The Worldwide Crisis of Authoritarianism

Abstract

The Arab Spring is merely the tip of a colossal iceberg in world politics. If the Middle East—which provides relatively infertile ground for democracy—is experiencing change, this reflects a pervasive process of democratization that has gathered momentum worldwide. As Carl Gershman, the President of the National Endowment for Democracy, notes: “the Middle East revolutions have already had a larger global impact than the… revolutions of 1989. This is because they were carried out by non-Western peoples who were once colonial subjects, so people throughout the world can identify with them.”² Like 1989, 2011 represents an intense moment of global reflexivity or growing consciousness about the spread of democracy. In turn, this is a major factor encouraging further demands for democratization. Even if the Arab Spring fails to produce a single new stable democracy in the Middle East, which is unlikely, it has massively intensified already strong pressures encouraging democratization on every continent.