign and attractive face’.21 ‘The central role of these deeper, long-term forces puts
in perspective and shows the limits of the designs and disputes of policy-makers. The
real genius of the Western system has been not its coherent and far-sighted policy, but
the vitality and attractiveness of its polity.’22
This interpretation admittedly offers some rather large hostages to fortune (will the
citizens of the new democracies of East-Central Europe continue to admire the vitality
of Western polities, no matter how policy-makers behave in the post-Communist
era?). And although it seems mainly directed against US conservatives who may feel
that the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicates their policies of containment,
nevertheless it does have the merit of emphasizing the multiplicity of channels
through which Western influences were exerted, and the cumulative macro-historical
impact of these influences. Despite this, it seems to me that certain key decisions by
Western policy-makers can be singled out for examination. Had different decisions
been taken at critical junctures, I would argue that the pattern, timing, and course of
democratization in East-Central Europe might well have been different. In some cases
even the outcome itself might have changed.
Most importantly, for example, the artificial post-war division of Germany created the
linchpin of Cold War Europe—a German Democratic Republic surrounding a
partitioned Berlin. The West never
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openly accepted this solution (after 1970 Ostpolitik involved recognition of post-war
frontiers subject to their eventual endorsement by a united Germany), nor did it
actively challenge this cornerstone of the Soviet security system, certainly not after
the erection of the Berlin Wall, on 13 August 1961. The outcome of this tacit
understanding between East and West was that a liberal capitalist democracy came to
flourish in West Germany and West Berlin, which never relinquished its claim to the
eventual reincorporation of an East German population denied access either to
democracy or to capitalism (or indeed to the West in general) by force of Soviet arms.
The moment that the people of East Germany realized that Moscow would no longer
use military means to block Reunification, the linchpin of the entire regional system
was removed. The dismantling of the Berlin Wall soon signified not only the
Reunification of Germany on a liberal capitalist basis, but also the democratization
along similar lines of most if not all of the other countries in the rearguard of the
Soviet alliance.
Clearly the basic Western position on German Reunification was much more long-
term and deeply entrenched than most of the policy debates that consumed the
energies of governmental strategists. Moreover, the structural pressures on the Soviet
bloc generated by the West's dogged and successful pursuit of ‘peaceful coexistence’
in Central Europe were much more profound in their effects than most consciously
designed strategies of selective reward and punishment. Although such pressures can
be disaggregated into their military, economic, political, and socio-cultural
components, it is in practice rather artificial to split up elements that were in reality
indissolubly interconnected. However, there is a need to explore how this bundle of
pressures changed over time, and how they acted differentially in different parts of the
East-Central European region.
Taking a long historical view, it is not so clear that the Western system always
displayed great vitality and attractiveness. The Western democracies may have
contributed substantially to the creation of a democratic Czechoslovakia in 1919, for
example, but they also played a key role in its destruction in 1938. Although they
went to war in defence of a much less democratic regime in Poland in 1939, their
basic concern was to maintain the balance of power. Hence their intervention only
served to maximize the wartime suffering of the Polish people. And even when the
war was won, neither Polish sovereignty nor Polish democracy were counted as a vital
interest of the West.
It is true, and important, that the incorporation of the Baltic

democracies into the Soviet Union (agreed under a secret clause of the Nazi–Soviet
Pact) was never fully accepted by the West, but of course for fifty years the issue
remained largely dormant in East–West relations. It only returned to haunt
officialdom in Moscow when President Gorbachev opened the archives in a
misjudged attempt to stabilize the USSR through historical openness. This example
confirms the vital importance of retaining a long-term historical perspective when
evaluating democratization processes, since suppressed political memories are
frequently so potent. It also illustrates the many complex ways in which the legacy of
past actions and inactions (both domestic and international) may hang over and
redirect the course of contemporary democratizations. To take one specific example,
the consequence of fifty years of Baltic incorporation into the USSR was the
Russification of these three republics. However, when the international community
recognized the restoration of their sovereignty as democratic states in 1991, it made
no stipulations as to their treatment of the by-this-time substantial Russian minority
populations within their borders. A consequence of this international inaction was that
the Estonian parliament enacted laws restricting citizenship rights to those families
already resident in the republic prior to its forced incorporation into the USSR. (This
notwithstanding the fact that many Russian nationals had voted for independence in
the 1991 referendum.) Thus long historical memories, and the selective application of
democratic principles by the West, can markedly alter the character of the
democratization processes under way in parts of East-Central Europe.
One period is of particular interest from our perspective. This is the early to mid-
1970s, the era of so-called détente, during which a new West German government, led
by the former mayor of West Berlin, sought to reassure Moscow and its Warsaw Pact
allies that growing Western prosperity and freedom would not be used aggressively to
destabilize the post-war status quo in the region. Although the broad framework of
European détente was inscribed in that phase of international history, a number of
specific institutional procedures, such as the Conference on Security and Co-operation
in Europe (CSCE), were established that were far from inevitable. Particular Western
decisions taken at that time contributed significantly to the course and pattern of the
democratizations that took place a generation later. Although the Brezhnev leadership
group in Moscow remained highly adversarial, Soviet memories of European détente
contributed to the Gorbachev team's perceptions of their strategic options (which were
of course
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also shaped by the Reagan Administration's more belligerent line in the 1980s).
Gorbachev's references to a ‘common European house’, and his favourable posture
towards the CSCE, provide tangible evidence of the significance of this contribution.23
Détente was formally incorporated into NATO policy on 14 December 1967, with the
adoption of the Harmel Report. This reflected a broadened conception of Western
security, whereby the military containment of Communism would be supplemented
by attempts to stabilize some form of political relationship with it. However, the
nature of that political relationship remained controversial within the West, right until
the end of the Cold War. Over that twenty-two-year period, perceptions of détente
shifted repeatedly on both sides of the East–West dividing-line. The West German
position underwent a particularly sharp shift when Willy Brandt became Chancellor in
1969 (although the ground was being prepared several years earlier). The earlier
position had been that there could be no détente before unification. Now Brandt
asserted the reverse proposition. ‘The basis of his thinking was that only by accepting
postwar reality and giving up unrealistic territorial claims could West Germany exert
influence in Eastern Europe . . . Wandlung durch Annäherung or “change through
rapprochement” was his stated aim.’24 He thought that by stabilizing the status quo the
West could pave the way for a gradual evolution in the East. Brandt's approach was
always controversial in Germany, first resisted by conservatives, who said it conferred
legitimacy on the fruits of conquest, and subsequently undermined from the left by
those who indeed sought only rapprochement, reducing the pressure for change.
But at least, according to a careful account by Richard Davy, the original approach
was to a considerable degree embodied in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, which
institutionalized the CSCE, and thereby provided a negotiated international
framework that helped channel and contain the decolonization and regime transitions
of 1989–91. According to Davy's interpretation, although both Soviet propagandists
and some Western hard-liners for different reasons chose to misinterpret the Final Act
as an instrument of appeasement, this was far from being the case. ‘Instead of
endorsing the status quo it was a charter for change. Instead of legitimizing the Soviet
sphere of influence it legitimized Western intrusion into it. Instead of making frontiers
immutable it specifically affirmed the principle of peaceful change. Instead of putting
contacts under official control it emphasized the role of individuals. Instead of
confining itself to inter-state relations it reinforced the
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principle that peace also depends on how states treat their people.’25 In short, a decade
before Gorbachev, the West set out in treaty form all the essential principles he would
subsequently embrace. On this view it was not just the general ‘vitality and
attractiveness’ of the Western polity, but rather a specific coherent and disputed set of
Western requirements, incentives, and reassurances embodied in an international
treaty that shaped Moscow's foreign policy options in response to the Soviet Union's
systemic crisis.
Admittedly the CSCE process only covers a part of the West's role in the
democratization of East-Central Europe. As the European Community developed and
expanded, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, its achievements in such areas as
personal freedom, welfare, prosperity, and law-based integration came to contrast
increasingly sharply with comparable performance in the Warsaw Pact countries.
Thus West European (and eventually even southern European) demonstration effects
brought mounting indirect pressure to bear on the Comecon states. More directly, the
EC espoused the Helsinki process (attaching particular importance to the human rights
basket), and it insisted on negotiating trade issues on a country-by-country basis, thus
undermining Moscow-led institutions of regional economic integration.26 Both the
CSCE process and the activities of the EC brought maximum pressure to bear on the
Soviet bloc system at its weakest point—the German Democratic Republic (whose
five eastern Länder were offered immediate and automatic incorporation into the EC
via the Treaty of Rome the moment German Reunification was agreed). It will never
be known whether these positive Western incentives to transform the Soviet system
would eventually have achieved their goals in the absence of intensified economic and
military competition between West and East in the 1980s. ‘Hawks’ in the West (now
supported by many anti-Communists in the East) argue that it was only by re-
escalating the Cold War that the Soviet system could be brought to such a crisis that
the Moscow leadership would accept full implementation of CSCE conditions.
Arbitration between such rival explanations would require a more precise analysis of
the causes of Soviet collapse than can be attempted here. Nevertheless it should be
noted that many Western hawks continued until the very end to disbelieve President
Gorbachev's protestations of good faith, and to insist that Soviet power could only be
destroyed through unrelenting external assault. Some hawks regarded the possibility
of a non-violent and negotiated transition as a snare and an illusion, until the very
moment when it was upon them.27
end p.378
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At any event European détente and the CSCE process produced a range of effects,
which varied between countries and social sectors. It is not only the possible impact
on the Soviet leadership in Moscow that requires consideration. The effects were
multiple, often indirect, and at times quite different from those intended. For example,
prior to 1970 the Communist regime in Poland achieved some modicum of patriotic
legitimacy because it was seen as defending the nation's post-1945 boundaries against
the threat of German revanchism. An unforeseen consequence of Ostpolitik was to
deprive the Warsaw authorities of their best claim to the right to rule, thereby
contributing to the rise of the broadest and most democratic mass anti-Communist
movement known within the region—Solidarnosc. Timothy Garton Ash has even
argued that without détente there would probably have been no Solidarity. But
Bonn was not prepared for the Polish revolution any more than Washington was.
