The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 256p. $22.50. The postcommunist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have generated a rich body of literature over the past 15 years. Most works on CEE transitions have drawn from the comparative politics literature and treated international factors, at best, as secondary. Yet with the recent eastern expansion of the Council of Europe, NATO, and the European Union, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the impact of international institutions on domestic changes in this region.

The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe

Why did so many Latin American leftists believe they could replicate the Cuban Revolution in their own countries, and why did so many rightists fear the spread of Communism? Cognitive-psychological insights about people's distorted inferences and skewed interest calculations explain why the left held exaggerated hopes and why the right experienced excessive dread. The resulting polarization provoked a powerful backlash in which the right uniformly defeated the left. To forestall the feared spread of revolution, the military in many countries imposed authoritarian regimes and brutally suppressed left-wingers. Overly worried about the advance of Cuban-inspired radicalism as well, the United States condoned and supported the installation of dictatorship, but Latin American elites took the main initiative in these regressive regime changes. With a large number of primary and secondary sources, this book documents how the misperceptions on both sides of the ideological divide thus played a crucial role in the frequent destruction of democracy.

Revolution and Reaction: The Diffusion of Authoritarianism in Latin America

Europe Undivided analyzes how an enlarging EU has facilitated a convergence toward liberal democracy among credible future members of the EU in Central and Eastern Europe. It reveals how variations in domestic competition put democratizing states on different political trajectories after 1989, and how the EU's leverage eventually influenced domestic politics in liberal and particularly illiberal democracies. In doing so, Europe Undivided illuminates the changing dynamics of the relationship between the EU and candidate states from 1989 to 2004, and challenges policymakers to manage and improve EU leverage to support democracy, ethnic tolerance, and economic reform in other candidates and proto-candidates such as the Western Balkan states, Turkey, and Ukraine. Albeit not by design, the most powerful and successful tool of EU foreign policy has turned out to be EU enlargement - and this book helps us understand why, and how, it works.

Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage, and Integration After Communism

The international dimension of authoritarian resilience is receiving increased attention by scholars of comparative politics and international relations alike. Research suggests that autocratic sta...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/13510347.2020.1823970

The dark side of regionalism: how regional organizations help authoritarian regimes to boost survival

A seemingly never-ending stream of observers claims that the populist emphasis on nationalism, identity, and popular sovereignty undermines international collaboration and contributes to the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Why, then, do populist governments continue to engage in regional and international institutions? This Element unpacks the counter-intuitive inclination towards institutional cooperation in populist foreign policy and discusses its implications for the LIO. Straddling Western and non-Western contexts, it compares the regional cooperation strategies of populist leaders from three continents: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. The study identifies an emerging populist 'script' of regional cooperation based on notions of popular sovereignty. By embedding regional cooperation in their political strategies, populist leaders are able to contest the LIO and established international organisations without having to revert to unilateral nationalism.

Contestations of the Liberal International Order: A Populist Script of Regional Cooperation

The evidence of regional authoritarian clustering across different world regions goes together with the finding that after the end of the bipolar world regional patterns of interaction beca...

Raphael Peresson

Papers

Playing the regional card: why and how authoritarian gravity centres exploit regional organisations