The democratic project on a global scale that seemed so promising and was pursued with so much vigor in the final quarter of the twentieth century is now in serious disarray, if not in ruins. In that tumultuous period of seemingly unfettered capitalist globalization, numerous constitutions were written and ratified; elections, not always fair and free, were held all over the world, including most recently in the long suffering Congo; people marched and dictators were deposed; blueprints for institution/nation building were devised and circulated; scholars spoke and wrote excitedly about the public sphere and civil society; the human rights discourse became audible; the so-called new social movements, already in play since the 1960s, proliferated to encompass every conceivable project for social justice; the NGOs, the self-appointed tribunes of the weak and the dispossessed (including the mother earth), emerged as a tangible force. It seemed as if a new era of democracy, with “a million mutinies now,” as V. S. Naipaul said of India, was dawning.1 But that promise of democracy has been tattered and truncated. The newborn democracies are under duress everywhere. This is not unusual in itself. The coming of or transition to democracy is rarely peaceful, because it involves a significant, if not a radical, reconfiguration of political society and power. The predecessor regimes are unlikely to yield power to their democratic successors without a prolonged, often violent, resistance. Moreover, democracies tend to break down and revert back to nondemocratic modes of governance. These reversals are often violent and tear apart the social fabric in a manner not easy to mend. Hence, intimations of danger and fratricidal conflict invariably accompany the rise and fall of democracies. This is true not only of the great age of democratic revolutions in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the ensuing “springtime of the people” in the nineteenth century but also of the two distinct phases of democratization in the second half of the twentieth century.

In Samuel P. Huntington’s now famous three-wave schema/count, the first wave of democratization, a long, slow wave that endured almost a century from 1828 to 1926, witnessed transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes in thirty-three countries, all of them located in Europe, the Americas, and the overseas English dominions. Huntington defines a “wave of democratization” as “a group of transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes that occur within a specific period of time and that significantly outnumber transitions in the opposite direction during that time.”2 It was followed by the first reverse wave of democratic breakdowns between 1922 and 1942 leading to the reestablishment of some form of authoritarian/totalitarian regimes in twenty-two countries. The second wave covering the period between 1943 and 1962 witnessed the establishment or reestablishment of democratic regimes in forty countries, which included, among others, the newly independent postcolonial nation states. It was followed by the second reverse wave of democratic breakdowns between 1958 and 1975 resulting in the return of nondemocratic regimes in twenty-two countries.

Now we are said to be in the midst of the third wave, which began in 1974 with the retreat of authoritarian governments in southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, and Greece) and Latin America, was followed by the recuperation and restoration of democracies that had withered and broken down in the postcolony, and culminated in the democratization of Eastern Europe and the Soviet successor states after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This wave added thirty-three countries to the democratic column, bringing the grand total to sixty-two out of the seventyone countries on Huntington’s list. There was already some erosion as three countries had relapsed back into some form of authoritarian governance by 1991 when the book was published. But the third wave persists. It is a stronger and swifter wave than the previous two. Despite the recent military coup in Thailand that toppled a democratically elected prime minister, the eighteenth coup in the short history of Thai democracy, the third reversal does not appear to be imminent. We are in a holding pattern.

Aside from the magic of numbers (while the first and the third waves each placed thirty-three countries in the democratic column, the first and the second reverse waves subtracted twenty-two countries each; a numeric pattern, if it were to hold, would make the whole wide world almost democratic in a few more waves), Huntington’s schematic counting alerts us to the fragility and danger of democratic/republican life and the sagacity required to sustain it against the ravages of time, a subject that profoundly engaged the political imagination of the ancients and their most disciplined and astute student, Machiavelli.3