ABSTRACT
It is normal to conjure up an image of democracy waxing and waning along with shifts in the Zeitgeist, that is, the spirit of the age. Consider the democratic explosion that took place in the wake of the victories of the democratic countries after the two World Wars and the end of the Cold War, or the numerous democratic collapses in the interwar period, influenced by the attraction of communism, fascism, and nazism. Indeed, we can go all the way back to the great liberal revolutions in 1830 and 1848 to 1849, when the spirit of revolution could be felt throughout Europe and parts of Latin America (Weyland 2009, 2010). In addition, democracy has sometimes been established as the result of actual occupations, as in Japan and West Germany after 1945. Against this background, it may sound paradoxical that the transition theories that dominated the democratization literature in the 1980s and early 1990s showed little interest in the impact of international factors (Levitsky & Way 2010: 37–38). The message was that transitions emerge from within, regardless of whether we are dealing with transitions to or from democracy. Juan Linz (1978) accordingly argued that democratic collapse had domestic causes, and Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter (1986: 19) insisted on maintaining a domestic focus when analyzing transitions to democracy. To quote their uncompromising claim:
we assert that there is no transition whose beginning is not the consequence – direct or indirect – of important divisions within the authoritarian regime itself, principally along the fluctuating cleavage between hardliners and softliners.1
