Oldal 27 [27]
ON DEMOCRACY —
INTERPRETATIONS AND MISINTERPRETATIONS!
——o—
ANTON PELINKA
“Democracy is the only game in the global village” (Fukuyama)?
ABSTRACT
In this opening article, Anton Pelinka deals with the way democracy functions in
modern times. He first presents the major backgrounds of present day (political)
democracies, and various definitions and typoes or forms of democracy.
He subsequently goes on to the tensions and (internal) contradictions,
such as the effect of globalisation on the citizens of formal democracies, and
to a description of various — sometimes conflicting — interpretations and
misinterpretations of democracyan. He concludes with saying that democracy
is certainly not perfect, but that there is no feasible alternative for it up till now.
INTRODUCTION
In the 20" century, global “waves of democracy” (Samuel Huntington’s
expression) have strengthened the impact of democracy on politics: Especially
as a result of World War II, when the three non-democratic axis powers
(Japan, Italy, and Germany) became democracies. India, at the beginning of the
dramatic process of de-colonization, became the world’s “biggest democracy”.
In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s other countries followed this wave of democratic
transformation: In Europe, the semi-fascist dictatorships in the Mediterranean
and the communist systems in Central-Eastern Europe became democracies
in the liberal (Western) style: Multiparty systems in which free and fair and
competitive elections decide about the government. Outside Europe, the
military (and other authoritarian) dictatorships in Latin America, South-Korea,
! The content of this article is a reproduction of the opening lecture by Anton Pelinka at the
ANSE Research Conference on Supervision and Coaching, Karoli Gaspar University, Buda¬
pest, April 24-25, 2015, based on extensive notes of Sijtze de Roos, and edited and accorded
by Anton Pelinka.
Francis Fukuyama as quoted by David Held — David Mepham, Progressive foreign policy — new
directions for the UK, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Polity Press, 2007, 40.