Henry Teune, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

     Prepared for the International Conference on Comparative Regional Studies Tohoku University, Sept. 16-21, Sendai, Japan     The world has always been a "total" physical system,  a fact that did not matter much until very recently.  The human race as a single bio-system remains a debate whose boundaries are being defined by research on genetics.  The human social system as a global system is just being recognized, and its parameters are fuzzy and controversial.

     Expansion of particular human societies has long been understood.  Why certain ones did,  most others did not, and only a very few of either survived is a driving theoretical question of the historical sciences wedded to the goal of understanding the origin, nature, and future of mankind.  The preferred modes of expansion were exchange (trade) and war. 1   The dynamics of the mixture of the two are difficult to untangle but their relationship is based on the same fundamentals:  knowledge and access.  Together they often provided opportunity for a political system of empire.

     Empires, political systems of subjugation and obedience, no longer are significant forms of human political organization.  They have been the modal form of the development of human civilization and processes of "globalization" that abort in accumulations of local resistance and competition from others.   Although China is a feared pretender to yet another empire based on force and fear as are one or more expanding political entities in the Middle East,  it is likely that democratic political systems, based on consent and choice, will prevail during the coming decades.  The past retains appeal in fantasies about extra-territorial centers of empires.  Most of the world’s population in fact live in the niches of states; those who do not have a moral claim to have equal rights to at least one national residence.

     The theoretical argument to be made is that democratic political development is the pre-condition for globalization without empire that goes beyond  capitalism and its international division of  labor.  And just as the logic of growth of capitalism depends on expansion which forces economic globalization, so democracy relies on choice of individuals and human societies which must tolerate diversity  regionally, locally, and individually.  That principle extends to others living in "democratic" political systems outside of one’s own.   Just as economic growth is dependent on the openness of economies, so democracy depends on the inclusion and acceptance of diversity, socially, culturally,  and politically expressed.
     Evidence for these arguments will be taken from the Democracy and Local Governance Research program which has examined samples of localities in 26 countries in Eurasia, including their Pacific and Atlantic neighbors, Japan and the United States.  The empirical base is interviews with about 15,000 local political leaders about their democratic values and practices.  One hypothesis is that local political environments that are more democratic are also more global in their values and experience.  Another is that with globalization both regional and local differences within countries will expand and  become oriented to others beyond their national boundaries.

From Empires to Big Localities

    The broad outlines of human history are only marginally controverted; the specifics are always in question.  Hunting-gathering,  agriculture-settlement,  inanimate powered manufacture-trade, and  information-innovation driven activities are some of the markers of change during the past 10,000 years or so. 2    Those societies that dominated the processes of human society becoming global through extending their ideology, economy, and administrative control came from a very small number out of thousands of local social niches.  China, Athens, Rome, and a few of others were stable long enough to leave legacies which persist today as "regions", although they died or stopped being empires.

     Six to 10 major empires of the past few thousand years until the 16th century that laid the foundations for today’s globalization can be identified without serious controversy.  3   Their hallmark was political subjugation of peoples unlike themselves.  They have been recently named "poly-ethnic" empires in that they did not attempt to homogenize the population they ruled.  They used a mixture of religious belief, economic dependence, and force to expand their boundaries and sustain their center and organization of control.

    Empires since the 16th century went beyond the constraints of oceans and "sea power", which became the means necessary to expand empire in part by avoiding stronger resistance on the Eurasian land mass.  The political world became one of oceans and sea lanes for information and access.  That too gradually would diminish with the rise of air transport and electronic communications.  Just as in the recent past ports were centers of human creativity and economic activity, so today is the airport tied to communication.
 
    The local opponents of empires were political organizations of whatever constituted the psychological identities of human groups,  nationalism, ethnicity, and religion.  The main challenges to empire in Europe were other empires and expanding localities, taking form as nationalism for several centuries, achieving "world status in the 17th century as states, acquiring general legitimacy from international norms of self-determination after 1920, and breaking down again into yet another babble of "ethnicities", but with global languages of communication in the late 20th century.

    The final breakup of 19th century empires and the defeat of the 20th century aspirants led to the total collapse of empire as a form of political systems.  The "new" localisms within empires were nations, big localities, but smaller than their suzerains.  The political integration of about 5,000 European principalities ended with about 25 modern nation-states, a number that has recently increased and will increase even more.  4   By the early  20th century,  several conflicting political systems in North America were consolidated into three; a fragmented Japan became one; and  Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman were no longer empires.  Germany, Italy, Japan, and in a traditional sense, the United States yielded territorial control of others by the middle of the 20th century, followed by the United Kingdom;  France held on a little longer at a high cost; and Russia gave up a few decades later.  All of them left legacies in culture, language, and economic ties.

