This book is about democracy, and how a small, poor country, ravaged over several decades by social strife verging on genocide at the hands of external powers, rose from the ashes in 1999 to embrace an adventure guided by the ambition to fulfil the golden promises of this most elusive political concept. To embark on an analysis of such a gigantic task, one needs to be equipped with a precise notion of what does democracy actually stand for at the beginning of the 21st century, and what can be substantively presumed to be covered by the word democracy, thus avoiding the pitfalls involved in semantic confusion over a very popular word (Coppedge 2012: 13).

In search of bases for a dense concept of democracy

Few, if any, concepts in the realm of politics have generated more heated debate, sustained far-reaching and prolonged controversies, and been subject to radically opposing valuations, than the notion of democracy. In our days, democracy is widely perceived to embody the zeitgeist of our time and to enjoy a ‘good name’ (Mandelbaum 2007). It is an ‘honorific word’ (Sartori 1987: 2). The ‘invention’ of democracy has been liked to such extraordinary feats as the discovery of the wheel, the printing press, or the steam engine (Keane 2010: ix). Democratic governance has been included, following the lead of Amartya Sen, as a central constitutive element of the notion of ‘human development’ (United Nations Development Program 2002). All good things in the domain of political life (and sometimes beyond its own borders) have been projected onto this broad notion, originating what Juan Linz has called a ‘pan-democratic ideology’ (2012: 228). However, the identification of democracy with so many good things as to emerge as a utopia raises serious questions to the political analyst precisely because, as T. S. Eliot wrote, ‘when a term has become so universally sanctified as “democracy” now is, I begin to wonder whether it means anything, in meaning too many things’ (1940: 11-12). More recently, Mark Warren has remarked that ‘democracy suffers from an excess of meaning’ (2006: 384).

A few decades ago, the Scottish political theorist and philosopher W.