Pressures on Civil Society in Partial Democracies

Reviewed by: Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries by David Sorkin Todd Endelman David Sorkin. Jewish Emancipation: A History across Five Centuries. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. 528 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000318 David Sorkin's expansive history of Jewish emancipation from the sixteenth century to the present works at two levels. To begin, it is a comprehensive account of how and why Jewish legal status changed—at times, improving; at times, worsening—everywhere in Europe, North America, North Africa, and the Middle East over five centuries. Sorkin casts his net widely. Emancipation's successes and failures in the Caribbean, the Balkans, Canada, and Russia take their place alongside the better-known, almost paradigmatic cases of France and the German states. The only modern communities that are absent are those of Latin America and the Antipodes, omissions that can certainly be forgiven in a work of such scope. He wisely insists that there was no single, universal path to emancipation but multiple paths. In some cases—the United States and France, for example—liberal revolutions paved the way for Jewish legal equality. In others—Germany and Italy—national unification fueled the process. And, in others—such as the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires—the reforming zeal of "enlightened" but authoritarian rulers hoping to remedy the backwardness of their realms was the driving force. Rejecting the "East versus West" binary that is so commonplace in writing modern European Jewish history, Sorkin proposes instead a fourfold geographic division of the early modern and modern Jewish world: western Europe (including North America and the Caribbean); central Europe; eastern Europe; and the lands of Islam. He also introduces two critical distinctions that illuminate the ways in which emancipation struggles unfolded. The first distinction is that between political and civil rights. The former refers to the right to hold office, vote in elections, and gain entry to the civil service. The latter refers to occupational and residential freedoms, the right to own and transmit property, and equality of standing in the judicial system. In Britain and the United States, for example, civil rights preceded political rights. Conflicts over Jewish legal status in the English-speaking world in [End Page 450] the first half of the nineteenth century largely concerned the right to hold office. In terms of their civil rights, Jews in Britain, its colonies, and later the United States were emancipated and enjoyed full civil rights from the very moment of their arrival. In the tsarist empire, by contrast, Jews enjoyed neither political nor civil rights—nor, for that matter, did anyone else. The second distinction Sorkin introduces is that between emancipation "into estates" and emancipation "out of estates." In illiberal states, on the one hand, where membership in corporate bodies and estates determined the privileges any individual enjoyed, emancipation meant the integration of Jews (usually Jews of property) into the existing system. In these instances, Jews received estate-specific privileges rather than nominally universal rights. In liberal states, on the other hand, where civil society, liberal individualism, and natural rights were in the ascendant, emancipation meant something very different: dissolution of the corporate Jewish community and integration into a state of citizens who were, in theory, all equal before the law. The distinction is critical because emancipation "into estates" was more limited in what it offered. However, it was the only possible form emancipation could take in states that lacked a body of rights-enjoying citizens into which Jews could be politically integrated. It is this distinction that underwrites Sorkin's account. He includes shifts in Jewish legal status that historians have not included within the conventional rubric of emancipation, such as those that occurred in eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire. While he is careful to distinguish the different political systems in which these shifts occurred, the question still arises as to what is gained—historiographically, theoretically, or strategically—by bringing together under one rubric these various changes. Granting rights in the wake of the French Revolution was a very different phenomenon from bestowing commercial and civil privileges to merchant colonies in port cities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Radical, novel ideas powered the former, while the latter represented an...

Through an examination of key historical documents, this book chronicles the Democratic Party's complete transformation from the small-government, Jeffersonian party to a party of activist government and social progressivism during the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. What are the objectives of today's Democratic Party, and what historic events have guided its evolution from a decidedly different ideological starting point more than 200 years ago? The Democratic Party: Documents Decoded supplies a thorough historical examination of the Democratic Party from its distant origins in George Washington's administration to the two-term administration of Barack Obama. Told through key documents and speeches, this history comes alive in the words and thoughts of those who built, sustained, and transformed the Democratic Party. No other book uses documents in this way to tell a comprehensive history of this party. The book utilizes primary documents to investigate a breadth of topics such as the Democratic party's positions on civil rights, discrimination, voting rights, taxation, representation, immigration, primary elections, caucuses, the Republican opposition, relations between church and state, the role of government, and foreign policy. The scholarly commentary provides essential context that bridges the gaps between documents and insightful explanations and clarifications of specific passages or terms to ensure reader comprehension. A work unlike any other on the history of the Democratic Party, this book will serve advanced high school students in government and history classes as well as undergraduate students taking courses in political science and history.

