ABSTRACT
Over the centuries, democratic government has taken many forms and has had a variety of partners. Consider democracy and the town hall, or city state; democracy of the landowners; democracy and the property qualification; universal male suffrage and democracy; democracy and ethnic purity; even we have seen the celebration – most improbably of all – of a slave-owning democracy. At different times and in different historical settings, it has been accepted that democracy is inextricably linked to Protestantism, to Christianity, to secularization, to social equality, to socialism, and then – most insistently since 1990 – to capitalism. Yet all of these couplings have proved transient. There is a broad set of political institutions, traditions, and values that we can call democratic, which have persisted (or mutated) as propertyowners, empires, religious commitments, and models of economic organization have succeeded one another on the historical stage. In the post-Cold War period, democracy seemed to flourish (and mutate)
as the claims of state sovereignty were said to subside. Under conditions of unipolar US supremacy, with global democracy on the advance, with state socialism discredited and eclipsed, and with liberalized markets extending into every recess of human society, the ‘decline of the state’ was celebrated by liberal internationalists who regarded state sovereignty as yet another impediment to individual freedom and the promotion of universal standards of human and political rights. Like slavery, like empire, like the command economy, it should be rolled back and eventually eliminated in order to maximize the liberty of all. From this perspective, the curbing of sovereigntist illusions would clear the
way for the establishment of a more secure and encompassing democratic order, one derived from permanent features of human nature undistorted by nationalist division and manipulation. Evidently, the variant of democracy promotion by the liberal internationalists was a modification of what earlier theorists had taken to be the essential characteristics of the creed. But this was not new. Each time the democratic tradition has moved from one partner to the next it has been adjusted to the new social context in which it must operate, without ever yielding its claim to moral and institutional continuity.
