Promise of Democracy
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The year 1989 was, as proclaimed in the American mass media, a banner year for democracy. Across Eastern Europe, Soviet backed Communist regimes crumbled, peacefully for the most part. A "velvet revolution" rose to power in Czechoslovakia. The Berlin wall crumbled. Solidarity took charge in Poland. In the independent but repressive Communist country of Romania, the "democratic" revolution triumphed a harder way, with the rising against and bloody fall of Nicolae Ceausescu. In the Soviet Union itself, Mikhail Gorbachev aligned himself solidly with the liberal elements in Soviet society, and the country moved rapidly towards a more open political order. Only in China, with the massacre in and around Tienanmen Square, did the tide towards democracy seem to be momentarily arrested in 1989. But the enthusiasm about democracy's progress was, for a time, heady. People spoke even of an "end of history," an end, that is, to the ideological strife between Western style democracy and other ideologies. Democracy had won the day, and had only a few pockets of poverty and ethnic strife to mop up before the final triumph. By early 1991, however, the promise of democracy seemed to be slowly fading, in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. In Poland, nasty squabbles broke out within Solidarity's leadership. Czechoslovakia and Hungary seemed stalled. The new, post Ceausescu Romania looks all too similar to the old Romania.1Gorbachev has drifted into alignment with the neo
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during World War II, slaughtered Jews even more savagely than did the Nazis.5
Thus, in both the Soviet Union and in Romania, ethnic divisions fundamentally hamper the emergency of a genuinely democratic political order. Large fractions of the population dismiss other segments of the population as not being among "the people." The most powerful political parties in some regions are those whose entire platforms are based on carrying on ethnic conflict. Democracies with such deep ethnic divisions are rare. Switzerland is an example of a democracy with long established and deep distinctions of ethnicity, combining native speakers of several languages. But Switzerland has prosperity and a long history of tolerance and stability. Romania and the Soviet Union have none of these things.
Almost all of the world's functioning democracies are in the industrialized world that is, in societies with strong middle classes. Presence of a strong middle class, indeed, has long been considered a prerequisite for a democracy. In part, this is because a middle class society, virtually by definition, has less internal economic tension. Societies where the middle class is weak tend to be divided between a wealty elite and the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3059
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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