Democracies are not born alone nor do they die alone. The shattering of authoritarian regimes and the breakdown of democracies typically occur when they are happening somewhere else nearby. It was Samuel Huntington (1991) who first memorably captured this phenomenon with his notions of “democratic waves” and “democratic reverse waves.” When a democracy emerges, others are likely to be coming close in its wake. When a democracy falters, so too are many other democracies likely to be doing the same. That democratization is a “wave-like” phenomenon, subject to a dynamic of cross-national diffusion, is well known. Why precisely such cycles get started in the first place has evaded the sustained theoretical attention of scholars.
Seva Gunitsky’s book gives us a novel explanation for this phenomenon. Aftershocks is a tour de force, traveling across the twentieth century, simultaneously providing a parsimonious theoretical map of the entire century’s experience with democratic breakthroughs and breakdowns, while also remaining immersed in rich historical detail. Gunitsky combines theory and historical depth. He is theoretically careful, deeply informed by the most relevant historiography, and learned (for example, his prose is filled with unfamiliar but always pointed quotes, from George Orwell to Mark Twain and Mao Zedong).
The analysis is structured chronologically across four major historical inflection points when, according to Gunitsky, global power was reshuffled: 1918, 1933, 1945, and 1989. At each point, he argues, a “hegemonic shock” occurred in which there was a sudden shift in the distribution of relative power among the leading states in the international system.
These dates are, of course, familiar, but the author goes further, providing systematic and careful evidence of shifts in global power in 1918, 1945, and 1989 as measured by the volatility of a composite index of national capabilities (CINC), which measures factors such as iron and steel production, energy consumption, military expenditure, and urban population. In 1918, with these data in hand, we see the rise of the United States; in 1945, the ascendance of the Soviet Union and the United States; and in 1989, the reverberations accompanying the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is interesting that Gunitsky decides, though his own data do not support the decision, that the Great Depression and the subsequent rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime after 1933 should “count” as a hegemonic shock—albeit an authoritarian one that sparked imitators worldwide. While Germany did not surpass the United States economically in the 1930s, it provided a model to would-be fascists in Europe and beyond. This twist aside, the theoretical point remains that sudden shifts in the global distribution of power are a precondition for understanding democratic waves and reverse waves.
Why, exactly? Gunitsky argues and demonstrates that shifts in international power and the rise of new hegemons matter because they directly and indirectly alter the political landscape of other states. This happens via three mechanisms: outright conquest (e.g., remaking states in one-shot acts of coercion); inducements (e.g., longer-term sanctions, foreign assistance); and emulation (e.g., the dynamic in which conquered and peripheral powers imitate rising powers). When a new power emerges on the scene, this transformation reverberates through the international system, powered by these mechanisms, as the new hegemon directly and indirectly reshapes life in other states.
This argument is intended not to supplant but rather to supplement existing accounts. Democratization, as Gunitsky rightly notes, is normally thought to be the domain of comparative politics, and so scholars typically highlight its domestic roots, including a high GDP per capita, a large middle class, stable political parties, a well-organized civil society, or low socioeconomic inequality. He does not reject the importance of these factors in explaining why democracies endure over the long run. He simply believes that at certain key moments, especially at the beginning of momentous transnational democratic waves, international factors may matter more.
For example, once the United States emerged victorious against the great German war-making machine in 1918–19, calls to make the world safe for democracy were bolstered precisely because of the rise of the United States. First, the initial terms of peace required the end of Wilhelmine monarchy and democracy in Germany, reinforcing the prodemocratic forces within Germany and other fledgling democracies. Second, the promise of foreign aid and loans softened the opposition of recalcitrant enemies of democracy—even if for short-run and opportunistic reasons. And the military success of the United States itself suggested that democracies could fight wars, providing a model worthy of imitation. Democracy spread, becoming in James Bryce’s (1922) famous words, “universally accepted.”