Since the late nineteenth century, African Americans have created independent political movements in the United States that have been vital to the development of democracy. These independent Black political movements constitute an ongoing feature of contestations of the liberal script as expressed in bipartisan political rule. Such challenges to the authority and policies of the Democratic and Republican parties, in particular, have centered on fighting for the expansion of Black civil and political rights and have taken a range of forms, including as electoral parties, labor unions, and associations, and often in combination. The largest of these independent movements were the Black Populist movement of the late nineteenth century, the Civil Rights movement of the mid-twentieth century, and Black Lives Matter in the twenty-first century.

This chapter shows the impact of the division of the human rights agenda, and it seeks to portray the regimes for civil and political rights as they have evolved out of that first discussion at international level about the efficacy of human rights between 1948 and 1966. The chapter is divided into three parts. It discusses the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The chapter examines few key rights from the Covenant in a bid to show the parameters of the rights identified as 'civil and political'; it also offers a commentary on the challenges for implementation. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights could be understood as the codification of the civil and political rights aspirations expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, into legally binding provisions. Keywords: civil rights; international covenant; political rights

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of the party system and democracy in African countries, for example Ghana, in the period preceding the postcolonial era. This article looks at some of the challenges facing Ghana’s democratic consolidation and party development, and some of the institutional benchmarks required to help to promote effectively an accountable, participatory and democratic party system in the country in order to consolidate further its democracy. The study concludes with the view that regardless of their apparent weaknesses, political parties in Ghana are generally important institutions that grease the wheels of the country’s democratic governance in the post-transition era.

With the fall of the oldest dictatorship in Western Europe, Portugal is now endowed with a liberal-democratic system very similar to that of its neighbours. This evolution towards democracy is best represented by the emergence of competitive parties. In fact, political parties played a major role in the democratization process following the military coup d’etat of 25 April 1974. Despite this involvement, during the first year of the ‘Carnation Revolution’, it was widely assumed that democratic parties would be relegated to playing a supporting role in a system where the military would exercise the essential elements of power. Clearly, these assumptions underestimated the ability of political parties to impose a civil form of government on a deeply divided military which was also influenced by the parties.

