Suchergebnisse

This article focuses on paradoxes of democracy promotion aid and offers research on an understudied topic: the microlevel of incentives facing donors and receivers of aid and its overall effect on the stability of authoritarianism. It argues that in the Belarusian case traveling the democracy promotion road, donors and implementers faced a typical bureaucratic problem: It became easier and more rational to justify the continuation of the democracy promotion project at large rather than closing it down, even though it was becoming increasingly clear it was not providing the desired results, that is, bringing about democratization or even a step in that direction. This created negative stimuli for the local beneficiaries, who developed strong aid addiction. A co-dependency between the providers and receivers of foreign aid led to the continuous application of unfit and self-defeating strategies. In fact, all of the actors involved (Western donors, implementers, and the Belarusian opposition but also the regime) became rationally interested in the status quo. As a result we argue that the democracy promotion efforts strengthened autocratic rule in Belarus rather than bringing about democratization.

The editor of this book has brought together contributions designed to capture the essence of post-communist politics in East-Central Europe and Eurasia. Rather than on the surface structures of nominal democracies, the nineteen essays focus on the informal, often intentionally hidden, disguised and illicit understandings and arrangements that penetrate formal institutions. These phenomena often escape even the best-trained outside observers, familiar with the concepts of established democracies. Contributors to this book share the view that understanding post-communist politics is best served by a framework that builds from the ground up, proceeding from a fundamental social context. The book aims at facilitating a lexical convergence; in the absence of a robust vocabulary for describing and discussing these often highly complex informal phenomena, the authors wish to advance a new terminology of post-communist regimes. Instead of a finite dictionary, a kind of conceptual cornucopia is offered. The resulting variety reflects a larger harmony of purpose that can significantly expand the understanding the "real politics" of post-communist regimes. Countries analyzed from a variety of aspects, comparatively or as single case studies, include Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine