2 results
11 - Slovakia
- John S. Dryzek, Australian National University, Canberra, Leslie Templeman Holmes, University of Melbourne
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- Book:
- Post-Communist Democratization
- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 13 June 2002, pp 173-189
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Summary
From Czechoslovakia to Slovakia
Slovakia's post-communist transition has followed a winding path. When still part of Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s, it was categorized with Poland and Hungary as on the fast track to reform. Its separation from Czechia was accompanied by the emergence of a more authoritarian government that quickly turned Slovakia into the black sheep of this Visegrad family, its route to the European Union blocked by failure to meet the EU's criteria for democracy. Thus Slovakia was left out of the first round of both NATO expansion to the east and the EU's negotiations with potential new members. The new Slovak state faced many challenges, and some deep internal divisions. Yet by the end of the 1990s, Slovakia seemed set fair once again.
The independent Slovak state dates to January 1993, resulting formally from the vote on November 25, 1992, of the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia to legislate the “Velvet Divorce” from Czechia. The Divorce did perhaps have deeper roots. The creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 out of the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not entirely happy. Interwar Czechoslovakia was a parliamentary democracy and, apart from East Germany, the most prosperous and industrialized of the countries that were to become part of the Soviet bloc. However, the level of industrialization was much greater in the Czech lands than in Slovakia. During the Second World War, the Czech lands and Slovakia were separated, with a puppet fascist regime running Slovakia.
13 - Bulgaria
- John S. Dryzek, Australian National University, Canberra, Leslie Templeman Holmes, University of Melbourne
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- Book:
- Post-Communist Democratization
- Published online:
- 22 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 13 June 2002, pp 206-222
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Summary
To the careful observer, of whom there have been too few, Bulgaria presents a democratization paradox. Cursory assessments by those who appear not to have studied the country in depth have often tended to be negative, consigning Bulgaria to the long-term laggard category. Such assessments are influenced by the image of the Balkans as backward. Some writers with deeper knowledge of Central and Eastern Europe have reached the same conclusion. For example, Gati (1996, esp. pp. 169–71 and 193) expected Bulgaria to become ever more clearly a “semiauthoritarian regime.” Vachudová and Snyder (1997) argue that the dominance of “nationalist former communists” in Bulgaria (as well as in Slovakia and Romania) between 1989 and 1996 signaled that the Bulgarian transition was different in kind from those in CEE, installing a regime that allowed ethnic politics to prosper. Even Hellén, Berglund and Aarebrot (1998), while generally more sensitive to the dangers of stereotyping and more upbeat about the prospects for democracy in most of CEE, argue that Romania and Bulgaria are mere transition democracies, in contrast to the clearly consolidating democracies of Poland, Czechia, and the three Baltic states. They attribute a North–South divide to “the resilience of authoritarian features in the Balkans,” which in turn is strongly related to “the clientelistic heritage in that particular region” (Hellén, Berglund and Aarebrot, 1998, pp. 365–6). Such depictions of backwardness are reinforced by the tendency of writers in CEE to use the concept of the Balkans as a constituting other (see Todorova, 1997).