All across the developing world, efforts to create political order had to contend with a set of common conditions. Populations were exploding, and expectations for independence ran very high, often exceeding the available resources. Many developing countries were culturally very diverse, with little loyalty to a central state. Nonetheless, public employment mushroomed as the state assumed greater responsibility for economic development. In conditions of widespread poverty and weak private economies, groups and individuals sought to capture the state, or parts of it, both for the salaries and status it offered and for the opportunities for private enrichment that public office provided.

This was the formidable setting in which developing countries had to hammer out new political systems. The range of that effort was immense: Communist Party control in China, Vietnam, and Cuba; multiparty democracy in India and South Africa; one-party democracy in Mexico, Tanzania, and Senegal; military regimes for a time in much of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East; personal dictatorships in Uganda and the Philippines. In many places, one kind of political system followed another in kaleidoscopic succession.

As colonial rule drew to a close, European authorities in many places attempted to transplant democratic institutions to colonies they had long governed with such a heavy and authoritarian hand. They established legislatures, permitted elections, allowed political parties to operate, and in general anticipated the development of constitutional, parliamentary, multiparty democracies similar to their own.

It was in India that such a political system established its deepest roots. There Western-style democracy, including regular elections, multiple parties, civil liberties, and peaceful changes in government, has been practiced almost continuously since independence. What made this remarkable democratic continuity possible?

The struggle for independence in India had been a prolonged affair, thus providing time for an Indian political leadership to sort itself out. Furthermore, the British began to hand over power in a gradual way well before complete independence was granted in 1947. Thus a far larger number of Indians had useful administrative or technical skills than was the case elsewhere. In sharp contrast to most African countries, for example, the nationalist movement in India was embodied in a single national party (the Congress Party), which encompassed a wide variety of other parties and interest groups. Its leaders, Gandhi and Nehru in particular, were genuinely committed to democratic practice, which, some have argued, allowed elites from the many and varied groups of Indian society to find a place in the political system. Even the tragic and painful partition of colonial India into two countries minimized a major source of internal discord as independent India was born. Moreover, Indian statehood could be built on common cultural and political traditions that were far more deeply rooted than in many former colonies.

Elsewhere in the colonial world, democracy proved a far more fragile transplant. Among the new states of Africa, for example, few retained their democratic institutions beyond the initial post-independence decade. Many of the apparently popular political parties that had led the struggle for independence lost mass support and were swept away by military coups. When the army took power in Ghana in 1966, no one lifted a finger to defend the party that had led the country to independence only nine years earlier. Other states evolved into one-party systems, and still others degenerated into personal tyrannies or dictatorships. Freedom from colonial rule certainly did not automatically generate the internal political freedoms associated with democracy.

Africans sometimes suggested that their traditional cultures, based on communal rather than individualistic values and concerned with achieving consensus rather than majority rule, were not compatible with the competitiveness of party politics. Others argued that Western-style democracy was simply inadequate for the tasks of development confronting the new states. Creating national unity was surely more difficult when competing political parties identified primarily with particular ethnic or “tribal” groups, as was frequently the case in Africa. Certainly Europe did not begin its modernizing process with such a system. Why, many Africans asked, should they be expected to do so?

The economic disappointments of independence also contributed to the erosion of support for democracy. By almost any measure, African economic performance since independence has been the poorest in the developing world. As a result, college and high school graduates were unable to find the white-collar careers they expected; urban migrants had little opportunity for work; farmers received low prices for their cash crops; consumers resented shortages and inflation; and millions of impoverished and malnourished peasants lived on the brink of starvation. These were people for whom independence was unable to fulfill even the most minimal of expectations, let alone the grandiose visions of a better life that so many had embraced in the early 1960s. Since modern governments everywhere staked their legitimacy on economic performance, it is little wonder that many Africans became disaffected and withdrew their support from governments they had enthusiastically endorsed only a few years earlier. Further resentments arose from the privileges of the relatively well-educated elite who had found high-paying jobs in the growing bureaucracies of the newly independent states. Such grievances often found expression in ethnic conflict, as Africa’s immense cultural diversity became intensely politicized. An ethnically based civil war in Nigeria during the late 1960s cost the lives of millions, while in the mid-1990s ethnic hatred led Rwanda into the realm of genocide. (See Zooming In: Mozambique.)

These economic disappointments, class resentments, and ethnic conflicts provided the context for numerous military takeovers. By the early 1980s, the military had intervened in at least thirty of Africa’s forty-six independent states and actively governed more than half of them. In doing so, they swept aside the old political parties and constitutions and vowed to begin anew, while promising to return power to civilians and restore democracy at some point in the future.

A similar wave of military interventions swept over Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, leaving Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, and other countries governed at times by their armed forces. However, the circumstances in Latin America were quite different from those in Africa. While military rule was something new and unexpected in Africa, Latin American armed forces had long intervened in political life. The region had also largely escaped the bitter ethnic conflicts that afflicted so many African states, though its class antagonisms were more clearly defined and expressed. Furthermore, Latin American societies in general were far more modernized and urbanized than those of Africa. And while newly independent African states remained linked to their former European rulers, long-independent Latin American states lived in the shadow of a dominant United States. “Poor Mexico,” bemoaned Porfirio Díaz, that country’s dictator before the Mexican Revolution, “so far from God and so close to the United States.”