Solidarity was an embarrassment to the social-liberal government . . . It reacted with
palpable confusion, for here (in a process that would have delighted Hegel) a policy
had produced its opposite: the policy of reducing tensions . . . had produced tensions.28
However, there were also major intended consequences of the policy. Václav Havel's
Charter 77, for example, was formed in direct response to the Helsinki Final Act,
which precipitated Czechoslovakia's signature of the UN Declaration of Human
Rights. More generally, as Adam Roberts has argued,
the existence of international agreements and even of some shared values—
exemplified in the 1966 human rights accords, the 1975 Helsinki Final Act, and the
1989 Vienna follow-up document of the CSCE—played a part in facilitating
transition, both by stressing the importance of human rights and by helping to
establish a framework of general security and confidence that made major change in
Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union seem thinkable.29
In a similar vein, Richard Davy concludes ‘it is incontrovertible that, without the Final
Act and the Western interest that it aroused, opposition in Eastern Europe would have
been weaker, less coherent, easier to supress and slower to foster the development of
civil liberties in Eastern Europe in preparation for the transition to democracy when
the opportunity finally came’.30 Moreover ‘by helping to support the development of
civil societies in Eastern Europe, detente paved the way for a smoother transition to
democracy when the old regimes crumbled because it had fostered alternative
structures and authorities to take their place’.31
end p.379
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5. After the Wall Came Down
The immediate post-Communist response throughout the region recalled the
democratic honeymoon of 1919, before right-wing dictatorships took over everywhere
except in Czechoslovakia (‘the only democracy east of the Rhine’).32 This quotation
reminds us both that democratization in the region has historical antecedents
stretching back before the first arrival of Soviet imperialism; but also that the
consolidation of democratic regimes can be threatened from more than one direction.
As in 1919–20, the years 1990–1 were occupied with the creation of new states and
the confirmation of old ones; with the establishment of internationally recognized
representative regimes; and with the redefinition of international alignments
throughout the region. As in the earlier period these three processes were intimately
interconnected. They took place all in a rush, and according to a relatively
standardized formula, because although they were obviously initiated and shaped in
response to internal political realities, all took place under the vigilance, not to say
virtual supervision, of the extra-regional powers. Admittedly the great powers had
limited control, and were deeply divided amongst themselves. They sought to sketch
out the main elements of an internationally acceptable new order for the region, to
substitute for the collapse of German hegemony, in the first instance, and of Russian
hegemony, in the second. The main elements of this new order had to be negotiated,
and reinforced by international treaty commitments and the appropriate redeployment
of economic and military assets, within a fairly short time period, before international
attention shifted elsewhere. In each case some international support for representative
and constitutional forms of government was expressed, but the depth and seriousness
of these commitments could not be gauged in so short a period.
Whether or not international support for the consolidation of fragile democracies will
prove more solid and durable in the 1990s than in the 1920s remains to be seen.
Progress has been particularly notable in the northern tier (where even the return to
office of reform Communist parties—in Hungary and Poland—can be taken as
evidence of democratic maturity), but the dismal failure of international policies
towards the former Yugoslavia casts a long shadow (see Chapter 14, below). As
always much will depend upon whether the main international actors can remain
united in their support for democratic consolidation in the region, whether their
attention becomes distracted by crises elsewhere, and whether the

objective of democracy promotion remains harmonious with other externally desired

objectives (the restoration of capitalism, the control of international crime, the
avoidance of warfare, etc.). In the past it has been suggested that the US style of
policy-making by crisis management may produce its greatest impact during the brief
and turbulent period when a democratic transition is in progress; whereas the more
cumbersome and bureaucratic style of the European Community may produce its
greatest effects in the long run-up to a transition (when it brings cumulative economic
and political pressure to bear against the ancien régime) and during the subsequent
protracted period of democratic consolidation (when it may hold out such incentives
as the prospect of full membership of the EC once sufficiently solid reforms have
been implanted). While this schema worked reasonably well for southern Europe or
Central America, it requires substantial modification in relation to East-Central
Europe. As we have already seen, there is a counterargument concerning the role of
military strength and the risks of European détente as instruments for forcing reform
out of the Communist apparatus before 1989. At the crucial moment of transition
neither Brussels nor Washington played a leading role—Western policy-makers in
general were overtaken by events they had not foreseen and could only applaud from
the sidelines. Since 1990, despite a torrent of Western rhetoric expressing support for
the consolidation of the region's fragile new democracies, the actual record has been
quite mixed. Both North Americans and West Europeans have shown a tendency to
switch attention to their own internal problems, perhaps at the cost of weakening the
long-term impact of such support.
Since 1989 the European Community has proved less reliable as an agency of
democracy promotion in East-Central Europe than might have been expected, given
its record in southern Europe. On the one hand, the Commission responded with
alacrity to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, extending an open welcome to East
Germany, whether as a separate state or as a region within a reunified Germany. (Ever
since 1957 the Treaty of Rome had beeen explicit in regarding the GDR as an integral
part of Germany, a founding member.) Brussels also made a quick start in establishing
PHARE programmes of technical assistance to assist the transformation of seven East
European countries (Yugoslavia was initially included). However, the Community
failed to maintain this momentum, in part because of its internal conflicts over
Maastricht and economic and monetary union, in part because the disintegration of
Yugoslavia and the USSR uncovered deep differences of priorities within
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Western Europe over how to handle the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The formerly
Habsburg areas of Central Europe benefited from EC support far more than the rest of
the region, with the Serbs and the Muslims the most conspicuous losers. The uneven
impact of EC support for democracy can be traced through the record of the Europe
Agreements set up by the Community as a half-way-house response to post-
Communist applications for membership. The first three agreements were signed in
December 1991, with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. The preambles
expressed a commitment to ‘pluralistic democracy based on the rule of law and the
market economy’. Subsequently Czechoslovakia split into two, each with its own
agreement (and it was in accordance with this preamble that the French and German
ambassadors called on the President of Slovakia in November 1994 to express the
European Union's concern over a purge of the state-controlled media carried out by
the Bratislava parliament). Romania and Bulgaria also signed similar agreements in
1993, and Slovenia and the three Baltic republics are expected to follow suit in 1995.
At the Essen summit of the European Union in December 1994 it was publicly
acknowledged that this might imply an eventual expansion of the EU to twenty-seven
member states (fifteen, plus Cyprus and Malta, plus the ten eastern countries). Poland
occupies a key position at the head of the queue, and the Czech Republic and Hungary
have publicly set their sights on full membership by the year 2000, and the
Commission has so far refused to commit itself to any timetable whatsoever. It begins
to look as though the southern European experience of democracy by convergence
may be replicated in at least a few Central or East European countries, and the EU
may therefore assist democratic consolidation in certain instances, although the
Turkish precedent could prove equally applicable in other cases. The queue for
membership is uncomfortably long, and the Union is under great internal strain.
From an international relations perspective there is one particularly crucial difference
between the earlier democratizations which provided the basis for transitions theory,
and those occurring since November 1989. Once the Cold War had ended, the entire
international context for democratization was transformed. Western reactions to
earlier democratizations were by contrast shaped and constrained by the overarching
context of a bipolar world. Authoritarian regimes had been supported or undermined
largely according to calculations concerning their value as allies in the conflict with
Moscow. When processes of democratization received support from the West it was
always accompanied by the discouragement
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of neutralism and efforts to strengthen the electoral appeal of centrist parties against
any possible challenge by the far Left. Moscow's approach to democratization in Latin
America and southern Europe was a predictable mirror image to these concerns of the
West. But since the Berlin Wall came down this logic no longer applies. In the
euphoria of 1990 there were even Western liberals who argued that in the post-Cold
War world the West would become the only important source of external influence,
and it would no longer have any motive for shoring up authoritarian allies, or for
intervening in a discriminatory manner between one set of domestic power contenders
and another (provided all observe democratic procedures). On a more sceptical
reading, once the challenge of bipolarity is removed the West no longer has a clear
realpolitik motive for democracy promotion. Liberal idealism is unlikely to have the
same staying power. In any case, in the absence of an external threat Western allies
are likely to develop a heightened sense of their conflicting interests, and are therefore
likely to cultivate rival protégés within each fragile new democracy, and to favour
competing client states. Whether or not this proves to be the case, the disappearance
of a bipolar order destroys the binary system of classification by which external actors
could identify allies and enemies in complex, turbulent, and distant political conflicts.
So long as the Czechs (or Croats) could be identified as ‘liberals’ and the Slovaks (or
Serbs) as ‘Communists’, international chancelleries could work out where they stood.
Once such spurious systems of classification have been eroded the West is left with a
much weakened rationale for sustained involvement in the internal political processes
of fragile regimes. The disintegration of the Soviet Union adds to this sense of
disorientation, by generating a proliferation of new arenas and untried political actors,
often of indecipherable antecedents, few of whom can be regarded as trustworthy
democrats, or who can be relied upon to respect the democratic aspirations of their
neighbours. Sustained international support for the consolidation of democratic
regimes would demand hitherto untapped sources of Western maturity and tenacity in
such a context.
Even in the most favourable conditions, such as those prevailing in southern Europe
in the 1970s, something like a decade must pass before a transition from authoritarian
rule can progress towards the consolidation of a liberal democracy. East-Central
Europe has tried to change itself far more drastically and rapidly than southern
Europe, acting on more fronts simultaneously. The initial conditions (prerequisites?)
for democratic stability were also much
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weaker. Consequently it is far too early to pass serious judgement on the prospects for
democratic consolidation in the region. A comparative perspective suggests a few
provisional considerations, however. If consolidation does occur, it will take time and
will develop unevenly. Quite a few regimes could be suspended in an intermediate
condition—neither properly consolidated nor clearly headed away from democratic
forms. Developments external to the region (e.g. the success or failure of reforms in
the former USSR, or shifts in outlook in Western Europe) will once again exert a
strong influence on the political climate in East-Central Europe, and may therefore
affect the region's democratic prospects. A final intriguing point concerns the likely
character of such consolidated democracies as may emerge. In southern Europe the
initial expectation was that newly empowered popular forces harbouring resentments
against earlier authoritarian regimes might press for a more radical and participatory
type of democracy than elsewhere. In the event, however, once memories of the
transition had faded, relatively conventional and unadventurous liberal democracies
took the stage. Authoritarian élites were forced to reform themselves, but were in no
way disqualified from eventual return to office. Does this mean that in East-Central
Europe, once the initial heat of anti-Soviet and pro-market feeling has abated, the
democracies that eventually achieve consolidation there will also become reconciled
to the preservation of substantial continuity linking them to their Communist past?
Will the distinctive overtones of the local terminology concerning democratization
fade, as consolidation progresses?
