Back to Index

Lessons from Europe
Sheri Berman
Extracted from Journal of Democracy: Vol 18, Number 01
January 2007

Download this document
- Acrobat PDF version (257KB)
If you do not have the free Acrobat reader on your computer, download it from the Adobe website by clicking here.

Sheri Berman is associate professor of political science in Barnard College of Columbia University. She is author of The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century
(2006).

Few serious observers today doubt that democracy is the best form of modern political governance. Solid scholarship has shown that democracies are less likely to abuse their own citizens, rarely if ever wage war upon one another, and do at least as well as other regimes in promoting economic development. Unlike during much of the twentieth century, when radicals on both the right and the left were skeptical of democracy's value, today the most important political discussions concern not whether it is desirable but rather how to promote and nurture it.

In this regard, a long-running debate has pitted what might be called "preconditionists" against "universalists." The former believe that democracy generally emerges from a particular set of conditions and experiences, while the latter claim that it can come about in all sorts of ways and settings. During the 1950s and 1960s, the debate was dominated by the preconditionists, who stressed the importance of various national prerequisites and deep structural factors such as levels of socioeconomic development, degrees of socioeconomic equality and group polarization, patterns of land ownership or agricultural production, or the prevalence of certain beliefs or cultural traits. Where certain configurations of these factors were present, successful democratization was likely; where they were absent, it was unlikely. Policy makers, the preconditionists argued, needed to take this into account, and accept "the disagreeable, perhaps even tragic, fact that in much of the world the conditions most favorable to the development and maintenance of democracy are nonexistent, or at best only weakly present."¹

In contrast, universalists contended that democracy could emerge through diverse paths and flourish in diverse circumstances. They be- lieved, as Dankwart Rustow put it in 1970, that scholars should "abandon the quest for 'functional requisites'" and be skeptical of the idea that a "minimal level of economic development" or particular types of societal structure are "necessary prerequisites for democracy." The "third wave" of global democratization that began in 1974 gave a strong push to the universalist view, as the shift from authoritarian to democratic rule was made in dozens of countries-including many that preconditionists would not have considered ripe for such a move. As a result, scholarship began to focus less on the structures supposedly associated with successful democracy and more on the process of democratic transitions.

This new perspective on democratization, in turn, led to a corresponding engagement with democracy promotion as a foreign-policy issue. Since "democratization is triggered mainly by political factors," the activists contended, "given the precarious balance of political and social forces in many newly democratic and transitional countries, international actors would appear to have real scope to influence the course of political development.", The result was the emergence of various organizations specifically devoted to democracy promotion and support. Western governmental and nongovernmental organizations directed more and more funding-climbing into the billions of dollars annually-toward a vast range of targets across the globe.

By the late 1990s, however, as few new democratic transitions had been taking place and some of the earlier ones had even stalled or reversed, weariness and disappointment began to set in. The Clinton administration had made democracy promotion a highlight of its agenda; in keeping with the times, the George W. Bush administration took office in 2001 pledging a "humbler" foreign policy and more emphasis on traditional great-power relations.

Download full document 

1. Robert A. Dahl, "The Democratic Mystique: How the United States Misconstrues Central America," New Republic, 2 April 1984. Some classic "preconditionist" works are Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960); Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation
and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); and Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.

TOP