The Liberal Project and the Transformation of Democracy: The Case of East Central Europe

PREFACE

PREFACE I t is my hope that this volume reaches a readership wider than the field of East European studies. Although most of my examples are taken from the East European context (with those not from Eastern Europe having been drawn from the contemporary United States), I believe that the framework developed here may have a more general applicability. Certainly the issues of democratization, liberalism, capitalism, gender equality, the claims of nationalism , and policy debates sparked by religious faith are common to all continents, and the challenges they present have nowhere been satisfactorily resolved. Indeed, in countries once thought to be paragons of stable liberal democracy, the old formulae have been subverted and local publics have become more polarized than they had been in a century or more. With the exception of chapters 2, 6, and 8, earlier versions of all the chapters included here have been published previously, whether in whole or in part; all of them have, however, been revised for republication here—some of them extensively. Chapter 5 was first published in Human Rights Review 2, no. 1 (2000): 84–103. Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 9 were first published as “Eastern Europe and the Natural Law Tradition,” Donald W. Treadgold Papers in Russian , East European, and Central Asian Studies, no. 27 (Seattle: HMJ School of International Studies Russian and East European Studies Program, August 2000). Chapter 7 was first published in Serbian translation under the title “Klizanje unazad: Sudbina žena u centralnoj i istočnoj Evropi posle 1989,” in Ljudska bezbednost/Human Security (Belgrade) 1, no. 1 (2003): 115– 33. The first English publication of chapter 7 was “Sliding Backwards: The Fate of Women in Post-1989 East-Central Europe,” published online by Kakanien Revisited (December 2004), at www.kakanien.ac.at/beitr/fallstudie/ Sramet.pdf. I am grateful to these journals, editors, and publishers for permission to reissue these works in revised format. I began work on this book while I was still teaching at the University of Washington, continued after I took up a new post at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, and completed it during the 2005/6 academic year, during which time I have enjoyed access to the holdings (both paper and electronic) at Georgetown University (as Visiting Researcher) and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (as Senior Policy Fellow). I also wish to thank the Peace Research Institute, Oslo, where I am a Senior Associate, for its support. I am grateful to Ola Listhaug for his support of my research and for his assistance in solving critical problems as they have arisen, to Beata Eggan, Krystof Kosel -a, and Maryjane Osa for putting me in touch with appropriate persons during my summer 2004 research trip to Poland (which contributed to the research for chapter 6), to Stefano Bianchini, whose invitation to present a lecture at Bertinoro in September 2003 inspired me to write chapter 7, to Jonathon Moses for his helpful feedback on chapter 8, and, as ever, to Christine Hassenstab, my spouse, for her enthusiasm for my work and for the intellectual discourse we enjoy. I also wish to thank L - ukasz Kocan, my Polish tutor, for checking the diacritics on Polish names, and Győrgy Péteri, my friend and NTNU colleague, for checking the diacritics on Hungarian names. I am also grateful to Charles King and Angela Stent for arranging for my visiting appointment to Georgetown University, to Jennifer Long, Andy Pino, and Sissel Tramposch for practical assistance while at Georgetown, to Marty Sletzinger and Michael Van Dusen for arranging for my visiting appointment to the Wilson Center, and to Dagne Gizaw, Michelle Kamalich, and Janet Spikes for practical assistance via the Wilson Center Library. Last, but certainly not least, I wish to thank Mary Lenn Dixon, editor-inchief of Texas A&M University Press, and Diana L. Vance, editorial assistant for acquisitions at the press, for their unflagging interest in this project and their hard work, and also the two anonymous readers for their helpful feedback. x PREFACE THE LIBERAL PROJECT AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY ...