 I'm Salvatore Bobonis, and today's lecture is Historical Waves of Democratization. The word democracy is an ancient Greek word that means people rule, or rule of the people. But the ancient Greek idea of democracy bears little resemblance to what we mean by democracy today. Most of today's democracies draw their heritage directly from the three western models of the United Kingdom, the United States, and France. Before 1800, there were at most three major democracies in the world. But over the last 200 years, the number of democracies has expanded dramatically to something close to 100. Still even today, most countries are still only partly, if at all, democratic, and only partly, if at all, free. Ancient Athens is usually held up as the birthplace of democracy. But in fact, all of the ancient Greek city-states had characteristics of democracies. Now, this is a photo of the Acropolis in Athens, the high city, or city on the hill that was the fortress of the ancient Athenian city-state. The dominating feature that you see is the Parthenon, or the temple of Athena, at the top of the hill. And even though this building and this photo is what we associate with the origins of democracy, in fact, Athenian democracy would not have been conducted here on the Acropolis. The Acropolis was a sacred precinct, a place for temples and the worship of goddesses and gods. It was not the place where people met in assembly, voted, and made decisions that affected their political lives. There is an arena or theater here at the base of the Acropolis. Speeches would have been held there and voting done. And there was an agora or open-air area where speeches would have been made and assemblies held of the people, not visible on this map. The ancient Greeks were not unique in their democratic institutions. Certainly Athens was not unique in its democratic institutions. All of the places in the world where small communities and small groups of people govern their own affairs had characteristics of democracy, at least in some points in their history. This is a still from one of my favorite movies, Eric the Viking, which is a comic take on Viking life. But it's probably not too far from the truth to say that Viking communities, like ancient Greek city-states, had something resembling democratic institutions. That is, they had assemblies where people spoke in turn and decisions were made based on the consensus of the people appearing in those assemblies. Now the people appearing in those assemblies would have been men with property who were adult full citizens of the community. Many people were excluded, women categorically excluded, slaves and serfs and other people who were not free, people who were below a certain age were excluded. But in general, among those communities, among those people who were included as citizens in these communities, there was a high level of democracy. That applies to ancient Athens, but also to ancient Sparta, the other cities of ancient Greece, as well as to these small city communities of the Viking world, of the Germanic tribes, of Northern Europe, and of the cities of the Italian peninsula. It probably applied in Mesoamerica and in Asia and in Africa as well, though we don't have very good documentation of it. The reason we have such fantastic documentation of democracy in ancient Athens, and relatively little documentation of democracy elsewhere, is that the Greek city-states, like ancient Athens, were lucky enough that when they looked out across their oceans, they saw the literate, civilized societies of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Thus, Greeks learned how to write, they learned how to philosophize, they learned how to create systems of thought, and as a result, Greek ideas about democracy and governance have been passed down to us in a way that Viking ideas and African ideas and Mesoamerican ideas and Asian ideas simply never made it through. The two most famous Greek philosophers of politics, Plato and his student Aristotle, were certainly no big fans of democracy. Plato in his book The Republic Equated Democracy with Undisciplined Mob Rule, Plato thought that in a democracy, poor people would always vote to seize the property of rich people and that inevitably democracy would descend into tyranny and a slide into the dictatorship of a single individual demagogue. And in fact, Plato may have been describing what he saw around him in the ancient Athens in which he lived. Our vision of Athenian democracy is timeless, yet in reality, Athens was something approaching a democracy for less than a hundred years. The golden age of Athens was very brief. In fact, Athens was originally a monarchy. Athens overthrew its kings and established an oligarchy or rule by a number of rich families. Those oligarchs were ultimately overthrown by the people and thus instituted, thus began the golden age of Athenian democracy. But then Athenian democracy quickly descended into demagoguery, into rule by individual strong men who convinced the people of Athens to engage in endless wars. When those wars were unprofitable, they convinced the people to expropriate the richer citizens in order to pay for them. So Plato's vision of democracy is probably just a description of the democracy he saw around him in ancient Athens. Plato's student Aristotle was also not a fan of democracy. That may be no surprise, since Aristotle was the court tutor to Alexander the Great, one of the most notorious emperors of the ancient world. Aristotle defined democracy in one place simply as government by the poor. Now Aristotle also in other places defined it as government by the people, and he was not always so negative in his discussion of democracy, but he did contrast oligarchy, government by the