     De-colonization and political re-structuring  after 1945 fashioned hundreds of groups into the single, huge countries of India, Indonesia, and Pakistan, and an even bigger Russia, recognized as three counties, and China.  The plans for a stable concert of nations in a United Nations set the number of countries at about 70 in its construction of buildings that were to last until at least the end of the century.  That number is now nearly 200.   Revitalized pressures, including those from a global economy, for decentralization and local autonomy at least has halted the increase in the relative control of national centers over regions and localities within countries but has not abated those for yet more countries and changes in existing borders.
 
     Just as Alexander the "Great" left a residue of Greek culture from the Mediterranean to the Indus valley but never was able to integrate the multiplicity of local cultures, so the nation-state was never able to fully absorb religious, regional, and economic diversities into a single "people".   Even countries claiming homogeneity, Japan, Korea, Poland, among them, mask differences in local social and political cultures.  Even "ethnically" cleansed, small countries, the Czech Republic with its 10 million Bohemians and Moravians, or Slovenia with is two million Adriatic, Austrian, and mountain Slovenes, respond politically to their local cultural differences, however muted.

     The emergence of "strong states" in the late 19th and 20th centuries were partially successful in cultural, social, and economic integration.  Rabid nationalism in fascism in Italy and the cry for one state and one people in Nazi Germany belied the lack of unity which is comfortably expressed today in the regional politics of those countries with their strong local political traditions.   The  national and ethnic late-comers and aspirants to statehood at the end of this century never had the time to generate unities of belief and value.  Even those few states which recently have gained legal independence or autonomy from the "last" empire  entered at a time when re-definitions of state boundaries matter less and autonomy and independence are necessarily sacrificed for the promise of prosperity from an emerging global political economy.

     The world of human societies today  remains as layers piled upon layers of past societies, reflecting the archeological pattern of many cities having been built upon some original locality.  But the boundaries of those societies occupying local and regional niches were never quite the same, and the mixtures and meldings created yet different kinds of societies.  But unlike the limits to the reach of empires, which by the beginning of this century nearly, but not entirely, encapsulated the whole world, the international system of nation states has normatively incorporated all the land space, indeed becoming territorially universal even as the boundaries of those states have become porous and fluid.   The spatial free zones are now on and in the oceans and in near space.   And whatever proclivities to empire remain incorporated in the governments of states will seek their expression and competition there.
 
     The recent political systems empires of the Ottomans, the Austrians, Germans,  Japanese, French, British, Americans and Russians, all of which tried cultural or "value" integration  as well as economic dependence to their centers  are gone in the sense of direct political/administrative control. 5   Their habits and values, however, remain as fuzzy residuals, which are reflected sufficiently in their former territories to be seen as regions.  On top of them, what is produced anywhere in the world has been introduced.  Today something of almost everything can be found almost anywhere.  If not, it can be accessed. A "new" system, a global one, has replaced those of empire.

     Conflict and wars among states are now guises for group conflict within them, often extending beyond national boundaries accepted by the "community" of nations.  Many of those groups never achieved full status as territorial entities and their aspirations are perceived as thwarted by other groups.  Even as territorial boundaries of nation-states become less important as means of political control, conflicts over them in the Balkans, Southeast Asia, Central Africa, the Middle East, and East Asia acquire heightened  saliency.  Regions with more established countries have become "peace" zones, all of North America, South America, Western Europe, perhaps even Central Europe.   Historic territorial contentions are easier to settle today among those countries that most involved in the global political economy and whose place in the international system of states is not contested.

