Central Europe on the Way to Democracy
The general topic which preoccupies us is the democratization of the whole of Eastern Europe. Now, democratization here in this context is a code word for a whole set of very deep changes, rule of law, civil society, plural politics, plural economy, and so on. We are all agreed on the desirability of that cluster of features. Unfortunately, the success of the very complicated, and the contributions would be made and make plain how complicated it is, the success of the very complicated process of attaining those objectives depends on two sovereign masters under whom contemporary societies live. Those sovereign masters are not what Bentham thought, pleasure and pain, that's a little bit too abstract. The two sovereign masters under which modern societies live are the need of economic growth without which any regime loses its legitimacy, and secondly, the principle of ethnicity, the congruence of political and ethnic units without which, again, regimes lose their strength, their legitimacy, their authority over their own population. These are the two major constraints.
