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Macedonia declared independence from the rump Yugoslav Federation on November 21, 1991. In the transition from Yugoslav republic to the Balkan Peninsula's newest country, it carried with it the tradition of a strong leader and control by a political elite. Privatization and an ambitious effort to establish a market economy have brought significant social and economic hardships to the people of Macedonia. At the same time, tensions between ethnic Macedonians and Albanians, and problems with neighboring Greece – resulting in stunted economic growth – have made the transition even more arduous. This chapter is devoted to understanding the nature of Macedonia's democratization process and the difficulties it has faced and is facing in seeking to create a democratic state and civil society. Some particulars The Republic of Macedonia, with 25,713 square kilometers, is the smallest and newest Balkan country. Landlocked, it is the least developed of the former Yugoslav republics. Bordered in the north by Serbia, in the east by Bulgaria, in the south by Greece, and in the west by Albania, Macedonia is a multiethnic state, home to 2,075,196 people according to the 1994 census (see table 7.1 for some demographic trends). Ethnic Macedonians number 1,288,330 (66.5 percent), Albanians 442,914 (22.9 percent), Turks 77,252 (4 percent), Roma 43,732 (2.3 percent), Serbs 39,260 (2 percent), Muslims (Torbeši) 15,315 (.07 percent), and Vlachs 8,467 (0.004 percent). The remainder is made up of foreign nationals and small minorities, including Croatians, Bosnians, and Bulgarians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of democracy is not so simple a matter as some writers suppose. Not only are there rival traditions of democracy, but even among those subscribing to the classical liberal tradition, there are differences between those advocating a maximal definition of democracy (and thereby imposing higher standards on the system) and those urging acceptance of a minimal definition (with the consequent lower standards thereby entailed). Nor do controversies end there. Should a political party be understood, in the first place, as an electoral organization that seeks to obtain sinecures for its members, or should the emphasis be shifted to the programmatic aspirations that unite the members in common action in the first place? Even equality may be thought to be a murky concept (though not by this author). After all, some say, if a constitution proclaims the equality of women, then should not women be satisfied that this, in and of itself, constitutes the full measure of equality? Others dispute the position implied in this rhetorical question, and urge that there is a distinction between formal equality and real equality. In the ensuing chapter, I shall be concerned with the subject of democratization in Slovenia, and, in the course of examining the Slovenian case, shall endeavor to shed some light on the nature of democracy itself. The legacy of the past As is self-evident, the transition in Eastern Europe associated with the years 1989–90 was, among other things, a self-conscious attempt to escape the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five years after the first free elections in postwar Serbia, the stated aim of most of its political actors there is still a true transition to democracy. The reason for this is simple. Although Serbia has the structures and institutions necessary for democratic government, there is no democratic culture. Instead, Slobodan Milošević has governed in an authoritarian manner in the name of the Serbian nation. The Serbian opposition offers little but the rhetorical promise of bringing liberal democracy to the state, and any politician wishing to succeed must offer a vision for the defense of Serbs from a variety of threats, real and unreal. Serbia's minorities, which constitute about a third of its population, have been excluded from politics by this political culture of intolerance. Today, the only positive sign for the future is the fact that the wars in Croatia and Bosnia are (at least temporarily) over, which might enable Serbian political leaders to attempt to broaden their appeal to non-Serbs. There are numerous reasons for the failed transition in Serbia. Firstly, it is a product of historical conditions and rivalries in the former Yugoslavia. The ethnic nationalism that links all of the most popular and most powerful parties in Serbia today has roots in the Second World War, during which Serbs were the target of attempted genocide by the Croatian Ustaša. Secondly, it is a result of conditions related directly to the wars accompanying Yugoslavia's collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bosnia Herzegovina is an example of failed democratization. The Bosnian republic was an ethnically divided society. Muslims, Serbs, and Croats constituted three distinct ethnocultural communities whose relations over the centuries were characterized by both intergroup conflict and accommodation. Conflict had, at times, taken the form of warfare between the groups including, during World War II, genocidal war. Accommodation had taken the form of power-sharing among the respective ethnic leaderships, largely as the result of sponsorship by more powerful outside actors. It also took the form of an emerging, multiethnic, or “civil” identity, expressed in the 1970s and 1980s as “Yugoslavism.” The failure of democratization between 1990 and the outbreak of war in 1992 represented the triumph of one tradition over the other. In an effort to maintain legitimacy, the Yugoslav communist regime had permitted a substantial degree of liberalization to take place. But the local communist leadership of Bosnia Herzegovina did not permit this process to proceed as far in its own republic as in some others. In neither Yugoslavia as a whole nor any of its regions did actual democratization take place under the old regime. With the breakdown of communist authoritarianism, liberalization accelerated in Bosnia Herzegovina, the political rules of the game were altered, and a significant pluralization of politics took place. More than forty new political groups of varying size and character came into existence in the republic in 1990. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have democracy and in our war conditions we even have too much of it. We are even allowing some anarchy but of course we will have full freedom and total democracy when we liberate every inch of land. There is no state in Europe that is more centralized than Croatia. All funds and decision-making concerning people have been concentrated in the presidential palace. In that way the incumbent party is exercising unlimited power. Croatia's first five years of postcommunist rule (1990–95) were marked by trends that may be viewed as both promising and inauspicious. Thus, for many Croatian citizens and leaders it was an exhilarating period filled with achievements: jettisoning a one-party communist regime, holding competitive elections, obtaining statehood and international recognition, embarking on a transformation of the economy. For many others, however, the same years were characterized by dashed hopes, societal deterioration, and repressive regime policies as Croatia experienced a tumultuous secession from the former Yugoslav socialist federation (including warfare, severe economic disruption, interethnic polarization, and territorial fragmentation). On balance, postcommunist Croatia has exhibited important aspects of both incipient democratization and residual authoritarianism. Croatia represents a classic example of how self-determination and state formation by an ethnic group seeking freedom may generate new communal violence, socioeconomic dislocation, and illiberal tendencies that can seriously jeopardize the democratic prospects of the newly “liberated” state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Of all the elements of the international wave of democratization that began some two decades ago, the transformation of communist political systems, once thought impervious to liberalization, is the most dramatic. Since 1989, more than two dozen countries within the former Soviet bloc have officially disavowed Marxist–Leninist ideology and have dismantled, in varying degrees, the apparatus of communist dictatorship and socialist economic planning. In many cases this transformation has led to a reinvention of politics, in the sense of genuine public debate about the purposes of society and the state, and has produced significant progress toward the establishment of a liberal–democratic order. This extraordinary turn of events has evoked a surge of scholarly research and writing from specialists on the former communist countries and other social scientists. Analysts have probed the causes of the demise of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. They have examined the communist legacies inherited by the East European and Soviet successor states and have constructed parallel narratives of early postcommunist developments in regional groupings of these states. They also have produced detailed studies of recent trends in individual countries. Extensive analysis and debate have likewise been devoted to the political and institutional aspects of market reform. To date, however, scholars have devoted relatively little effort to systematic cross-country comparisons of political change in the postcommunist states. With some notable exceptions, Western thinking about attempts to democratize these polities has generally been based on the experience of the countries of North America, Western and Southern Europe, and Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]