ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the period following World War II in which the second and third waves of democratization in which, despite regressions, the broad trajectory was in favor of democracy. In particular, the Cold War had divided the world into countries aligned with the then Soviet Union and those aligned with the ‘Free World’, in which many accepted the comfortable proposition that being anti-communist implied being in favor of democracy, even when that was often not the case. Within democracies themselves, there was a similar sense of comfort with the democratic proposition, as though democracy was a natural state of political affairs and that, as a fixture of the political landscape, it could be taken for granted. This chapter identifies how such complacency about democracy's permanence has become prevalent and how this has allowed democracy to be undermined, diminished and, in some cases, replaced.
