External and International Impacts on Democratization in East Asia and Central Europe.

The paper is to examine how international actors influence democratization by focusing on two leading states of recent democratization in East Asia and East Europe - Taiwan and Hungary. The paper seeks to challenge the classic domestically biased assumption that democratization is an exclusively domestic affair, aiming at the transformation of the internal political system, and external factors may play a secondary role. It aims to provide systematic accounts for why and how there are different external actors at different phases of democratization through a cross-regional comparison between the two regions. First, I will examine the dynamics of democratization and the interactions between external and domestic factors in each national case from the phases of transition to consolidation. Next, I will develop some explanatory factors for the international dimension of democratization from the two regions and compare their similarities and differences. For the country case studies, I will be attentive to internal-external linkages and to their own historically specific conditions. For the inter-regional comparison, I will compare Taiwan with Hungary, placing greater emphasis on their common elements across regions and differences shown in each region. My analysis supports following points: (1) in Central Europe, the Soviet presence was a decisive overriding obstacle to democratization, no matter how favorable domestic conditions may be in countries like Hungary. The constraint was gradually lifted under Gorbachev, finally opening the possibility for a successful transition to democracy. Furthermore, the policies of various European institutions like EU, OSCE, the Council of Europe, and NATO are becoming crucial stabilizing elements in the consolidating process. The integration into Western institutions began to act as an external democratic force. (2) in East Asia, the global trend toward economic liberalism did exert some positive impact on the transition to democracy in Taiwan. More fundamentally, unlike Central European cases, the political opening in both Asian cases was not triggered by any major socio-economic crisis, geopolitical change or external market shocks. In both cases, societal support for the regime-sponsored development program has been much more broadly based as compared to many Latin American countries at comparable level of industrialization. Lastly, the dominant characteristic of Taiwan is its inherited legacies of divided nations. Their nationhood problem makes the regime stability highly susceptible to external influences in the processes of democratic transition and consolidation. This paper will be a first effort to compare and distinguish international effects on East Asian patterns of democratization from what has been noted especially in East Europe. It attempts not only to refine current theoretical frameworks, but also to enhance the literature of democratization in both breadth and depth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]