Rethinking Democracy: Challenges for global and local governance: Interview with Wil Hout

Abstract

Erasmus University, the Hague, reflects on challenges that democracy is facing and the need to continuously rethink what democracy is and means, and how this relates to reality. In particular, he argues that democracy, and democratic development, is much more of a local process than we might be willing to acknowledge and that external interventions aimed at promoting democracy need to be aware of this -that ultimately, it is the local and national dynamics and political economy that count much more than external influences.YZ: The theme of the conference was 'rethinking democracy'. What does rethinking democracy mean to you?WH: At the conference, I approached the concept of democracy and rethinking democracy from the perspective of political science. Let me quote Jack Lively's Democracy, a little book that was published in 1975 and that I read during one of my first year courses in political science at Erasmus University in the early 1980s. In chapter 2, on the meaning of democracy, Lively says: 'Despite the apparent absence of difficulty, merely to state the simple definition [of democracy as the rule by the people] is to run immediately into a host of definitional ambiguities'. That observation about democracy has informed my thinking on the topic ever since. For me, as I think for most political scientists, democracy is an essentially contested concept.In the context of democracy, a continuous rethinking has always been and will always be necessary. We always will need to consider what democracy is and whether the concept is still applicable to contemporary reality. The situation of, let's say, the 1970s is incomparable with the situation that we are facing now. Classical notions of democracy may not easily apply to contemporary political realities. There is a second layer to the rethinking of democracy: the assumed linearity that characterizes much of the discourse on democracy needs to be revisited. The path from authoritarianism to democracy isn't linear, as is sometimes suggested in work on political developments. The seminal work of Francis Fukuyama on the end of history and Samuel Huntington on the third wave of democracy, both published at the end of the Cold War, demonstrate this point: both authors pictured democracy as a normative ideal that had been spreading to ever more countries. Now, some 25 years later, a shadow has been cast over the optimism voiced by