     By standards of human social organization, many nation-states are too large, certainly for participation and democracy based on familiarity and trust.   A big territory and population were  pre-requisites for a country’s economic prosperity, security, and getting its way in the world.  Some very large countries, founding their political and governmental legitimacy on consent established, federal systems, often as a facade to assure the survival of cultures and dampen the threats to the local by the center.   Although long major questions of theoretical and practical importance-- size and national viability and size and democracy--the approximate answers lie in the size and economies of neighboring countries, the region, and technologies of communication.  Few large countries, certainly large empires, have for long been both democratic and centralized.  The "trade-off" between "size and democracy" has always been that between larger the size, the more important the potential collective decisions but the smaller the voice of the individual citizen". 6   The global economy makes prosperity less dependent on the size of the country and the imperatives of democracy are toward smaller entities conducive to community.  The rationale of the  European Union to create a large market for economic growth and assure democratic governance has embraced contradictory goals, a federated, polyethnic empire of unequals, a political form whose time has past.
Ecological and Developmental Dynamics of Globalization

     The dominant social science theoretical paradigm since its modern emergence in the 19th century  is ecological;  its contender is developmental.  The ecological paradigm, of course, is  the core of Darwin’s theory of evolution, which had older roots and a more immediate one in Malthus.  There are living organisms occupying niches, which have neighbors, the environment, which is both encompassing and controlling.   What happens is the result of the interaction between the two, but primarily  the organism adapting to its environment.   Organisms grow, migrate, occupy, dominate and destroy those in other niches.  Adaptation comes by selectivity of what is wrought from random variations in the organisms.   The concepts of equilibrium, stability,  growth, exchange, invasion, domination, competition, conflict are part of the edifice of ecological theories of change.
 
     Extensions of this concept to the social world were made by Marx, Spencer, and Weber.   It retains a silent presence in most contemporary social theories.  It was elaborated in the 1920s by the Chicago School of sociology as human ecology, which focused on processes of urbanization and  patterns of settlement and work, tying together physical space and social behavior.  It was recast later, when territorial as a determinant of behavior weakened, as social ecology which looked at the ways that various social niches were related without regard to specific physical, spatial parameters. 7
 
     The developmental paradigm is also found in 19th century secular theories of social change.   In contrast to the constants of the human population--eating, disturbing, reproducing, and dying--it focused on changes in the components of societies and their relationships.   It allowed not only for survival, growth, decay, and death but also sought, often whimsically, for qualitative change and social transformations.  Whereas human ecology with relatively constant relationships among components of systems resulting in incremental and evolutionary change, developmental theories sought to explain and predict their transformation.  The "industrial" revolution changed the nature of human settlements and relationships among them.  A major component of developmental change is know-how or technology which changes relationships and the social units and organizations that make up human societies.

     The difficulties with developmental theories in contrast with ecological ones derive from predicting both changes in relationships and the nature of the components at the same time.  Ecological theories always have constant relationships, although the numbers of the components will increase and decrease and, if there is a "mutation", it is introduced as a " historical event" rather than explained or predicted.   They are theoretically incomplete, but logically tractable.  Developmental theories are different in that they are directed toward transformations of social systems.  The nation-state developed out of something else; some of them developed processes of establishing political consent, out of which electoral political parties emerged, whose functioning in the established democracies have changed with the technologies of electronic communications.  Developmental theories, the main-stay of historical accounts of great changes, therefore, elude the logical requirements of theories and lead to despairing searches for "events", including technologies, that "shake" the world.  Those requirements are that either the components or the relationships remain constant.  The success of "modeling" change of physical systems (where neither the components nor the relationships change) and, recently, biological ones are matched in the social sciences only by scenarios or "what if..." statements.

     International  relations uses the ecological paradigm for explaining the behavior of its territorial political units.  The nation state is a  political-territorial niche occupied by a species, a nation, capable of collective action with regard to its neighbors and the world as a whole.  The aggregations of these interactions is the international "system".  In this sense, the international "system" of international relations is not a "system proper’.  Great insights about the behavior of countries can be taken from theories of games in which one player is matched against another (others) and the outcome is the result of the game.   It is a relatively simple system, allowing for only a few avenues of activities, communications (diplomacy), exchanges of goods and services (trade), competition (positioning of one with others against others), cooperative action (treaties), invasion and resistance (wars of conquest and defense), along with some niceties of conduct expressed as aspirations in international laws.  Balance of trade, military parity, diplomatic recognition, formal agreements are the currencies of the players.  As the system is  relatively simple,  personalities, reciprocity , and errors constitute stuff of international politics.

     The world as a total human social system must be explained by developmental theories.  8 When the world became a total system, sometime in the last quarter of this century, what was being described are both differences in components and relationships.  The transformation was from relations among states linked ecologically by competition for dominance, resources, and position to one where some level of "systemness" emerged, which influenced the components independently of their specific actions in dealing with others.  Things happening began to transcend the traditional theoretical paradigms of international relations.  One of the predictable consequences would be the multiplication of components, some significant parts of whose behavior, could be explained by their being part of, components of the world, rather than of particular states.  At one level the system would be global and its process of integration described as globalization; and at the other local, whose autonomy would develop by its  breaking away from control by national centers and becoming integrated into a global system.

