Islam and the Claims of Democracy

At the end of the Cold War, a surge of triumphalism swept over the West. As the communist countries went down like dominoes, some authorities were ready, perhaps prematurely, to pronounce the final victory of democracy. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama first launched his speculative proposition that the end of the Cold War meant 'the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government' (Fukuyama 1989), and in 1990 Paul Hirst wrote: 'There are no credible forces seeking to overthrow Western politics' (Hirst 1990, 1). Eight years later, Ulrich Beck published his Democracy Without Enemies (Beck 1998). More recentlyJohn Dunn's sober assessment was that democracy has 'won the global struggle for wealth and power' (Dunn 2005, 20), but at the expense of submerging its traditional freedom ideals of equality and freedom beneath the 'order of egoism' (Dunn 2005, 124).