We see variations on this theme after 1945 and after 1989 as well. The post-1945 context differed from the post-1918 environment, according to Gunitsky’s measures of hegemonic power, since two new and competing hegemons, the Soviet Union and the United States, straddled and competed for control of the globe. In wartime and after, America’s hegemony unleashed a democratizing impulse across the globe, especially in the mid 1940s. And in the post–Cold War environment, the author’s perspective generates new insights. Huntington’s “third wave” of democracy, which often is thought to have begun with Portugal’s 1974 democratic transition, is too monolithic a category in Gunitsky’s view. The regional cluster of southern European and Latin American democratic transitions of the 1970s and 1980s, to Gunitsky, needs to be delineated from the more sweeping fallout of the collapse of the hierarchical Soviet world order that began in 1989, with reverberations in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. The sudden shift in the global distribution of power that came from the sudden fall of the Soviet Union left, as he puts it, “third world orphans” in place, creating a temporary surge in the number of democracies worldwide. This retelling of the post-1989 democratic era is one of the most compelling and lasting contributions of the book.
At several points in his analysis of hegemonic shocks, Gunitsky uses the language of “positive feedback,” suggesting a path-dependent process at work. This makes sense. In politics, after all, victories lock in advantages that become self-reinforcing over time. As Paul Pierson (2015) has argued in a different context, power is self-reinforcing because it brings with it a one-time transfer of stocks, a rechanneling of resource flows, an inducement to fence-sitters to join the winning side, and the opportunity to control public debate and discourse. At first glance, nowhere ought the dictum “power begets power” be more relevant than with hegemonic shocks, because wars and military victories are critical junctures that typically have enduring effects.
Can Gunitsky’s thesis also make sense of why democracies founder after global surges in the number of democracies? This, it turns out, is the most challenging test of Gunitsky’s framework. The theoretical framework is intended to explain, after all, not only why waves of democratization get unleashed but also why democracy misfires and why reverse waves occur. One of the virtues of Aftershocks is precisely the recognition that diffusion is not a one-way street—and that waves of democratization always crest and moments of optimism are superseded by democratic backsliding. What explains these reversals? Gunitsky answers the question this way: “[D]emocratic failures . . . ha[ve] their origins in the same factors that initially created the wave” (p. 68), and “autocratic rollback . . . is baked into the dynamics of transnational regime cascades” (p. 59). In particular, he identifies four mechanisms through which a rising hegemon’s influence saps away over time, creating counterwaves: the decline of external pressures, the dissolution of prodemocratic domestic coalitions, the adaptation of autocrats, and the realization that democratic activists have overestimated their chances for success.
These points are central because the problem Gunitsky calls “overstretch” comes from democracy’s spread to countries where it ultimately cannot survive (e.g., Poland after 1918; Peru after 1945; Zaire after 1990). This, he asserts, is an endogenous part of regime cascades. Here, however, are the limits of a view focusing on international dynamics. Overstretch, or regime cascades into inhospitable settings, is a function not merely of regime cascades themselves but of democracy’s extension into contexts marked by the domestic variables that comparativists have long highlighted—low GDP per capita, a weak party system, or inadequate civil society. To the author’s credit, he willingly admits that rollback happens when international power encounters inhospitable domestic environments. It is, he claims, the interaction of international and domestic variables that matter.
Yet if domestic politics and economics can be insurmountable, as Gunitsky admits, what does this tell us about the importance of “hegemonic shocks”? Ironically, if anything, this core finding suggests that path-dependent “shocks” might be more anemic than they may at first appear. In the short run, military victory or the rise of new powers appears to change politics globally. But, in this case, power seems not to beget power. The “aftershocks” of rising powers are short-lived, and the path dependence of domestic politics and economics ultimately simply trumps the much more short-lived path dependence of hegemonic shocks.
Nonetheless, Gunitsky has given us a powerful lens to understand not only the past but the present as well. In a last chapter, he raises the question of what the long-run decline of the United States and the accompanying rise of China tell us about the future of democracy and authoritarianism. His account provocatively gives us a distinctive vantage point on the contemporary crisis of democracy around the world. Perhaps, the crisis of democracy is rooted in an inexorable shifting of global power that is happening around us. If Gunitsky is correct, however, his book’s main findings suggest that new and old democracies’ crises may not be inexorable. The crises might have distant global sources, but the ability of democracies to survive hinges on the actions of political leaders and collective actors, as well as on how well built their domestic political and economic institutions are in the first place.
