International effects on the process of democratization in East Asia and Central Europe (1949--2002) (China, Taiwan, Hungary)

This study examines the international effects on the process of democratization through a cross-regional comparison between Taiwan and Hungary. The aim of this paper is (1) to cross-regionally investigate the exact influences of international security and geopolitical order on the process of democratization in Taiwan and Hungary, and (2) to further develop a more general model suitable to comparatively investigating the relationship between geopolitical/security orders and domestic democratization. By exploring various external influences at different phases of political change, I argue that we should isolate international influences from common domestically dependent-level factors in national cases in order to examine the exact effects of key explanatory factors.; The findings firstly show that democratization in both cases was initiated as a result of the unfavorable international/geopolitical climate (erosion of U.S. diplomatic support) or the lifting of outside pressure (the Gorbachev factor). Without the redirection of foreign policy by the U.S. and the Soviet Union, both transitions would not have been possible. In the consolidation period, while the Hungarian democracy still relied on a stable near-abroad order and the sequential adaptation to the conditionality set by the EU and NATO after its accession, Taiwan's political development and future were heavily determined by the US's security support and the interactions between Washington and Beijing. Second, international dimensions could be regarded as an explanatory variable for the emergence or the survival of a democracy rather than a context variable situated at the macro-level of a given system argued in previous studies. Third, as ignoring by current literature, the distinction between favorable/unfavorable external factors strengthens the explanatory power of the influence of external conditions and actors on democratization, especially in accounting for the impact of external threats and the timing of political liberalizations and transitions. Fourth, the model I developed shows that the effect of external conditions is identifiable and even measurable, and should be examined systematically in more detail in further studies.