IntroductionBrothers and Sisters in Arms Noah Riseman (bio) Around the world, the centenary of the First World War has accelerated what Jay Winter refers to as the memory boom of the twentieth century.1 Nations such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have invested significant taxpayer dollars into commemorations of the war, continuing processes of (falsely) positioning wartime service as central to each nation’s identity and development.2 In other nations, such as the United States, it is the Second World War that has led to similar mythologies about the goodness of the nation’s character and citizenry through ideas of “the Good War” and “the Greatest Generation.”3 Notwithstanding the criticisms of historians, war and conflict continue to form a central place within national collective memories. Being included within that memory is akin to being recognized as a member of the nation-state, with particular entitlements to be heard on matters of national or political importance. As military sociologists such as Morris Janowitz argue, minorities have often viewed military service as an opportunity to demonstrate acts of citizenship and, through such acts, to point to their military service in fights for civil and political rights.4 Scholars such as Warren Young and Ronald Krebs have debated the extent to which racial minorities may effectively leverage their position as service personnel or veterans to secure civil rights. Indeed, as both Young and Krebs argue, usually veteran or service member status alone is not enough to secure social change unless there are other catalysts within civil society that [End Page 5] make it in the state’s best interest to award civil rights to minority veterans (or, more widely, entire minority groups).5 Even so, racial minorities, including Indigenous peoples, have for their own reasons participated in the militaries of former or current colonial powers. I have written elsewhere about the rise of Indigenous military histories across the major Anglo settler societies of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. The emergence of such histories, especially since the 1990s, has aligned with national reconciliation agendas, as well as efforts among Indigenous communities to commemorate the contributions of their forebears to their country’s defense.6 This project of historicizing Indigenous military service continues around the world, exposing the complex histories of Indigenous peoples who are constantly negotiating their statuses and military service, as well as their own traditions. More recent histories have been especially interested in the intersections between military service and themes such as colonialism, gender, race relations, and martial race theory.7 This special issue represents an extension of this new historiography, drawing scholars on Indigenous military participation from the nineteenth century until the present in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. These articles derive from a conference hosted at Australian Catholic University in 2015 entitled “Brothers and Sisters in Arms: Historicising Indigenous Military Service,” and they represent some of the newest directions in this growing field. Dr. Teresia Teaiwa of Victoria University of Wellington began the conference with a captivating keynote address about the historical and continuing relationship between colonialism and militarism in the Pacific, with a particular focus on Fiji. Her sophisticated arguments drew together postcolonial theory, Pacific research methodologies, and gender studies. Teresia declined the invitation to contribute an article to this collection because she needed to focus on finishing a book about Fijian women and military service. It was with great sadness that I heard Teresia that passed away in March 2017 after a brief battle with cancer. Teresia’s work, and her unique approach as an oral historian using innovative and creative techniques to give voice to Pacific Islander women especially, inspired me as a historian. On behalf of all the contributors to this issue, I extend our deepest condolences to Teresia’s family and dedicate this special issue to her memory. The first article, by Mark van de Logt, returns to the American frontier to examine the role of Sahnish scouts in the wars on the Great Plains from 1865 to 1881. Van de Logt describes the relationships between the Sahnish and their white commanders, as well as their complex motivations to work for...

Studies on democratic attitudes in Latin America indicate that older citizens are more likely to express a preference for democracy. This contradicts part of the literature, which suggests that the greatest support should come from younger generations, who were socialized under democratic regimes. One possible explanation for the greater support for democracy among the older generation is that they experienced the repression of political and civil rights under authoritarian rule, thus creating an aversion to such regimes. In this article, we replicate tests conducted by other studies in evaluating the effect of generation on support for democracy, using data from the 2012 Americas Barometer. In addition, we add a new factor to the analysis: the country's authoritarian legacy, measured as to the duration and intensity with which individual and political rights were curtailed in the past. The results show a complex picture. First, they confirm that the generations that have lived under authoritarian regimes are more likely to support democracy. However, we find no evidence of an increase in the difference in support between generations in countries where the authoritarian legacy is stronger. Finally, the data indicate that countries with stronger authoritarian legacies exhibit less support for democracy, while stronger democratic legacies have the opposite effect.

<i>Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism</i> by Reuel Schiller

