The Transition to Democracy Proceedings of a Workshop (1991) / Chapter Skim
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Getting to Democracy: Plenary Session II
Getting to Democracy: Plenary Session II
Pages 29-40
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From page 29... ...
Second, in those cases where we cannot say, according to some basic definition, that a full-blown democracy exists, such as Mexico and certain parts of Eastern Europe, will those liberalizations continue into some real form of democratization? The third question is will previously consolidated democracies be able to extend the principles of political citizenship and political equality into the economic and social realms in their societies and be able to perpetuate themselves?
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From page 30... ...
If the United States was strong, political democracies would emerge around the world, but if the United States was weak, you would be less likely to find this taking place. One of the things that we know now, after watching this enormous 30
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From page 31... ...
In the Latin American context, those countries in the Southern Cone, where United States influence has been weakest, have moved much further ahead in the democratization process than the countries of Central America and the Caribbean, where the United States is much stronger. That particular relationship is trickier than many people initially thought.
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From page 32... ...
In fact, in my study with Philippe Schmitter, it seems that democracies arise not from these forms of trust and tolerance, but specifically from very uncivic behavior, such as warfare and out of internal social conflicts. Even though many transitions happened relatively peacefully, there was an enormous amount of conflict involved in many of them.
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From page 33... ...
Will the state and party apparatus permit elected governments to undermine their monopoly on administrative roles and structures? Will they undermine the possibility of transferring substantial productive resources to private citizens?
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From page 34... ...
My first point is that some transitions cannot be neatly located in this space. Poland, for instance, started at the box labeled "reform." With the rise of Solidarity, they moved toward the "pact" box in 1981, then into "imposition" when the military regime said, "We don't like these rules," and back to "pact" in 1989 when the military regime bargained with Solidarity for restricted elections, and finally once again back to "reform" at the bottom when those elections produced a more reformist regime.
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From page 35... ...
have beneath them not just small deals struck by politicians, but big, foundational pacts. In most cases, these pacts revolve around four types of agreements.
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From page 36... ...
Even if they had elections, it was already decided outside the electoral arena who would be the head of the country. In Venezuela, the political parties signed an accord in which all the political parties fighting for office agreed to implement the same kind of economic programs.
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From page 37... ...
This is in the past, in the following sense: an important component of the failed "reform" cases Philippe Schmitter and I investigated in Latin America was the identification of mass movements with communism, with Soviet-inspired actions. The winding down of the Cold War means that it will be more difficult to make an automatic assumption that mass movements per se are linked to external actors that have important security implications for the United States.
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From page 38... ...
The final chapter, written by Abraham Lowenthal, concludes: Recurrent efforts by the government of the United States to promote democracy in Latin America have rarely been successful, and then only in a narrow range of circumstances. From the turn of the century until the 1980s, the overall impact of U.S.
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From page 39... ...
"Imposed" transitions would likely result in what she termed "conservative democracies" in which the prerogatives of the dominant power are so pervasive that the emerging democracy's ability to continue transforming society and provide increasingly equal citizenship rights Is severely circumscribed.
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From page 40... ...
Karl also disagreed that successful transition pacts necessarily required at least one strong competing group. Again citing the Venezuelan example, she commented that a powerful group there had shown wisdom and political insight by not fully utilizing its powers, actually giving up control over portions of the labor unions and ministries to competing political parties.
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