6. Conclusion
The recent democratizations in East-Central Europe have introduced some important
variations on the themes present in earlier transitions literature; important variations,
but not an entirely new tune. Among the most important continuities I would stress
the loss of cohesion within the authoritarian coalition prior to the transition; the
unforeseen or unintended consequences of its attempts to liberalize the political
system without relinquishing ultimate control; the dilemmas this presented to the
democratic opposition (how to negotiate a non-violent transition without being co-
opted); the rapid turnover of political groupings and projects during the brief quasi-
revolutionary phase of full transition; the significance of pacts, constitutional
arrangements, and other bridging institutions in
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containing the uncertainties of this phase, and channelling the outcome towards
democratic institutionalization; and the relatively conventional and standardized
forms of liberal democracy that emerge rather consistently as the macro-political
framework for the post-transitional settlement. The existence of such continuities
should be pleasing to those who theorized about democratization prior to the collapse
of the Soviet system. Those who relied on totalitarianism for theoretical guidance, or
who regarded Communist political systems as incomparable with pro-Western
authoritarian regimes, were by comparison handicapped in their attempts to
understand the transformations of 1989 (except in the case of Romania). However,
such continuities are imprecise and incomplete. A number of critical features of the
East-Central European transition were distinctive to the region, and to the problems of
dismantling Communist forms of autocracy.
This chapter, and this volume, have focused on one particular dimension of the
democratization process and one crucial respect in which East-Central European
experiences differed from those of earlier democratizations. The brute fact is that a
particularly anti-democratic model of Communism was imposed by Moscow, at
Stalin's behest, on all territories occupied by the Red Army, and that post-Stalinist
rulers of the USSR nevertheless continued to restrain political liberalization and to
veto democratization by threat of military force for almost forty years thereafter. This
chapter has tried to unravel the major distinguishing features of the 1989
democratizations that flow from this raw geopolitical reality.
There was a pre-1945 tradition of attempted democratization in this region, which
provided quite a promising internal basis for redemocratization in at least some of the
more influential and prosperous countries of the region following the defeat of
Nazism. Not all the local Communist parties of the region were always pure
instruments of Stalinist imperialism. On the contrary, in Poland and Czechoslovakia,
at least, more democratic traditions of socialism found brief expression even at the
highest party levels. However, wherever such soft-line attitudes materialized they
were subjected to the same harsh disciplines that Moscow customarily dispensed to
liberal dissidents at home. In consequence, all the Communist parties of the region
without exception were turned into accomplices of foreign imposition, and of the
suppression of popular rights and aspirations. This is the fundamental reason why all
later attempts to stabilize Communist rule through liberalizing it were doomed to
failure. In other parts of the world some soft-liners within the authoritarian coalition
could manage to survive

and even flourish by steering a path to full democratizations. Those who attempted
this in East-Central Europe in the late 1980s were swept aside by a tide of popular
indignation the moment Moscow withdrew its protection from them. Whether Nagy,
Gomulłka, or Dubçek could have done better in an earlier generation is an experiment
the Soviet leadership was not prepared to risk. In consequence, when democracy did
finally return to the region it carried very distinctive connotations, not to be confused
with the meaning of the term in the abstract, or with the overtones it acquired in other
regions. Democracy, private property, anti-Communism, and ‘embrace of the West’
were all rolled into one, and linked to the rebirth of national sovereignties.
This chapter has emphasized two basic factors that probably suffice to explain the
durability of the Soviet veto on democratization, independent of the personal
inclinations of individual Russian leaders. One factor is strictly international, or
geopolitical; the other is a matter of internal Soviet politics. But the two seem to me
so interrelated that it would be artificial to claim that the real explanation was either
essentially domestic or primarily international. The first is the strategic imperative of
maintaining a divided Germany. This was the core of the post-war settlement in
Europe, and the linchpin of Soviet bloc security. It required the imposition of a strict
form of Communism on the inhabitants of the Soviet-controlled part of Germany
(preferably, no doubt, with their consent, but finally regardless of their preferences).
From time to time experimentation, pluralism, and the loosening of Soviet controls in
other parts of East-Central Europe might well have been more tolerable to Moscow,
but for the repercussions on the GDR. This fundamental geopolitical reality underlay
the Soviet veto on all attempts at democratization in the region.
Equally compelling was the second factor, which must be seen in the context of the
first. All Soviet reformers had to consider the implications for their own power base
within the USSR of permitting the dismantling of core Communist structures in allied
countries. In theory, it might seem as though there could be two alternative routes to
reform, regional or system-wide—i.e. liberalism might be allowed in some or all
client states, without dictating the content of reform policies within the Soviet Union.
In practice, Moscow's scope for permitting deviations within the Warsaw Pact, while
blocking them at home, was always highly constrained. If the Hungarians made a
success of the price mechanism, that would inevitably (through demonstration effects
and the pressures of international rivalry) feed into similar debates throughout the
Soviet
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bloc. If Solidarity's trade unions proved tolerable in Poland, workers elsewhere would
certainly wish to emulate the experience. If objective historical enquiry was licensed
in any part of the system, it would raise questions that had to be answered throughout
the bloc. In short, only a Soviet leader steeled to promote openness at home (and to
take the domestic consequences, whatever they might be) would be willing to lift the
essential veto on political liberalization in the neighbouring Communist countries.
Prior to 1985, reform-minded Soviet leaders always drew back from the dangers of
such far-reaching domestic reform and for that reason they were bound to maintain a
wary vigilance over dangerous precedents anywhere in the bloc. The essential link
between the two factors just mentioned was provided by the centralizing logic of the
Soviet command system. Since it was known throughout the system that all essential
decisions (military, political, economic, and ideological) must be initiated from the
top, it followed that whatever the Moscow leadership decided (by either action or
inaction) in relation to a particular challenge in a specific policy or geographical arena
would be taken to apply more generally. Thus, if Moscow had not crushed the Dubçek
experiment in 1968, this would have signalled the raising of a veto on reform
elsewhere as well (even at home). Likewise, once Gorbachev had decided on
extensive liberalization within the USSR he could never afford to suppress reform
elsewhere, without capitulating to the enemies or reform at home. Somewhat similar
issues arise with earlier Western experiences of imperial decolonization.
The transitions literature has sometimes been criticized for focusing too heavily on
élite strategies and calculations, to the neglect of broader democratic pressures rooted
in society at large. This chapter's focus on the Moscow veto might seem an extreme
case of such over-emphasis. However, the claim made here is that the maintenance of
that veto was a crucial distinguishing feature distorting democratization patterns and
timing in this region. Within the Soviet bloc most pressures from below were heavily
suppressed by the Communist system of control (to this extent the totalitarian
literature made a valid point, although grossly overstating it). Another distinguishing
feature of the regional experience was the role played by the West both in pressing
Moscow to liberalize, and in sustaining popular aspirations for democracy in East-
Central Europe. This may to some extent be regarded as a partial international
substitute for the missing domestic pressures from below—but of course it followed a
different rhythm and operated according to a distinctive logic, as discussed above.
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There is, however, another societal dimension to this process which certainly requires
far more attention than it could be given here. The pro-democratic influence of the
West came not only through formal treaties and public policies—it was also
transmitted through culture, consumption patterns, and a proliferation of other
demonstration effects.33 These societal influences are in the long run extremely
powerful, but also quite difficult to specify and evaluate.34 Their impact on different
geographical and social sectors within the region was extremely uneven depending on
the extent of media control by the regime. (In Romania in 1989, for example, not only
were there no private VCR's but every individual typewriter had to be separately
registered with the Securitate, and photocopying was also rigorously supervised.) In
any case it is one thing to show that by example Western social values and practices
were in general undermining Communist structures of social control and quite another
to link this to specific political consequences. However, it is striking, as Adam
Roberts points out, that popular demands for change should have proved so non-
violent, as well as so widespread and uncontainable. Demonstration effects across
international boundaries were dramatically reinforced by the impact of television
news coverage. In some cases the greatest practical impact was felt by the ruling
élites, whose confidence in their own legitimacy was undermined by demonstrations
of the West's superior appeal. Elsewhere the biggest effect may have been to stimulate
a wish to travel abroad (particularly in the younger generation)—a wish which once
frustrated by bureaucratic edict could be turned into political resistance and the
demand for change.
In summary, then, even though Communism may have traditionally suppressed most
forms of civil society in the region, the societal push for democracy became a major
independent variable as the transition process got under way. This element in the
democratization process, like the others considered in this chapter, surely contained a
major international component. But whether one stresses pressures from below, or the
importance of élite strategies, in any case the domestic and international components
were so intermingled that it would be arbitrary and artificial to disentangle them, let
alone to present the former as dominant over the latter.

15 The Enlargement of the European Union: A ‘Risky’ Form of Democracy

Promotion
show chapter abstract and keywords
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Laurence Whitehead
1. Introduction
This chapter is about EU enlargement as a major, but under-theorized, component of
the post-cold war drive for ‘democracy promotion’ in those parts of the world that
were until recently not organized into liberal democratic regimes. The paper is
focussed on the proposed ‘eastern’ enlargement, the decision taken at the EU's
December 1999 Helsinki summit to open negotiations over accession to the Union
with ten of the post-communist states that have emerged from the break up of the
USSR and the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, together with Cyprus, Malta, and
eventually with Turkey as well; henceforth these are referred to as the Helsinki 13. 1
This was a remarkable decision, which will have the most far-reaching consequences
both for the internal balance and workings of the EU, and for the prospects of
democratic consolidation in eastern and south-eastern Europe. It attracted far less
public attention than its significance merited, and is liable to be seen as just another
small step on a long pre-determined path, when in fact it was a marked increase in
commitment compared with the Luxembourg summit of December 1997. A full
analysis of the reasons for this strong embrace of such an ambitious variant of the
enlargement agenda is not possible here. Contributory factors are said to include the
need to compensate for the EU's disarray over the Kosovo crisis, and for the loss of
momentum following the introduction of the euro, together with the internal
demoralization revealed when the European Parliament dismissed the entire Santer
Commission—all shocks to the system that occurred in the twelve months prior to the
December 1999 summit.

