Democracy and Argumentation

Abstract

Speaking in Fulton Missouri at the same place and from the same oaken lectern used by Winston Churchill to make his historic “Iron Curtain” speech 46 years earlier, on May the 6th 1992 the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev delivered a warning that mankind faced “the most difficult transition in its history.” According to the British newspaper The Independent of May the 7th 1992, Gorbachev urged “a new system of global government anchored to the United Nations.” The Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant reported on the same day that Gorbachev announced “a new era of worldwide democracy.”