Stephen Deets

Reimagining the Boundaries of the Nation: Politics and the Development of Ideas on Minority Rights

The collapse of communism reshaped European debates on minority rights. By the 1980s, the different institutionalizations of turn-of-the-century perspectives created an ideational divide between East and West. Since 1989, Western norms have not simply transferred East, as intellectuals and politicians in the region challenged and reinterpreted the norms in novel ways. Fifteen years later, European minority norms are elaborated in much greater detail than ever before, but consensus on core issues remains elusive. The article first explores the roots of this ideational divide and how recent trafficking of ideas between East and West Europeans has caused both to reexamine their core assumptions on the rights of minority communities, particularly with regards to individualism, collective autonomy, and justice. The second part examines how these controversies over norm interpretation appear in minority policy debates in Eastern Europe, including minority autonomy, education, and the Hungarian Status Law.

Wizarding in the Classroom: Teaching Harry Potter and Politics

This article describes teaching a course called Harry Potter and Politics. Focusing on aspects of political culture, the class tackled themes of identity, institutional behavior, and globalization. Teaching Harry Potter has several benefits. Students are both familiar with the wizarding world and yet have enough distance to examine it dispassionately. The book is driven by ethnic conflict, political power struggles, and dysfunctional bureaucracies. Finally, there is an academic literature on the books. Beyond Harry Potter, teaching politics through popular culture is not only natural for addressing political culture, but taps into the ways undergraduates are increasingly experiencing politics.

Public Policy in the Passive-Aggressive State: Health Care Reform in Bosnia-Hercegovina 1995–2001

Abstract This article uses Bosnia and Hercegovina as a prototype of an emerging subset of weak states, the passive-aggressive state. Appearing as the result of agreements ending civil strife, the general characteristics of the passive-aggressive state include complex power-sharing arrangements at the centre and local institutions that are designed for capture by parties to the conflict, which in turn creates a weak and segmented civil society. As a result, only the international community can devise and financially support policy reform, but it must rely on the state to implement the reform. Dependent on international support for its own survival, the centre rhetorically embraces reform while local institutions engage in passive resistance to block it. This article uses three examples of health care reform in Bosnia to illustrate the difficulties of reform in these types of states. The paper concludes with observations on how strengthening the powers of the central government and reorienting international aid towards civil society might alleviate some of the structural problems of passive-aggressive states. passive-aggressive: Of, relating to, or having a personality disorder characterised by habitual passive resistance to demands for adequate performance in occupational or social situations, as by procrastination, stubbornness, sullenness, and inefficiency (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition).

The Hungarian Status Law and the Specter of Neo-medievalism in Europe

In 2001 Hungary passed ‘the Status Law’, which legally recognized a Hungarian nation that extended into its neighbors. This article argues that the sharp debate across Europe on the laws legitimacy and European efforts to change the law radically are a reaction to the neo-medievalist vision embedded in the law. By setting up overlapping authority over and multiple loyalty of the Hungarian communities in the neighboring states, the law violated carefully crafted and interrelated European norms on individual equality of citizens, state responsibility towards minorities, and the circumstances under which sovereignty can be violated.

The Czech Greens revived

After the June 2006 elections, the Czech Greens (SZ) were the surprise kingmaker, finally opting for a centre-right coalition with the Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and the Christian Democratic Union (KDU). Like other East European Greens, SZ emerged in the first post-communist elections only to quickly disappear. Its recent success is attributable to the Green ‘brand name’, its new party leadership and political orientation, and the major liberal party’s collapse. However, this does not mean the internal and systemic challenges facing SZ are over. Given the environmental degradation under communism, most notably the tremendous air pollution in northern Bohemia and Moravia, ecological issues were salient enough for SZ to win 4.1% in the 1990 elections, obtaining its highest support in the ecologically devastated regions. The elections were won by Civic Forum (OF), a broad anti-communist coalition which soon began to disintegrate. In the inchoate party system, the Green Party also began to fade. For the 1992 elections, it formed a coalition with the Agrarians and Socialists, placing it well on the left. The coalition won over 6% of the vote, but twothirds of the Green members left the party over the coalition agreement. By 1996 SZ was in such disarray that it did not even contest the parliamentary elections, and in 2001 it was down to 239 members, most of whom were older, had little formal education, and did not hold the post-materialist values often associated with the Greens (Jehlicka and Kostelecky 2003). The 1996 elections also marked the comparative consolidation of the Czech party system. The centre-right Civic Democratic Party (ODS) and centre-left Czech Party of Social Democracy (CSSD) each average about 30% of the vote, the unreformed Communists (KSCM) slightly over 10%, and the Christian Democrats (KDU) slightly under 10%, with only the liberals floating among various parties since the revolution.

