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540 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1995)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0540 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE What might be called the second democratic revolution began to take form around 1990. In the decades before then, democracy had held against massive challenges from imperial orders, fascism, and communism. With the emer- gence of new democracies, the international system had encapsulated most of the peoples of the world into nearly 200 nation-state entities. Yet the nation-state remained a thin veneer of governance and a myth of unity and sovereignty. The many localisms never disappeared, despite the internal dynamic of the nation-state to dissolve differences of class, ethnicity, and religion and the tension between center and periphery. The breakup of several states followed the end of the Cold War. More are on a trajectory of internal reorganization or realignment of their boundaries, long subscribed to as vital lines for the security of their peoples. Yet, at the same time, there is general recognition that the nation-state must be part of larger regions to ensure their economic prosperity. National centers today are being pulled from below by the local and attracted from above by the global. There has never been a sound theoretical resolution to the question of democracy and its necessity for familiarity, on the one hand, with the size and diversity required for prosperity on the other. One approximation was feder- alism and political systems with local autonomy. Such systems are inherently conflictive. The history of the nation-state is the story of national centers dominating the local, even if through bloody civil wars. The Industrial Revolution and the logic of expanding markets gave national governments access to resources on such a scale that most economies-indeed, the very concept of a society-were cast in national rather than local or regional terms. The concept of a nation-state asserted its reach even to the realities of a Soviet society or a Belgian economy. A main consequence of a new kind of international system of global relations is the capacity of localities to bypass national governments. A response of nation-states has been to join together in regional and interna- tional associations, the most recent of which is the reorganization of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as the World Trade Organization. But in an attempt to control the global, national governments have had to tolerate local political entities also becoming part of a new transnational system. This localism of autonomy and democracy in a global context is the inspiration of the articles composing this issue of The Annals. One necessary characteristic of democratic political systems is their open- ness, a consequence of their embrace of freedom. But if nation-states are open to the world, why not local governments, associations, and, indeed, individu- als? The second democratic revolution opened a huge part of the world to research outside of the national capitals, allowing direct access to local governments, political elites, and the people. A demand for knowledge other than that provided by national statistics, even if only for a simple mapping 8

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