Richard N. Haas Quotes


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A major problem of new and emerging democracies is that many people believe that majority rule per se is democracy. In Egypt for example, Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood won the election. They then assumed that they had the right to do anything including exempting the government from judicial review or deciding the role of women in society or denying freedom of religion to non-Muslim citizens. Democracy is not a serial autocracy with each new autocrat being selected by a free and fair election.


After the many years of the Cold War attacking of Democracy, for many Russians the word conveys a bad image of their old enemy. For others, using the word reminds them that the Soviet Union collapsed and the Russians lost the cold war—an unpleasant memory. Yet many of the leaders of the Russian Federation very much wanted to democratize Russia. Bushmin had this very practical, albeit humorous, solution.


Despite his warning---and that of others—all that they could get agreement upon had each of these three weaknesses. After winning the American Revolution, the new country found the Articles of Confederation and the Continental Congress completely inadequate and finally in 1787 there was a Constitutional Convention held in secret in Philadelphia to overcome the weaknesses of the existing structure of which the warnings of Rush were three of the problems that had to be fixed.


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