DETERMINANTS OF DEMOCRATIC MODEL CHOICE IN NEWLY INDEPENDENT STATES

Abstract

At the beginning of the period of democratic transformation, the political systems of the former Soviet republics had a unified institutional base which they had inherited from the half-ruined empire. Apart from this, the introduction of democratic principles also took place within the framework of a unified approach formulated in the early 1990s by Western conceptions of democratic transition. The democratization processes that began in the former Soviet republics after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 led to radically different results. The thesis that historical and cultural prerequisites have a decisive influence on the choice of a democratic model is confirmed mainly by the experience of building democratic political systems on the territory of the former USSR. Some countries immediately abandoned the path of democratic development, others no less resolutely adopted the political model of liberal democracy, others balanced between these positions for decades, and a fourth group established stable authoritarian regimes.

It is not possible to explain the variation in outcome only by means of cultural differences and situational factors; the thesis about the decisive role of prerequisites for the successful establishment of democracy therefore will need clarification. Attention should particularly be paid to the fact that the complex socio-political transformations of the post-Soviet space included not only the liberalization of regimes, but also the processes of building new independent states. At the same time, most of these countries were inclined to reproduce one or another model of the state inherited from the preceding historical period. The author's assumption is that this difference is the most significant in the question of the prerequisites for building democracy. According to this criterion, the newly independent states can be classified as 1) post-imperial regimes, 2) post-colonial regimes, and 3) anti-imperial republican state projects.