Contemporary approaches to democracy promotion

A clear definition of ‘democracy promotion’ is rather difficult to come by, partly because ‘democracy’ is a highly contested concept whose meaning ranges from majoritarian or popular rule, through the institution of elections through which this rule is often, but not always, established, to respect for individual rights even in the absence of a general franchise.Footnote ¹⁹ In line with this theoretical confusion, the term ‘democracy’ has historically been applied to a wide variety of political communities – ranging from indigenous tribal societies through ancient Greek city states and contemporary ‘illiberal’ or ‘authoritarian’ democracies to modern Western liberal democracies.Footnote ²⁰ While the term ‘democracy’ remains essentially contested, the ‘rise of illiberal democracy’Footnote ²¹ since the mid-1990s has led to a clarification of the goal of ‘democracy promotion’ policies. Such policies, it became clear, were ultimately neither content with the introduction of elections nor with respect for liberal values. Instead, democracy promotion policies aim to establish the kind of polities that provide the model for democracy promotion: ‘modern, representative, liberal, political democracy as practiced within nation-states’Footnote ²² – for short, liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy in turn is understood as a conglomerate of characteristics generally found in, or associated with, European (settler) states. These states and their transition to democracy provide the main model for both major periods of democracy promotion since the Second World War: modernisation theories and policies in the 1950s and 60sFootnote ²³ and transition theories and democracy promotion policies especially in the 1990s.Footnote ²⁴ In addition, the case of South Africa seemed to prove that democratisation was possible in deeply divided societies; Spain became a model for step-by-step democratisation of authoritarian regimes; and Hungary and Poland played a similar role for the ‘triple’ transition from communism.Footnote ²⁵ Finally, the cases of Germany and Japan after the Second World War are frequently cited in support of the notion that democracy can successfully be promoted by foreign actors.

It is, nevertheless, the history of Western liberal democratic states that provides the basis for the main theoretical approaches to democracy promotion. These fall into two broad groups, a political and an economic approach, in line with the disciplinary distinction between politics and economics. These two approaches, I will now show, provide rather different and at times contradictory interpretations of the history of liberal internationalism.

According to the political approach, the emergence and democratisation of liberalism in Europe and America has its roots in a particular political culture – characterised by secularisation and the ‘taming of politics’ which led to the ‘invention’ of liberal ideas.Footnote ²⁶ The subsequent expansion of liberalism is explained by ‘the spread of liberal ideas of the natural freedom and equality of all human beings’ which ‘doomed any special and substantial privileges enjoyed on the basis of heredity’ and ‘eventually undermined any effort to exclude people from political participation on the basis of such factors as race, religion, or sex’.Footnote ²⁷ This explanation is supported with reference to the fact that it was the ruling elites themselves who eventually outbid each other in extending the franchise,Footnote ²⁸ and with reference to the comparatively early introduction of universal (male) suffrage in America, assumed to be rooted in a relatively progressive political imagination on the part of American citizens who had left the traditional hierarchical political societies of Europe behind.Footnote ²⁹

Theoretically, this political approach sees liberalism or individual freedom as a ‘necessary condition’ for democracyFootnote ³⁰ which explains the sequential development of liberalism and democracy in much of European and American history. According to this account, constitutional liberalism is ‘naturally “democratic”’.Footnote ³¹ Yet, if the freedom of the individual is a precondition for democracy, than the latter must not be confused with majority rule.Footnote ³² After all, ‘there is reason to fear that a government responsive to popular majorities will be tempted to violate the rights of unpopular individuals or minorities’.Footnote ³³ In this view, only liberal democracies are democracies – even if they limit the franchise.Footnote ³⁴

This development of liberal and democratic political institutions was historically frequently accompanied by technological and economic development.Footnote ³⁵ Yet, while economic development is widely seen as ‘very helpful’ for the process of democratisation, it is ‘neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for stable democracy’.Footnote ³⁶ Since liberalism was, a hundred years ago, not at all associated with providing economic benefits, ‘a “poor democracy” is equally conceivable and possible’.Footnote ³⁷ Indeed, economic development itself, according to this account, has its roots in technological innovation which, in turn, was made possible by the culture of logic and rationality the West inherited from ancient Greece.Footnote ³⁸ In short, both economic and technological development as well as liberal political institutions have their roots in a particular, Western, political culture.

