30 Years of World Politics: What Has Changed?
By Fukuyama, Francis
Francis Fukuyama is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University, where he also serves as Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy. Development, and the Rule of Law and director of the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Public Policy.
What has changed in world politics over the thirty years since the Journal of Democracy published its inaugural issue in January 1990, and how has the Journal changed in response?
First, to get the obvious out of the way, we are now living in a political climate very different from the one that existed in 1990. The Journal of Democracy began publication just past the midpoint of what Samuel P. Huntington called the third wave” of democratization. The Berlin Wall had just been torn down, and communist regimes had begun collapsing across Central and Eastern Europe the most dramatic advance for de mocracy during the entire thirty-year period. Today, by contrast, we are living in what Larry Diamond labels a “democratic recession,” with reason to worry that it could turn into a full-scale depression. Authoritarian great powers such as Russia and the People’s Republic of China are openly challenging the Western liberal-democratic model, even as populists and nationalists launch attacks on that model from within the West itself. These setbacks have occurred not only in peripheral democracies, but in the very countries that led the democratic revolution, the United States and Britain
The pages of the Journal have reflected this shift, going from cautious optimism to a focus on the different routes to democratic transition, to skepticism about whether transition” was an adequate concept to capture what was happening, and then to a far more defensive concern with new and emerging threats to democracy. In recent years, this analysis has gingerly begun to include the threats emanating from within what had been considered “consolidated” democracies, as well as the new forms of “sharp power” that authoritarian regimes are deploying to undermine liberal-democratic norms and regimes around the world.