From an academic point of view one of the most striking features of the Helsinki
commitment is that it is so undertheorized. Neither the core literature on European
integration, nor that on democratic consolidation, provides much assistance in
analysing this truly historic decision. The integration literature is essentially
concerned with explaining and interpreting the processes of policy convergence and
institutional restructuring within a given community of nation states. On that
assumption it can then examine the creation of policy networks, the lowering of
transaction costs, the ‘functionality’ of collective action in particular issue areas, and
the possible ‘spillover’ of integration dynamics from one area to another. Most of the
debate about intergovernmentalism versus supranationalism and about the
‘Europeanization’ of national politics takes the composition of the community for
granted, or at best assumes that any new member will essentially mimic the patterns
of adaptation adopted by the core states, without having enough weight to alter the
balance of power in the community as a whole. While this may just be tenable for
Finland or Ireland, it is very questionable when applied to the ‘southern enlargement’
of the 1980s—as we shall see in the next section—and is quite untenable in relation to
the Helsinki 13.
The Helsinki communiqué stated that democracy promotion was an indispensable
component of the EU's enlargement strategy, but the academic literature on
democratization pays scant attention to this aspect of the process, either. Three key
assumptions underlying most analysis of democratic ‘consolidation’ are: (1) domestic
processes are dominant; (2) the nation state is integrated and authoritative; and (3)
consolidation is about reducing the risks of zero-sum confrontation. By contrast, this
chapter will argue that the EU's strategy of democracy promotion through
enlargement puts external processes in command; brings into question the authority of
such key national institutions as the parliament; and raises the risk of conflict between
those willing to conform to external conditionalities, and those who can—or will—
not.
Hence, viewed as a ‘democracy promotion’ initiative, the EU's Helsinki commitment
is a high-risk venture. The argument presented here is not that it is bound to fail, or
that the decision was a mistake, but only that the consequences are complex and
uncertain, and that it could easily carry high costs to the EU as a whole—and to the
cause of democracy promotion more generally—as well as high potential benefits.
Those who favour Western efforts to extend and consolidate democracy around the
world may well applaud the ambition of the Helsinki commitment. But even they
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are well-advised to examine the balance of risk and reward, and to compare this
strategy with alternative possibilities. At a minimum, identifying in advance the
potential risks might help them to anticipate possible difficulties and perhaps to
prepare strategies for coping with them if they materialize.
The original goals of the Treaty of Rome may have included democracy preservation;
all six 1957 signatories were democracies emerging from recent experiences of war
and authoritarian rule. But democracy promotion was hardly on the agenda,2 except
for the understanding that an eventually reunified Germany would participate in the
Community as a single democratic entity. The main priorities were economic
integration, market promotion, and the diminution of national rivalries between the
existing Member States. Since the end of the cold war all these objectives have come
to be viewed as closely related to democracy promotion, but they are in fact
analytically distinct, and historically have been quite separable. The idea was slow to
develop that enlargement of what was then the European Economic Community might
promote, underwrite, or ‘lock in’ a democratic regime in an incoming Member State.
It crystallized in the 1970s, at the very beginning of the so-called ‘third wave’ of
democratization, when Brussels began to plan for the second, or ‘southern’,
enlargement that was subsequently to add Greece, Spain, and Portugal in the 1980s,
and so increase total membership from nine countries to twelve. The second section of
this chapter will therefore review the precedent created by this ‘southern’ enlargement
to see how far it offers reassurance about the prospects for the—much larger—
forthcoming mainly ‘eastern’ enlargement. The third section will consider what it was
about the EU that made the prospect of membership so attractive to many post-
communist regimes in the 1990s, and whether this creates much risk of disillusion
further down the road. The fourth section turns to the inner workings of the EU, to
examine the pressures on its decision-making processes, in particular as they are being
affected by the Commission's pledge of enlargement—a pledge that it may not be in a
position to honour, perhaps for decades to come. Section five turns to the more
specific issue of performance monitoring—including democratic performance3 —as
Brussels supervises the long and stressful process of transition separating the opening
of negotiations on entry from the final ratification of full membership of the EU. From
a democratic perspective a key issue here is the potential for dilution of national
sovereignty, having regard to the fact that the new democracies of eastern Europe will
need a degree of national
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autonomy if they are to inspire the allegiance of their citizens. It follows that some
potential members will pull ahead of others, so that section six addresses the problem
of ‘leaders’ versus ‘laggards’. Section seven considers the problem of the ‘democratic
deficit’ within the existing EU, and the risk that it may be aggravated by the eastern
enlargement. The conclusion attempts a provisional assessment of the balance of risks
associated with this particular approach to international democracy promotion and
how they may be mitigated.
2. The Precedent of the Southern Enlargement
The ‘southern’ or ‘Mediterranean’ enlargement of the 1980s, which added Greece in
1981, and Spain and Portugal in 1986, was a glorious success, and therefore provides
great encouragement when the EU considers expanding eastwards. The three new
members were all recent and apparently fragile democracies; only a decade earlier
they had been under severely authoritarian rule. They were significantly poorer than
the founding Member States, and they each had a history of ideological polarization,
including a significant current of opinion on the radical left. During and after
accession they all converged towards the liberal democratic and constitutional norms
of the larger community. Their democratic institutions were consolidated; structural
funds and cohesion aid from Brussels seem to have helped diminish their internal
economic and social divisions and the gap separating them from the European
average; and electoral preferences gravitated away from the extremes towards broadly
‘centrist’ parties and policy options. It is hard to avoid the inference that membership
of the EC contributed to the consolidation of these regimes; that it helped to buy off
opposition, that it diminished the scope for inward-looking nationalism that had once
fuelled the military's bids for power, and that it created international
interdependencies which would make the future repudiation of democratic practices
unthinkably costly, and would make a return to the old ways seem anachronistic to a
new generation. Above all, the membership of an open, successful, prosperous, and
expanding Europe could be shown to symbolize the benefits of democracy through its
association with personal freedom, security, and self-respect. Moreover, the new
members generally played a full and constructive part in the internal life of the EC;
they broadened its base and reinvigorated its integration process; and they also
strengthened the international profile of
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Europe as a collectivity. There is an extensive academic literature which documents
all this; see the bibliography.
Of course these are all broad tendency statements that can be disaggregated and
qualified in various ways. The Greek experience is not so clear-cut as that of Spain.
There had already been considerable convergence before accession, even stretching
back into the previous period of authoritarian rule. There is room for debate about
how far the prospects of membership, or the material inducements associated with it,
contributed to economic and political convergence, and how far these were driven by
other processes independent of the enlargement process. Self-congratulatory
Community rhetoric about the benevolence and benefits of its policies has not always
been echoed by the beneficiaries. Some programmes have been wasteful and
inefficient, some even counterproductive. But such objections are of secondary
significance for our purpose. As the EU approaches ‘eastern’ enlargement its
confidence is bolstered by the conviction that this is not unknown territory; that in
broad terms the ‘southern’ equivalent proved a historic triumph and rebutted many
earlier doubts and fears; and that if the Europe of the Nine was cohesive enough to
absorb and integrate these three, the now more institutionalized Europe of the 15
should be capable of progressively absorbing their post-communist counterparts.
These parallels between ‘southern’ and ‘eastern’ enlargements are quite compelling.
Nevertheless it is also necessary to consider a number of differences between the two
processes that will limit the relevance of the southern precedent. Four main
differences stand out. First, the Mediterranean accessions were negotiated during the
closing stages of the cold war. Greece and Portugal were both founder members of
NATO, while Spain was engaged in a longstanding military alliance with the USA.
These security commitments had been undertaken by the former authoritarian anti-
communist regimes, and were therefore viewed with suspicion and even hostility by
many democrats, particularly the recently legalized parties of the left. The Western
security rationale for the southern enlargement was therefore that EC membership
would help win over left-wing oppositions that might otherwise secure electoral
success and destabilize the Western alliance. A democratic and pluralist Europe which
offered political freedom and social benefits to formerly excluded socialists—and
even to communists—and can be differentiated from the military part of the Western
alliance, could be expected to help deradicalize and so win round these groups. In
some cases, notably with regard to PASOK in
end p.419
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Greece, this proved to be a slow and costly process. The contrast with the proposed
eastern enlargement is clear.
Second, the degree of external political monitoring of the candidate countries was
more limited in the 1980s than it has proved to be in the 1990s. In part this was simply
because the accumulated body of European laws and institutional commitments —the
acquis communautaire, which currently consists of 86,000 pages of standardized
legislation—was so much less about 20 years ago. Europe in the 1980s was still an
essentially economic association, direct election to the European parliament was in its
infancy, and the Single European Act was not yet in force, let alone the Maastricht
Treaty, the Schengen Agreement, or Economic and Monetary Union. Moreover, all
three southern candidates for membership were undergoing processes of re-
democratization. That is to say, they possessed traditions of autonomy, press freedom,
competitive electoral politics, labour organization, constitutional division of power,
and the rule of law: all of which could be reconstituted both in accordance with past
national practices and with international standards. Here too the post-communist
regimes have a larger gap to bridge, and are subject to greater supervision and indeed
intrusion from Brussels and Strasbourg.
Third, although the gap in living standards between the Mediterranean three and the
EC nine was significant, it is dwarfed by the gap between Helsinki's 13 candidate
states and the EU 15. Even the poorest regions of Greece and Portugal were already
up to around half the average European income per head at the time of accession. The
richest three of the Helsinki's 13—Slovenia, Malta, and Cyprus—are only at about 40
per cent of the EU 15 average, and the poorest two—Bulgaria and Romania—are at
less than 10 per cent. Overall the income gap, in 1996 dollars per capita, separating
the Helsinki 13 from the EU 15 is over seven to one: $3,000 to $23,000. Hence,
whereas in the case of the Mediterranean enlargement it was feasible to extend the
Common Agricultural Policy to the farmers of the three new members, and thus to
build up rural political parties and patronage machines favourable to the Community,
there is no will to pay for this for the Helsinki 13. In consequence, rural and peasant
disaffection with Europe is likely to be far more troublesome in the case of an eastern
enlargement.
Fourth, and last, the geopolitical scope of the ‘southern’ enlargement was fairly
clearly delimited by the north shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Both Morocco and
Turkey were excluded from the list of candidates considered in the 1980s. Portugal
came with Madeira and the Azores, but without its many overseas territories.

Spain had already relinquished the Spanish Sahara, though not Ceuta and Mellila.
Greece included a few disputed Aegean islands, but not Cyprus. The geopolitical
headaches accompanying the southern enlargement were not trivial—especially with
Turkey and Cyprus, but also with Gibraltar—but they could be classed as limited and
peripheral. Contrast the case of the Helsinki 13. A divided Cyprus constitutes the most
evident stumbling block, but the boundary problems are far wider. Where does an
eastward expansion of the EU stop? Why Romania but not Moldova? Why Moldova
but not the Ukraine? Why Tallinn but not Kaliningrad, or St Petersburg? Why Greece
but not Macedonia? Why Slovenia but not Croatia? Whenever the new line is drawn
the geopolitical repercussions will be far more problematic than was the case in the
1980s.
