Twenty-first-century perspectives

Historians are no good at predicting future developments – which is why they usually refrain from drawing lessons for the future from the recent (or not so recent) past. But perhaps one should not think so much of ‘drawing lessons’ as, rather, of discerning and considering different options, of the possibilities as well as the limits of one’s choices and of the ways and means of making these choices felt in the political sphere. In 1950 some twenty of the then eighty sovereign nation states in the world were democracies (i.e. 25 per cent); according to the latest count (2004), today there are 192 nation states out of which 117 (i.e. nearly two-thirds) are democracies and ‘only’ forty-four are dictatorships. Reading and speaking about twenty-first-century perspectives may not be very uplifting and encouraging.