The political approach thus adds economic development as a helpful factor but fails to provide a theoretical account of its role in the development of liberal democracy (in comparison with other ‘helpful’ factors such as Western culture and values, religion, ethnicity) or of its relationship to liberal political institutions.Footnote ³⁹ It thus attaches additional factors to the political ‘master narrative’ without integrating them theoretically. Ultimately, the political approach holds ‘that the philosophy of liberalism contains within itself the seeds of its own democratization’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Democracy promotion policies based on this narrative therefore identify a traditional political culture as the main barrier to the development of liberal democracy and propagate policies focusing on the spread of liberal ideas and institutions. These prominently included such issues as elections, citizenship, civil society, the rule of law, decentralisation, anticorruption, and others that are designed to address precisely this political backwardness.Footnote ⁴¹ Generally, however, these policies do not achieve ‘the hoped-for dramatic results’.Footnote ⁴² While they are often successful in establishing democratic institutions, these institutions are subsequently frequently used to pursue decidedly illiberal policies.Footnote ⁴³ In short, most countries do not follow the path outlined by the historical model derived from European political development.Footnote ⁴⁴

These failures of the political approach and its neglect of the economic dimension of liberal democracy have given renewed impetus to the second historical narrative which focuses on economic forces of transformation. It is based on the assumption that the protection of private property is a ‘sacred’ principle of liberalismFootnote ⁴⁵ which played a crucial role in triggering economic and technological development. Initially, this protection of private property ran counter to the interests of a majority of the population, that is, of the poor who did not hold any property. Historically, liberals thus widely resisted the introduction of democracy on the grounds that giving the vote to the poor would simply result in the plunder of the rich – and hence in the end of civilisation.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, both Macaulay and Ricardo were ready to extend suffrage only to those social groups ‘which cannot be supposed to have an interest in overturning the right to property’.Footnote ⁴⁷

According to this account, liberalism and democracy are initially incompatible. And yet, over time the protection of private property and the resulting technological and economic development made possible a wider spread of property within society, and consequently an extension of the franchise to wider sections of society, hence the differential pace of democratisation in Europe and America. America was blessed with abundant land, a small population, and the absence of a traditional propertied class which led to rapid economic development. Europe, in contrast, suffered from a comparatively limited supply of land, a large population, and the presence of a traditional propertied class. And yet, since economic development and democratisation ultimately occurred in both cases, observers suggest that economic development is, in principle, possible anywhere.Footnote ⁴⁸

The economic approach thus recognises the constitutive role of private property, or economic development more generally, for the constitution and democratisation of liberalism.Footnote ⁴⁹ ‘Few relationships between social, economic, and political phenomena are stronger than that between the level of economic development and the existence of democratic politics.’Footnote ⁵⁰ Conversely, ‘poverty is a principal – probably the principal – obstacle to democratic development’.Footnote ⁵¹ Democracy promotion policies based on this approach thus aim to trigger economic development by following the European and American example, that is, by propagating privatisation and marketisation (more or less rapidly). And yet, despite following the successful models of economic development in the West, the results of these policies are extremely uneven – ranging from some highly successful to apparently hopeless cases. Income disparities are rising and it seems to be very difficult in some cases to break ‘the bonds of poverty’.Footnote ⁵²

These failures of economic approaches to democracy promotion as well as the fact that economic development does not always lead to democracy have led observers to argue that economic development, or capitalism as the source of this development, is a ‘necessary – though not sufficient – condition for democracy’.Footnote ⁵³ Parallel to the political approach, analysts thus list additional conditions like Western culture and valuesFootnote ⁵⁴ as well as state capacity, a secure social and political order, horizontal accountability and the rule of law, lack of corruption, strong political parties linked to social groups, a coherent party system, autonomous capacity and public accountability of legislatures and local governments, and a vigorous civil society.Footnote ⁵⁵

The attempt to theorise the connection between economic development and such additional factors has given rise to a wide variety of studies exploring the political implications of the distribution of property,Footnote ⁵⁶ the development of the public sector,Footnote ⁵⁷ the impact of economic modernisation on cultural change, and subsequently democracy.Footnote ⁵⁸ Yet, this research tends to be based on comparative studies and focuses entirely on the relationship between economics and politics within the state – that is, on the domestic sphere.