     The beginnings of this global development were the spread of markets and the decentralization of economic production.  Accompanying this were political activities, in weak international  institutions.  Taken together they formed  an incipient global political economy.   The "new players" recognized in the second half of the 20th century were called transnational actors, non-governmental organizations, multi-national corporations, international secular social and political movements (unlike political parties trapped within national boundaries), and, indeed, self-appointed, often secretive, international governors, either legal, made famous by the Rockefeller funded "Tri-lateral Commission, or illegal as "organized crime".  But before this could happen and be described in a credible political sense as global, the last big barrier to global integration territorially had to be broken, the militarily maintained division of the world into capitalist and communist systems.
     The question of our time is which of these forces for change--the international system of states or the emerging global system--is strong, will prevail. That depends, but the new has the edge in that it can provide for and do everything nation-states can and more and a lot more than all but a few of them.  The resistance of the old, embedded in the physical structures of capitals, military bases, monuments and established in the symbols of past achievements and sacred duties, is also strong.  Just as the old empires and institutionalized religions made enduring impressions, so the nation-state will remain but in new form in a global system.

The World as a Global System

     How did the world become one of nation-states by the end of the 20th century?  Nation-formation, nationalism, and the emergence of strong states in this century provided unprecedented opportunities for both human betterment and experiences of human misery.   As this process of nation-state coverage of the world's territory began to reach completion, two major shifts in beliefs were beginning to be become apparent, weakening the moral foundations of the state: the failure of the state to protect the lives of its citizens; and the blurring of responsibility for prosperity.

     One of the most important "facts" of our time, as is always true of any human society, is about life and death.  The technologies for killing became so efficient in this century and governments of nation-states so perverse that they managed to destroy willfully about 170 million of their own citizens or "subjects" and about an equal number in war. 9   Although there are many more significant theoretical reasons for the decline of loyalty to the state, the two moral claims of the state have diminished: the right to treat their own in any way whatsoever and the right to conduct war.  The decline in these prerogatives of sovereignty is indicated in the spread of international human rights, especially since the middle of the 1970s and efforts to control means of destruction in war.  Slowly, democracy is being recognized as a form of government that does not kill and that may even help people stay alive.
 
     A second, important fact of this century is that never before in history have so many people lived so well and for so long.  The life expectancy of people living in the early industrialized countries increased by nearly 30 years in the first half of this century; those in the less wealthy ones is approaching that expectation in the second half.   At the same time, economic prosperity has never been so abundant for so many people, including the formerly impoverished river valleys of Asia and many parts of Africa.  For the last 25 years or so hundreds of millions of people have acquired wealth substantially above the level of subsistence, including several hundred million in China and India.  Much of that occurred after the "opening" of their countries to the international system with consequent visible, non-national symbols being associated with economic growth.  In the 1960s, the de-stabilizing impact of the "international demonstration effect" from contact with the West, particularly the United States, in newly independent states was noted.  In the 1970s and 80s those symbols had become global institutions, media, and enterprises.  The relationship among openness, democracy, and prosperity is becoming part of a the ideology of a global political economy.
     For various reasons, the ending of the Cold War was signified by the  extension of the areas of peace in the world.  All of Europe and Southern Africa were added to the regions of North and South America we peaceful areas.  More importantly, no major conflicting powers were likely to work out their conflicts in the "peripheries", as they had in Southeast Asia, the Horn of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East in preceding four decades.
     The twin claims that legitimated secular, constitutional states by the end of the 19th  century  were economic sufficiency with the promise of prosperity and security from neighbors and other external "enemies".  Both required subordination of their societies and economies
to these national imperatives.  The reduction in local conflicts among states and the shift of economic production and distribution to the global level diminished the necessity for unity within nations to survive and compete with others.  Intensification of claims and threats of action for group autonomy from state control followed.

     The pressures on national governments from diversification from the decentralization of world production and the emergence of global markets, sheer population growth with a larger proportion of a dependent elderly, and the absence of real and immediate threats from neighbors came together in imperatives to decentralize governmental authority and disengaged from controls over the society and economy.  Add to this the focusing of perceptions that central governments were neither all that reliable in protecting the lives of their population nor essential to economic growth.  The economic success of England and the United States in this decade occurred with admission that government helped by doing less.  More than that, the ideology of world markets and open economies were now claimed to be the horses pulling economic growth.   National economies, generally their leading sectors, had become global and, despite, the reactions to the destabilizing consequences, the perception was that this was generally good.

