The empire of democracy

He used the phrase "the empire of democracy", and by that he meant the ways in which the general conditions of equality that he saw in America were something fundamental to what American democracy was. He was writing this for a French audience, and he was in many ways trying to educate and to convince his French audience that there was something in the American model of democracy that France might wish to aspire to. Now, there's a certain play on words here as well, because Tocqueville, like many liberals, was also an imperialist. So the phrase "empire of democracy" has, in a sense, a double meaning.

It is something that has been constantly reinvented through history in different periods and in relation to different needs of societies at the time, and this was what Tocqueville was really getting to the heart of. What is it that drives those changes? How do we understand, as it were, our era of democracy, which I argue began really as recently as the 1970s from previous eras, and what is it that is fundamentally at the core of the democracy we live in today? I think these are important questions to ask, and as we see, I would argue, democracy is changing again before our eyes all around us.

But after the 1970s, when many of those assumptions, and also many of the institutions that enabled those assumptions to take place, began to fall apart all at the same time, suddenly the answer to that question changed. And my argument is that it is this change that gives us the form of democracy we have today, and so it makes sense to not take democracy for granted, to not assume that democracy will always muddle through. It depends entirely on the quality of the answers we give, it depends on the quality of the leadership, and it depends on the capacity of individuals, through the institutions that they are given, to live up to the challenge of reconciling in productive ways, in positive ways, freedom with equality.

But in truth, histories are formed, periods are established in many different ways, and it often depends on what your lens is. If we are focused on politics and the military, then the beginnings and ends of wars make sense. If we're focused on the economy, however, we might come up with very different periodizations. This was one reason why, in beginning to write a history of the post-1989 era, the post-Cold War era, it became very apparent to me, very early on, that that actually is a story—a period that begins much earlier—and it begins in this transitional moment in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when the assumptions of a post-war generation are falling apart, when the economic conditions are changing, when we have not only political and military upheavals around the world—the rise of radicalism, right wing and left wing alike—when we have the oil shocks of 1973 transforming the relationship between different economic models, the ways in which Europe, for example, and the US managed their international affairs—and we have a whole series of other challenges that really brought into question whether the post-war institutions of liberal democratic societies that had been rebuilt after the war were any longer fit to the challenges of the moment. In other words, a series of questions were posed. And it is really in the answers that were given to those questions that the subsequent era of democracy was established.

The transformation of that system in the early 1970s, beginning when Nixon unpegged the dollar from gold, gave rise to not simply a new economic reality, one in which the relations between domestic economies were tied and fixed, always moving in a certain degree of rigidity, but to one in which economies were much more fluid and free – in a sense, the beginning of globalization as we experience it today. It also gave rise to a whole series of social responses and institutional responses to that changing underlying political economy. While none of these are things that crop up on the radar of the events of the time immediately – there were no, specifically speaking, wars related to those changes – nonetheless, the conditions that they set in train become a part of the way in which North America and Western Europe in particular continue to evolve in the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s.

There is a huge amount of truth to this, and there is a huge amount of benefit for all of those citizens attached to those changes. But the narrative that somehow democracy is or was or can be something that is given to a country – this whole notion of democracy promotion – is fundamentally flawed. It is flawed because democracy emerges in and through what societies themselves determine, and it is flawed because what was actually given to the East in the years after 1989 was much less obviously democracy than it was free markets and capitalism, particularly in a country like Russia. What was given was, in a sense, something that was taken. Markets were opened up, companies and investments moved in, and the capacity of those societies to respond to those changes, almost overnight, perhaps not surprisingly, overwhelmed many of them in the interim period.

It perhaps should have been less of a surprise to us that there was an upwelling of response around the world, both in terms of civil society movements, sit-ins, protests, all of which were in many ways a reaction to the fact that the causes of the political challenges and the economic challenges of the time were much more deeply rooted than perhaps we had expected.

Gunnar Myrdal, for example, a Swedish economist writing very much from the perspective really of two places – of Sweden, first of all, where he lived and worked, and of the US, where he'd spent a lot of time – imagined and envisaged and dared to believe, perhaps, that those ideas, those policies, the welfare state, could be replicated around the world. And, of course, the reality is that welfare states require certain conditions to be established. They require certain benefits in terms of economic growth, resources, the capacity to exploit and make use of those resources, and the very global economy that someone like Gunnar Myrdal was instrumental in building and establishing and regulating through his work as a UN civil servant is, of course, actually one of the fundamental reasons why many countries were unable to develop welfare states in the way that North European or Western European countries had been able to.

There is a wealth and an increasing interest in learning from the experiences of other countries, learning from the economic histories and trajectories of other countries, and in trying to put those together now in a way that is more universal and cooperative, rather than in a way that is extractive and that characterised much of the international economic relations of the late 20th century.

Very often as geographers, we would say that the West is an imaginative construct, and like all imaginative constructs, it is used to particular effects. Those that are willing and able to use the West as a claim will do so, and those that understand it as an imposition will also use the West in that way. Like any political concept, the West—the idea of the West—is fundamentally contested, and we need to recognise this whenever we are engaging in conversations about what particular countries, regions, or territories mean to us, and mean in terms of the history of the world.

Democracy is ultimately no more and no less than what we make it to be: the institutions we create to nurture and protect it, and the capacity of individuals to live up to the demands of those institutions and of the rules and regulatory framework that we establish around democracy. That, for me, is where the core of democracy emerges from, and that, for me, needs to be understood as something fundamentally fragile, as something that needs protecting, and as something that will change from era to era. But the idea that democracy itself necessarily and always will continue and survive and thrive, I think, is an assumption that we in the current age in particular would do well to rid ourselves of.

Editor’s note: This article has been faithfully transcribed from the original interview filmed with the author, and carefully edited and proofread. Edit date: 2025