Abstract
In a recent debate with Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl carried out on the pages of the Slavic Review (see Schmitter and Karl, 1994; Bunce, 1995b; and see Bunce, 1995a) I made the following arguments. First, comparisons between democratization in the “south” (or southern Europe and Latin America) and postcommunism1 in the “east” (or the former Soviet Union and eastern and central Europe) are problematic, because of the considerable differences between the two regions with respect to such key factors as the nature and impact of the authoritarian past, the modes of transition and the agenda of transformation2. Second, the easiest and in many ways most illuminating comparisons are among the postcommunist cases. This is because they combine both striking similarities — most obviously, the socialist past — and yet important differences — for example, level of socio-economic development, cultural diversity of the domestic population and extent of political and economic liberalization prior to the collapse of communist party hegemony. Finally, there are good reasons, nonetheless, to engage in cross-regional, as well as intra-regional comparisons. Such comparisons can alert us to some causal factors previously overlooked, and they can be quite helpful in the generation, as well as the testing of theory. Thus, cross-regional studies can force us to re-think our understanding of the origins, the meaning and the practice of democracy, democratization, and democratic breakdown, and, for that matter, dictatorship and its breakdown as well (also see Collier and Levitsky, 1997). The purpose of this chapter is to continue this discussion by focussing on several key contrasts between the east and the south and using these contrasts to address some important theoretical issues in the study of recent democratization.
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Bunce, V. (2000). The Place of Place in Transitions to Democracy. In: Dobry, M. (eds) Democratic and Capitalist Transitions in Eastern Europe. The GeoJournal Library, vol 55. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4162-8_4
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