Download or read book Beyond Liberal Democracy written by Daniel A. Bell and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-10 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is liberal democracy appropriate for East Asia? In this provocative book, Daniel Bell argues for morally legitimate alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy in the region. Beyond Liberal Democracy, which continues the author's influential earlier work, is divided into three parts that correspond to the three main hallmarks of liberal democracy--human rights, democracy, and capitalism. These features have been modified substantially during their transmission to East Asian societies that have been shaped by nonliberal practices and values. Bell points to the dangers of implementing Western-style models and proposes alternative justifications and practices that may be more appropriate for East Asian societies. If human rights, democracy, and capitalism are to take root and produce beneficial outcomes in East Asia, Bell argues, they must be adjusted to contemporary East Asian political and economic realities and to the values of nonliberal East Asian political traditions such as Confucianism and Legalism. Local knowledge is therefore essential for realistic and morally informed contributions to debates on political reform in the region, as well as for mutual learning and enrichment of political theories. Beyond Liberal Democracy is indispensable reading for students and scholars of political theory, Asian studies, and human rights, as well as anyone concerned about China's political and economic future and how Western governments and organizations should engage with China.
Download or read book East Meets West written by Daniel A. Bell and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Attempts to chart a middle ground between the extremes of the international debate on human rights and democracy. Criticizes the use of "Asian values" to justify oppression, but also draws on East Asian cultural traditions and contributions by contemporary intellectuals in East Asia to identify some powerful challenges to Western-style liberal democracy.
Download or read book How East Asians View Democracy written by Yun-han Chu and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: East Asian democracies are in trouble, their legitimacy threatened by poor policy performance and undermined by nostalgia for the progrowth, soft-authoritarian regimes of the past. Yet citizens throughout the region value freedom, reject authoritarian alternatives, and believe in democracy. This book is the first to report the results of a large-scale survey-research project, the East Asian Barometer, in which eight research teams conducted national-sample surveys in five new democracies (Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Mongolia), one established democracy (Japan), and two nondemocracies (China and Hong Kong) in order to assess the prospects for democratic consolidation. The findings present a definitive account of the way in which East Asians understand their governments and their roles as citizens. Contributors use their expert local knowledge to analyze responses from a set of core questions, revealing both common patterns and national characteristics in citizens' views of democracy. They explore sources of divergence and convergence in attitudes within and across nations. The findings are sobering. Japanese citizens are disillusioned. The region's new democracies have yet to prove themselves, and citizens in authoritarian China assess their regime's democratic performance relatively favorably. The contributors to this volume contradict the claim that democratic governance is incompatible with East Asian cultures but counsel against complacency toward the fate of democracy in the region. While many forces affect democratic consolidation, popular attitudes are a crucial factor. This book shows how and why skepticism and frustration are the ruling sentiments among today's East Asians.
Download or read book Stateness and Democracy in East Asia written by Aurel Croissant and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparative analysis of case studies across East Asia provides new insights into the relationship between state building, stateness, and democracy.
Download or read book Participation and Democracy East and West written by Dietrich Rueschemeyer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-05-11 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Alexis de Tocqueville first made the linkage in his writings on America, a healthy democracy has been associated with the flourishing of civil society, as measured by popular participation in voluntary and civic activities and the vitality of organizations that mediate between the individual and the state. This volume takes a fresh look at this classic theme in the context of post-communist Eastern Europe, the West European welfare states and the United States, asking: what patterns of participation characterize the new democracies of Eastern Europe?; what levels of civic activism are characteristic of contemporary Western democracies?; what factors account for differences among countries and changing patterns over time?; and what do findings suggest about the prospects for democracy in the 21st century?
Download or read book The Light that Failed written by Ivan Krastev and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A landmark book that completely transforms our understanding of the crisis of liberalism, from two pre-eminent intellectuals Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West. In this brilliant work of political psychology, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of history turned out to be only the beginning of an Age of Imitation. Reckoning with the history of the last thirty years, they show that the most powerful force behind the wave of populist xenophobia that began in Eastern Europe stems from resentment at the post-1989 imperative to become Westernized. Through this prism, the Trump revolution represents an ironic fulfillment of the promise that the nations exiting from communist rule would come to resemble the United States. In a strange twist, Trump has elevated Putin's Russia and Orbán's Hungary into models for the United States. Written by two pre-eminent intellectuals bridging the East/West divide, The Light that Failed is a landmark book that sheds light on the extraordinary history of our Age of Imitation.
