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Beyond its selective, “sporadic,” and hence faulty empiricism-which ignores the frequent staggering developmental failures of autocracy-the Lee argument failed on both intrinsic and instrumental grounds.
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3 In 1999, at the end of the Journal’s first decade, Indian economist Amartya Sen decisively rebutted Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew’s thesis that autocracies are preferable as engines of economic development and stability. From both the left and the right, intellectuals like Nigeria’s Claude Ake and Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa were making the case for democracy as the best and historically necessary form of government. This was the hopeful-and at times thrilling-context of the Journal of Democracy’s early years, a period in which the liberal democracies were regarded as “the only truly and fully modern societies.” 2 Democracy was on the march not only literally-on the ground and at the ballot box-but normatively and intellectually. The January 2022 issue is his last after 32 years as coeditor of the Journal of Democracy. Larry Diamond is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. By 1994, some forty countries had transited to democracy within the space of half a decade. Seemingly impregnable dictators soon fell in Zambia, Kenya, and Malawi. Transitions to democracy were then well underway in most of Central and Eastern Europe, Nelson Mandela had been released in South Africa, civil society had toppled a dictatorship in Benin, and other longstanding African dictatorships were on the defensive. After five years of opening under Mikhail Gorbachev, the decrepit Soviet Union itself had entered a twilight period. But we did not assume its inevitability, and we did not imagine the scope and speed of the political transformation that was looming.īy the time our first issue went to press toward the end of 1989, the Berlin Wall had been torn down by the people whom it had held captive for decades , and the Soviet bloc was crumbling. 1 As we prepared to launch a new kind of publication that would inform scholars, students, activists, and policymakers around the world, we believed that we were riding a historical wave that would transform the world. Huntington would soon call “democracy’s third wave” had already spread from Southern Europe to Latin America to Asia, increasing the percentage of states that were democracies from a quarter in 1974 to about 40 percent at the end of 1988. When Marc Plattner and I began preparing to launch this journal early in 1989, democracy was resurgent globally, but far from dominant.
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“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.” Now, with the deterioration of democratic norms and institutions in the United States, the growing doubts about democracy’s efficacy, and the resurgence of authoritarian power and belligerence (led by China and Russia), democracy faces its most daunting test in many decades.Ī longer version of this essay, with additional reflections on the evolution of the Journal ’ s work, is available here. Beginning in 2006, the world entered a period of global democratic recession that has gathered considerable momentum in recent years. These illiberal, poorly governed democracies were identified as prime candidates for erosion, and many of the have since failed or oscillated. Yet even at the peak of democracy’s third wave in the mid-1990s, scholars were worrying about the shallow nature of many democratic regimes. Democracy was on the march not only literally-on the ground and at the ballot box-but normatively and intellectually. The Journal of Democracy began publishing in 1990 in an era of hopeful, even exhilarating, expansion of democracy around the world.