rich, with democracy as government by the poor. Aristotle thought that offices in a democracy should not be paid in order to discourage poor people from running for office. Aristotle argued in his book The Politics that if offices were paid in a democracy, poor people with no experience and no skill in government would run for office just so they could collect the salary. And so his advice was don't pay political officers like presidents and representatives, and if you don't pay them, only rich people would be able to afford to take on the roles. And Aristotle saw that as a good thing. Aristotle also said that democracy worked best when citizens were too busy and lived too far away to actually participate in it. Aristotle thought that the best form of democracy would be based in a rural agrarian society where people lived on their own farms. He didn't feel that way because he believed in the ethics of the solid citizen farmer. He felt that way because he thought that citizen farmers would not be able to take time away from their farms to actually come to the city and have discussions and vote. And even if they could take the time to do so, they probably wouldn't be able to get to the city in time to be able to participate at the time of vote was called. So Aristotle was a big fan of absentee democracy, of democracy in which people were too busy to pay much attention to politics and couldn't be troubled to vote. It would be interesting to know what Aristotle makes of our contemporary democracies where that seems like a great description of how people engage or don't engage with voting today. Though the vocabulary of modern democracy was drawn from the ancient Greeks, its forms of government are entirely different. And here it's interesting to note that it wasn't just the vocabulary of democracy that was drawn from the ancient Greeks. The American government in particular drew its architecture from the ancient Greeks. If you ever go to Washington, D.C., you will see Greek temples repurposed as government office buildings all over the city. And in fact, if you look closely at the Capitol, the home of the U.S. Congress on Capitol Hill, you will see a Greek temple right at the center of the photo with what looked like two office buildings on either side. Those office buildings are later additions. They actually house the House of Representatives and the Senate chambers. And then a huge Roman dome put on top. Again, the dome was added later after the wings were added. It was felt that the building needed a dome to complement them and make it look more grandiose. But right in the middle, the old 18th century core of the U.S. Capitol is shaped exactly like an ancient Greek temple. And in fact, America's leaders thought they were modeling American democracy on ancient Greece. In fact, however, they were modeling much more on a world they knew all too well, British democracy. The U.K. parliament, the English parliament specifically, is known as the mother of parliaments because the institutions developed in the United Kingdom became the pattern for all other democracies around the world. The irony of this is that the U.K. parliament became the model for other democracies before the United Kingdom itself was even a democracy. The United Kingdom had representative institutions in parliament, but it did not have the principle of one person, one vote. It wasn't even one man, one vote. In fact, only a small number of people were eligible to vote in the United Kingdom before the reforms of the 1840s and 1860s, and universal manhood suffrage only came to exist in the United Kingdom in the 1920s. The English parliament itself arose out of medieval feudal institutions that divided society into two groups presided over by a hereditary king. The two groups in medieval society were the aristocracy and the commoners. Now I should say right up front that most people were simply excluded from society. Most people were neither aristocracy nor commoners. Most people were slaves and serfs, slaves being owned by a person and serfs being owned by the land itself. The two groups had a personal owner and the serfs were in effect owned by the land that they worked. The parts of society that were represented in parliaments were the aristocracy and the commoners. The aristocracy consisted of two groups, the lords temporal, the kinds of lords you've probably heard of, meaning, you know, earls, knights, barons, marquises, the people who owned land and fought battles on behalf of the king, and the lords ecclesiastical, the high officials of the church, the bishops and archbishops, and bishops and archbishops in medieval Europe weren't just concerned with matters of the spirit. They also owned large amounts of land and ran quite large industries within their bishoprics and within their monasteries. These two groups, the lords temporal and the lords ecclesiastical, came to be represented in the British House of Lords. The House of Lords was the pattern for the ultimate formation of the United States Senate and in fact all of those parliaments in the world that are bicameral, that have two chambers draw their heritage from the United Kingdom UK Parliament, which had both a House of Lords and a House of Commons. The commoners were the free landholders, often called the yeomen of England, and the members of city guilds, the artisans and merchants who worked in the city. The yeomen farmers, the free landholders, and the city workers, the city guild workers and artisans and merchants, were people who were neither serfs nor slaves, they were not owned by somebody else or bound to the land, they were free, but they were not nobles, so they did not have representation in the House of Lords, instead they were commoners represented in the House of Commons. An interesting little fact about medieval England and medieval Europe in general is the custom that if a serf or slave lived in a city for one year and one day that person would become free, that is that person would become a city dweller instead of being tied to the land or tied to agriculture as previously. This led to the expression in English, city air makes a man free. In fact the air in the cities is often pretty bad, but by custom if a person lived in a city that person was a free person, or at least if that person was a man, that person was a free man. These two groups, the aristocracy and the commons, are the basic division that is seen throughout Western history and probably throughout history in general, and these are the two groups that together have been considered as constituting political society. In ancient Rome the two groups were called the patricians and the plebeians, and neither in Rome, both in Rome and in England, the difference between a patrician and a plebeian or between a lord and a commoner was not one of income, it was one of status. The rich commoners and the rich plebeians in England and in Rome were in fact much richer than aristocratic lords, but they did not have membership in that narrow aristocratic group. In the English tradition the power of the king to act as a kind of chief executive, binding together the lords and the commons, was limited both by law and by custom. The most famous law limiting the power of the king was the Magna Carta of 1215, guaranteeing all free men the due process of law. Now when the Magna Carta said free men, that meant first of all men, not women, and second it meant lords and commons, not serfs and slaves. Nonetheless, the Magna Carta set the pattern for protections under the law that would survive into the day when serfs and slaves were no more and everybody was considered a free person. The basic protections guaranteed in the Magna Carta were protection against arbitrary imprisonment, against the seizure of your property, guarantee of trial by jury, and the principle that justice should not be sold. Before this it was considered, well, if not acceptable, at least common and normal, that if you wanted to be forgiven from a for a crime you should simply pay a bribe to be forgiven from the for the crime. The Magna Carta established the principle that courts should be independent of payment, that people should be tried based on the merits of the case, not on their willingness to pay to be absolved of the crime. Of course it should always be emphasized that this guarantee of rights to free men excluded most of society, all women plus slaves and serfs, slaves and serfs were the majority of the population and of course women were by definition around half the population. So only a small fraction of the population were guaranteed rights by the Magna Carta. Nonetheless, those rights expanded over the years to become the core of rights that in developed democracies today are extended to all citizens and even in most cases to non-citizens. I should note that the theory of absolute monarchy, the idea that the king can do whatever he wants because he is the king and that he is divinely ordained by God to rule over others, that idea came much later. It developed out of the Renaissance in the 1400s and only became widely accepted in parts of Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. In fact it was the kings of France in the 1600s who claimed the divine right of absolute rule and refused to convene parliament in order to show that they did not recognize any checks in their power. The kings of France were the ones who promoted this idea of absolute monarchy. It did not exist in the Middle Ages and it is really an early modern invention, not a timeless understanding, at least in the western world. England at this time and before the 20th century in general was in many ways a free society but it was not in any sense a democracy. England almost became a democracy in the 1600s during the English Civil War but the problems that resulted during the English Civil War seemed to confirm many of the concerns that ancient Greek philosophers had about democracy. In the English Civil War the parliamentary party in the English Civil War was fighting against the absolutism of King Charles I. King Charles I looking across the English channel to France saw French kings claiming to be absolute monarchs and he wanted to be an absolute monarch himself in England. Parliament would not have any of that, there was a rebellion and King Charles was ultimately overthrown in the English Civil War. But the parliamentary leader Oliver Cromwell eventually became the dictator of England. He went on to the title Lord Protector and his title as Lord Protector in his office as the dictator of England was initially passed on to his son when he died. So just as Plato and Aristotle predicted a democracy doesn't last very long because it results in rule by individuals who are charismatic and who seize power for themselves and their families. In fact the first real democracy to stand the test of time was and remains the United States. The American Revolution was fought about 125 years after the English Civil War but it was fought against the same kind of arbitrary rule by English kings. Now this time it was not arbitrary rule by English kings in England it was arbitrary absolute rule by English kings in the colonies, in the American colonies. The interesting fact is that the American Revolution started in Massachusetts which a hundred years previously had been a center of parliamentary forces in the English Civil War. Massachusetts had actually sent troops in support of the parliamentary party in the English Civil War. And in fact in both the English