Democracy Is Coming

Abstract

In the 1990s democracy was the dominant imaginary of politics. A global trend toward democracy was celebrated, heralded at world summits, prominent in the discourse of transition in Eastern Europe and institutionalized as part of international development policy where good governance became a condition of foreign aid. The worldwide scope of democracy was widely heralded. `No doubt, the defining concept of the 1990s is democracy. Like Coca Cola, democracy needs no translation to be understood virtually everywhere' (Norton 1993, p. 208).