Democracy: The Challenges Ahead

246 Pages·1997·22.7 MB·English

by  Yossi Shain

ST ANTONY'S SERIES
General Editor: Alex Pravda, Fellow o/St Antony's College, Oxford
Recent titles include:
Mats Berdal
THE UNITED STATES, NORWAY AND THE COLD WAR, 1954-60
Craig Brandist
CARNIVAL CULTURE AND THE SOVIET MODERNIST NOVEL
Stephanie Po-yin Chung
CHINESE BUSINESS GROUPS IN HONG KONG AND POLITICAL
CHANGE IN SOUTH CHINA, 1900-25
Alex Danchev and Thomas Halverson (editors)
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE YUGOSLAV CONFLICT
Anne Deighton (editor)
BUILDING POSTWAR EUROPE: National Decision-Makers and European
Institutions, 1948-63
Reinhard Drifte
JAPAN'S FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1990s: From Economic Superpower to
What Power?
Jane Ellis
THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH, 1985-94
Y Hakan Erdem
SLAVERY IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND ITS DEMISE, 1800--1909
Joiio Carlos Espada
SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP RIGHTS: A Critique of F. A. Hayek and Raymond Plant
Dae Hwan Kim and Tat Yan Kong (editors)
THE KOREAN PENINSULA IN TRANSITION
Barbara Marshall
WILLY BRANDT: A Political Life
Neil Renwick
JAPAN'S ALLIANCE POLITICS AND DEFENCE PRODUCTION
William J. Tompson
William J. Tompson
KHRUSHCHEV: A Political Life
Christopher Tremewan
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SOCIAL CONTROL IN SINGAPORE
Holly Wyatt-Walter
THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY AND THE SECURITY DILEMMA, 1979-92
St Antony's Series
Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0-333-71109-5
(outside North America only)
You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order.
Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write 10 us at the address below with
your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above.
Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Democracy:
The Challenges Ahead
Edited by
Yossi Shain
Senior Leclurer in Polilical Science
Tel Aviv University
Israel
and
Aharon Klieman
Professor of Internalional Relalions
Tel Aviv University
Israel
First published in Great Britain 1997 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-25778-2 ISBN 978-1-349-25776-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25776-8
First published in the United States of America 1997 by
ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-17484-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Democracy ~ the challenges ahead / edited by Yossi Shain and Aharon
Klieman.
p. cm. --(SI. Antony's series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-17484-2
I. Democracy. I. Shain, Yossi, 1956- . 11. Klieman, Aharon S.
111. Series.
JC423.D44135 1997
321.8-dc21 97-5325
CIP
Selection and editorial matter © Yo ssi Shain and Aharon Klieman 1997
Chapters 1-13 © Macmillan Press Ltd 1997
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1997
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made
without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with
written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by
the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 TOllenham Court Road, London WI P 9HE.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to
criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and
sustained forest sources.
10 9 8 7 6 5 432
06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98
For
Morris E. Curiel
Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgements xii
List of the Contributors xiii
Introduction
Yossi Shain and Aharon Klieman
Part I The Social Sciences and Democracy's Prospects 17
Between Principles: Liberal Democracy and the
Communitarian Challenge 19
Peter Berkowitz
2 The Confucian Tradition and Democratization 30
Steve Tsang
3 Religion, Democracy and the Dilemma of Social Order 48
Charles S. Liebman
4 Why Democracy Does Not Always Follow
Economic Ripeness 63
Mark R. Thompson
5 The Ideological Challenge from the 'New Right' 85
Alberto Spektorowski
Part II On Two Fronts: Coping with Interior and
Exterior Challenges 105
6 Xenophobic Movements in Contemporary Germany 107
Ekkart Zimmermann
7 Does Immigration Threaten Democracy?
Rights, Restriction and the Meaning of Membership 130
Noah M. J. Pickus
8 Democracy and the Fragmenting State 146
Aharon Klieman
vii
viii Contents
9 Democratic Deficit, or Deficit of Democracy?:
European Integration and Priviledged Institutional
Position in Domestic Politics 161
Mitchell P. Smith
IO The Democratic State, Globalization and Privatization 184
/lan Talmud
II 'Limits to Growth' and the Limits of Democracy 202
Gail Talshir
Index 226
Foreword
Not so very long ago, when the death throes of the Soviet Empire, the fall
of the Berlin Wall and the breathtaking process of democratization in
Eastern Europe produced euphoric impressions about our collective move
to a global society where history had come to an end, many of us were led
to believe in liberal democracy's inevitability. And no doubt we are wit
nesses to inspiring processes of democratization - in South Africa and
