ABSTRACT
The definition of the concept of democracy is widely connected to some qualifications of the political traditions in Europe and the United States. Democracy is usually defined through the prism of only Western experience, in which the ‘West’ and ‘experience’ are key terms.1 At the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which convened in Moscow in September of 1991, the Secretary of State James Baker’s address to the disintegrating Soviet was on ‘democracy’. Esposito and Voll pointed out that Baker spoke of ‘democracy’s season and presented to all Soviet citizens and their leaders five fundamental principles that he urged them to follow, including multiparty, free elections and Jeffersonian understanding of the rights of minorities’.2 The qualification of modern democracy is not merely election or voting but freedom, justice, equality, coexistence and human rights as well. None of these qualifications can work or even exist in any society without some regulations, that is to say laws and norms regulating the existence and the work of these qualifications. Society is not a society without law; law is not law unless it is practised; to practise the law needs authority that is government.
