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These setbacks have occurred not only in peripheral democracies, but in the very countries that led the democratic revolution, the United States and Britain.įrancis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University, where he also serves as Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Public Policy. 1 Authoritarian great powers such as Russia and the People’s Republic of China are openly challenging the Western liberal-democratic model, even as populists and nationalists launch attacks on that model from within the West itself. Today, by contrast, we are living in what Larry Diamond labels a “democratic recession,” with reason to worry that it could turn into a full-scale depression. The Berlin Wall had just been torn down, and communist regimes had begun collapsing across Central and Eastern Europe-the most dramatic advance for democracy during the entire thirty-year period. Huntington called the “third wave” of democratization.

The Journal of Democracy began publication just past the midpoint of what Samuel P. What has changed in world politics over the thirty years since the Journal of Democracy published its inaugural issue in January 1990, and how has the Journal changed in response?įirst, to get the obvious out of the way, we are now living in a political climate very different from the one that existed in 1990. Sustaining democracy will require rebuilding the legitimate authority of the institutions of liberal democracy, while resisting those powers that aspire to make nondemocratic institutions central. The environment for democracy has been further transformed by other slow-moving changes, among them the shift toward neoliberal economic policies, the legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and lowered expectations regarding democratic transitions. In a second major shift, technological development has had unexpected effects-including that of facilitating the rise of identity-based social fragmentation. Since the publication of the Journal of Democracy began in 1990, the political climate has shifted from one of democratic gains and optimism to what Larry Diamond labels a “democratic recession.” Underlying these changes has been a reorientation of the major axis of political polarization, from a left-right divide defined largely in economic terms toward a politics based on identity.

Free republic photos of saddam hussein capture