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Democracy’s practically uncontested status as the single legitimate regime type conceals how extraordinary an achievement its emergence has been. Emerging democracies face the task of institutionally redistributing power and of normatively legitimizing a people’s self-government. They need to reconcile the urge to individual freedom and the hope for equality by ensuring that the exercise of power in the people’s name becomes accountable and transparent. This emancipation of the people into a political subject implies complex social and institutional, but also ideational and symbolic, transformations. Turning the poor, the many, or the low into masters of their own affairs raises the question of the availability and the role of models in shaping institutions and moral-normative values.

Models Of Democracy

The ancient Greeks had no model of democracy to inspire them. Neither the Founders in the United States nor the French revolutionaries had dispositions toward the establishment of a representative democracy in its contemporary guise. Only the prolonged political stability, economic welfare, and moral purpose of freedom in the Western hemisphere after World War II (1939–1945) shaped democracy as a model in a bipolar world. The collapse of Soviet communism turned representative democracy into a normative goal—with the possible exception of the Middle East and North Africa— on a global scale. While earlier studies theorized the socioeconomic origins of democratic regimes, more recent approaches emphasized externally assisted regime changes by multilayered efforts of democracy promotion. These inter related but diverse approaches interpreted emerging democracies with regard to technical assistance, knowledge transfer, and the rational design of democratic institutions. Structural approaches postulate a set of habitually accepted interdependent arenas such as an existing state bureaucracy, the rule of law, and civil, political, and economic society as preconditions for the consolidation of democracy. Process oriented approaches highlight causal mechanisms by which trust networks are transformed, public politics is insulated from categorical inequality, and autonomous power centers in states are removed. Considered a globally appearing order to come, the challenges of emerging democracies have been framed in the lines of a capitalistic logic, focused on rational self-interest of autonomous political elites, not on the social spirit of the people.

The Fallacy Of Preconditions

Such interpretations derive normative ideas and institutional practices regarding democracy from some imagined status quo of democratic values, institutions, or practices, which transcends the social and cultural context of the emerging democracy concerned. Yet values do not emerge independently from existential facts. It is questionable, for instance, whether any established Western democracy had any prodemocratic preconditions in place at its foundation. The focus on institutional design underestimates that, in its core regions, democracy has been a dramatic, messy, and contingent process, riddled with conflict, violence, and regression. Old, antidemocratic regimes were replaced by waves of democracy following violent revolutions or world wars, while creating the demos in colonial settings required ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population. An apparently strong democracy such as the United States could be undermined by the inverted totalitarianism of managed democracy (with its main aim to increase profits of large corporations) and superpower (with its focus on imperialism and militarism).

The contrasting examples of the breakdown of new democracies in the 1930s and the successful southern European (in the 1970s) and postcommunist waves (in the 1990s) proved the importance of a supportive international environment for democracy promotion. However, the focus on empiricist procedures and causal mechanisms depoliticizes the experiences that underlie democracy. Concerns for conceptual distinction require definitions of what political democracy is. Yet such essentialism may turn democracy into an ideological force that becomes politically nonnegotiable. Operational and pedagogic models for the goal of developing democracies may thus be culturally biased and potentially disregard the truly political element in their emergence.

Initiating The Spirit Of The People

This evidence suggests that emerging democracies require more attention to individual paths and experiences than liberal monism is ready to accept. The focus on expected or desired political outcomes risks eluding historical continuities and anthropological dimensions in emerging democracies. Institutions are like medicines. Their success depends not only on their quality or dosage but also on whether, in the long term, the body accepts the cure. Rather than to predetermine the shape of emerging democracies by importing values from outside (such as constitutionalism, structural preconditions, or assumptions about the strategic rationality of actors) it is more adequate to engage with the social body’s background conditions, under which meaningful claims for people’s self-government emerge.

Etymologically, emergence refers to rising from a liquid by virtue of buoyancy. Combining the Latin ex (“out”) and mergere (“to dip, sink”), emergence suggests that the new has been contained by the old, from within which it rose. While democracy clearly has a global appeal at the semantic and conceptual level, the concrete methods and meanings of transparency, accountability, and the modalities of rule are embedded in cultures of democracy. According to Thomas Paine, the American constitution was not an act of government but a people constituting a government. During the French Revolution (1789–1799), the Abbé Sieyès claimed that the French nation’s will was the supreme authority but that the constitution givers were fundamentally unconstitutional. In other words, the people may be unified as a political principle, but as a social reality, they remain unstable, malleable, and volatile.

Democracies, like individuals, actually emerge and come of age through processes of transition. Such transitions are not simply about connecting the dots. They are liminal moments, when people find themselves confronted with an authority vacuum, in-between the dissolved authoritarian power structures and a hypothetical future. Feelings of belonging to a political association arise from events and experiences in which many of the taken-for-granted essentials of democracy such as sovereignty, rule of law, or freedom not only are not given but are substantially threatened. The initiation into democracy thus requires attention to moments of enchantment, predemocratic imaginaries, and rituals, which all influence the symbolic transfer of meaning toward the people as the master. The myth of the people’s collective will is a myth, but without this myth democracy is not possible.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s recognition that Americans were born equal and thus did not require a democratic revolution did not refer to a predetermined set of sine qua non preconditions. Citizenship, for instance, was not a right but a daily practice grounded in preconstitutional ways of life, social practices, beliefs, and cultural representations. Memories of a common past, for instance, are crucial for the building of ties of solidarity, belonging, and affective association. From Athens to the United States, Spain to South Africa, commemorations of those who died for the cause of the community, in internal conflicts but also defending against external enemies, forged collective memories of belonging and affective bonds between citizens. In Eastern Europe, communism was not only an antidemocratic legacy but also a social organism in gestation, where dissident movements articulated the power of the powerless by translating memories of humiliation, national self-affirmation, and ethic individualism into democratic aspirations. Despite the lack of a European demos and a collective memory of a European past, the recognized democracies within the European Union aspire to a new form of European democracy. Emerging democracies thus thrive on a utopian bent where ideas of inclusiveness, equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty are sustained not only by institutional arrangements but also by myths, symbols, and social imaginaries.

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