Download or read book Confucian Democracy in East Asia written by Sungmoon Kim and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confucian Democracy in East Asia explores the unique Confucian reasoning that still exists in much of East Asian culture.
Download or read book Democracy in East Asia written by Larry Diamond and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-02-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Predicts that East Asia, with its remarkable diversity of political regimes, economies, and religions, would likely be the critical arena in the global struggle for democracy, a prediction that has proven prescient. This title offers a treatment of the political landscape in both Northeast and Southeast Asia.
Download or read book Is Non western Democracy Possible A Russian Perspective written by Alexei D Voskressenski and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2017-05-19 with total page 769 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, with theoretical and practical analyses of comparative political systems of Eastern countries (Asia and Africa), their political process and political cultures, describes and analyses the influence of political culture on political process in the Eastern world. It gives readers an opportunity to make a comparative appraisal of maturity of civil society in these countries as well as their specifics in political interactions and internal political competition seen through the eyes of a group of distinguished Russian researchers. The book concentrates also on specifics of political-economic and political modernization in the East, and assesses the prospects of an emergence of a Western as well as a non-Western democracy in the framework of Eastern political transformations. It also explains why the one-dimensional spread of democracy — completely negating or neglecting regional political-cultural specifics — may lead to war among civilizations instead of the formation of a more just and fair system of democratic governance.
Download or read book Freedom in the World 2018 written by Freedom House and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-01-31 with total page 1265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Freedom in the World, the Freedom House flagship survey whose findings have been published annually since 1972, is the standard-setting comparative assessment of global political rights and civil liberties. The survey ratings and narrative reports on 195 countries and fifteen territories are used by policymakers, the media, international corporations, civic activists, and human rights defenders to monitor trends in democracy and track improvements and setbacks in freedom worldwide. The Freedom in the World political rights and civil liberties ratings are determined through a multi-layered process of research and evaluation by a team of regional analysts and eminent scholars. The analysts used a broad range of sources of information, including foreign and domestic news reports, academic studies, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, individual professional contacts, and visits to the region, in conducting their research. The methodology of the survey is derived in large measure from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and these standards are applied to all countries and territories, irrespective of geographical location, ethnic or religious composition, or level of economic development.
Download or read book Decentring the West written by Professor Viatcheslav Morozov and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a world where democracy is almost universally accepted as the only legitimate form of government but what makes a society democratic remains far from clear. Liberal democratic values are both relativized by the self-description of many non-democratic regimes as 'local' or 'culturally specific' versions of democracy, and undermined by the automatic labelling as 'democratic' of all norms and institutions that are modelled on western states. Decentring the West: The Idea of Democracy and the Struggle for Hegemony aims to demonstrate the urgent need to revisit the foundations of the global democratic consensus. By examining the views of democracy that exist in the countries on the semi-periphery of the world system such as Russia, Turkey, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil and China, as well as within the core (Estonia, Denmark and Sweden) the authors emphasize the truly universal significance of democracy, also showing the value of approaching this universality in a critical manner, as a consequence of the hegemonic position of the West in global politics. By juxtaposing, critically re-evaluating and combining poststructuralist hegemony theory and postcolonial studies this book demonstrates a new way to think about democracy as a truly international phenomenon. It thus contributes groundbreaking, thought-provoking insights to the conceptual and normative aspects of this vital debate.
Download or read book The East Asian Challenge for Democracy written by Daniel A. Bell and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The rise of China, along with problems of governance in democratic countries, has reinvigorated the theory of political meritocracy. But what is the theory of political meritocracy and how can it set standards for evaluating political progress (and regress)? To help answer these questions, this volume gathers a series of commissioned research papers from an interdisciplinary group of leading philosophers, historians and social scientists. The result is the first book in decades to examine the rise (or revival) of political meritocracy and what it will mean for political developments in China and the rest of the world. Despite its limitations, meritocracy has contributed much to human flourishing in East Asia and beyond and will continue to do so in the future. This book is essential reading for those who wish to further the debate and perhaps even help to implement desirable forms of political change.
