Socialization and Democratization: a Tenuous but Intriguing Link

This book seeks to understand one of the important processes of change taking place in the ‘New Europe’ in its process of enlarging the circle of states whose shared identity and core values of democracy, human rights and the rule of law, makes them a value-based community with some very specific qualities — most notably peaceful and co-operative relations. In its focus on the processes of change in the relations between states, the book is very much located within International Relations. However, a key assumption of the book is that we cannot separate the ‘international’ from the ‘domestic’, and that both form a mutually constitutive relationship. As a result, we must direct our attention at both the ‘international’ and the ‘domestic’, thereby locating the book at the intersection between International Relations, Comparative Politics and Democratization Studies. The assumption is that in our quest for explaining the processes of change between states in the post-Cold War world, we must also look in more detail at the processes of change within states, because as suggested by Ian Clark, ‘the change is relational to both rather than particular to either’ (Clark, 1999: 5).