Jeffrey Kopstein

The transatlantic divide over democracy promotion

Potential disagreement exists between Europe and the United States over how, not whether, to promote democracy. Will democracy promotion become yet another new source of transatlantic tension, or is it an area in which they can work together?

Deadly Communities: Local Political Milieus and the Persecution of Jews in Occupied Poland

Why, after the outbreak of World War II in Eastern Europe, did the inhabitants of some communities erupt in violence against their Jewish neighbors? The authors hypothesize that the greater the degree of preexisting intercommunal polarization between Jews and the titular majority group, the more likely a pogrom. They test this proposition using an original data set of matched census and electoral returns from interwar Poland. Where Jews supported ethnic parties that advocated minority cultural autonomy, the local populations perceived the Jews as an obstacle to the creation of a nation-state in which minorities acknowledged the right of the titular majority to impose its culture across a country’s entire territory. These communities became toxic. Where determined state elites could politically integrate minorities, pogroms were far less likely to occur. The results point to the theoretical importance of political assimilation and are also consistent with research that extols the virtues of interethnic civic engagement.

Beyond Dictatorship and Democracy: Rethinking National Minority Inclusion and Regime Type in Interwar Eastern Europe

Most standard models of democratization privilege class-based actors and the regimes they prefer to account for patterns of dictatorship and democracy. These models are ill suited, however, to explain political regime change in interwar Eastern Europe, where the dominant cleavage was not class but nationality. As a consequence, neither the process of regime change nor the resulting regime outcomes in Eastern Europe conform to the standard Western European models. Through a detailed analysis of key episodes of regime change in interwar Czechoslovakia and Poland, the authors explore the different ethnic and social coalitions on which political authority was built and the circumstances under which these two countries made the transition from one regime type to another. The depth of the ethnic divide meant that sustaining democracy in Eastern Europe required sidelining the urban bourgeoisie of the majority ethnic group from a dominant role in political life, a finding quite at odds with common views of the origins of democracy.

Growing apart? : America and Europe in the twenty-first century

Introduction: growing apart? America and Europe in the 21st century Sven Steinmo and Jeffrey Kopstein 1. The religious divide: why religion seems to be thriving in the United States and waning in Europe Steven Pfaff 2. Value change in Europe and North America: convergence or something else? Christopher Cochrane, Neil Nevitte and Steve White 3. On different planets: news media in the U.S. and Europe Donald Morrison 4. One ring to bind them all: American power and neoliberal capitalism Mark Blyth 5. Spreading the word: the diffusion of American conservatism in Europe and beyond Steven Teles and Daniel Kenney 6. Work, welfare, and wanderlust: immigration and integration in Europe and North America Randall Hansen 7. Lost in translation: the transatlantic divide over diplomacy Daniel W. Drezner 8. The Atlantic divide in historical perspective: a view from Europe Laurent Cohen-Tanugi.

Does Familiarity Breed Contempt? Inter-Ethnic Contact and Support for Illiberal Parties*

Does contact between ethnic groups lead to greater support for liberal parties? Research on this debate in the U.S. context is contaminated by high levels of mobility and a truncated party palette. This paper addresses the problem through an examination of the 1929 and 1935 national parliamentary elections in Czechoslovakia, where mobility was limited and the spectrum of parties was broad. We employ ecological inference on an original database of election and census results for several thousand municipalities to estimate ethnic group support for liberal and nonliberal parties across a variety of local demographic configurations. The results show that interethnic contact has indeterminate electoral effects: no uniform pattern of support for liberal parties exists either across or within ethnic groups. The electoral impact of contact depends upon the peculiarities of the group being studied and the national demographic context under which contact occurs. In and of itself, contact between ethnic groups breeds neither amity nor contempt.

The politics of national reconciliation: Memory and institutions in German‐Czech relations since 1989

In 1997 the parliaments of both Germany and the Czech Republic ratified a joint declaration on reconciliation. The political conflict surrounding the agreement illustrates how collective memory influences and shapes ethnic relations. The path by which memories are institutionalized determines how they reenter politics. Although the purpose of the declaration was to clear the air and pave the way for a new era in ethnic relations in the region, Germans and Czechs with access to institutional resources who opposed specific passages in the declaration succeeded in impeding its passage and ultimately in watering down its meaning.

