(Page 14 of 54) - "Civilizing" the Post-Soviet European Space: A Comparison between the European Union, the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) authored by Stivachtis, Yannis.

Western ideas were not the exclusive mainsprings of their political attitudes
and actions (Bozeman 1960). Behind the screen of an unofficial accord upon
Western interpretations of such values as freedom, democracy and law,
discords grew in the field of intercultural relations. Non-Western political
communities proceeded consciously and unconsciously to reinstate their
native modes of thought and behavior, while continuing to pay allegiance to
Western concepts and forms. Western states, meanwhile, hearing their words
employed in senses strangely foreign to long-familiar definitions, began to
realize that not only their transplanted words but also their institutions had
come to stand for practices and attitudes that differed greatly from the
paternal norms (Bozeman 1960:5).

The demands of Asian and African states for equality of rights was put

forward long after their communities had absorbed the European ideas of the
equal rights of states to sovereignty, of communities to self-determination,
and of people of different races to individual rights. Previously these ideas
were almost non-existent in the cultures and political experience of the
regions concerned. As the Third World mobilized politically in defense of its
interests, the use of force to maintain Western positions of dominance
became more costly. At the same time, the Third World found a great ally in
the ‘barbarous’ and totalitarian Soviet Union, whose anti-colonial practice and
rhetoric was well suited to Third World needs (Bull 1984:217-220). It was
mainly the conflict between two opposing ideologies – liberalism and
communism – during the Cold War which temporarily subdued cultural
differences. Naturally, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the
Soviet Union such differences came to the forefront.

The fall of communism in the Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern

Europe has been a major boost to the recent third wave of democratization,
and has been a significant world event. The result of the downfall of these
authoritarian regimes has been the introduction of either liberal democracy
or partial democracy. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of
communism made scholars like Francis Fukuyama to declare the triumph of
democratic liberalism and the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). As a result,
‘models of democracy’ were replaced by a ‘model of democracy.’ As Peter
Fenves suggests, Fukuyama hit upon an important ‘linguistic fact,’ namely,
“the absence of any universalizable alternative to the language of liberal
democracy for the legitimisation of political institutions” (Fenves 1994:229).
Therefore, what the end of the Cold War actually signified was not that
democratic states were confirmed as ‘virtuous’. It rather signified the rise of a
much more limited understanding of what ‘democracy’ as an institution and
in practice means, and which model this ‘virtue’ stems from. It is one variant
– the Anglo-American liberal model – that is promoted as democracy and the
benchmark of fully legitimate statehood (Hobson 2007:18).

Practitioners and international institutions did not stay behind. President

Bush Senior called for a new world order based on democratic states, while
President Yeltsin was quick to reciprocate by declaring that Russia should
become a democratic state in order to join the ‘community of civilized