Indeed, while the ‘internationalisation’ of modernisation processes in the context of globalisationFootnote ⁵⁹ has recently been noted, this development is taken to be historically unprecedented.Footnote ⁶⁰ All historical attempts at modernisation ‘conceived of development as a project linked to national economic and political independence’, based on national cultures, political traditions, national industries, and local markets; in contrast, it now involves a ‘partial surrender of national sovereignty in the political, economic, and cultural realms’ opening markets to foreign penetration, abolishing cultural barriers, and advocating political institutions developed abroad.Footnote ⁶¹ Hence, the international dimension of the development of liberal democracy is seen as a recent phenomenon that radically breaks with the historical record underpinning conventional models.

In sum, then, conceptions of democracy promotion can be broadly divided into a political and an economic approach. Both approaches are based on an interpretation of the history of liberal democracy in European (settler) states and seek to provide explanations for core phenomena of this history: the sequential development of liberalism and democracy, the differential pace of democratisation in the comparative cases of Europe and America, the nature of the historical link between economic and political development. Yet, the resulting explanations differ considerably. The political approach locates the roots of liberalism in a particular political culture and the economic approach in economic development; the political approach argues that liberal values contain the seeds of democratisation (ultimately convincing the ruling classes) while the economic approach views liberalism (and its ruling classes) as opposed to democracy and identifies economic development as the necessary condition for democratisation; for the political approach early democratisation in settler states is the result of a progressive political culture and for the economic approach it follows the distribution of private property; for the political approach, economic development is helpful but unnecessary while it is constitutive of political democracy for the economic approach.

The substantive differences between these two approaches provide the basis for different, and at times contradictory, democracy promotion policies, either focusing on support for economic development which is then expected to lead to political democratisation as in the case of modernisation policies, or providing support for democratic political institutions as in the post-Cold War period. Yet, support for economic development in the form of privatisation and marketisation – as suggested by the model of successful Western liberal democracies – may well run counter to the interests of the majority of the population and thus undermine political democratisation. Meanwhile, support for democratic political institutions may well stand in the way of moves towards privatisation and marketisation.

There exists, then, clearly a tension between the political and economic dynamics of liberal democracy which is not resolved in either of the existing approaches. And it is arguably this tension that leads academics as well as practicioners to separate the economic and political dimensions of liberal democracy promotion even while their combination is widely recognised as providing the most conducive conditions for democratisation. Hence, theories as well as policies tend to prioritise one or the other; the different policies are pursued at different times introducing phases of democracy promotion; they are undertaken by different actors. While governments generally pursue both policies, different ministries focus on different policies; while NGOs in general cover both dimensions, particular NGOs tend to focus on one or the other; while international organisations pursue both policies, different institutions will pursue different policies (the UN focusing on the political, the IMF on the economic, and so on). The tension between these two core dimensions of liberal democracy thus remains unresolved in academic as well as political practice. And yet, historically this tension has been sufficiently resolved to lead to the establishment of some mature and stable liberal democracies. And it is a thorough engagement with John Locke's reflections, I will show in the next section, that provides an answer to the question: how?

The Lockean alternative

Despite the considerable differences between these contemporary approaches to democracy promotion, both are based on the interpretation of the historical development of European/American liberal democracy – the same history to which John Locke's reflections also apply albeit in his case with fore- rather than hindsight. His work thus offers a perspective on the development of liberal democracy prior to the disciplinary fragmentation which underpins the contemporary, and contradictory, interpretations of this history.

In Locke's work ‘the central elements of the liberal outlook crystallized for the first time into a coherent intellectual tradition expressed in a powerful, if often divided and conflictual, political movement’.Footnote ⁶² It is thus not surprising that Locke is widely mentioned in the democracy promotion literature.Footnote ⁶³ For the most part, however, these references to Locke are fairly cursory and do not entail a serious engagement with his theory. Such an engagement is nevertheless fruitful, I will show, because Locke offers an account of the development of liberalism and its democratisation which theorises the relationship between domestic and international politics and economics.