throughout southern Europe. Setbacks aside, to lose hope in democracy as
a global system or, worse, abandoning the struggle for its realization,
would deny us the meaning of life in free societies.
Nevertheless, realism dictates we admit that the road to universal
democracy and to the democratic peace is anything but paved; nor is the
terrain so clearly charted. Certainly Fukuyama's vaunted plateau of an
unchallenged state of liberal society and ideology is proving hard to come
by. Not only because of democracy's difficulty in consolidating itself in
countries with legacies of repression, but also because of the multiple
challenges it faces in the old, established democracies as well.
One of the major dilemmas of democratic societies today is the average
citizen's alienation from the political process. Many people believe they
are themselves the innocent victims of a hostile takeover of the political
process at the hands of a professional political class speaking a different
language and dealing in the art of avoidance when it comes to defining,
addressing and resolving the issues of public policy. Another democratic
dilemma is that in spite of their indisputable economic progress, democra
tic societies and electorates face a genuine political identity crisis. The
welfare state is faltering under the pressure of economic imperatives. The
ideological compasses we have used to guide our socio-political life no
longer appear to be fully reliable. Not only is there a loss of the sense of
community, but also a malaise, a feeling that public life is no longer the
arena for expressing a collective identity, or for achieving the common
good.
This sense of community disintegration may not be unrelated to the irre
sistible expansion of the media. If traditional journalism offered a picture
of reality people could act upon, as Walter Lippmann put it, what we see
today are societies acting upon reality refracted in a thousand different
ways. If the media are unable to provide a culture of community conversa
tion, then neither can they any longer stimulate what John Dewey termed
ix
x Foreword
'the vital habits' of democracy; that is, the ability to follow an argument,
to grasp divergent points of view, to expand the boundaries of understand
ing, to debate alternative purposes.
Yet another challenge among many seems to be that of reconciling
modern society's natural diversity with the search for a unifying ethic. To
be sure, the democratic idea can be sustained only if it avoids a descent
into tribalism and intolerance. We have seen in Europe the shattering of
old postwar coalitions of mass parties into smaller groupings of parties -
from libertarians and greens to regional separatists like the Lombard
League in Italy. The greatest European - or perhaps western - vice has
been that of racial repression. We have seen the racist grasp for identity
associated with Le Pen in France and the right-wing parties of North
Rhine Westphalia. The tension between the need, on the one hand, for cul
tural and social distinctiveness, and, on the other, integrative tendencies is
related perhaps to what Jiirgen Habermas identified as the West's 'legit
imation crisis': the gap between what Edmund Burke called in his
Reflections 'the inns and resting places of the human spirit' (day-to-day
existence, ethnic, religious and community ties), and the remoteness of
distant bureaucracies and of universal values.
In the case of Israel, with the relegation of national and broadly patri
otic issues to a secondary position, and given the growing alienation of cit
izens from the big, amorphous parties and the emergence of single-issue
constituencies, processes are being unleashed as well that may radically
change its political culture and practice in a way that is far more attuned to
emerging political cultures in the West in general. Politics in Israel, too,
may have to start moving away from mobilizing practices centring around
the larger nationalistic issues, in order to focus on the real needs of living
citizens, and on the particularistic concerns of specific sectors.
Human systems are by nature imperfect. Neither is democracy a rigid
regime. We shall remain democratic only so long as we take pains to pre
serve the Tocquevillian meaning of democracy as a regime which 'makes
despotism immaterial', or the Aristotelian definition of the best constitution
as that 'which does not assume a standard of virtue which is above ordinary
persons' or 'an ideal state which is an aspiration only' but 'having regard to
the life in which the majority are able to share and to form a government
which states in general can attain' (Politics IV, Chap. XI).
Yet, having said this, it must be admitted that the problem is not only
the mechanisms and processes of democracy, or the pattern of the consti
tutional administration. The problem also lies in the quality of democ
racy's leaders. De Tocqueville had a thing or two to say about this,
too - about the worrisome deterioration, already in his time, in the