From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict

Abstract

A trenchant analysis of the attempts to mediate the transition from oppression to freedom, and a warning of the potentially disastrous challenges that face burgeoning democracies. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many proclaimed the triumph of liberal democracy as they watched democratization sweep through formerly authoritarian countries in Latin America, Eastern Europe, and East Asia. Yet the 1990s turned out to be a decade marked by chronic nationalist conflict, and the sense of democratic triumph turned to frustration. In From Voting to Violence, Jack Snyder shows how democratization can actually exacerbate nationalist fervor and ethnic conflict if the conditions permitting a successful transition are not in place. Arguing that international organizations can cause conflict rather than averting it in their rush to establish democratic governments and punish outgoing leaders, he prescribes policies that will make transitions less dangerous and allow fledgling democracies to flourish. In the light of such tragic examples as Weimar Germany and contemporary Bosnia--each drawn into a spiral of ethnic hatred and civil war by political leaders manipulating nationalist sentiments--From Voting to Violence questions the sometimes rash optimism of liberal democracy that would rush to democracy at the cost of freedom.