ABSTRACT
In 1945, following several decades that saw most experiments in democratisation fail, there were only a dozen democracies left on the face of the earth. Since then, despite many ups and downs, democracy has bounced back from near oblivion to become a planetary phenomenon for the first time in its history (Diamond, 2008; Dunn, 2005; Keane, 2009b). Fresh research perspectives on this sea change are required, and that is because the point has been reached where the language and institutions of democracy have taken root in so many different geographic contexts that several fundamental presuppositions of democratic theory have been invalidated. As democracy spread through the world, the world has made its mark on democracy, even though the metamorphosis has remained largely unregistered in the literature on democracy. I give two recent English examples: the effort of John Dunn (2005) to write a history of the word democracy ignores its pre-Greek origins, its survival in the early Muslim world, its earliest modern redefinition in the Low Countries, its penetration of the countries of Spanish America during the nineteenth century, and its more recent metamorphosis in contexts as different as southern Africa, Taiwan, Indonesia and India; and the influential textbook treatment by David Held (2006) of various ‘models’ of democracy that have a distinctively Eurocentric bent which precludes references to many anomalous cases, past and present. Well into the twentieth century, analysts of democracy supposed that the functional prerequisites of democracy included:
1 a ‘sovereign’ territorial state that guaranteed the physical security of a resident population of citizens;
2 a political culture favouring mechanisms that were widely supposed to be synonymous with democracy: competition among political parties, periodic elections and parliamentary government;
3 a more or less homogeneous social infrastructure or ‘national identity’ bound together by a common language, common customs and a common sense of shared history; and
4 an economy capable of generating wealth that lifted citizens out of poverty and guaranteed them a basic standard of living sufficient to enable them to take an interest in public affairs.
