Making Democracy Under Communist and European Rule

Abstract

Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration After Communism. By Milada Anna Vachudova. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 360 pp., $95.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-19-924118-X), $29.95 paper (ISBN: 0-19-924119-8). At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama (1989) captured the watershed change in international politics with the metaphor of the “end of history,” by which he meant “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (Fukuyama 1989:3). Despite Fukuyama's confident claim, the process of convergence toward liberal democracy has been—and still is—far from being straightforward for those countries that emerged from communist rule. Milada Anna Vachudova offers an indepth analysis of the process toward liberal democracy in Eastern and Central Europe. Europe Undivided , indeed, traces the political and economic trajectories of six East–Central European countries, recording their successes and failures with regard to a number of issues—ranging from the establishment of open democratic institutions to the protection of minority rights—within a 15-year time horizon. The aim is to explain patterns of variation or convergence across the six case studies, which are grouped in countries that embarked on either a “liberal” (Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic) or an “illiberal” (Romania, Bulgaria, and Slovakia) “pattern of political change” after the collapse of communist rule. In order to account for the variety of political and economic outcomes that have occurred since 1989, Vachudova builds a two-level model combining domestic factors (the …