ABSTRACT
This chapter argues not only that democratization is possible, but that, in an era of rapid and continuous global technological revolution, democratization can facilitate the modernization of Leninist systems. It views modernization as an ongoing process of institutional adaptation to technological change—change that periodically produces new economic lead sectors and shifting world market logics. China's modernization process will undoubtedly find its own particular way of negating its premodern inheritance, just as the Netherlands, England, and France were shaped by their rooted particularities. Traditional norms have been reinforced by Leninist forms. Leninism, they argue, is increasingly incompatible with the imperatives of post-steel modernization. The chapter focuses on the earlier democratizations of Holland and England rather than on Greece and Argentina in the late twentieth century. This approach directs our attention to the striking similarities between contemporary Leninist state quandaries and those experienced in an earlier democratizing epoch.