Anti-Americanism and the Transatlantic Relationship

The big idea in the study of the transatlantic region for the past five decades has been that of a “security community.” First articulated by Karl Deutsch in the 1950s (Deutsch et al. 1957), elaborated upon by a subsequent generation of scholars, and then updated and revised by Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett in 1998 and Adler in 2005, a security community can be said to exist when a group of people believe that social problems can be resolved through “peaceful change.” Above all, war is unthinkable. People within a security community are bound by “common values,” “trust,” “mutual sympathy,” and a “we-feeling,” all terms normally associated with domestic nation building rather than international politics. Deutsch was ahead of his time, however, and believed that the same dynamics at work within states should also be operating among them. Separate states can attain a sense of community through “integration” based on intensive interaction and shared interests and values. The crowning achievement for Deutsch and subsequent scholars of international relations was NATO and the entire institutional edifice of the Atlantic order. It is now difficult to recall the scholarly excitement that this idea generated in the 1950s and 1960s. Of course, not all scholars shared Deutsch’s view of the Atlantic “community,” and Deutsch himself remained uncertain that the conditions for genuine integration were being met. Even so, the idea of an unshakable peace between the United States and Europe, based not only on American power but on the idea that in some important sense we had become (or at least were becoming) more alike than not, was new. It was widely recognized as a phenomenon that deserved to be studied. After all, for the previous century and a half, Europeans and Americans had come to the opposite conclusion—that they were essentially different—and either celebrated or, less frequently, lamented this fact. The new notion of a security community combined with Cold War politics to spawn a generation of scholarship on transatlantic relations and an even larger industry of interpretation by journalists and public intellectuals. The vast majority of public writing on the Atlantic community sought both to study the relationship and, perhaps just as important, to cement and even enact it. Americans and Europeans not only needed to be friends but also wanted to be friends. And so it went, not without ups and downs, but basically smoothly until spring 2003 in the run-up to the war in Iraq, when the United States and its major allies on the European continent, France and Germany, disagreed loudly and openly, for months, culminating in a shocking dust-up on the floor of the United Nations Security Council, a conflict that has been documented blow by blow by scholars, policy intellectuals, and journalists. Americans were portrayed in the European press as out of control and French and German leaders found themselves on the cover of U.S. newspapers with rodent heads photo-shopped in place of their well coiffed human heads—charter members of the new “Axis of Weasels.” Did this argument reflect some deeper divergence in interests and values between the United States and Europe that had been identified even before 2003 (Kagan 2003; Kupchan 2002)? Did it threaten the very foundation of the security community, Jeffrey S. Kopstein is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at the University of Toronto. The author thanks Emanuel Adler and Jeffrey Isaac for comments on an earlier draft of this essay. | |

Comparative Politics: What Is Comparative Politics?

Imagine that you could design the political order (e.g., democracy in the United States, Communist Party dominance in China) for a country of your choosing. Where would you start? Who would get to rule? What rules for political life would you choose? Could you make rules that would be fair to everyone? If not, whom would these rules favor and whom would they disadvantage? Would they be rules that even those at the “bottom” of the social order, the poorest and least powerful people, would agree to? What would be the rules for changing the rules? These are difficult questions because to answer them in a meaningful way requires an understanding of why and how different countries of the world are governed differently. With so many choices to make, it is easy to see why the job of designing a constitution would be such a difficult one. It could, however, be made easier. One might start by evaluating the existing possibilities as exemplified by the various forms of government in the states of the world. The state is an organization that possesses sovereignty over a territory and its people. Yet, within our world of states, no two are ruled in exactly the same way. Why should this be the case? Why are societies run, and political orders designed, in so many different ways? What consequences do these differences hold for a people’s well-being? Comparativists (i.e., political scientists who study and compare the politics of different countries) believe that it is possible to provide answers to these questions, and in this book students will begin to understand the craft of comparative politics. Even if it is not possible to design a country as one sees fit, it is possible to understand why countries develop the way they do and why they are ruled as they are. By comparing the range of possible political responses to global opportunities and constraints, we can begin to offer explanations for why countries develop as they do and evaluations about the trade-offs

Post-Communism, the Civilizing Process, and the Mixed Impact of Leninist Violence

Leninism and the central role that violence played in it is most commonly presented as a hindrance to democratic development in post-communist Eastern Europe. This paper reconsiders this proposition in light of the classics of comparative historical analysis. These classic works maintain that the long-term consequences of revolutionary violence sometimes counteract its short-term anti-democratic impact. Social change unleashed by revolution can contribute to the emergence of democracy in subsequent periods by removing pre-modern barriers to democracy. Two aspects of Leninist violence are highlighted as having such effects: forced modernization and the civilizing process. Communist modernization altered pre-modern social structures which had served as impediments to democracy prior to the Leninist seizure of power. The resulting social structures and the values reinforced by the communist version of the “civilizing process,” patterned on those of bourgeois conventions of the early twentieth century, helped some post-communist countries overcome obstacles to the introduction of liberal democracy encountered in earlier attempts in the region after World War I.

The Dilemmas of Liberal Intervention

This book brings together two important streams of political science that normally do not speak to each other, the broad literature on democratization and the smaller but formidable thinking on the theory and practice of postwar peacebuilding. Since the 1990s, the editors note, the introduction of democracy in the wake of civil war has become standard practice, especially for the international community which has frequently intervened to help end brutal and protracted civil wars, such as those in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Nepal, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The contributors to this book each assess a different facet of this practice and essentially conclude that, while the theory may be appealing, the practice is full of pitfalls. The rough-and-ready theory of the practitioners is simple enough: vote rather than fight. In the jargon of political science, interests can be articulated either through bullets or ballots, and the latter may be the solution to the former. This intuition is backed by a huge empirical literature in international relations theory which generally shows that democracies do not go to war with each other. Or so the theory goes. Whether it translates to the domestic level and to new democracies is unclear and there is a strand of theory that disputes the latter assertion. In either case, whether propounded by a UN bureaucrat or a political science professor, the practice of democratizing war-torn societies is a sobering one and often it seems that democracy and peace seem to work against each other. After all, democracy is a system of institutionalized conflict, and, it stands to reason, the last thing that war-torn societies need is more conflict. In the short run, democracy may actually work against peacebuilding and peacebuilding may require restrictions on basic liberal rights, such as freedom of the press and mass demonstrations. But in the long run, covering the simmering pot may lead it to explode and it is hard for an outsider to get it exactly right.