The confirmation narrative will likely not look too different from the one surrounding Justice Sonia Sotomayor. President Obama will nominate a judge with a strong resume including a degree from an elite university. The judge will have a moderately liberal voting record and perhaps be a person of color, a woman or both. Liberal interest groups will support the nominee, but some more progressive groups will be critical of the candidate's pro-business history. The right wing will attack the nominee as yet another sign of the imminent socialist apocalypse and identify minor scandals and gaffes which they will seek to make into bigger issues. The nomination fight will end with the nominee being confirmed with almost unanimous Democratic support and perhaps the support of a small handful of Republican senators as well. While the final outcome and general outline of the nomination process are unlikely to offer any surprises, the way these events play out and the political strategies and rhetoric which both parties employed are significant because they will, at least partially, frame the fall elections. While the nomination fight will share the headlines with the economic problems which the country still faces and ongoing developments in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, the nomination is significant because it will probably focus largely on social issues and more unadulterated partisanship then the other major issues facing the countries. During the nomination fight, each party will seek to portray the other as an extremist. The Democrats will point to the right wing opposition to the nominee as proof of Republican intolerance and refusal to take governance seriously, while the Republicans will go back to the well of calling the nominee too liberal and out of touch with real Americans. There are also potential pitfalls in this nominating process for both parties. Obvious pitfalls for the Obama and the Democratic Party include a scandal arising around the nominee due to insufficient vetting or the more likely possibility that the nominee over the course of his or her academic or legal writing has taken positions that, while more or less mainstream in scholarly circles on the left or right, lend themselves to attack as elitist or out of touch with America. This might be called the Lani Guinier scenario. For the Republican Party the major pitfalls are the inevitability that they will again show themselves to be the party of no, and the likelihood that the party will again fail in their effort to stop the nomination. There is the additional possibility the Republican Party will not be able to rein in their more radical elements. A six week spectacle in which the opposition to the nominee is dominated by images of Tea Partiers and radical rhetoric at a time when the majority of

This article looks into the meanings of 'human rights' and 'democracy' which are supposed to be 'essentially contested.' In this connection, it revisits the history of Western political ideas in which the political thoughts of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on human rights and democracy are reviewed and contrasted. The ultimate purpose of this exercise is to elucidate the theoretical basis of contemporary debates on North Korean human rights within South Korea. For these debates seem to have to do with the multifarious meanings of 'human rights' and 'democracy.' While most people tend to support the concepts of both 'human rights' and 'democracy' with positive outlook, they do not seem to make an adequate differentiation of these terms. This phenomenon is not helpful in addressing the real problems of human rights in some sector of the world. In this sesne, a contrasted comparison between Locke and Rousseau regarding human rights and democracy can shed light on the contempoary debate in this field. Locke provided a comparatively thorough discussion on 'natural rights' in 17th century Europe and, in turn, the theoretical basis of contemporary liberal democracy. He emphasized that human beings were born with the natural rights of life, liberty, and property before the civil government had been established. Furthermore, he argued that the purpose of establishment of civil government was to preserve the natural rights of human beings. This means that Locke's view on natural rights underlies the 'civil and political rights' of contemporary international human rights norms. On the other hand, Rousseau, while paying keen attention to the same question of human liberty, provided a different methodology to achieve this goal in the 18th century. In other words, he advocated comparatively equal level of property among human beings for guaranteeing freedom of the people. In this sense, he placed priority on the equality over the liberty in reality of human life. In turn, he seemed clear that he had provided the theoretical basis for the 'economic and social rights' of the contemporary international human rights norms. At the same time, this article points out that whether Rousseau intended it or not, he contributed to the rise of social democracy or communism as put forward by Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. In particular, his thesis of 'general will' in political community embraces a crucial theoretical strand of totalitarianism as pointed out by scholars. While this interpretation of Rousseau is not common in contemporary debates on democracy, this article posits that such approach helps to clarify the contemporary debates and even confusion in the field of human rights protection. Seen in this way, the discourses of both human rights and democracy are both sides of the same coin. The 'civil and political rights' form the basis of liberal democracy while 'economic and social rights' social democracy or totalitarian communism. These two contrasted discourses have dominated modern political history, in particular, during the Cold War period. This is why the International Covenants on human rights were divided into two separate documents while the Universal Declaration of Human Rights represented a simple juxtaposition of these two ideological positions on human rights. The contrasted and even confrontational situations between the two theoretical positions were remarkably weakened with the collapse of the Berlin Wall as a proof of failed Eastern bloc. Nevertheless, the same contrasted discourse of human rights and democracy continues by way of now the concept of human security meaning both 'freedom from fear' and 'freedom from want.' The two political regimes on the Korean peninsula emerged as a byproduct of the two competitive visions of human rights and democracy.

