Ethnic Identity and Democratization Lessons from the Post-Soviet Region

Mark R. Beissinger

《Taiwan Journal of Democracy》 3卷2期 (2008/01) Pp. 73-99

https://doi.org/10.29654/TJD.200801.0005

並列摘要

The third wave of democratization became the occasion for sharpening the engagement between ethnic identity and democracy, as democratization spread to countries that were much more fragmented along cultural lines than was true of early democratizers. Three sets of issues in particular were brought back onto the agenda: whether ethnic diversity in and of itself represents a powerful obstacle to building stable democracies; whether strong ethnic identities are detrimental to the democratization process; and the causal paths by which ethnic identities are implicated in democratization and de-democratization processes. This essay examines these three questions in light of the experience of the post-Soviet region. While the essay places regional patterns into the perspective of the findings of large-n, cross-national research, it argues that there is a pressing need to ”scale down” when analyzing the implications of ethnic politics for democratization, and that too much of the work on this subject has been shaped by the availability of demographic data on ethnicity. The essay makes three basic arguments. First, ethnic diversity is a relatively weak explanation of democratic development on its own, but ethnicity rather exercises its effects on democratization in part through its interaction with other factors that affect democratic development. Second, the impact of ethnicity on democratization also flows through processes of ethnic mobilization, which are not a function of diversity per se, but rather revolve around how democratization affects the interests of minorities and around the mobilizational opportunities and capacities of challenging groups. And third, ethnic nationalism is not necessarily incompatible with democracy, but rather depends on the types of objects against which ethnic groups mobilize, so that strong ethnic passions can form the basis for a mobilized path to democracy when ethnic nationalism is focused against foreign domination rather than against other ethnic groups.

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