Democracy: A Global Revolution?

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A tide of democratic change is sweeping the world, not only in the once-monolithic communist regions but also in a wave that started in Mediterranean Europe in the mid-1970s and spread to Latin America, Asia, Africa and, even, South Africa.

Remarkably, the current demise of communism and the movement toward democracy have come not in the aftermath of destructive war but in an unprecedented half-century of global peace. Indeed they come at a time when the Cold War has ended, regional conflicts from Central America to Southeast Asia have abated, and Europe, the very powder keg of global wars from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, has moved into a historic process of economic and political unification.

Why is all this happening? Why have communist and Third World dictatorships embarked upon their various moves toward democracy?

Factors specific to each country are obvious: an ailing or aging dictator in Lisbon or East Berlin, economic setbacks in Brazil and economic successes in South Korea, Catholic priests providing safety for regime opponents in El Salvador and Poland, the insistence of a Soviet leader on fundamental restructuring at home and abroad. Taken separately, such stimuli for change toward democracy might seem no more than fortunate happenstances. Is there a broader pattern?

Looking back, three times in modern history the world has seen efforts to replace oppressive rule with popular government. The American War of Independence, followed by the French Revolution, set off proclamations of free republics in Europe and across Latin America; but then came Napoleon's military dictatorship, traditional monarchies were restored, and the new states of Latin America soon succumbed to caudillismo or other forms of feudal or military rule.

A century later, Woodrow Wilson sought to make the world safe for democracy; the empires of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey fell, but again the gains for nascent democracy in the successor states proved precarious...