Download Free Ethnic Struggle Coexistence And Democratization In Eastern Europe Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Ethnic Struggle Coexistence And Democratization In Eastern Europe and write the review.

In societies divided on ethnic and religious lines, problems of democracy are magnified – particularly where groups are mobilized into parties. With the principle of majority rule, minorities should be less willing to endorse democratic institutions where their parties persistently lose elections. While such problems should also hamper transitions to democracy, several diverse Eastern European states have formed democracies even under these conditions. In this book, Sherrill Stroschein argues that sustained protest and contention by ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia brought concessions on policies that they could not achieve through the ballot box, in contrast to Transcarpathia, Ukraine. In Romania and Slovakia, contention during the 1990s made each group accustomed to each other's claims and aware of the degree to which each could push its own. Ethnic contention became a de facto deliberative process that fostered a moderation of group stances, allowing democratic consolidation to slowly and organically take root.
Argues that protest by ethnic Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia brought about policy changes and integrated Hungarian minorities into the democratic process.
Published in 1997. After the collapse of the communist system, the political systems in Eastern Europe were unable to cope with increasing tensions between ethnic majorities and minorities. These tensions led to violent ethnic conflicts and civil wars, in particular in former Yugoslavia. In this phase of transition and nation-(re)building, ethnic groups strove for more political autonomy and even territorial secession. The newly independent states lacked democratic structures and traditions as well as civil manners that could be used for regulating ethnic conflicts. The idea of Civil Society provides both basic democratic mechanisms for a lasting co-existence in an ethnically plural society. The theoretical part of this book discusses the issues of conflict anatomy, causes for conflict, and democratic conflict resolution. The empirical part describes experiences of ethnic conflicts in former Yugoslavia (especially Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia) in Ukraine and Romania. Experiences from Switzerland and the United States demonstrate successful examples of ethnic conflict management and illustrations of the political culture within a Civil Society.
This volume provides an overall assessment of ethnic diversity in Central Europe in historical context and presents a critical assessment of the conflict in former Yugoslavia. It advances a hypothesis on the origins of ethnic conflict, proposes an approach to the prevention and reduction of ethnic conflict in general and in Central Europe in particular, and forwards concrete policy recommendations for the region of East and Central Europe and beyond.
Ethnicity and ethnic parties have often been portrayed as a threat to political stability. This book challenges the notion that the organization of politics in heterogeneous societies should overcome ethnicity. Rather, descriptive representation of ethnic groups has potential to increase regime support and reduce conflict.
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. There are case studies of Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, and Romania.
Post-socialist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe have been characterised by historically shaped crises and conflicts on all levels of political, economic and societal life. Minority and ethno-political conflicts, many of them currently at a stalemate, have severely hampered state-building and societal stability – and continue to do so. Contradictory interpretations of history prevent societies from forging a common identity and thus impede nation-building processes. Political and social identities exert an important influence on democratic and socioeconomic transformation processes. Taken together, the contributions in this volume reflect the wide variety of challenges and conflicts linked to ethnic, national, political, social and gender identities in post-socialist societies in Central and Eastern Europe. They not only serve to illustrate the significant differences among post-socialist transformations, but also highlight the variety of theoretical concepts and methodological approaches that can be used to analyse identity, its change and impact on societal developments.This book presents some of the best papers presented at the Changing Europe Summer School on “Crises and Conflicts in Eastern European States and Societies: Stumbling Blocks or Stepping Stones for Democratisation?“ held in Warsaw in September 2007.
Many new democracies are characterized by majority dominance and ethnocentrism. Varying paths or transitions toward democracy create very different outcomes for how ethnic identities, communities and politics are recognized. This book illustrates the varied consequences of democratization, from ethnic violence, new forms of accommodation to improve minorities’ status, or sometimes only minor improvements to life for ethnic minorities. The book treads a nuanced path between conflicting myths of democratization, illustrating that there are a variety of outcomes ranging from violence or stability, to the extension of rights, representation, and new resources for ethnic minorities. Contributors discuss the complex mechanisms that determine the impact of democratization of ethnic minorities through five factors; inherited legacies from the pre-transition period, institutional configurations, elite strategies, societal organization and international influences. Global in scope, this book features a broad range of case studies, both country specific and regional, including chapters on Nigeria, Kenya, Turkey and Taiwan, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, Southeast and East Asia. This book provides new insights and makes at important contribution to existing debates. Democratization and Ethnic Minorities will be essential reading for students and scholars of democratization, nationalism, ethnic conflict and ethnic politics, political science, history, and sociology.
This book offers a linguistic-semantic analysis of the expression ‘Eastern Europe’ in international English-language media discourse and academic discourse. Interdisciplinary in nature, it provides insights beyond semantics and lexicology, commenting on the politics, history, economy and culture of the region. Its thorough analysis of ‘Eastern Europe’ as a linguistic entity, surrounded and affected by other linguistic entities, allows for a systematic description of the term’s linguistic ‘behaviour’ in specialist written discourse. The author measures the ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’ of ‘Eastern Europe’ in specialist discourse, painting a holistic picture of how it appears in English-language quality texts published in the last twenty-five years. This book will appeal to students and scholars of cognitive linguistics, semantics, lexicology and lexicography, and to specialists working on history, political theory and international relations as they relate to Eastern Europe.