Democracy Ethnic Diversity And Security In Post Communist Europe

Inder Singh examines why international organizations including the UN, OSCE, and Council of Europe advocated democratic governance, based on the rule of law and respect for human and minority rights, as the method by which states should try to accommodate their ethnically mixed populations. She discusses how realistic this advice has been, given the tension between the principle of the sovereignty of states and their international obligations, and the extent to which democratization had made for ethnic and political stability in post-communist Europe. Inder Singh demonstrates that this advocacy of democracy to handle ethnic diversity questions the perception of nationalism as a cause of war and disorder. This pathbreaking study will be of appeal to academics and policy makers interested in how the management of ethnic diversity through democracy can enhance domestic and international security.

With the upsurge of nationalist sentiment in post-communist societies, the problem of political rights for ethnic minorities became a dangerous flashpoint. The introduction of electoral competition, the rewriting of constitutions, the breakup of federations, the weakness of civic institutions, and the social and economic dislocations associated with marketization have all contributed to the salience of majority-minority relations. This collection systematically analyzes different models of minority politics in Eastern Europe, in an effort to understand why tensions are manageable in some contexts, uncontainable in others. Anchoring the volume are essays by Carlos Flores Juberias on electoral systems, and Janusz Bugajski on national minority parties. Six case studies examine the interaction of different types of institutional arrangements (which structure political participation) and different demographic conditions (ethnic balances and territorial concentrations) in Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, and Romania. Framing these studies are overviews by the editors and by Jack Snyder.

This is the first volume in which the fate of democracy is directly related to ethnic diversity. It highlights the crucial episodes in modern European political history, and shows in what sense ethnic diversity was of vital importance.

For more than forty years, Western policymakers defined communism as the central threat to international peace and stability. They responded by confronting it with a counterbalancing threat of force, and pursuing a strategy of containment. With the collapse of communism, the challenge to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic community has changed. Soviet expansionism has been supplanted by powerful, internal forces arising out of the clash of competing ethnic nationalisms. This challenge, argues Steven L. Burg, cannot be met by force alone, or neutralized through a strategy of containment. It requires Western states to act decisively to influence the internal political development of the post- communist states themselves. Burg surveys the challenges that the ethnic diversity in Eastern Europe present to domestic stability, international peace, and American interests, and suggests policies and practices by which the United States and its allies might contribute to the consolidation of peace in the region. He provides a concise explanation and analysis of the issues, evaluates the usefulness of scholarly approaches to the resolution of ethnic conflicts, and offers a strategy of what he calls preventive engagement by which policymakers may prevent conflicts such as the one that destroyed the former Yugoslavia. War or Peace? offers clear and direct recommendations to guide both interested citizens and national policymakers as they attempt to grapple with the complexities of ethnic and nationalist politics in Europe.

The Soviet Union encompassed dozens of nationalities and ethnicities, and in the wake of its collapse, the politics of ethnicity within its former borders and throughout Eastern Europe have undergone tremendous changes. In this book, Zoltan Barany and Robert G. Moser bring together eminent scholars whose theoretically diverse and empirically rich research examines various facets of ethnicity in postcommunist Europe and Eurasia: ethnic identity and culture, mobilization, parties and voting, conflict, and ethnic migration. The contributors consider how ethnic forces have influenced political outcomes that range from voting to violence and protest mobilization to language acquisition. Conversely, each chapter demonstrates that political behavior itself has an impact on the forms and strength of ethnic identity. Thus, ethnicity is deemed to be a contested, malleable, and constructed force rather than a static characteristic inherent in the attributes of groups and individuals with a common religion, race, or national origin.

Twenty years after the demise of communist policy, this book evaluates the continuing communist legacies in the current minority protection systems and legislations across a number of states in post-communist Europe. The fall of communism and the process of democratisation across post-communist Europe led to considerable change in minority protection with new systems and national political institutions either developed or copied. In general, the new institutions reflected the practices and experiences of (western) European states and were installed upon advice from European security organisations. Yet many ideas, legislative frameworks, policies and practices remained open to interpretation on the ground. With case studies on a diverse set of post-communist polities including Slovakia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Estonia, Croatia, the Baltic States and Russia, expert contributors consider how the institutional legacies of the communist past impact on policies designed to support minority communities in the new European democracies. Providing unique empirical material and comparative analyses of ethnocultural diversity management during and after communism, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, European politics, political geography, post-communism, ethnic politics, nationalism and national identity.

Focusing on Europe this book explores the complex relationships between ethnicity and democratisation. Case studies cover ethnic experiences in a range of countries including Germany Spain, Russia, Hungary and Polnad.

This book presents various models of minority participation through political parties in post-communist Europe, based on the experiences of Hungarians in Slovakia and Romania, and Albanians in Macedonia.