1989- A Banner Year for Democracy

People ar relate about bread, not about freedom of speech. Throughout the region, cultural tensions have emerged, coming at times to the forefront; " country" and "selfdetermination" seem all to often to be taken as meaning the right of majority populations to harshly repress minorities of all sorts.2

Proclaiming democracy  even holding comparatively free, fair, and open elections  did not by itself serve to usher east atomic number 63 into a bright new age of apparitional freedom and material plenty. Is democracy failing, then, in Eastern europium? And if so, is it failing because it has no answers for Eastern Europe's problems, or because Eastern Europe is not ready to function in a popular way. These are the questions we will ask, using the experiences of the Soviet Union and of Romania as particular instances of the problems of democratization.

Democracy, as commonly used, means two perspicuous but related things. Literally it means "rule by the volume" in Greek. But nowhere, of course, do all the people of a country actually met to settle political questions by a show of hands. Actual decisions are made everywhere by individual leaders or relatively vitiated groups.

In a "democracy," these individuals and groups are somehow accountable to a broad voting public, an accountability symbolized by periodic elections

Almost all of the world's functioning democracies are in the industrialized world  that is, in societies with strong shopping mall classes. Presence of a strong marrow class, indeed, has long been considered a prerequisite for a democracy. In part, this is because a middleclass society, virtually by definition, has less internal economic tension. Societies where the middle class is weak tend to be divided amidst a wealty elite and the masses of the poor. Under "capitalist" ideological dominance, this produces the Haitis and El Salvadors of the world; at a somewhat higher(prenominal) level it produces the Chiles and the South Koreas.

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 76ff.

Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1988), 118120.

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