Nuclear Nonproliferation: A Hidden but Contentious Issue in US-Japan Relations During the Carter Administration (1977-1981)

This paper ascertains the differences and similarities of democratic transition and consolidation in Asia and Eastern Europe. To this end, this study focuses on the four important aspects of democratization: the modes of democratic transitions, the institutional choices after the transitions, the magnitudes and patterns of democratic development, and the levels and patterns of popular support for democracy. As a result, we concluded that the modes of democratic transition did not vary across the two regions, whereas there are remarkable differences in institutional choices, democratic progress, and attitudinal orientation toward democracy. The current, third-wave of democratization began to spread from Southern Europe to Latin America and other regions in the mid-1970s. After over two decades of steady diffusion, it has now reached every region of the globe stretching from Central and Eastern Europe to South America and from Asia to Africa. How does the process of democratization differ across various regions? Do the differences really matter for the successful establishment of complete rule by the people and for the people? These questions have recently become a subject of increasing concern in the comparative study of democratization.1 To date, much of the cross-regional research on democratic transitions and consolidations has been devoted to comparing Southern Europe, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe.2 In the literature on third-wave democracies, only a handful of cross-regional studies have attempted to compare and distinguish the Asian patterns of democratization from what has been noted especially in former Communist Europe.3 Even these attempts are extremely limited in both breadth and depth. As a result, little is known about how the contours, dynamics, and sources of democratization in the Asian states differ from those in the former Communist European countries. This paper is a first systematic effort to compare Asia and post-Communist Europe in terms of four important aspects of democratization. Specifically, the paper first compares the modes of democratic transition in the two regions. Then it focuses on the institutional dimension of democratization in these regions with an emphasis on governmental structure and electoral systems. This is followed by a comparative analysis of substantive democratic progress or retrogression in the two regions. Finally, this paper will identify regional differences in the general levels and patterns of popular support for democracy. In a nutshell, the present inquiry seeks to offer a comprehensive account of Asia-Europe differences and similarities in democratization during the mid-1980s and 1990s. To this end it examines not only the transition and consolidation phases of democratization, but also its three key dimensions featuring, respectively, institutions, political rights and civil liberties, and pro-democratic and anti-authoritarian political orientations among the mass public. In Asia a total of nine countries completed their transition to democracy during the mid-1980s and late-1990s. The nine countries are Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. Pakistan has recently reverted to military rule and can no longer be considered a new democracy. In Eastern Europe seven countries ended decades of Communist rule, and joined in the current wave of democratization by the late 1980s and early 1990s; they are: Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Of the 15 member states of the former Soviet Union, eight still remain under authoritarian rule or are in a state of civil war. Only seven of those member states can be considered new democracies; they are: Estonia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. With the subsequent breakup of Czechoslovakia into two separate states, a total of 15 post-Communist European countries are under investigation, along with nine Asian countries in the third wave of democratization. All member countries of former Yugoslavia are not included in this regional comparison for the reason that the process of their democratization has been distinguished from that of their former Communist European peers by successive waves of violent ethnic cleansing.