V - Democracy

Summary

America's desire to entrench democracy as the norm in international relations is the least unifying element in the possible emergence of a triangular relationship among Washington, Singapore, and New Delhi because the interests of these three capitals are not invested equally in the prospects of an ideational and prescriptive goal whose success it is difficult to measure anyway.

AMERICA

From an American perspective, Samuel Huntington speaks of three historical or “long” waves of democratization. The first wave began in the early nineteenth century with the extension of the franchise to a large proportion of the male population in the United States, and continued until the 1920s. During this era, about twenty-nine democracies came into existence. This wave began ebbing in 1922 with Mussolini's rise to power in Italy and lasted until 1942, when the number of the world's democracies had gone down to twelve. The second wave began with the Allied triumph in World War II and crested in 1962, when the number of democracies had risen to thirty-six. The ebbing of the second wave between 1962 and the mid-1970s reduced the number to thirty. Since 1974, democracy's third wave has added about thirty new democracies, doubling the number of such societies. The third wave began in southern Europe in the mid-1970s, moved on to Latin America and Asia, and crested at the end of 1989 with the collapse of communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, which was followed soon by the disintegration of the Soviet Union. At the end of the twentieth century, there were around 120 democracies in the world.

While American arguments for universalizing democracy appeared to be borne out by the end of the Cold War, Washington's zeal in spreading democracy abroad has been marked by a series of compromises. These were most notorious during the cruelties unleashed by the proxy wars, insurgencies, wars of “national self-determination”, and coups of the Cold War, when the challenge from the Soviet Union — armed with an egregiously legitimating narrative of its own — led the United States to support even viciously anti-democratic regimes so long as this would help check the spread of Soviet influence.