    The third most important fact of our time, but one that has yet to be established historically as firmly as the other two, is a  Second Democratic Revolution.  The ideology and practices of democracy were made attractive by the economic, political, and military successes of the democracies in Europe, Japan, and North America;  international efforts of  the European Union, the United States, and others; and public admission of  failure and incapacity by leaders representing socialist and communist alternatives.  These changes created an environment for  initiating and strengthening democratic processes and institutions in almost all parts of the world.  Unlike the First Democratic Revolution of the late 18th  and early 19th  centuries which were confined to European countries and populations, where they took root in mass based political parties, competitive elections, and written delimitations of authority and rights of citizens within in a world of international rivalries, the Second took place in one of  relaxed international tensions and world economic growth.  The ideologies of democracy joined the pressures on national governments to reduce control of their societies and economies by decentralization and reduction of regulation in order to respond to increased complexity of their populations and economic globalization.

The New Levels of Globalization

      The processes of state formation in Europe and later in other parts of the world points to the processes of the development of a global political economy.  States emerged from political alliances between cities and a "national" center, the king and the burghers in Europe, against the agricultural land based nobility.  The monetization of trade provided the currencies for these alliances in the form of taxes to pay for "king's" armies to keep local groups in check and defend against predators on land routes, sea  lanes, and rivers. 10   The cities and national centers became the engines for the development of modern nation-states.

    Both democratization and globalization, the first requiring smaller units than nation-states or large cities for political participation based on knowledge and community and the second enabling global and international institutions to by-pass national capitals and penetrate directly into regions and localities, have begun the process of re-structuring human societies into the "new localisms" of regions larger than cities and localities smaller than them.  In addition, urban conglomerates, areas with more than two million people, national capitals, and regional centers are being organized into a world of cities,  comprised of global cities, transnational regional capitals, and regional centers.

     A global human system means re-structuring aggregations and organizations of societies.  That does not imply  the demise of either countries or national cities but rather that they will begin to change their nature and relationships.  The urban places of the Roman empire, became the parishes of the Roman Catholic Church, many of which became medieval trading cities, then modern cities.  The histories of urban places, parishes, and trading cities remain embedded in the physical and social ecologies of the new.  Countries and their cities will also take on new functions but not only will the relationships within them change but also those with stronger regions and localities both proximate as well as in other parts of the world.

     First, the new local entities will include industrial and research parks, residential associations, neighborhood organizations, and enclave communities, whether of  ethnic groups, citizens of other countries, or peoples with life-style preferences or special service requirements.  They can take on democratic organization, as is the case in condominiums, neighborhood groups, and special organizations.  Even as residences, they can be linked to the rest of the world, and through that, to their neighbors and fellow national citizens.

    Second, regional groups, mostly based on historical developments, will again become more defined.  Once there was Eastern and Western Europe; now there is Central Europe and North Central Europe, Southern Central Europe, Southeastern Central Europe, reflecting shared experiences, certainly since the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Even in countries as economically developed as the United States, regional differences are becoming greater, if not in the standard economic indicators of GNP and unemployment.  The state level of government in the United States has become stronger relative to Washington in an expanding number of area, including welfare, education, housing styles, and recreation.  Already over 45 of the states in the United States have representation in Tokyo, many others have similar presences in other cities.

    Third, meso-regional differences can also be more clearly seen through the lens of globalization.  The histories of these large regions is manifest today in the beginnings of their processes of democratization.  The main regions in Eurasia are Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Eastern Asian. Similar major regional differences can be expected to be found in several Africas and South Americas.  The line is one of the Eastern and Western Church in the middle, and a quite different political culture in Central Asia. Africa will remain north, south, Atlantic, and Pacific.  South America is already made up of different cultures which is being changed by different kinds of international economic ties.  The United States is West-Pacific, East-Atlantic, and South-Carribean.
 
    Five tiers of territorial aggregation and organization are part of the incipient global political economy, a mixture of the new and the old, all responding to new economic and political forces: the local, the near-regional, the country, the meso-regional, and the global.  In addition, transnational boundary regions must be introduced in those areas where national boundaries were forced on localities and their peoples.