So the 1980s precedent, although encouraging, has the potential to mislead. Despite
the success of the ‘southern’ enlargement, it was in fact accompanied by considerable
risks, and the risks are likely to be considerably greater in the case of the ‘east’. Even
though the Mediterranean enlargement turned out well, it contained some warnings
that deserve further attention when the same exercise is repeated on a larger scale.
Greece did not always ‘converge’ as required, and at one point in 1989 Commission
President Delors even gave voice to the possibility of suspension. In any case, once
inside the Community Greece could exercise its national veto to bring EU pressure to
bear on its historic enemy, Turkey, which was in a position of weakness as an
outsider. The 13 Helsinki candidates are likely to remember this precedent as they
jostle for their places in the next admissions queue. This brings us to their motives for
seeking accession to the Union.
3. The EU in the 1990S: What Kind of Magnet?
In very broad terms we can say that in the 1980s the European Community attracted
broad support from most sectors of society in the three Mediterranean countries
because (1) membership represented international acceptance of their liberal
democratic credentials; (2) it granted unrestricted access to a powerful market backed
by a generous system of social entitlements; and (3) it offered continuing guarantees
against a relapse into oppressive political practices. To gain and ‘lock in’ these
benefits, to fully ‘rejoin the West’, it was necessary to make a series of far-reaching
end p.421
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institutional commitments, but the transition periods for the more painful adjustments
were reasonably long, the compensation came early, and little was demanded that ran
fundamentally counter to the interests of any major social group. If rightists had to
relinquish some of their former privileges these were probably doomed in any event,
and for the most part the readjustments required were not that harsh. If leftists had to
shed their revolutionary aspirations and make their peace with NATO and with liberal
capitalism, the illusions of the old left were in any case fading away and the benefits
of full civil political and economic participation were almost irresistible. Even small
farmers stood to gain; so did trade unions, and the unemployed were also mostly
better off in a larger labour market.
There are some definite similarities between the factors of attraction that operated in
southern Europe in the 1980s and in eastern Europe in the 1990s. The wish fully to
‘rejoin the West’ was exceptionally strong among those who had felt trapped behind
an arbitrary East-West divide created by the legacy of the Second World War. The
course of events in the ex-Soviet Union and the ex-Republic of Yugoslavia served to
reinforce the widespread desire of those in neighbouring countries for convincing
guarantees against a relapse into oppressive political practices. In some countries the
ex-communists found themselves in a rather similar position to the ex-rightists of the
Iberian peninsula. Their privileged access to enterprise management and their local
knowledge of the state apparatus meant that, although they would have to relinquish
some privileges, they could often hope to adapt and flourish within the post-
communist system. At the other end of the spectrum, not a few former dissidents
followed a path to influence and prosperity similar to that traced by the ex-
revolutionaries of the southern dictatorships.
Nevertheless, the attractions of the EU were not entirely the same in the east as in the
south, and in particular the impact of prospective membership was more uneven and
differentiated. As already mentioned, the far wider income gap makes it unrealistic to
imagine that the Common Agricultural Policy could be extended to post-communist
farmers.4 But this is a large and needy sector of the east European electorate, with a
strong geographical concentration, and, if rural restructuring is to proceed rapidly and
without much of a welfare cushion, the political resistance will be troublesome.
Although the welfare system constructed under communist rule was in many respects
defective, or even a sham, there have been social costs involved in dismantling it
without
end p.422
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offering much of an alternative. Pensioners in particular—and some sectors of the
unemployed—have less reason to view the prospect of convergence with the West in
such a positive light as was the case in the 1980s. The cohesion funds that flowed
generously in the 1980s have not been matched by similar fiscal largesse in the 1990s,
except in the special case of the ex-GDR, which has distorted resource flows to the
post-communist world as a whole. The Helsinki 13—including Turkey, which has
slightly different but equally troublesome needs—will have to swallow an acquis of
over 60,000 pages—which continues to grow rapidly as their applications are slowly
processed—including Schengen rules on immigration and an increasingly restrictive
set of politics on police and security matters, all of which burdens the state apparatus
in the new candidate countries far more than used to be case earlier on. Insofar as
‘joining the West’ offers security and recognition, various post-communist regimes
have found this easier and quicker to achieve through membership of NATO than
through access to the EU. In summary, although in principle the EU continues to act
as a powerful magnet of attraction to the many candidate countries of eastern Europe,
in practice the impact of the convergence and eventual membership is likely to prove
more divisive, or at least less consensual, than in the 1980s.
EU decision-making processes were always rather remote and off-putting, but as the
number of states and issue arenas has multiplied these tendencies seem to have
become more pronounced, particularly as they are felt in eastern Europe.
4. EU Decision-Making in the 1990s
On the positive side, during the 1990s the EU successfully incorporated an additional
three new member states—the ‘EFTA’ enlargement—as well as eastern Germany. It
carried out two wide-ranging constitutional reforms, under the terms of the Maastricht
and Amsterdam revisions to the basic treaty. It added further ‘pillars’ to the
integration process, concerning justice and home affairs, and the Common Foreign
and Security Policy, both deepening the political side of the ever-closer union. And on
the economic side it largely completed the single market, and moved on towards
economic and monetary union through the establishment of the euro and the European
Central Bank. This was a remarkably packed agenda of major innovations, delivered
broadly on schedule in the face of much scepticism. On the eastern
end p.423
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enlargement the record is also impressive. The Copenhagen summit of 1993 laid
down the main guidelines and political criteria for the enlargement process. The
Luxembourg summit of 1997 refined the initial strategy, and identified the ‘first
wave’ of candidates for admission, together with the sequence of institutional
adjustments that would be needed to accommodate an enlarged Union. The Helsinki
summit of December 1999 extended the list of candidates, refined the timetable, and
confirmed a more detailed work programme for the period 2000–6. By most
yardsticks this would constitute a striking record of achievements. And yet on a more
detailed level, the EU's processes of decision-making have given growing cause for
concern, not least among the states vying for accession.
The dismissal of the entire Santer Commission by the European Parliament in the
spring of 1999 provided a prima facie indication that problems of decision-making in
the EU may be more serious now than in earlier times. Other recent episodes can be
invoked in the same sense, particularly in relation to repeated failings of policy
towards the Balkans. The sustained mismanagement of the European banana import
regime provides a further example of particular interest to me. But it is not possible
here to establish just how widespread, or how different from the past, these failings
may be. What can be shown is that there are plausible grounds for anticipating that the
current decision-making process will sometimes tend to work badly, and that the 13
Helsinki candidates for membership face considerable exposure to any defects in the
machinery that may be present. During the 1990s the EU has been both ‘widened’ and
‘deepened’. This has meant that more states have acquired a role in decision-making,
more policy areas have been created, and more interested parties have sought to exert
pressure and influence through a wider array of veto points. The institutional structure
has been modified in an attempt to manage these increased pressures, but changes in
procedure have often seemed half-hearted or incoherent when measured against the
emerging needs. In some major policy areas there may be growing networks of non-
state actors capable of steering decisions and supporting the policy implementation.
But in other areas, notably those affecting external relations and the issues of
enlargement, an overworked bureaucracy can find itself operating in something of a
decision-making vacuum, with insufficiently clear guidance from the EU's national
political masters, and with multiple uncoordinated jurisdictions between the budget-
setters, the rule-makers, the policy-architects, and the crisis managers.
end p.424
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The enhanced authority given to Commission President Romano Prodi after the
dismissal of Santer Commission, and the appointment of Javier Solana as the points
man for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, represent recognitions that all was
not well in these respects.
In such policy areas the absence of a closely-knit community of lobbyists and
specialists, combined with the complexity of the rules and procedures—for example,
the interplay between qualified majority votes and national vetoes; the complex
interaction between the Commission, the Council, and the Member States and the
European Parliament; and the juridicalization of crucial decisions —can make for
opaque and erratic outcomes. It was therefore symptomatic that the December 1997
decision to open Luxembourg negotiations with only six of the candidates for
admission would be reversed in December 1999 by the Helsinki commitment to
negotiate with twelve, and eventually 13. It remains uncertain whether this latest
commitment represents the Commission's last word, or whether it may still be
possible to add further countries to the list. It is equally unclear how many of the
named 13 have a realistic chance of accession within the next decade, or in what order
they are likely to enter. They are almost certain to come forward in ‘clusters’, if only
because each ratification process is so cumbersome that the EU will need to minimize
the opportunities for each Member State to abstract enlargement.5 But clearly all 13
cannot be admitted at once and the number, composition, and sequencing of the
clusters will generate much uncertainty. There has been much discussion of ‘regatta’
models, ‘stadium’ models, and ‘process’ models of negotiation, but still it is by no
means clear how the next stage will eventually be handled. Indeed, a good case can be
made that the expectations created by the Helsinki Summit are doomed to be
frustrated for procedural reasons. The Commission may inform an applicant that it has
been accepted as a ‘candidate’ for accession, but under the treaty only the Member
States, acting unanimously and in accordance with the European Parliament, can
legally ratify the incorporation of any new member to the Union. What this means in
practice is that the candidate state must satisfy the Commission that it has met the
necessary standards under all 31 chapters of negotiation, at which point Brussels will
turn to the 16 parliaments and recommend admission. However, the remaining
procedural step is very far from being a formality; the recent inability of the EU to
secure unanimous ratification of its trade agreement with South Africa because of
narrow domestic veto groups in wine-exporting Mediterranean
countries is symptomatic of what may lie ahead. A fully qualified candidate could
therefore easily face years, or even decades, of delay, after meeting the Commission's
demands—an indignity with dangerous implications for the enlargement project.
None of this is surprising, of course. In many ways Brussels deserves credit for
bringing a degree of order into what in all circumstances was likely to be a chaotic
process. But from the viewpoint of the applicant countries EU decision-making on
enlargement is frustratingly complex and uncertain. By contrast, the process of
monitoring the progress of potential entrants is intrusively clear.