Download or read book Political Liberalism Confucianism and the Future of Democracy in East Asia written by Zhuoyao Li and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contributes to both the internal debate in liberalism and the application of political liberalism to the process of democratization in East Asia. Beyond John Rawls’ original intention to limit the scope of political liberalism to only existing and well-ordered liberal democracies, political liberalism has the potential to inspire and contribute to democratic establishment and maintenance in East Asia. Specifically, the book has two main objectives. First, it will demonstrate that political liberalism offers the most promising vision for liberal democracy, and it can be defended against contemporary perfectionist objections. Second, it will show that perfectionist approaches to political Confucianism suffer from practical and theoretical difficulties. Instead, an alternative model of democracy inspired by political liberalism will be explored in order to achieve a multivariate structure for citizens to come to terms with democracy in their own ways, to support a neutral state that ensures the establishment and stability of democracy, and to maintain an active public role for Confucianism to prevent it from being banished to the private sphere. This model represents a more promising future for democracy in East Asia.
Download or read book How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs written by Elizabeth F. Thompson and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a pivotal moment in modern world history, when representative democracy became a political option for Arabs - and how the West denied the opportunity.
Download or read book The Puzzle of Non Western Democracy written by Richard Youngs and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Western democracy is being questioned around the world. At the same time, Western aid groups are quick to say that they are not trying to impose a particular style of democracy on others and that they are open to supporting local, alternative forms of democracy. This book examines what it is about Western democracy that non-Westerners are reacting negatively to and whether the critics often are equating a dislike for certain Western social or economic features with an aversion to of Western political systems. It also explores the current state of debate about alternative forms of democratic practice in different regions—Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America—and then puts forward ideas about how Western actors engaged in democracy support can do a better job of incorporating new thinking about alternative democratic forms into their efforts.
Download or read book The Legacy of Division written by Ferenc Laczó and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the legacy of the East–West divide since the implosion of the communist regimes in Europe. The ideals of 1989 have largely been frustrated by the crises and turmoil of the past decade. The liberal consensus was first challenged as early as the mid-2000s. In Eastern Europe, grievances were directed against the prevailing narratives of transition and ever sharper ethnic-racial antipathies surfaced in opposition to a supposedly postnational and multicultural West. In Western Europe, voices regretting the European Union's supposedly careless and premature expansion eastward began to appear on both sides of the left–right and liberal–conservative divides. The possibility of convergence between Europe's two halves has been reconceived as a threat to the European project. In a series of original essays and conversations, thirty-three contributors from the fields of European and global history, politics and culture address questions fundamental to our understanding of Europe today: How have perceptions and misperceptions between the two halves of the continent changed over the last three decades? Can one speak of a new East–West split? If so, what characterizes it and why has it reemerged? The contributions demonstrate a great variety of approaches, perspectives, emphases, and arguments in addressing the daunting dilemma of Europe's assumed East–West divide.
Download or read book Empire of Democracy written by Simon Reid-Henry and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 880 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first panoramic history of the Western world from the 1970s to the present day—from the Cold War to the 2008 financial crisis and wars in the Middle East—Empire of Democracy is “a superbly informed and riveting historical analysis of our contemporary era” (Charles S. Maier, Harvard University). Half a century ago, at the height of the Cold War and amidst a world economic crisis, the Western democracies were forced to undergo a profound transformation. Against what some saw as a full-scale “crisis of democracy”—with race riots, anti-Vietnam marches and a wave of worker discontent sowing crisis from one nation to the next—a new political-economic order was devised and the postwar social contract was torn up and written anew. In this epic narrative of the events that have shaped our own times, Simon Reid-Henry shows how liberal democracy, and western history with it, was profoundly reimagined when the postwar Golden Age ended. As the institutions of liberal rule were reinvented, a new generation of politicians emerged: Thatcher, Reagan, Mitterrand, Kohl. The late twentieth century heyday they oversaw carried the Western democracies triumphantly to victory in the Cold War and into the economic boom of the 1990s. But equally it led them into the fiasco of Iraq, to the high drama of the financial crisis in 2007/8, and ultimately to the anti-liberal surge of our own times. The present crisis of liberalism is leading us toward as yet unscripted decades. The era we have all been living through is closing out, and democracy is turning on its axis once again. “Brilliantly, Reid-Henry calls for the salvation of democracy from the choices of its own leaders if it is to survive” (Samuel Moyn, Yale University).