Constitutionalism and identity in Eastern Europe: Uncovering philosophical fragments

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge the comments of Karen Dawisha and Venelin Ganev. An earlier version of this paper was presented as part of the Project on Minorities and Tolerance in Central and Eastern Europe and the NIS (Newly Independant States) at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Networks and Communal Autonomy as Practice: Health, Education, and Social Welfare in Lebanon

Abstract Building on ideas of networked governance and non-territorial autonomy, this article uses aspects of Lebanese public policy to show that significant functional communal autonomy can be achieved in the absence of coherent institutions designed to support it. In this way, the article argues that norms, notions of legitimacy, and behavioral practices are as important as institutional design in understanding communal autonomy. An overview of the Lebanese education, health, and welfare systems provides an understanding of how communal governance operates and interacts with the state across several policy areas. These policy areas are also used to explore issues of individual autonomy and state strength.

Europeanization in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Recent Lessons from the Dairy Sector

Despite the European Union’s prior success promoting marketization and democracy in post-communist countries, Bosnia and Herzegovina may prove a unique challenge due to the incentives embedded in its governance structure. This article examines how the EU shifted strategy in response to these challenges through the example of BiH’s dairy industry. By de-emphasizing explicit leverage and instead promoting increased institutional capacity in discrete sectors, the EU sought to inculcate norms of professionalism and create more coherent top-to-bottom state service provision, which over time could help reduce resistance to the more fundamental constitutional changes that likely will be necessary for EU membership.

Consociationalism, Clientelism, and Local Politics in Beirut: Between Civic and Sectarian Identities

Both liberal and corporatist consociational systems are often characterized by identity-based networks that rely on clientelism and are difficult to hold accountable. This article uses Beiruts 2015 garbage crisis and 2016 municipal elections to argue that cities can be important sites for building new civic networks because cities often have resources and frames that can be used to mobilize individuals in different ethnosectarian networks. These civic networks, by promoting ideas of citizenship and state accountability, can be a significant factor in increasing liberalism in consociational systems.

Sovereignty, networks, and norms

Despite considerable scholarly work on ethnic mobilization, less attention has been paid to explicitly examining how differing notions of the state undergird our analysis and normative approaches. As the title of Ted Gurr’s Peoples versus States reminds us, the state is central to these processes. Similarly, there seems to be widespread, yet little discussed, disagreement on the proper role of politics in ethno-politics. In other words, at what point do we shrug our shoulders and say, “minority X lost this political fight and that’s the way democratic politics functions”? The three books here focus on vastly different topics (international minority rights norms, Native American struggles, and the Holy Roman Empire’s decline), but in reading them together it is striking how their notions of the state and politics lead us to varying conclusions about the possibilities for minorities. With Multicultural Odysseys, Will Kymlicka has written an ambitious book that is also his most empirical. Dividing the book into three sections, he discusses the rise of international minority policy and the logic of liberal multiculturalism in the first two sections and outlines his views on the prospects for global norms on multiculturalism in the third. He argues both that current norms are incoherent and unstable and that moving forward is difficult because of the inherent dilemmas in minority-rights norms (e.g. targeted versus generic norms, security concerns versus ethnocultural justice, and short-term conflict prevention versus long-term standards). He still argues, though, that liberal multiculturalism offers the best “alternate vision to the Westphalian state” as “ethnic minorities have not fared well under the Westphalian system of sovereign ‘nation-states’” (5). His alternative, however, is still rooted in Weberian images of territorially bounded entities with coherent, hierarchical governments; this is key to his understanding of how international norms operate, his stress on securitization, and his recommendations on federalism and territorial