5. The Process of Monitoring Transitions in the East
With the exception of east Germany, which was incorporated into the EU
automatically as a consequence of German reunification, all the post-communist
applicants face extended waiting periods before they can enter the Union. In addition,
Turkey has been kept in limbo since 1963, and seems likely to remain near the end of
the queue. Hitherto the interval separating application from admission ranged from a
minimum of three years—Finland—to a maximum of eight. But the Helsinki twelve
—setting aside the extreme case of Turkey—face more like a decade of waiting and
striving for acceptance. Slovenia was the last to apply—in June 1996—and may be
one of the first to enter, so perhaps it can complete the process in under eight years.
But Cyprus and Malta have already been waiting a decade—since 1990—and the
other post-communist states officially lodged their applications in 1994/5. However,
Poland and other leading candidates had already lodged unilateral declarations with
Brussels as early as December 1991, stating that for Warsaw the ultimate goal of any
association agreement would be full membership of the Union. The most typical
pattern, therefore, is likely to be a decade-long process of vetting and negotiations,
during which the EU lays down the conditions and checks on their fulfilment, while
the candidate country is faced with the demand to undertake a comprehensive legal,
political, economic, and security transformation in accordance with EU precepts.
These conditions may be open to negotiation on matters of detail,6 but in essentials
they are laid down on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. There are 31 chapters of negotiation,
ranging from fisheries to telecommunications and IT, in each of which the applicant
country must basically convince the Commission that it is well on the way to meeting
established EU standards, laws,
end p.426
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and practices. The first six applicants passed an initial detailed screening test in 1997,
and the Commission has issued two subsequent annual reports on their progress.
Following Helsinki this procedure will be broadened.
A crucial test case is provided by Poland, the largest, most strategic, and most
independent-minded of the ‘first wave’ countries. Indeed, it is difficult to see how
Brussels could recommend an eastern enlargement round without the inclusion of
Poland. But the Commission's negotiations with Warsaw have been fairly
problematic. By the spring of 2000 Commission President Prodi was more or less
publicly warning that Poland's slow progress in adopting the reforms required for
accession risked delaying the whole enlargement timetable, or relegation to the
‘second wave’—countries unlikely to be admitted before 2007. Polish President
Kwasnieski, facing a re-election battle in the autumn, responded by warning against
the ‘virus of selfishness’ in western Europe. He warned that a protracted stand-off
over enlargement could provoke a nationalist backlash in the east. Behind the rhetoric
substantive difficulties could be discerned. The Polish parliament has enacted a series
of controversial reform laws, but it is not invariably prepared to endorse proposals in
the form desired by Brussels—or, indeed, by the Polish government, which is an
uneasy coalition. Property restitution and the terms offered to foreign investors have
been among the most sensitive of issues, where nationalist opinion is most at variance
with the outlook of the EU. Agricultural modernization and/or protection, and the
question of direct payments to Polish farmers to bring them into harmony with their
west European counterparts, provide another source of friction; there are 2 million
Polish farmers, as compared with 7 million in the whole of the EU, and if they do not
receive direct payments from Brussels they have no reason to ‘set aside’ land in order
to restrict the accumulation of European food stockpiles. The EU seeks stringent
controls over the movement of population across Poland's borders to the east, while
Poland seeks rapid dismantling of restrictions on free movements to the west. Brussels
complains of corruption and administrative disorder in Poland, while Warsaw objects
to the excessively bureaucratic approach of the EU. Each of these specific difficulties
can no doubt be overcome if the political will to do so is present. But the Poles are
uncertain just how far such potential allies as Germany will go on their behalf, and the
strong anti-enlargement vote in Austria casts a pall. The underlying issue is that
Poland is too large, proud, and pluralist to act as just a supplicant, simply accepting
terms dictated from without; but
end p.427
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equally the EU is in no position to reopen the delicate balance of commitments it has
already established between its existing Member States, and may not even be able to
deliver an early accession agreement to those applicants who do simply embrace all
its onerous conditions.
It is not possible here to review the way this monitoring has operated for all
candidates. Each country has different problems, and moves forward at a different
pace. Since Poland is the largest and most independent-minded of the ‘first wave’
countries, and its experience of the negotiation has not been entirely smooth, it merits
a brief discussion.
While the candidate members are pushing for early accession without too much
intrusive monitoring of their internal affairs, it is understandable that the Commission
has to proceed carefully. What many consider to have been the hasty and ill-prepared
admission of Greece led to late problems that the Brussels officialdom would not wish
to see repeated. Many of the Helsinki 13 have problems of minority rights, possible
disputes over boundaries, and the unresolved legacies of past property seizures and
forced migrations. All are relatively poor and nearly all have been engaged in ‘triple’
transitions, huge simultaneous upheavals in economic, political, and security
orientations, which mean that many basic arrangements have to be restructured within
a very short time, and without much underpinning of legal institutions or guidance
from an autonomous civil society. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the
Commission has judged it necessary to keep a very close watch on a multiplicity of
inter-related processes of transformation. This is all the more necessary since eventual
membership of the EU is supposed to be irrevocable. Once inside the Union any
Member State can promote its interests through use of the national vote and veto, and
through appeals to the European Court of Justice to uphold its full treaty rights.
Before these powerful advantages are conceded to applicant countries it is inevitable
that they will be carefully scrutinized for evidence that such powers would not be
lightly abused. But in addition to these irreproachable arguments for transitional
monitoring, some candidates claim to have knowledge of other, less high-minded,
motivations. The Turks inevitably distrust the motives of the Greeks in pressing for
strong political conditionality, but also the Poles suspect German apprehension over
the free movement of labour between their two countries, the Slovaks worry about
joining behind the Czechs, and so on.
end p.428
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In short, close monitoring of the political and economic performance of all candidates
for admission is both highly necessary and quite problematic. From a democracy-
promotion perspective there is an evident risk that too much external conditionality—
too many interventions and intrusions from without—could undercut the self-
confidence and sense of authenticity needed to consolidate these post-communist
democracies. It is necessary to recall that whereas the democratization of eastern
Europe was generally associated with the reaffirmation of long-suppressed national
sovereignties, the Helsinki approval process of enlargement requires these new
democracies to pool or even submerge major aspects of their new-found sovereignty
in a vast, bureaucratic, and remotely accountable European Union. Euro-enthusiasts
may tend to view the nation-state as a fading relic, but in eastern Europe it may be a
necessary vehicle for democratic development.
Given such tensions at the heart of the enlargement project, and the diversity of
conditions prevailing among the Helsinki 13, any political analysis needs to include
the implications of the probable clustering of countries into various groups, notably
into ‘leaders’ and ‘laggards’ in the race for admission.
6. ‘Leaders’ and ‘Laggards’
Provided that we can be sure that the future contains an ‘ever closer union’ of some
25–30 European states, differences between primary and secondary candidates can be
reduced to questions of timing and sequencing. This was the case with the
‘Mediterranean’ enlargement, and it probably also applies to the ‘EFTA’ enlargement
of the 1990s. Norway and Switzerland remain outside the EU, but on the assumption
that it continues to flourish, and that no existing members depart or are expelled, it is
difficult to avoid the conclusion that sooner or later they will prefer to join in. This
logic applies also to the euro, the Schengen agreement, and the social chapter.
Individual EU members may for a period hang back from these additional
commitments, but in due course they are expected to be drawn in. That psychological
orientation is critical for the success of the integration project. If ever the contrary
belief took hold—that the future might contain a dwindling bank of Member States, or
a cumulative cycle of withdrawal from treaty commitments—interactions between the
most integrated and the least would be reversed. The ‘leaders’ in integration would
become the ‘laggards’
end p.429
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in securing national autonomy. ‘Widening’ and ‘deepening’ of the EU have both been
promoted in part because they keep such doubts at bay, and focus initiative on the
states most eager for further integration.
Can this dynamic be sustained as the EU attempts expansion to the east? The ‘regatta’
metaphor presumes that after an initial start it is only a matter of time until all twelve
—or all 13—accession candidates achieve full membership of the Union. The
Helsinki summit gave a renewed impetus to this assumption and makes it likely that
the ‘leaders’ versus ‘laggards’ competition will prevail for some time to come. Thus,
when the Poles seemed to be losing momentum the Hungarians hastened to take the
head of the queue, and similarly as the Czechs slowed down the Slovaks speeded up.
Before Helsinki the EU had tried to hold out the prospect of some intermediate status,
short of full membership, that could provide support for convergence to those post-
communist states least well-placed to satisfy the full Copenhagen requirements. But
as a result of Helsinki this option, never politically acceptable to any of the aspiring
entrants, has been replaced by a single more open-ended alternative. Every candidate
is promised eventual full membership when the conditions are met, and there is no
presumption that the leaders will enter first. This means, for example, that Lithuania
or Latvia could theoretically hope to pull ahead of Estonia. In the short term the
competition for precedence is therefore likely to heat up. However, there are other
constraints on the process. For one thing, the Amsterdam Treaty committed the EU to
complete substantial internal reforms a year before membership was allowed to
exceed 20 states. Thus, those who are not in the first five may face an additional
hurdle and delay. There are special problems about the admission of Cyprus—can this
take place before Turkey has removed the troops stationed there without international
agreement?—and Turkey itself, concerning its treatment of the Kurdish minority, and
the extra-constitutional powers of its armed forces, not to mention the issues
associated with Islam. In addition, extending the list of candidates to 13 states does
not resolve the problem of how to handle the aspirations of non-candidates. Albania,
Croatia, and Macedonia each have grounds for resentment at their exclusion, but of
course they could hardly be promised eventual membership so long as Serbia and
Bosnia-Herzegovina were left out.7 In a similar vein Moldova and the Ukraine may
deserve some consideration, but it is difficult to promise them too much without
creating problems with Belarus and Russia.

Given this long list of complications, it seems questionable whether all 13 Helsinki
candidates will remain locked into the logic of the ‘regatta’ model over the medium to
long term. In at least a few of these countries the argument will be heard that the wait
is too long, and the conditions are too hard to fulfil. This is particularly likely in those
countries which see their historical rivals entering ahead of them, and then adopting
common policies which discriminate against non-members. For example, if Hungary
joins it will be expected to enforce Schengen-type barriers against migration from
outsiders, even those with large Hungarian minorities at their borders—Romania,
Slovakia. Similarly Estonia would be expected to turn the hitherto largely theoretical
border with Latvia into a stringently controlled frontier, just as Poland is currently
required to do with its historical rival, Lithuania. Problems of this kind could become
even more bitter in those cases where a continuing security threat divides two nations,
as it divides Greece from Turkey, and as it divides Cyprus. In summary, then, over the
medium to long run, notwithstanding the optimism of the Helsinki summit, EU
enlargement to the east is just as likely to shift the locus of conflict between ‘ins’ and
‘outs’ as to erase the differences between ‘leaders’ and ‘laggards’. The dynamic of
integration will remain delicately balanced against an alternative dynamic of
disintegration to the east.