Civil War and in the United States and in the American Revolution the most revolutionary forces were religious Puritans, Protestants who did not accept the legitimacy of the Church of England and wanted religious independence for themselves and to be free from both the government but also from the religious rule of the English monarchy. The American Revolution created the first true modern democracy which began operation in 1789 and it's really noteworthy that George Washington did not become the Lord Protector or King George I of America in the way that Oliver Cromwell became a dictator and later hereditary lord of the short-lived English Republic. There were some calls in the 1700s for George Washington to be made an American King but the colonies, the other colonies would have none of that and the U.S. Constitution established a representative democracy instead of establishing a new monarchy. Now the U.S. Constitution is an incredibly flexible document. In fact there's nothing about democracy in the Constitution itself. The Constitution guarantees representativeness in much the same way perhaps that the UK Parliament was representative but was not a democracy. The difference between the U.S. and England was that in the United States at the time each of the 13 constituent states was a democracy. All 13 states of the United States already had democratic constitutions and already had universal manhood suffrage, one man, one vote. In some cases with modest property qualifications but the property requirements were quickly discarded. By the early 1800s every state in the United States had full voting by every male citizen. Again that excluded women and that excluded slaves in the southern United States but nonetheless it was a very solid principle on which to move forward. With all 13 and future states being democracies over time the United States itself evolved from a federal republic in which states sent representatives to Washington D.C. into a democracy in which people elected the representatives to Washington D.C. That was a slow process that was pretty well complete by the time of the United States Civil War in the 1860s. Probably what made the United States so stable as a democracy and made it that prevented it from falling into the same kind of traps as ancient Dathons or as the English Republic under Oliver Cromwell. The big difference was not so much its democraticness as its freedom. The United States Bill of Rights was enshrined right from the beginning into the United States Constitution. In fact the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution constituted the Bill of Rights and were passed at the same time as the Constitution itself so that from the very moment the Constitution came into effect in 1789 it included the protections for individual freedom in the Bill of Rights and those freedoms are very wide ranging. They make it difficult for any government to dominate its citizens or to withdraw those freedoms since they are in the Constitution itself. Those freedoms include very first freedom of religion but then quickly after that freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, these freedoms especially freedom of the press allow the people to keep watch on government. People are also free from government oppression because they are free from having troops quartered in their houses, they have a right to privacy in their home and in their documents, a right that if the government wants to put them in jail it has to indict them via a grand jury, not simply have a prosecutor send someone to jail, there is a right to trial by jury so the government can't simply decide that you are guilty of a crime a jury must make that decision. There is freedom from indefinite detention, you can't just be held in a jail at the government's will, and there is freedom from cruel and unusual punishments so there is a right to a speedy trial and speedy justice, nothing like the kinds of gruesome punishments that prevailed in Europe in the 1700s. Probably the most important of these freedoms from the standpoint of creating and maintaining a robust democracy was freedom of the press. The United States had and has the most robust free press in the world. The freedom of the press is enshrined in the US Constitution making it very difficult for governments or powerful individuals to do much about it, no matter how much they may dislike the press coverage they have to accept it. This is very different from countries that have slid into authoritarianism, countries like Russia under Vladimir Putin or Turkey under Roger Erdogan where newspapers have been closed down or intimidated in the case of Turkey, just this year President Erdogan seized the most popular newspaper in the country and put government staff in control of the editorial page because it had been attacking him so aggressively. In the United States the shoe is on the other foot, the press aggressively attacked the government and at least in one case the press so successfully attacked the government that it led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. Richard Nixon had approved and supported the burglary of his political opponents. Richard Nixon was a Republican president and he had ordered the burglary of documents from the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building, an office complex in Washington DC. The crisis became known as the Watergate crisis and in this crisis Nixon again and again tried to obstruct justice and try to pressure newspapers not to investigate the crime and not to report on it. Two Washington Post reporters are given the most credit for bringing about Richard Nixon's ultimate resignation, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, their reporting on Watergate