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18 J. Democracy 28 (2007)
Lessons from Europe

handle is hein.journals/jnlodmcy18 and id is 26 raw text is: How Democracies Emerge LESSONS FROM EUROPE Sheri Berman Sheri Berman is associate professor of political science in Barnard Col- lege of Columbia University. She is author of The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe's Twentieth Century (2006). Few serious observers today doubt that democracy is the best form of modern political governance. Solid scholarship has shown that democ- racies are less likely to abuse their own citizens, rarely if ever wage war upon one another, and do at least as well as other regimes in promoting economic development. Unlike during much of the twentieth century, when radicals on both the right and the left were skeptical of democracy's value, today the most important political discussions concern not whether it is desirable but rather how to promote and nurture it. In this regard, a long-running debate has pitted what might be called preconditionists against universalists. The former believe that de- mocracy generally emerges from a particular set of conditions and experiences, while the latter claim that it can come about in all sorts of ways and settings. During the 1950s and 1960s, the debate was domi- nated by the preconditionists, who stressed the importance of various national prerequisites and deep structural factors such as levels of so- cioeconomic development, degrees of socioeconomic equality and group polarization, patterns of land ownership or agricultural produc- tion, or the prevalence of certain beliefs or cultural traits. Where certain configurations of these factors were present, successful democratiza- tion was likely; where they were absent, it was unlikely. Policy makers, the preconditionists argued, needed to take this into account, and ac- cept the disagreeable, perhaps even tragic, fact that in much of the world the conditions most favorable to the development and mainte- nance of democracy are nonexistent, or at best only weakly present. In contrast, universalists contended that democracy could emerge through diverse paths and flourish in diverse circumstances. They be- Journal of Democracy Volume 18, Number 1 January 2007 © 2007 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press

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