Answer to Question #174563 in History for Eri

Question

1.  What explanation accounts for the rapid rise of democratic governments in the world after 1945?

2.  Popular movements in what three Eastern European countries prior to 1989 challenged the influence of the Soviet Union?

3.  1989 was a pivotal year for pro-democracy social movements in both China and Eastern Europe. What were the differing outcomes of each set of movements?

Answer 1

1.     What explanation accounts for the rapid rise of democratic governments in the world after 1945?

           The number of countries with the fundamental democratic structures of parliamentary democracy grew dramatically over the twentieth century. Independent analysts agreed at the turn of the century that more than a third of the world's nominally autonomous nations had political institutions equivalent to those in English-speaking countries and traditional European democracies. These structures provided historically high representative governance levels in an additional one-sixth of the world's nations, including certain flaws. Nearly half of the world's people lived in these democratic and near-democratic nations. During the twentieth century, several countries maintained democracy despite severe diplomatic, security, fiscal, and political crises, such as those experienced during the early years of the Great Depression. The presence of a tradition of broadly held political ideals and principles in these cultures contributes to democratic structures in these nations.

 

2.     Popular movements in what three Eastern European countries prior to 1989 challenged the influence of the Soviet Union?

 

           The 1989 Revolutions were part of a series of revolutions in the late 1980s and early 1990s that saw the collapse of communist control globally, including in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The era is sometimes known as the Fall of Communism and the Fall of Nations or Autumn of Nations, a variation on the word Spring of Nations, which is often used to characterize the 1848 Revolutions. These revolutions began on April 21, 1988, with a general strike by Polish employees, and ended on September 24, 1993, when Cambodia adopted a new Constitution, abandoning Communism. In Poland in 1988, the movement spread to Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. The widespread usage of civil disobedience movements, showing public hostility to one-party rule and adding to the demand for reform, was common to both of these trends. Only civilians and resistance groups in Romania and Afghanistan used terror to topple their communist governments. Protests in Tiananmen Square (April–June 1989) did not usher in significant democratic reforms in mainland China. Still, photographs of brave resistance caught in those protests continued to ignite events across the world. Solidarity, a labor union, secured an overwhelming win in a partly free referendum in Poland on June 4, 1989, contributing to the country's peaceful collapse from Communism in the summer of 1989. Hungary started removing its portion of the physical Iron Curtain in June 1989 as well.

 

 

3.     1989 was a pivotal year for pro-democracy social movements in both China and Eastern Europe. What were the differing outcomes of each set of movements?

           The Chinese Democracy Movement of 1989 pitted an authoritarian dictatorship against a burgeoning democratic society. The strict restrictions that the state brutally put on culture during the initial period of Stalinism have started to erode after ten years of economic change. There is substantial proof of the beginnings of a democratic society, whether it is characterized as autonomous organizations, entrepreneurial enterprise, or autonomous public discourse. There are comparisons between China and Eastern Europe, where "civil society" was viewed to resolve Stalinism. Unity's decentralized association, Hungary's creative economy, and Havel's spiritual awakening can all be found as intentions or partly realized. This skilled distinction means that China's potential is untouched by the country's ostensibly oppressive system. The outlook is unpredictable, but it's possible that, in the long run, socialism will prove to be an unwelcome detour on the road to creating an autonomous civil society.