But beneath the changes in political regimes in Latin America lay the more deeply rooted transformations of the twentieth century: population growth and large-scale migration from rural areas to the urban slums of big cities; industrial development and trade union activism; rural poverty and sharp divisions between rich and poor; resentment against American economic and political power; and the influence of ideas deriving from European socialism, the American New Deal, the Mexican Revolution, and Christian “liberation theology.” All of this pushed Latin American politics away from the elitist orientation that had largely prevailed since independence toward concerns with economic development, social reform, mass participation, nationalism, and anti-imperialism.

These issues found expression in a wide range of political movements and government programs. Early in the century, the revolution in Mexico and a peaceful program of radical state-directed social reforms in Uruguay were early examples of the new politics. During the 1930s, the Aprista movement in Peru blended ideas of Latin American uniqueness, democratic socialism, the full integration of indigenous peoples into society, and anti-imperialism into a political outlook that had appeal in many parts of the continent. The “social justice” program of Juan Perón in Argentina between 1945 and 1955 enacted a large body of social and labor legislation, aimed largely at the mass of long-ignored and marginalized urban workers. A broadly similar program took shape in Brazil under the leadership of Getúlio Vargas. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 likewise gave expression to these ideas and sought to export them to the rest of Latin America. The 1960s and later years witnessed guerrilla warfare in Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia and short-lived left-wing governments in Guatemala, Brazil, and Nicaragua.

Chile illustrated both these new political directions and the fears they generated. In 1970, Chileans narrowly elected to the presidency a Marxist politician, Salvador Allende, who soon launched an ambitious program to achieve a peaceful transition to socialism. In an effort to redistribute wealth, he ordered prices frozen and wages raised. Nationalization of major industries followed—including copper, coal, steel, and many banks—without compensation to their former owners, many of whom were foreign corporations. In rural areas, land reform programs soon seized large estates, redistributing them to small farmers. And Allende warmly welcomed Fidel Castro for a month-long visit in 1971. It was an audacious effort to achieve genuinely revolutionary change by legal and peaceful means.

But internal opposition mounted—from the bureaucracy, military officers, church hierarchy, and wealthy business and landlord elites as well as various small-business and middle-class elements, climaxing in a huge strike in late 1972. Furthermore, the U.S. government, which had long armed, funded, and trained military forces throughout Latin America, actively opposed the Allende regime, as did U.S. corporations. A CIA document declared, “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup.”13 And in September 1973, he was. What followed was an extraordinarily repressive military regime, headed by General Augusto Pinochet, which lasted until the restoration of democracy in 1988.

Chile’s return to democratic practice was a small part of a remarkable late twentieth-century political reversal, a globalization of democracy that brought popular movements, multiparty elections, and new constitutions to many countries all around the world. This included the end of military and autocratic rule in Spain, Portugal, and Greece as well as the stunning rise of democratic movements, parties, and institutions amid the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. But the most extensive expression of this global reemergence of democracy lay in the developing countries. By 2000, almost all Latin American countries had abandoned their military-controlled regimes and returned to some form of democratic governance. So too did most African states previously ruled by soldiers, dictators, or single parties. In Asia, authoritarian regimes, some long established, gave way to more pluralistic and participatory political systems in South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Iraq, and Indonesia. And in 2011, mass movements in various Arab countries—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen—had challenged or ended the hold of entrenched, corrupt, and autocratic rulers, while proclaiming their commitment to democracy, human dignity, and honest government. What might explain this global pattern and its expression in the Global South in particular?

One factor surely was the untethering of the ideas of democracy and human rights from their Western origins. By the final quarter of the twentieth century, democracy was increasingly viewed as a universal political principle to which all could aspire rather than an alien and imposed system deriving from the West. Democracy, like communism, feminism, modern science, and Christianity, was a Western import that took root and substantially lost its association with the West. It was therefore increasingly available as a vehicle for social protest in the rest of the world.

Perhaps the most important internal factor favoring a revival of democracy lay in the apparent failure of authoritarian governments to remedy disastrous economic situations, to raise standards of living, to provide jobs for the young, and to curb pervasive corruption. The oppressive and sometimes-brutal behavior of repressive governments humiliated and outraged many. Furthermore, the growth of civil society with its numerous voluntary groups provided a social foundation, independent of the state, for demanding change. Disaffected students, professionals, urban workers, religious organizations, women’s groups, and more joined in a variety of grassroots movements, some of them mobilized through social media, to insist on democratic change as a means to a better life. Such movements found encouragement in the demands for democracy that accompanied the South African struggle against apartheid and the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European communism. And the end of the cold war reduced the willingness of the major industrial powers to underwrite their authoritarian client states.

But the consolidation of democratic practice was an uncertain and highly variable process. Some elected leaders, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Vladimir Putin in Russia, turned authoritarian once in office. Even where parliaments existed, they were often quite circumscribed in their powers. Outright electoral fraud tainted democratic institutions in many places, while established elites and oligarchies found it possible to exercise considerable influence even in formal democracies, and not only in the Global South. Chinese authorities brutally crushed a democratic movement in 1989. The Algerian military sponsored elections in 1992 and then abruptly canceled them when an Islamic party seemed poised to win. And the political future of the Arab Spring remained highly uncertain, as a military strongman became a civilian politician and returned to power in Egypt in 2014. Nonetheless, this worldwide revival of democracy represented the globalization of what had been a Western idea and the continuation of the political experiments that had begun with independence.