7. Enlargement and the EU's ‘Democratic Deficit’
In order to have any kind of democracy, or rule of the people, it is necessary to start
with an identifiable demos. Modern representative democracies can cope with very
large and geographically dispersed populations, but up to now these have always been
confined within precise territorial boundaries. The demos has to be enumerated in
order to be represented, and this task is carried out by the nation state, which both
taxes and represents its citizens. In fact their collective identity as citizens—as
possessors of a uniform set of rights and obligations to the constitutional public
authorities—is constructed through their interactions with—membership of—the
nation state. Viewed from this standpoint the European Union would not yet seem to
qualify as a prime locus of democracy, or as a public authority capable of constructing
its own demos. Even before adding the complications of enlargement, the Union
would seem capable of expressing no more than a secondary or derivative mandate
from the citizens of Europe. Essentially
end p.431
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they are represented by their national governments, who then choose to cooperate, in
various areas of economic standardization, legislative harmonization, and collective
initiatives controlled through international treaty agreements and monitored by a
European court. Major decisions are still taken by national vote: whether qualified
majority voting or unanimity is required, the Council of Ministers is a Council of
national Ministers, weighted by a number of states rather than the number of
European voters. The Commission is composed of a specified balance of nationalities:
every Member State must have its ‘own’ Commissioner. Its tax base is set by
intergovernmental agreement at a fixed percentage of European GNP: 1.27 per cent
until at least 2006. Although the European Parliament might seem to break free from
this intergovernmentalism, since it is directly elected, in reality it lacks legislative
authority, and it internal composition reflects the limited degree of integration
between political parties across national boundaries. In truth there is no single
European electorate, but just the aggregation of 15 national electorates. The best case
that can be made for the claim that the EU is a democracy is to argue that it is a
consensual form of democracy. But this raises the question of what happens when a
consensus is not possible. The answer seems to be that the disaffected party, almost
invariably identifiable as one or more Member States, has the choice between
reluctant acquiescence, negotiating an opt-out, and the ‘ultimate deterrent’ of
withdrawal. Euro-enthusiasts anticipate that as the benefits of integration emerge and
as cross-national networks and alliances intensify, the EU will eventually construct it
own demos, not perhaps as a replacement for national identities but as an additional
layer of shared identifications. But whereas throughout Europe the national state has
been capable of drawing on deep reserves of shared beliefs and traditions, the
hypothesized demos of a united Europe would only be united around a very ‘thin’ set
of values: shared impersonal principles concerned basically with agreement on
methods for dealing with others. There would be no linguistic unity or consensus
about historical origins—Canadians will appreciate the significance of these
omissions. It is not even clear whether the majority of European citizens share the
‘thin’ consensus of values which is the best that advocates of an EU level of
democracy can invoke.8
Add to these problems the complications of enlargement. Even if intergovernmental
democracy can be made to work with a fixed membership of 15 states—which
remains to be seen—it can hardly function in the same way with an expanding
membership of up
end p.432
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to 28, as the Amsterdam Treaty acknowledges. The inequalities in population size and
income levels would make it increasingly difficult to proceed on a ‘one country one
vote’ basis, particularly where matters of taxation and resource flows were involved.
Each candidate for entry will be scrutinized not only for its eligibility, but also for its
likely policy alignment on divisive issues. For example, critics of the Common
Agricultural Policy are likely to welcome the reinforcement of new members with no
stake in its preservation, and defenders will presumably react accordingly. Enlarged
membership will require a profound rewriting of the Union's procedural roles, and this
too will divide ‘ins’ from ‘outs’, and losers from gainers. There are bound to be many
disaffected parties in such negotiations, and they are likely to find expression for their
grievances through their respective Member States, thus accentuating the problems of
intergovernmental consensus and coordination. Each disaffected Member State will
face the standard alternatives of reluctant acquiescence—in some countries made
harder by the requirement of a national referendum before any treaty modification can
be ratified; partial opt-out—a pattern of behaviour which is therefore likely to become
more generalized, with damaging consequences for the teleology of integration; or
even the ‘ultimate deterrent’ of withdrawal. The unexpectedly strong showing of anti-
Union candidates in the 1999 Austrian elections demonstrates the potential negative
dynamics. While the withdrawal of any currently admitted Member State would seem
almost unthinkably costly and therefore unlikely, analogies such as Quebec
notwithstanding, the suspension of a non-cooperating Member State is now a
constitutionally recognized possibility, and could become a source of real concern as
the eastern enlargement progresses. Article Fa and Article 236 of the Amsterdam
Treaty for the first time provide for the possibility to use sanctions against a Member
State found guilty of violating fundamental civil rights and liberties—‘grave and
persistent’ violations. The procedural requirements for suspension are extremely
restrictive—including a unanimous decision by the other heads of state convened in
the Council—and the provision is no doubt intended as a warning rather than a
practical possibility, but it deserves attention as a further indication of how
enlargement complicates the process of decision-making and increases doubts about
the dynamics of integration. In the background stands the reality that whatever pan-
European demos or collective identity might have been emerging before Helsinki, it
will become still thinner or more fragile with the eventual inclusion of about 170
million new citizens,
end p.433
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speaking at least a half dozen extra languages, many of them very poor, some
Catholic, some orthodox, many Muslim. The eastern enlargement will render
intergovernmental forms of democratic representation within the EU ever more
problematic, at the same time that it also undermines the always slender possibility of
a genuinely federal form of European democracy. Universal suffrage within a 550
million-strong European Union would mean that British or French voters, for
example, would each have only one-tenth of the total citizen voice in a hypothetical
pan-European demos.
The consequences of the Helsinki commitment for the EU's incipient democratic
institutions can be illustrated by reference to the European Parliament. In 1999 the 15
Member States directly elected 626 Members of the European Parliament. The next
election is due in 2004, by which time up to an additional six members may have been
admitted. But the Amsterdam Treaty set an upper limit of 700 on the size of the
Parliament. Consequently, if the first wave of new members were allocated, say, 120
seats—about the appropriate proportion—it would be necessary to abolish about 50 of
the existing constituencies. Germany might lose seven, Britain, France, and Italy six,
and so forth. Obviously this problem would become even more acute by 2009, when
twelve, or perhaps even 13, new members would have to be accommodated. MEPs
from existing Member States who already represent huge districts would be still
further removed from contact with their electorates.
Of course, democracy promotion is far from being the dominant motive of European
integration, or indeed of European enlargement. But there are great risks involved in
pursuing the other objectives—economic, security, and global influence advantages—
at the expense of democratic legitimization. In the Conclusion an attempt is made to
balance these risks against the prospective rewards, and to suggest how the dangers
might be contained.
8. Conclusion
The completion of a European-wide union of peaceful, prosperous, and democratic
states would be an historical achievement of momentous significance. It would bring
down the curtain on many centuries of internecine conflict and destructive struggles
for supremacy in the old continent, clashes that not only inflicted huge damage on
European civilization, but that also transmitted intolerance and violent antagonisms to
much of the rest of the
end p.434
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world. Two centuries after Kant's improbable vision of a perpetual peace, it would
provide a resounding vindication of one of the most ambitious speculations of the
Enlightenment project. It would provide the most credible of guarantees that the
global so-called ‘Third Wave’ of democratization was durable and difficult to roll
back. It would transform European integration from its defensive ‘rich man's club’
origins into an outward-facing multi-cultural community necessarily engaged in
overcoming problems of poverty and under-development within a liberal democratic
framework. No longer confined within the boundaries of historic Christendom, it
would have to embrace a cosmopolitan civic culture that would enhance the universal
appeal of its example. Viewed from this perspective an eastern enlargement of a
democratic European Union constitutes a prize of immense value. Nothing in this
chapter is intended to denigrate the scale of this potential.
However, viewed on a shorter time-scale—say, the next generation—and with a
narrower perspective—the quality of political organization made available to the
almost 170 million citizens who now have a promise of joining the EU within that
generation—the risks of disillusion, and even at least short-term failure, are also large.
This chapter has sought to draw attention to those possibilities, attempting to identify
where the major challenges lie. Our existing models of democratization in general,
and ‘democratic consolidation’ in particular, are ill-equipped to prepare us for these
challenges. But failure to think through the likely repercussions of processes already
under way constitutes a much greater risk than any deliberate decision to frustrate the
project. For that reason, an unblinking look at possible futures can draw attention to
inconvenient realities that are otherwise likely to lead to unpleasant surprises. It may
even help to avert needless setbacks. That is the spirit in which this paper has been
constructed.
Four distinct types of risk can be distinguished. Under each heading it is also possible
to identify the large potential rewards of success, and the strategies that could be
adopted to control the risks and to promote the rewards. First, there are the risks to
democratic advance within each of the candidate countries, risks that could arise from
the haste and urgency with which they may scramble to meet the accession timetable
and conditions. Second, there are the interaction risks, risks of rivalry and division
between those candidates for membership that find themselves in a ‘virtuous circle’ of
advance, and their neighbours who could lag behind and even enter into downward
spirals of resentment and exclusion. Third, there are the risks to the quality of
democratic governance

Within the Institutions Of the Eu Itself, Risks Attributable To the Over-Reach Of the
Enlargement Project and the Gridlock It Could Precipitate. Finally, and More
Abstract, There Are the Risks That a Failed Eu Project Would Inflict Upon the
Credibility Of Liberal Democratic Constitutionalism As a Philosophy and Practice Of
Permanent and Global Value. This Chapter Concludes With a Brief Survey Of Each
Of These Four Risks, and How They Might Be Countered.
