¶ … Voting to Violence, Jack Snyder starkly poses some of the most vexing questions for foreign policy analysts during the 1990's. Why was this decade, despite the collapse of the totalitarian system of communism and an overall greater global potential for democratic involvement, marked by a worldwide increase in ethnic conflict and hatred in Europe and across the larger world?
Why did this "the process of democratization" become seemingly "one of its own worst enemies," because of its populist nature of the democratic politics that seemed to point towards peace and freedom, rather than conflict. Why has the promise of democracy leading to a more stable worldwide peace seemingly inevitably become "clouded with the danger of war?" (Snyder 2000: 21)
In another section of Snyder's book, the author states that "the transition to democratic politics is meanwhile [still] creating fertile conditions for nationalism and ethnic conflict, which not only raises the costs of the transition but may also redirect popular participation into a lengthy antidemocratic detour." It has proved difficult for "advanced civic democracies," the writer Robert Dahl's term for successful and peaceful nations, to evolve from many new nations, even nations espousing democratic ideals, when those nations have arisen out of ethnic self-identification. (Dahl 2000) Snyder and Dahl's analysis force one to ask which conditions and characteristics of a representative democracy in a nation moving towards a new system of government are most and least likely to facilitate the stable, peaceful governance of a diverse political community, and why?
One of, though certainly not the only reason, for the escalation of ethnic conflict during the 1990's was that the regions had long been hotbeds of ethnic unrest. The Balkan region was famously known as the 'powder keg' of Europe before the onset of World War I. After the end of World War I, according to the principles of national self-determination that had become, in Woodrow Wilson's mind, inextricably linked with the principles of democracy, the map of Europe was redrawn. The old Empires were indeed carved up, but this privileged some ethnic groups...
Macro analytical approaches of Marx and Durkheim regarding democratic republics, freedom, & equality This paper looks at the question on how the macro analytical approaches that were discussed by Marx and Durkheim are applied to the attitudes of freedom and democratic republics and how it affects the equality of society. Bibliography cites four sources How might the macro-analytical theories advanced by Marx and Durkheim help us understand the causes and consequences of
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