became immortalized in the movie All the President's Men where they were played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford. It's a great movie, I suggest you see it. In 1974 under relentless pressure from the press and investigative reporting about his crimes Richard Nixon actually resigned the presidency of the United States. Now Nixon had tried very hard to prevent the reporting of his crimes but the extensive protections given to the press in the United States meant that the press was able to operate independently and to keep him honest or if not keep him honest at least drive him from office. Eventually freedom of the press is more important for keeping a democracy operational, for preventing it from sliding into authoritarianism than any of the other freedoms that are guaranteed in the United States Constitution. The political scientist Samuel Huntington, influential identified three waves of democratization in modern history. The first wave we've already talked about, that's the wave that created the United States as a democracy that led to increasing democratization in the United Kingdom and also to the creation of democracies throughout Latin America as the Spanish Empire collapsed and the new countries of Latin America became democracies. This first wave of democracy culminated around the period of World War I and led to a maximum number of democracies of a little more than 20 democracies at the very end of World War I. Some of the new countries that arose out of World War I also were new democracies. But after World War I and with gaining momentum into the 1920s and 1930s, democracy receded and many countries fell into dictatorship. The most famous of course being Nazi Germany, which went from being a robust democracy in the 1920s to being a country where Adolf Hitler won an election and after winning suppressed opposition to such degree that there was never an election again until after World War II. After World War II there was another wave of democratization associated with the independence of dozens of countries around the world, many of those countries becoming democracies on independence. But by the 1970s many of these newly independent countries of Africa and Asia were, well the quality of their democracies was declining dramatically. Many of them experienced coup d'etats, illegal changes of government, military dictatorships and all sorts of non-democratic rule starting in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. But then in the early 1980s a third wave of democratization began. It started in Latin America and in Southern Europe where dictatorships were overthrown in some Latin American countries and in Spain, Portugal and Greece. But then it really gained momentum with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The fall of the Soviet Union liberated countries that were part of the Soviet Union like Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, but it also led to the democratization of all of Eastern Europe between the former Soviet Union and Western Europe. So countries like Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria all became democracies during this period. And so you see in this graph the rapid growth in the number of democracies to almost numbering 100 today. Ironically the first wave of democracy broke around the period of World War I or a little bit thereafter and democracy, many countries started to recede from democracy back into dictatorship after World War I, but ironically that was the period in which democracies became more democratic in those countries where democracy survived. Before World War I there were very few countries and states within the United States that allowed women to vote. Most countries and states had universal manhood suffrage, not universal adult suffrage. By the end of the 1920s there were fewer democracies than before, but virtually every democracy in the world that was still a democracy was a full democracy allowing voting rights for all adult citizens. These votes for women in these democracies however only came at a real cost and difficult campaigns fought mostly by women in all the countries that experienced universal suffrage after World War II. The most famous examples are the United Kingdom which granted women the vote in 1918 with property reservations and marital reservations, and the United States which granted full universal female suffrage in 1920 in an amendment to the United States Constitution. But it wasn't just the US and UK that granted full adult suffrage after World War II. Pretty much every democracy in the world became a universal adult suffrage democracy after World War II or after World War I. In fact there's some suggestion that the war delayed this transition, that it would have happened a little bit earlier, that the transition would have happened along with the culmination of that first wave of democratization, except that the war led to big social changes like this being put on hold. And thus as soon as the war was over the move towards full adult suffrage just broke out on the scene all at once. Suffrage movements existed everywhere, but with varying degrees of militancy. We usually distinguish between two types of women's suffrage movements. The suffragists, that is the movement of respectively protesting middle class women, and the suffragettes, a more militant, more feminist, all class suffrage movement. Though the fictional representation of suffragists is full of whimsy like this depiction from the film Mary Poppins in which Mrs. Banks sings for votes for women, the reality of the suffragettes was police brutality, hunger strikes, and forced feeding. So we think of suffragists, we think of American figures like Susan B. Anthony, but we think of