The first may seem the least troublesome of the four, in that each candidate for
membership can take as long as necessary to meet the conditions for accession, in the
expectation that whenever that restructuring is finally completed the benefits of
membership will be conferred. Therefore, even if there is a slippage in the timetable,
or a temporary reversal of political direction, the inducements to renew the reform
effort will remain in place. So far not a single candidate for membership has resisted
this logic over the long-run: not the Iberian dictatorships, not Greece even under a
‘Third Wave’-oriented PASOK; not Turkey despite endless delays and rebuffs; not
the GDR. Until 1997 Slovakia seemed a possible exception, but it too has now
changed course in the expected manner. Nevertheless, the 13 candidates officially
endorsed at the Helsinki summit of December 1999 will put this logic to an
unprecedented test. Twelve of them have already announced extremely ambitious
target dates for accession, ranging from 2003 for Hungary to 2006 for Bulgaria. Not
even Turkey is resigned to a long delay. None of them seem prepared for the
possibility that after a breakneck effort to meet all the Commission's requirements
they could still face decades held to ransom by multiple national ratification
procedures. No doubt a short time-frame will galvanize the reform process. But there
is also a considerable risk that the drive to meet all the multiple conditions on time,
and so to overcome EU inertia and scepticism, will override the need to construct a
domestic consensus behind each reform. The democratic process requires each
government to negotiate in detail with all the local parties and interests concerned, so
that the resulting policy packages are both well crafted and domestically accepted. If
the politicians of the candidate countries find that they can disregard such procedural
constraints because of the urgency of the accession process, it is all too likely that a
cavalier style of policy-making will take hold more generally. After all, the
institutional, legal, and economic commitments required to meet the acquis
communautaire amount to a comprehensive overhaul of most of the major aspects of
public policy in the countries concerned. Democracy requires that such far-reaching
changes should be the product of
end p.436
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an extended national debate and collective deliberation, not just the wholesale
importation of measures imposed from without. There is already evidence of tension
between the prescriptive form taken by EU policy requirements and internal political
dynamics within candidate countries—for example, over the treatment of agricultural
interests. Such tension is to some extent unavoidable, and may indeed serve the
positive function of precipitating a debate. But, to limit the associated risks to the
democratic process, the EU needs to make a clear distinction between the non-
negotiable conditions for membership—minimum performance standards, mutual
recognition, and the observance of common rules and procedures—and the nationally
specific contents of many associated policy choices. The latter require a sense of
‘local ownership’ to make them durable and legitimate.
The second potential risk concerns the scope for friction and even hostile interaction
between those candidates for membership that move on to a ‘fast track’ and those that
fall behind. The Helsinki agreement is that each of the 13 candidates for membership
will negotiate at its own pace. There should be no presumption that those originally
ranked in the first tier would necessarily enter ahead of the second group. Nor is it
envisaged that clusters of countries will necessarily all join on the same date, as
occurred in 1973, 1986, and 1995. It follows that countries with close historical and
geographical ties may find themselves at least temporarily divided. For example, one
Baltic state could acquire access to all the resources and leverage of EU membership,
while being required to erect Schengen-type controls over labour migration from its
neighbours, who would still be struggling to satisfy the requirements for membership
laid down by Brussels. Another example of the problems that could arise would be if
the front-runner, Hungary, was to acquire membership at a time when Hungarian
minorities in neighbouring candidate countries were complaining to the EU that their
minority rights were under threat. The most extreme of these difficulties could arise if
a Cyprus still subject to partial control by the Turkish military were to join the EU
while Turkey's hopes were yet again postponed.
Each of these individual contingencies may at present seem manageable, especially if
the interval separating the first of these accessions from the last is only a matter of a
few years. But individual negotiations with 13 candidates for membership make it
difficult to guarantee adequate coordination across the whole region. It may not help
that income per capita in the richest state —Slovenia—is almost eight times that of
the poorest; or that
end p.437
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Turkey has almost 200 times the population of Malta; or that some applicants for
membership border on rather similarly placed countries which have not yet been
conceded that status: consider Romania's links with Moldova. Various of the
applicants for admission are states with a fragile sense of national identity. EU rules
and procedures that could harmonize inter-state relations in western Europe may not
be so appropriate in the Balkans, for example. Instead, the experiences of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire in seeking to contain competing nationalisms may be more
pertinent. The Helsinki decision to expand the list of candidate members from six to
13 was prompted in no small part by the shock of the Kosovo tragedy and the
perceived need to construct a wider zone of peace and integration on the eastern side
of the Union. Admirable though that response may be, it also draws attention to the
severity of the continuing geopolitical risks in this area: risks of continuing conflict in
the fragments of the former Yugoslavia and in Albania—not yet candidates for EU
membership; risks that the historic conflict between Greece and Turkey may not yet
have been extinguished; and risks of instability transmitted from the remaining ex-
Soviet states, now grouped in the CIS, and not yet offered the prospect of EU
membership either. Taken together, these risks add up to a far from negligible
potential for negative interaction between those states most favoured by the prospect
of admission to the Union, and those with least grounds for optimism on that score. A
clumsy process of EU enlargement could therefore easily revive old enmities, and
create new divisions, on the eastern and southern flanks of Europe. There is no simple
formula by which the EU can avoid such risks, which could arise just as easily from a
failure to enlarge as from an over-inclusive eastward project. The first requirement is
a clear diagnosis of the scale of the potential problem; second, a unified capacity to
respond when things go wrong; third, a sense of urgency about the time-scale within
which divisions between ‘leaders’ and ‘laggards’ should be bridged; and finally, a
firmness of purpose to inspire confidence that the commitments made by the Union
will be honoured, and that episodes of local turbulence will not reverse the overall
enlargement thrust. All these requirements presume a degree of commitment to the
Helsinki strategy which is, as yet, far from being established in the majority of
existing Member States.
The third risk concerns the quality of democracy practised within the EU itself as it
enlarges eastward. It is not only in the new democracies of the candidate countries
that decisions emanating from the Union can seem imposed. Take the Helsinki
enlargement
end p.438
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decision as an example. It implies that the population of the Union may in due course
increase from about 375 million to around 550 million, while average income per
capita, in 1996 US dollars, would fall from 22,700 to 16,500. Before Helsinki the gap
between the income of the richest member state—Luxembourg—and the poorest—
Greece—was about 4 to 1. After enlargement, even allowing for a intervening state of
rapid growth in the poorest countries, the gap will be at least 20 to 1. Such an
expansion of population and increase in economic inequality is bound to transform the
nature of the EU. Existing cohesion funds and the common agricultural policy can
hardly be maintained in such a context. Nor is it likely that the present low and capped
tax base of the Union will prove sufficient to meet all the new obligations that will
arise.
Of course, the Helsinki decision is only one step on the road to enlargement. Each
accession will have to be ratified by the national parliaments of all the Members
States and by the European Parliament. However, by the time these legislative bodies
are invited to approve what has been negotiated, they will be confronted with what
they may well interpret as an attempted fait accompli. It is far from clear that the
parliaments, parties, and electorates of the 15 Member States will manage much prior
deliberation over the overall significance of the enlargement decision before that
stage. But if the voters of the existing Union are not fully informed, let alone
consulted, about the effects on them of the momentous steps being taken in their
name, then the legitimacy of democratic decision-making within the EU will surely
come under increasing challenge.
Even those who deny the existence of a ‘democratic deficit’ in the procedures of the
current EU will need to consider their positions when analyzing the prospective
enlarged Union. With 80 per cent of the European electorate living in only nine out of
the 28 Member States, it would hardly be democratic to persist with a one-
government-one-vote—or indeed a one-governmentone-Commissioner—decision
rule. Similarly, with 88 per cent of all income generated by the nine largest and
wealthiest economies of the enlarged Union—with these nine having about 65 per
cent of the total population—the collection and disbursement of EU ‘own resources’
between claimants of very unequal size will inevitably become a focus of greater
political disagreement. The current arbitrary tax base—1.27 per cent of GNP for every
Member State—will hardly remain consensual. But any more progressive or
redistributive alternative will raise profoundly divisive questions about the nature of
the Union and its base of political legitimization.
end p.439
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In principle, the three main alternative modes of democratic legitimization are
intergovernmentalism, with democracy exercised through national parliaments; quasi-
federalism, with democracy directed to a significant degree through the European
parliament; and legalism, with authority exercised by rule-base Community
institutions lacking much direct electoral accountability. Until now the conflict
between these alternative principles of democratic legitimization has been muffled,
but as the EU has grown in authority these tensions have become more visible. The
dismissal of the Santer Commission in 1999 highlighted this underlying problem.
Enlargement from 15 to 28 members will eventually magnify the conflict of principle,
even if, which may be doubted, attention can be diverted from it during the course of
the accession process. There is no simple way to counter these risks to the democratic
credentials of the EU. But perhaps the best way forward would be to acknowledge the
existence of the problem, and to invite all concerned, including the 13 candidate
members, to formulate proposals for its mitigation. Failing that, voters in all the
Member States may be tempted to direct their democratic energies against decision
processes which they experience as out of their control.
This leads to the fourth, final, and most far-reaching of the risks of enlargement: the
risk to liberal democratic constitutionalism as a global philosophy. This may sound
altogether too grandiose, and yet in the post-cold war world it has become a question
of the most general and long-term significance whether the prosperous and developed
liberal democracies of the West have indeed developed a coherent body of theory and
practice capable of abolishing international conflict, legitimizing public authority, and
protecting individual freedoms and collective prosperity. That is what supporters of
the EU assert, and it is on that prospectus that so many additional Member States are
being recruited. If this claim is correct, it is an achievement of universal, and not
merely European, transcendency. By the same token, if the liberal democratic
constitutionalist promise is overblown, or proved to be internally flawed, the damage
would not be confined to Europe. The principles that are being tested by the EU and
its enlargement project are also under scrutiny in other regions of the world, where a
European failure would inflict collateral damage. Moreover, these principles are of
more than purely regional significance. The EU experiment provides the kernel of a
liberal democratic strategy for tackling global problems. In partnership with the
parallel, but more settled, constitutionalism of the USA, it could contribute to

the eventual construction of democratic forms of international cooperation and

governance in principle extendable to all humanity. The enlargement of the Union to
incorporate developing countries, Islamic societies, and nations riven by ethnic
conflict constitutes a vital testing ground for these broader ambitions. The benefits of
a successful enlargement are correspondingly large. But so too are the risks of failure.
This chapter has been concerned with identifying the main risks in the belief that they
may thereby be mitigated. It has only managed to identify a few rather general ideas
about how to mitigate these risks. The essential point is that successful management
of the enlargement project will require the EU to ‘raise its game’, to highlight the
great issues and principles at stake, in order to generate enough momentum to
overcome the many opportunities that will exist for obstruction by narrow interests.
This chapter is neither a warning against enlargement, nor a prescription for ensuring
its success, but just an attempt to underscore the full implications of the Helsinki
commitment. Most of the existing academic literature requires a thorough overhaul
before it can address those implications in an effective manner. In the meantime, even
without much of an analytical framework to assist them, European policy-makers will
need to focus their attention on what more now needs to be done in order to follow
through on the EU's initial promise.