ABSTRACT
Democracy at the Turn of the Century “The day of the dictator is over.” So claimed President George Bush in a 1990 address in Argentina.1 In his optimism, Bush echoed Francis Fukuyama, who had written months earlier that with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the world had finally reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” (1989, 4). More recently, political scientist Robert Dahl has expressed a similar sentiment. According to Dahl,“the main antidemocratic regimes of the twentieth century”—he refers to Communism, Fascism, and Nazism-have either “disappeared in the ruins of calamitous war” or else “collapsed from within” (1998, 1). In a less rhetorical, but no less prophetic mode than Bush and Fukuyama, Dahl explains:
Before it ended, the twentieth century had turned into an age of democratic triumph. The global range and influence of democratic ideas, institutions, and practices had made that century far and away the most flourishing period for democracy in human history. (1998, 145)
Throughout the United States and Western Europe, the collapse of nondemocratic states and the trend toward the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” (Fukuyama 1989, 4) was duly celebrated. By the final decade of the twentieth century, it seemed that Woodrow Wilson’s image of a world “safe for democracy” had been realized.2
