Search results

A. James McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Christiane Olivo, Creating a Democratic Civil Society in Eastern Germany: The Case of the Citizen Movements and Alliance 90 (New York: Palgrave, 2001)

Nine years after the domino-like collapse of East Central Europe's Communist regimes, the near-unanimity of the conclusion, in retrospect, that the collapse was inevitable stands in stark contrast to the failure of nearly all observers and participants to anticipate it (or at least to say so publicly) at the time. In looking back at the year preceding the collapse, the nagging question that still presents itself is why practically no one saw the "unavoidable" coming. Phrased more positively, it may prove instructive to ask what evidence was available to external observers, to eastern elites, and to ordinary citizens that should have alerted us or them to the impending catalysm.

Open conflict between presidents and prime ministers has become a familiar phenomenon throughout East Central Europe since the fall of communism. While individual personalities and the particular constellations of issues in each country have helped shape individual conflicts, this article seeks to account for them in more fundamental structural terms and to place them in the context of current debates over the relative virtues of presidentialism and parliamentarism. There is a discrepancy between the prestige and popularity of presidents and their modest formal powers; prime ministers, by contrast, enjoy considerable formal power but only limited legitimacy. Since the distribution of authority in newly constituted democracies is ambiguous and fluid, with no established conventions and understandings defining precisely the boundaries among key institutions, presidents seek to utilize the ambiguity to convert their assets of prestige into "real" power over policy, while prime ministers resist what they see as incursions into their areas of responsibility. The article explores the strengths and weaknesses of each side, the terrain of struggle, the tactics employed, the political outcomes to date, and the implications for political consolidation and the future distribution of executive authority in the region's states.