    These levels must also be seen as changing with global developments, some regions gaining ascendancy in the global economy, East Asia being one, others receding relatively, Southern Europe and the Balkans.  They also are in conflict: the country with the locality, when the latter seeks relationships with, or redress of grievance from, the European Union, another national capital or city for economic and other relationships.  They are also mutually re-enforcing when countries agree to facilitate travel and exchange between cities and peoples in border regions.

Democracy and Local Governance: The Research  11

    The Democracy and Local Governance research program, which began in 1991 and is still underway, examined local political leaders in 26 countries,  nine former communist countries for two points in time (1991-92 and 1995-96).  Samples of local communities, cities and communes, ranging in population size from about 25,000 to 400,000, adjusted upward and downward depending on the urbanization of the country were sampled randomly.  About 15 local leaders were selected in each locality, starting with the mayor and deputy mayor, council people, and political party leaders.  The target population was the official political strata.  When administrators were added, they usually came from finance.  The leaders in most countries were interviewed for up to two hours, face-to-face.   The countries were chosen opportunistically, with a focus on the new democracies and comparisons with the established ones.

    The design was set so that several "levels" could be examined: individuals leaders (pooled without regard to locality, region, country), localities, regions recognized as such within countries, and meso regions comprised of several countries in this analysis.  In addition the impact of globalization, it was hypothesized, would be observed by changes over time, especially in those countries that were generally "closed" and then opened.  The research and analysis are continuing and some of the results presented here are first cuts.
 
     The total observations targeted in each country was about 450, a smaller number being selected in small countries, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, and a larger number in large counties or those with a large number of localities with political self-governance, Russia, Switzerland.  The analysis was both pooled, all leaders (about 11,000 as only those interviewed most recently are reported here, all localities (about 700) all regions (about 70), and all 26 countries.

     The theoretical variables presented are based on the assumption that democracy, democratic development, and stability rest on the tripod of values, institutions, and processes.  The main measure of democratic values is what is called the democracy score (demscore) based on a selection of three items from three different five item value scales, tolerance of conflict (pluralism); political equality (everyone should count the same); and minority (versus majority) rights.  Although a variety of other measures from about 45 value scale items have been analyzed through various means, including factor analysis, these nine value items do about as well as and a bit  better cross-nationally than any alternative so far examined.  The main measure of institutionalization of democracy is the ways in which local leaders perceive the people have to influence local decisions, including petitioning, joining parties, demonstrating.  The total number is called "ways-influence". The processes of democracy were measured by leaders' reports on their seeking support from groups when making decisions.  In both ways of influencing and support sought, leaders were given a list of such ways and such groups, in the latter case numbering 16.

    The globalization of localities was assessed by asking political leaders with what political and social unit they identified, their local community, a regions, their country, a transnational region (Europe or Asia), and the world.  Leaders could chose more than one; most did, but they were scored as "international identification" if they chose any level above that of country.

   Other questions asked about perceptions of the impact of the global (foreign) on the communities: exports, imports, tourists, immigrant workers, media, pollution, investment.  In addition, variables targeted leaders orientation to the local, whether local problems should take precedence over national ones; whether pollution was a local, national, regional, or international problem and responsibility; whether the local, intermediate, national government or private institutions should have responsibility for education, housing, crime, and other traditional collective functions.  All in all, over 400 cross-national variables were taken from the interviews and in selected countries, data were added about actual levels of unemployment, housing stock, and the like.

   This report will focus only on local and regional differences and the main democratic variables to indicate the vast differences in the regions, countries and localities in one large part of the world.  Plans have been made to extend the research to Africa and South America.

The Local and Regional Differences

     If one had to know one thing about the democratic environment provided by the values and practices of local political leaders, it would be the geographic location.  In so far as democracy is rooted locally (an assumption of the research program), there are vast differences between Western and Central Europe, Northern Asia, Central Asia, and East Asia.  These meso-regions matter.  History, culture and the empires that carried them are decisive, as was pointed out long ago.  What is surprising is that the "ethos" that attempted to destroy the old and build a new, the communist regimes, had so little impact even though in power from 40-70 years.  This is presented in a macro map on the distribution of the demscore based on countries (demscore By Global Region).

