Session 6: Democratic Transition and Its Implications.

With the fall of the communist states of Eastern Europe in the early 1990s and the emergence of the ‘New World Order,’ many things were irreplaceably changed about the global political paradigm.

With the clear victory of the Capitalist West signaled through the material discontent that communism appeared to bring in the economies of Eastern Europe, one victorious system of social organization had apparently emerged. It seemed as if the global debate on the optimum political culture had ended, and the bipolar world of pre USSR collapse had now concluded that democracy is the way forward. A dangerous assumption had been made, a risky normative judgment passed.

Underlying this conclusion is an assessment that one system suffices for all. Democratic states have mounted a pedestal and have pushed hard to export their ideology through political clout, economic might and the creation of a global capitalistic and materialistic culture that is considered vital to the sustenance of the democratic ideology. The Heritage Foundation, one of the leading thing tanks operating in Washington, claims that an abandonment of welfare institutions and a continual lack of content with the state of affairs to an extent that is drives a desperate attempt towards improvement is indispensable for the overall prosperity of a people. Another interesting observation is that communist societies collapsed due to discontent brought about by their citizens’ understanding of their relative lack of prosperity in comparison to The Capitalist West. From this emerges the analysis that capitalism and democracy are closely linked in a scenario where each lends support to the other. The problem, however, begins when this set of normative assumptions is propelled as the only right answer and their holders assume superiority as if forming a monopoly over morality.

While Eastern Europeans forwent their ideology for material gains, not all ideologies are willing to concede their essence for the sake of certain gains. At the time of the Communist surrender and the glorious acceptance of the western model of Capitalistic Democracy as the sole system with a reasonable claim to optimality, there remained certain unrecognized peoples and ideologies that still did not buy into that claim of optimality.

As observed by a member of the LUMS Political Science Faculty, modernity is the ideology least tolerant of all belief systems that contradict it and most impositional upon them. It was this unrelenting and impatient export of ideas and the usage of mechanisms such as the IMF and World Bank that promulgated a certain set of beliefs that claimed to be universally accepted, but actually weren’t, that creates a very problematic international political scenario.