ABSTRACT
Globalization has put the classical question of the relation between democracy and culture prominently on the political agenda. For academic research this represents a challenge: can we theorize democracy in a culture-sensitive way? One way of exploring possible cultural foundations for democratization is to analyse actual historical cases of successful and unsuccessful democratization. At first sight, unsuccessful democratization seems to be especially instructive because such cases can disprove some all-too-simple theories about what democratization requires. Thus, many revolutionary movements showed their intellectual weakness by suggesting that freedom and democracy could be achieved by toppling the existing power holders; similarly, the largely failed attempt of bringing democracy to Iraq shows that removing a dictatorship will not be enough to effect democratization. On the other hand, theorizing failed democratization often becomes a Eurocentric exercise. Speculating about the causes of failure, it is easy to identify missing cultural foundations for democracy, where the aspects considered to be missing are exactly those that we take to be well-developed in the West (for instance individualism, transparency, or so-called ‘democratic values’).