The question of the survival of organizations is an important aspect of organizational theory. What are the reasons that some organizations survive and others don't? It will be argued here that the survival of organizations is a function of their interaction with the political, social and economic environment under different conditions of knowledge and power. This argument will be made with reference to the insurance and mining industries in British Columbia during the period of New Democratic Party government, 1972-1975. The mining industry successfully opposed government regulation against its interests while the right of private insurance companies to underwrite their own automobile insurance policies was eliminated by the NDP government. The mining industry emerged triumphant in its confrontation with the NDP government since the latter's mineral policy proved to be largely ineffective. When the NDP came to power in 1972, it was clearly committed to a significant change in the structure of the province's resourcebased economy. It had three broad objectives regarding natural resources: the first was to effect a significant redistribution of the province's income through increased taxation of resource corporations; the second was the promotion of growth based on the diversification of the economy away from its reliance on the export of primary products; finally, the NDP's economic strategy envisioned a broad regulatory structure designed to protect the public interest against the detrimental effects of unrestrained resource development. The implementation of this approach in the mining industry was especially challenging since that sector was one which exported the natural resources in a relatively unprocessed form, and it

This article contributes to scholarship on the relationship between political parties and social movements by proposing a new model of ‘party-driven movements’ to understand the formation of a new hybrid model within existing political parties in majoritarian systems. In our two case studies – Momentum’s relationship with the UK Labour Party and the Bernie Sanders-inspired ‘Our Revolution’ with the US Democratic Party – we highlight the conditions under which they emerge and their key characteristics. We analyse how party-driven movements express an ambivalence in terms of strategy (working inside and outside the party), political aims (aiming to transform the party and society) and organisation (in the desire to maintain autonomy whilst participating within party structures). Our analysis suggests that such party-driven movements provide a potential answer to political parties’ alienation from civil society and may thus be a more enduring feature of Anglo-American majoritarian party systems than the current literature suggests.

This article is devoted to the analysis of the influence of international law norms on the development of Russian legislation on public control. The authors note that the legislation of the Russian Federation on public control has as its origins the Soviet legislation on people's control of power, which for its time was characterized by significant democracy and had a certain impact on the content of the UN Charter, international covenants on civil, political, economic, social and cultural human rights, other norms of international legislation, in particular by largely incorporating and developing democratic principles in the modern system of international law. The liquidation of the institute of national control in the last years of the USSR and the prolonged absence of a legal framework for public control in the Russian Federation at the federal level significantly reduced the legal possibilities of civil society control over the system of public authorities in the country. At the same time, international legislation has continued to strengthen the institutions of civil society in the world. The work uses a number of methods of scientific cognition, including: formal-logical; historical-legal; comparative-legal; statistical; sociological; method of analyzing specific legal situations. The authors analyzed the main directions of the impact of international legislation on the development of Russian legislation on public control. It is noted that the UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and numerous international covenants enshrining various political and civil rights and freedoms, on the one hand, create a kind of foundation for the institution of public control in the Russian Federation, and on the other hand, set the vectors for the development of this institution of civil society in the country. In addition, the article formalizes and examines the current problems of the organization and functioning of the institute of public control in Russia, which are caused by ignoring the main trends in the development of international legislation in the field of human rights and freedoms, as well as civil society. The paper suggests and substantiates ways to solve these problems.

The case of Brazil, like that of Spain, pointedly contradicts the conventional wisdom about civil society and democratic consolidation. Brazil undertook to democratize with a civil society whose vibrancy and robustness would have made Tocqueville proud. But this particular feature of Brazilian civil society, as suggested in this chapter, has been of questionable relevance to the actual consolidation of democracy. While democracy survives in Brazil—which is more democratic today than at any other time in its history—democratic survival is not consolidation. As noted previously, democratic consolidation supposes a wide range of attitudinal, institutional and procedural requirements that Brazilian democracy simply does not meet, including civilian control of the military, adherence to the rule of law, governmental accountability, widespread respect for civil and human rights and especially mass support for democracy. These are, of course, some of the very tasks that a vibrant and robust civil society is meant to facilitate.