ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly sketches the broad movements of political systems since that first twentieth-century surge of democratization during the World War I era. In 1910, only a small proportion of the world's population lived under governments with a claim to democracy. Much of Africa and large areas of Asia were held as colonies by European powers. The democratic impulse, already advancing around the time of the Great War, accelerated with the victory of the western democracies. The twentieth century was to be marked by the ebb and flow of multicontinental democratic and antidemocratic currents. The support of the United States during the Cold War was hardly a clear inducement to develop democratic forms. The policy of the United States was more clearly directed against its great enemy, the Soviet Union, than it was in favor of democratization. By the middle of the 1990s, far larger proportion of the governments of this planet were claiming to be democracies than ever before.
