The Triumph of Democracy and the Eclipse of the West

275 Pages·2014·1.56 MB·English

by  Ewan Harrison, Sara McLaughlin Mitchell (auth.)

The Triumph of Democracy and
the Eclipse of the West
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The Triumph of Democracy and
the Eclipse of the West
Ewan Harrison and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell
THE TRIUMPH OF DEMOCRACY AND THE ECLIPSE OF THE WEST
Copyright © Ewan Harrison and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, 2014.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-35386-3
All rights reserved.
First published in 2014 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN ®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave ® and Macmillan ® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-46980-2 ISBN 978-1-137-34686-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137346865
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the
Library of Congress.
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: January 2014
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To our children
The peoples of earth have . . . entered in varying degrees into a universal com-
munity, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part
of the world is felt everywhere.
—Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, 17951
1. Kant 1991, p. 107.
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments i x
1. I ntroduction: The Arab Spring in Global Perspective 1
World Politics Twenty-Five Years after History “Ended” 8
A Return to Grand Theory in the Study of World Politics 20
Part I T he Arab Spring and Global Democratization
2. T he Arab Spring and Democratic Socialization:
Transnational Influences 27
Democratic Socialization in World Politics 28
The Arab Spring and Transnational Democratization 36
Economic Modernization 36
Moderate Religious Movements 39
Communications Technology 44
3. The Arab Spring and Democratic Socialization:
International Influences 5 3
The Arab Spring and International Democratization 54
Prospects for Democracy in the Middle East 64
Part II T he Triumph of Democracy
4. T he Worldwide Crisis of Authoritarianism 75
Modernization and the Growth of the Global Middle Class 75
Low-Grade Authoritarianism 81
High-Grade Authoritarianism 88
Extremism and Diversionary Tactics 97
viii Contents
5. T he Expansion of the Global Democratic Community 101
Emerging Democracies in World Politics 103
The Spread of Democracy in the Non-Western World 1 06
A Fourth Wave of Democratization 1 12
The Developing World’s “Second Struggle for Independence” 117
Part III T he Eclipse of the West
6. A Post-Western Democratic Global Order 129
The Convergence of Civilizations 129
Overtaking the West: The Role of Institutions 137
The World the West Made: “Everyone’s World” 142
7. Global Democratic Futures: The Clash of Democratizations 1 49
Inter-Democratic Conflict in World Politics 149
The Politics of Global Democratization 153
Reforming Global Governance: The “Reverse Colonization”
of International Society 162
8. C onclusion: A Global Spring 177
Notes 201
Bibliography 233
Index 257
Preface and Acknowledgments
This year, it is the 25th anniversary of the end of the Cold War.
Following the Arab Spring, the larger questions about the fun-
damental nature of the global order that surfaced dramatically in
1989 have powerfully reemerged. Many people thought these questions
had faded away, the mere by-product of a peculiar set of circumstances in
the late 1980s and 1990s. This widespread assumption is wrong. When
several Arab dictatorships fell in 2011, the fact that almost a quarter of
a century after the end of the Cold War scholars had not satisfactorily
explained why the Soviet Union suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed
came back to haunt the discipline of International Relations. Just because
scholars ignored this question (perhaps because they were embarrassed
about not being able to answer it properly) did not mean that the dynam-
ics which caused the Soviet collapse went away. Indeed, the revolutions of
the Arab Spring showed that the global forces leading to the end of the
Cold War had not only intensified but had spread from the communist to
the developing world. The result was that, as at the end of the Cold War,
the field was once again left with egg all over its proverbial face when the
Arab Spring erupted.
It is time to acknowledge that Francis Fukuyama was essentially cor-
rect when he argued in 1989 that the dominant trend in world politics
was a global process of socialization spreading democracy through the
international system. 1 He was also correct to highlight the contributions
of Hegel’s and Kant’s philosophical writings, and their importance for
understanding the dynamics of the international system over the past few
centuries. Moreover, the global spread of democracy was not derailed by
9/11, the Iraq War, the Bush administration, or the Western financial cri-
sis of 2008. Processes of globalization and democratization unleashed by
the emergence of a critical mass of capitalist and democratic states in the
international system have continued to gather momentum. However, what
events over the last decade have made clear is that Samuel Huntington
was correct when he argued that the West was in relative decline, and that