The Crisis of Democracy. What crisis?
What democracy? The case of Brazil or
saving the world by-and for-Uncle Sam.
Political Studies Association-UK 50th Annual Conference, (April 2000)Abstract
During the 1990s it became clear that democracy's global extension had not brought a matching degree of popular affection. In this paper I seek to explain this phenomenon by exploring the process of democratisation that began in Brazil in the mid-1970s. I argue that disenchantment was the predictable outcome of the mode of transition advocated by S.P. Huntington and by the 'transitologists' whose perspective emerged from the response to the mid-seventies 'crisis of democracy'. I argue that to the enfeebled citizenship which this produced was added a demobilisation of the class politics which had emerged in Brazil around the PT. With the democratising energies of liberalism and socialism curtailed I suggest that we may have to look to a new community-populist-politics if we are to go beyond the restricted options that Sam Huntington recommended in his 1988 plan to 'save the world'.