In a series of essays by an international group of scholars and policy makers, this book provides the first sustained look at democracy and democratic movements in the Middle East. Moving beyond a concern with the growth of Islamicist movements and nationalist states, the authors probe the historical experiences of the last hundred years and the social conflict over the past decade centering on democratic structures and processes from North Africa to Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. The essays explore from theoretical, descriptive, and political perspectives questions of democracy, freedom, and...

In Can Europe Work? Germany and the Reconstruction of Postcommunist Societies, eight scholars from the United States and Europe discuss the problems posed for European unity by the collapse of communism and the reemergence of Germany as Europe's strongest state. Among the topics addressed are a comparison of nationalism in Western and Eastern Europe, the intellectual origins of the often antiliberal and antidemocratic East European nationalism, deteriorating popular support for the Polish Roman Catholic Church, a comparative analysis of the German nation-state in the nineteenth and...

Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, like Jews in Central Europe until the Holocaust, have been remarkably successful as an entrepreneurial and professional minority. Whole regimes have sometimes relied on the financial underpinnings of Chinese business to maintain themselves in power, and recently Chinese businesses have led the drive to economic modernization in Southeast Asia. But at the same time, they remain, as the Jews were, the quintessential "outsiders." In some Southeast Asian countries they are targets of majority nationalist prejudices and suffer from discrimination, even when...