Abstract
Although majority voting was first found to be inadequate by Pliny the Younger in Rome in the year CE 105 (Sect. 1.1.1), most people today, from Brest to Brest-Litovsk, still believe in majoritarianism. This chapter looks at some of the effects in this belief, briefly in western Europe, in some detail in the Balkans and the Caucasus, albeit with a little interlude in Turkey, and finally in the country which suffered more than any other from these ideas: Russia.
…beginning about the ninth century, movements for self-government developed in the Italian cities and then spread northward, ‘forcing bishops and barons… to share power with the burghers, and in the end often yield to them altogether’.
(Samuel P. Huntington 1996 : 71).
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Notes
- 1.
The author crossed this border, with his bicycle, in 1986, firstly, when travelling from West to East Germany, and later, from East to West and back again, through Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin.
- 2.
Belgium as a Crucial Test of Consociationalism: the 2007–2011 Political Crisis by Zsofia Pales, writing in 2011.
- 3.
One of many good ideas from the late Senator John Robb.
- 4.
Poland was partitioned three times: in 1772, 1790 and 1795, with the three surrounding empires of Austria, Russia and Prussia slicing off various bits until there was nothing left.
- 5.
The powers-that-be in the Kremlin always liked the Soviet Empire to be, like its predecessor the Russian Empire, contiguous. Accordingly, they wanted common borders with the satellites, and chopping off the eastern tip of Czechoslovakia gave the USSR a common border with Hungary as well. It was not a very long border, but wide enough for the tanks which then rolled in to Budapest in 1956 at the time of the Hungarian Revolution.
- 6.
Poland’s biggest protest came a little later, with the rise of Solidarity, Solidarność, in 1980.
- 7.
- 8.
The author’s frequent visits to Czechoslovakia and its successor states—his first was in 1988—have all indicated that many in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia regretted this separation.
- 9.
Su svi ratovi u bivšoj Yugoslaviji počeli nekim referendumom. Author’s translation.
- 10.
Sarajevo’s legendary newspaper.
- 11.
At about the same time, the Gaels went from this part of Central Europe to Ireland. At home one evening during the 1997 election observation mission in Herzegovina, where many of the locals spoke of this land as if it were Serbian—“Ovaj je Srbije, this is Serbia”—the author joked that this region was actually part of the old Irish Empire. Whereupon all the women laughed… and all the men did not.
- 12.
Kosovo usually ends with an ‘o’ when spelt by the Serbs, but with an ‘a’ if written by an Albanian-speaker.
- 13.
The Krajina are three regions in Croatia which had been and were still peopled by Serbs, initially as a bulwark against the Muslims of the Ottomans. And hence the word ‘krajina’ from ‘kraj’ or ‘border region’, (as also in the word ‘Ukraine’).
- 14.
Such distortions could also occur in multi-option voting, but almost certainly not to the same divisive and corrosive extent.
- 15.
When asked in 2008 if he had any reflections on all this, Robert Badinter replied, “The answer is negative.” (Private correspondence, 30.7.2008).
- 16.
The word ‘consensus’ is often assumed to mean unanimity, with all parties having the power of veto , the very use of which would imply that there was no consensus.
- 17.
Prior to and then during the war, RS had a total of five referendums.
- 18.
Ratko is a recognized first name in Serbia, but the Serbo-Croat word for ‘war’ is ‘rat’.
- 19.
By coincidence, a presidential election campaign was underway in the US at the same time. The Bosnian election was supervised by the OSCE, and the author was an observer in Derwenta, in RS. It was an amazingly complex logistical exercise, for every internally displaced person, IDP, was allowed to vote, either in their new residence or as if in their old. The vote took place on the Saturday. On the Sunday, lorries crisscrossed the country, taking ballots from Tuzla to Srebrenica, from Sarajevo to Zvornik, etc., etc. The ballots were then all mixed up, so that no-one could know any one ballot’s provenance, and the count started at 9 o’clock on the Monday, to proceed non-stop until all was done: 6 pm on the Wednesday. Some of the locals joked that the acronym OSCE actually meant, ‘the Organization to Secure Clinton’s Election’. And they were right!
- 20.
The same is true in Israel of course, where the Arab List can get into parliament, but no further. Instead, as in the wake of the 2015 elections, there emerged another pretty horrible majority coalition , with Jewish Home giving the ruling party a majority of just one.
- 21.
On 2.12.2007, the people of Venezuela were asked 36 questions in this way, and 50.7% said only one ‘no’.
- 22.
For some unknown linguistic reason, the Russians translate the word Ulster with a capital O.
- 23.
The Russians, however, knew about NI (Biryukov, 1985). In Marxist theory, the Troubles were a sign of the impending demise of capitalism.
- 24.
For what can only be assumed to be selfish reasons, the Irish Times correspondent in Moscow was not interested at all.
- 25.
Me.
- 26.
The chosen system was not, however, PR-STV , let alone QBS. It was a parallel system , with 75 members elected in single-seat constituencies —the GP won none of these, of course—and 150 elected by PR, in which the Greens won 11 seats.
- 27.
The overthrow of Gamsakhurdia was revolutionary. In the Rose Revolution, in contrast, Shevardnadze was in his dacha or home in Tbilisi and, as far as is known, he participated in the election of his own downfall; so maybe the word ‘revolution’ is a little too strong.
- 28.
In addition to four other visits to the Caucasus, in 1990, 1993, and two in 1999, the author was an OSCE election observer in Georgia in 2004 and 2012, (and the same in Azerbaijan in 2003 and 2005). He was also deployed to the region in 2008–2009, just after the Russo-Georgian war, in the EU Monitoring Mission in Georgia, EUMM, near the boundary line with South Ossetia.
- 29.
In 1999, the author met the Karabakh Minister of Foreign Affairs, a lonely figure who sat behind his desk on which sat just a telephone and a couple of sheets of paper.
- 30.
To describe the River Volga, therefore, as Russian, is a bit like describing the Danube as Serbian.
- 31.
One of the economics experts was Sir Robert Maxwell MP, a Czech originally and a crook latterly, so hence his nickname: ‘the bouncing Czech’. He was first elected to the House of Commons in 1961 for Buckingham, the author’s then home constituency, but everyone that evening in the local pub, The Swan, knew of his nefarious activities. He was nevertheless fêted in the Kremlin in the 1980s, where doubtless he was telling his interlocutors how best to cook the books.
- 32.
When talking to the leader of Kirov’s local council in 1989, the author tried to explain the advantages of an MBC in decision-making . “No, I don’t like it,” his host concluded. “Now why not?” was the obvious rejoinder. “Because you cannot predict the results.”
- 33.
Reproduced by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. ©1996.
- 34.
The author lived in Moscow for two years from August 1988.
- 35.
‘Я сам издаю, ya sam izdayu, I publish myself’. A samizdat can be anything from a one-page hand-out to a complete book.
- 36.
‘Да’ и ‘нет’ не говорите, ‘Da’ i ‘nyet’ ne govoritye, Never say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. 3.2.1989.
- 37.
The Irish Times and other western media took absolutely no interest in any of this.
- 38.
In the first round of the election to chair, 535 voted against Yeltsin, (Pravda, 27.5.90); so the contest went into round two, in which 535 cast their votes in favour of him, and so he took the chair.
- 39.
Committee of State Security, Комитет Государственной Безопасности, Komityet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopastnosti.
- 40.
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Emerson, P. (2020). Continental Europe: Are We All Little Bolsheviks?. In: Majority Voting as a Catalyst of Populism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20219-4_5
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