DEMOCRACY'S VICTORY IS NOT PREORDAINED
Azar Gat
Two recent articles in these pages -- "The Myth of the Autocratic Revival" (January/February 2009) and "How Development Leads to Democracy" (March/April 2009) -- have taken issue with my July/August 2007 essay, "The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers." In the first, Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry dispute my argument that the authoritarian capitalist great powers Germany and Japan were defeated in both world wars largely because of contingent factors rather than structural inefficiencies. As I have argued, these countries were too small in comparison to the United States. With respect to the