1 - Introduction: Beyond the ‘End of History’

Summary

We have suffered in the past from making democracy into a dogma, in the sense of thinking of it as something magical, exempt from the ordinary laws which govern human nature.

(Lindsay 1951: 7)

The exponents of liberal democracy make the mistake of ignoring the all-important fact that democracy is not something given once and for all, something as unvarying as a mathematical formula.

(Hogan 1938: 10)

INTRODUCTION

Little over 200 years ago, a quarter of a century of war fundamentally reshaped the European international order. That conflict was triggered by the advent of popular doctrines in revolutionary France, and fears that it might seek to export ‘all the wretchedness and horrors of a wild democracy’, as the British ambassador Lord Auckland described it at the time (quoted in MacLeod 1999: 44). In stark contrast, today ‘rogue regimes’ are defined by the fact that they are not democratic. In the intervening period a remarkable series of revisions took place in the way democracy was understood and valued in international society. In a relatively short space of time, popular sovereignty went from being a revolutionary and radical doctrine to becoming the foundation on which almost all states are based, while democratic government, long dismissed as archaic, unstable and completely inappropriate for modern times, came to be seen as a legitimate and desirable method of rule. This book examines these changes in the concept of democracy, and considers how these processes have interacted with the structure and functioning of international society. Put differently, this study is structured around the historical contrast between, on the one hand, the high degree of acceptance and legitimacy that democracy now holds, and on the other, the strongly negative perceptions that defined democracy when it reappeared in the late eighteenth century, which should have seemingly limited the possibilities of it becoming understood so positively.

The book seeks to throw new light on a central feature of the current international order, in which– according to Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen– democracy has become a ‘universal value’, having ‘achieved the status of being taken to be generally right’ (Sen 1999: 5). It explores the remarkable reversal that took place, accounting for democracy's rise from obscurity to its position as a central component of state legitimacy.