The earlier discussion mentioned the constant refrain of authoritarian governments and Northern cultural supremacists that Africans, Asians, Eastern Europeans, Muslims or some Latin Americans are ‘not ready for democracy’. But similar arguments are made by scholars and commentators whose concern is precisely the opposite – to insist on the right of other cultures to avoid Western imposition. They seek not to show that Southern cultures are not yet ready for democracy, but that Northern imposition on the South of particular understandings of democracy, or democracy itself, is a form of cultural imperialism which ignores the understandings of governance held by the cultures of the South.

Whether this view has any merit depends in part on how democracy is understood. The view supported here is that democracy is the right of human beings to choose. If we view democracy as popular sovereignty, it does not seek to impose values but to ensure that values are freely determined by all, not imposed by elites. If this imposes on people, there must be societies in which people freely decide that they do not want to take decisions which affect them – they choose not to choose.

The idea that the right to choose is a Western cultural imposition seems odd when we consider that Western powers have been chiefly concerned to deny people in the South that right. The record of major powers in limiting Southern choices during the Cold War is well known. In Africa, it dates from the first months of independence, with the overthrow of Patrice Lumumba's elected Congolese government. Chapter 2 has noted the use of Northern power to erode or deny popular sovereignty in the South where it was seen to threaten the North's strategic interests during the Cold War or, latterly, to aid Islamic fundamentalism. In these and other cases, the West has sought not to force other countries to choose, but to deny them choice when it clashes with Western interests.