     There are vast differences among the "traditional regions" within countries.  This is presented in the regional maps of the demscore and the number of leaders’ support groups.    The  "red belt" below Moscow, the socialist manufacturing areas, stands out.  There is an increase in democratic values of local leaders moving both westward and eastward.  Although not presented here, the map of  the international identification of local leaders is similar to the pattern of democratic values and support groups.   Also not presented here for practical reasons are the vast differences within countries, less so within regions, among localities within countries.  This is obvious from the regional maps of Russia and is indicated in the other larger countries.  Many of these regions, of course, are recognizable as traditional regions of empires.

    If one wanted to predict whether or not  particular leaders are democratic in their values, it is possible to do so by knowing the extent to which they believe people are active in trying to influence decisions, claim that they seek support from many rather than a few groups in the locality, and identify with Asia, Europe, or the world.  It also matters, but in more complicated ways whether the leaders perceive that their local community is influence by foreign trade, investment, and people.

     In comparing where democracy matters--country, region-locality, or just as individuals—it is possible to compare the relationships between the demscore, importance of support groups, and the ways people influence decisions along with the international identification of leaders and their perception of the importance of foreign imports.  The correlations are presented in Table I.
The data are from the most recent set of interviews.
 
        The best level of prediction across four levels is the locality and then he region.  In making this comparison, allowances are made for inflation of correlations in aggregation.   Although the details will not be presented, the indicators of democracy at the local level--the democratic values of local leaders, the perception about political support groups and ways people influence behavior, the assertion that the local level of government can do more--increased in most of the former communist countries, frequently significantly between 1991-92--1995-96, during which they all had one or more major elections.  The main exception was the Ukraine, for easily understood specific reasons.  Another was Lithuania, which vacillated on several of the democratic dimensions in the study.  All of these countries experienced "globalization".  Those localities within them that became somewhat less "democratic were those that were outside of these changes or especially adversely impacted by them, the old Soviet industrial towns or isolated regions within Central Europe.  These observations must be interpreted cautiously, as the new democracy, openness, and global contact is very new in these Som countries and regions. But the data so far fit with the general expectations.

Some Concluding Comments

     The Democracy and Local Governance project did not start out with assumptions of the importance of regions and their histories.  As the first data came in, it became overwhelmingly obvious that there were vast cultural difference within Eastern Europe, and then between it and the West, and then between both of them and other countries as the data became available from areas moving toward the Pacific.  The first reaction was to get data from the Pacific region of Russia, which looked very much like Central Russia.  Later data would taken from samples of the autonomous regions of Russia, vast areas of the world.  As data became available from Central Asia, the contrasts became more obvious.  Finally data from East Asia--Korea, Japan, and Taiwan--showed something of another pattern, more like the mixed pattern that was described in our publications as the "Three Political Cultures of Europe".

    The data have also to be looked at from the perspective of the political dynamics within each country.  Country studies are the first step in the analysis and publication. The nation-state has been the strongest of the political integrators during the past century or so.  The variables in the study are related differently in each of them, although there are many similarities.

    Case studies are part of the initial observations, each leader is a case, as is each community and country.  The results was to turn to the dynamics of regions, not just localities.  The heavy hand of historical empires had to be taken into account.  Today, those empires must be examined in the context of what is happening today.   With the macro-global perspective of this research, however, it possible to put the cases in the ascendent context of our times, the global political economy and its various, but pervasive ideologies of democracy.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

FOOTNOTES

1. L. Keeley, War Before Civilization. NY: Oxford, 1996.

2. D. Chirot, Social Change in the Modern Era. NY: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, 1986.

3. E. Service, Origins of the State and Civilization. NY: Norton, 1972.

4. P. Jacob and J. Toscano (eds.), The Integration of Political Communities. Philadelphia, PA:             Lippincott, 1964.

5. G. Lundestad (ed.), The Fall of Great Powers. NY: Oxford, 1994.

6. R. Dahl and E. Tufte, Size and Democracy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1973.

7. Z. Mlinar and H. Teune, The Social Ecology of Change. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1978.

8. K. Boulding, The World as a Total System. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985.

9. R. Rummel, Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence.  New Brunswick, NJ:               Transaction, 1997.

10.G. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1978.

11.  This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Polish Scientific
        Council, the U. S. Institute of Peace and many other national and international groups.                   Contact author for full information.  Also see the page http:/www.ssc.upenn.edu/dlg/
        The first country publication was B. Jacob, K. Ostrowski, and H. Teune, Democracy and
         Local Governance: Ten Empirical Studies. Honolulu: HA:Matsunaga Institute, 1993.