Introduction

The title of the Symposium Victory and Crisis reflects very well the mood of scholars in the mid-1990s. The wave of transitions from nondemocratic rule to democracy since the mid-1970s to around 1990 led to that feeling of victory of democracy. The work with Alfred Stepan on a book on Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (Linz and Stepan 1996), leads me to introduce a caveat on both victory and crisis. When we think of the victory of democracy since 1974, we tend to forget the failures of democratic transitions and the fact that democracy in many parts of the world, including two large countries, China and Indonesia, has not yet been victorious. When we speak about crisis, it is unclear if we mean by that the “desencanto,” the “Entzauberung” of democracy that, with greater or lesser intensity, has followed practically all the transitions since the Spanish in 1977, where the term was coined. Or if we are referring to some deeper questioning by the intellectuals and sectors of the public, perhaps influenced by them, about the functioning of democracies. In addition, there is the question of the consolidation of democratic institutions and processes in some societies in which formal transitions from authoritarianism have taken place.

What do we mean by victory of democracy? First of all, the fact that in many countries authoritarian and post-totalitarian rulers have been replaced by elected governments in an overwhelming number of cases without much bloodshed.