ABSTRACT
In the post-Cold War era, roughly the decade of the 1990s, authoritarianism was frequently viewed as the default position for democracy. At the height of the Third Wave, a democratizing bias was often evident in both policy-making and scholarship. Nondemocratic nations were assumed to be moving toward democracy, however distant the goal and slow the pace; accordingly, authoritarianism was explained as a delay in that inevitable movement, and authoritarian systems were seen as incomplete or transitional forms of democracy. Authoritarian regimes were often assumed to be the only factor holding back reform-minded societies, and political oppositions to these regimes were almost always assumed to be democratic. An exception to the latter generalization was made in countries where the primary or sole opposition was based in political Islam. Indeed, in the early 1990s ‘the Algerian dilemma', in which a rightist authoritarian regime was deemed tolerable if it prevented an Islamist party from coming to power, presaged a new Cold War, this one between polarized civilizations rather than ideologies (Quandt 1998).