suffragettes, the most famous figure was the British suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst. Pankhurst and women like her in the UK were imprisoned, regularly held hunger strikes, and then were brutally force fed by the authorities. Now force feeding is much worse than it sounds like, it involves stuffing a tube up a woman's nose and back down into her esophagus and then forcing liquid through it. It's a very violent process, especially when most of the women who were on hunger strike were force fed resisted, thus ended up terribly bruised and battered when they were force fed. And in fact the UK government routinely imprisoned women just long enough until they appeared to be starving to death, then released them back out. They continued to protest as they gained health, and when they were healthy enough to be re-emprisoned, they were arrested again and put back in prison. The women's suffragette movement, especially in the United Kingdom, was very vicious and viciously fought by the government, nonetheless it ultimately resulted in votes for women. First in 1918 when married women with property gained the right to vote, and then later in the 1920s when all women, along with all men, eventually gained the right to vote in the UK. It's only in the 1920s that the UK can really be called not just a free society, but also a democratic society. Of course in the United States, South Africa and elsewhere, full racial equality in voting took even longer. In some places it still hasn't arrived. In the United States black voters were suppressed in multiple ways and prevented from voting up until the 1960s in the Voting Rights Act. Here's a photo of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on the Washington Mall, the steps of the Lincoln Monument. Of course Martin Luther King Jr. paid with his life for fighting for votes for African Americans. On the right side of this photo is a story with a happier outcome at least. Nelson Mandela elected the first president of a democratic South Africa. Before the 1990s South Africa was, well, democratic in so far as it held representative elections, but only a tiny, well it's a small minority of the population of white South Africans were able to vote. The coming of democracy to South Africa was considered part of the third wave of democratization that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. Now in the 21st century many scholars are worried about another reversal in representative democracy and its associated freedoms, a new de-democratization. Now the de-democratization that's occurring today is very different from the de-democratization that occurred in Europe under the Nazis in World War II or that occurred in third world countries in the 1970s, 1980s or early 1980s, but nonetheless it's very real. In the peripheral countries of Africa and elsewhere the people who were elected during the last wave of democratization in many cases refused to step down. They are changing constitutions and using authoritarian methods to become presidents for life. In the semi-peripheral countries of Eurasia, especially in Russia and Turkey there has been a rise of authoritarianism in which countries maintain outwardly democratic institutions but severely repress freedom of the press and freedom of assembly in order to make sure that the governments in power stay in power. Even in the core countries of North America and Western Europe there has been a crisis of representation in which people increasingly feel that they are not represented by the people who nominally represent them in government. There has been an increasing gap between what people say they want on opinion surveys and the policies people actually get from their own governments and increasingly people seem to feel like they have no stake in the governments that nominally represent them. My own writing on American empire suggests that democracy is in crisis because the true locus of power is no longer the national government. Now I am not suggesting that there is a Darth Vader style evil empire that is conquering the entire world like the Star Wars empire conquered the galaxy. I am suggesting though that many of the decisions that affect ordinary people's lives are no longer made in their own national capitals. Those decisions are increasingly made in far away places like Washington, New York and London by people who do not answer to the people who are being affected. So if the decisions that impact your life as an Australian are not made in Canberra or the decision that impact your life as a Malaysian are not made in Kuala Lumpur but instead the decisions that affect all of us are made in Washington and New York then even if we have democracies at the national level that doesn't necessarily mean that our lives are politically organized in a democratic way. Simply put there is no longer the rule of the people. If the people are only able to rule over their national governments not over the larger forces that determine the realities of their lives. Key takeaways. First there have been three major waves of democratization in the 1800s, in the 1950s, 1960s and most recently in the 1980s, 1990s especially with the breakup and fall of the Soviet Union. Second, universal adult suffrage including votes for women became common in democracies only after World War I at the end of that first wave of democratization. And finally many scholars believe that since 2000 there has been a global decline in the quality of democracy or de-democratization. Scholars disagree over exactly what that means but nearly all of us see that something is going on. Thanks for listening. You can find more about me at Salvatorpabonus.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter covering global affairs.