I will begin by setting out Locke's theoretical conception of the constitution and democratisation of liberalism as a purely heuristic device whose explanatory potential is subsequently compared with the contemporary approaches. Locke's work certainly invites and deserves a systematic critique which goes, however, beyond the scope of this article. Core areas of contention and critique will nevertheless emerge in the exposition of the historical consequences of the Lockean promotion of liberal democracy as well as in its implications for contemporary democracy promotion.

Like most classical authors, Locke begins his reflections on government with assumptions about the state of nature. This state of nature of all men, he argues, is ‘a State of perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Yet, upholding this freedom requires self-preservation.Footnote ⁶⁵ And it is this requirement, Locke argues, that can only be fulfilled if ‘every Man has a Property in his own Person’ and ‘the Labour of his Body and the Work of his Hands’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Self-possession, property in one's person and the fruit of one's labour, thus allows individuals ‘the taking any part of what is common, and removing it out of the state Nature leaves it in, which begins the Property’.Footnote ⁶⁷ According to Locke, the right to private property therefore exists already in the state of nature, and it is this right that underpins and upholds the natural freedom of the individual who would otherwise perish.Footnote ⁶⁸ Locke supports this theoretical argument with reference to the historical origins of government largely based on information about indigenous communities in America.Footnote ⁶⁹ ‘Men are naturally free, and the Examples of History shewing, that the Governments of the World … had their beginning laid on that foundation, and were made by the Consent of the people’.Footnote ⁷⁰ And since this freedom is based on property, the ‘great and chief end therefore (of government) is the Preservation of their Property’.Footnote ⁷¹

Locke thus naturalises the (in fact man-made) right to private property which provides the necessary basis for individual freedom; such free individuals then demand government by consent which in turn has to protect private property as the basis for their freedom. In short, Locke argues that individual freedom is and must be based on private property for without private property the individual is necessarily dependent on others for its survival and thus not free.

Yet, this ideal formulation did not reflect the social and political conditions at the time of Locke's writing. In fact, it was precisely because most governments in Locke's time and throughout history had not been governments by consent, and because private property had not necessarily been protected, that Locke developed this theory and propagated it against the prevailing political positions, such as Filmer's defence of paternal government which he attacks in the first treatise.Footnote ⁷² In practice, he thought it ‘evident that there is a difference in degrees in men's understandings, apprehensions, and reasonings to so great a latitude, that one may, without doing injury to mankind, affirm, that there is a greater difference between some men and others in this respect, than between some men and some beasts’.Footnote ⁷³ A liberal polity could therefore not be established by simply introducing elections. Locke thus had to show how society could be based on the principles of private property and government by consent in the absence of a majority of individuals supporting such developments or, conversely, how the majority of the population could be made sufficiently rational to establish and maintain such a polity. In other words, Locke saw himself confronted with the task of promoting ‘liberalism’ in a non-liberal environment.

Locke's solution to this problem was faithful to the fundamental premises of his theory – and in particular to the linkage between freedom and private property. If private property was the basis of individual freedom, Locke argued, property owners would demand that government protect private property and hence their freedom. He thus advocated the extension of full political rights to property owners only – and the concomitant denial of these rights to those who did not own property. ‘Paternal Power is … where Minority makes the Child incapable to manage his property; Political where Men have Property in their own disposal; and Despotical over such as have no property at all’.Footnote ⁷⁴

This solution, however, directly contradicted his claim that, in principle, all people were born free and equal and thus had a right to consent to government. Moreover, Locke saw the tiny minority of property owners, ‘the rich’, who would have been accorded full political rights, as ‘mostly corrupt’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Hence, Locke was interested in extending the franchise and, perfectly in line with his theory that private property provides the basis for individual freedom and the rights that follow from this, he argued that an extension of the franchise could be achieved by turning more, and ideally all, sections of society into property owners. This was a neat theoretical solution, but in practice it threw up the problem where all this additional property was to come from. Once private property had been naturalised and Locke had committed himself to its protection, redistribution was not an option. So, Locke argued that private property was more productive than common property and thus of greater benefit to all of humankind.Footnote ⁷⁶ It was therefore justified to turn common into private property: God gave the land ‘to the use of the Industrious and Rational’.Footnote ⁷⁷ People could simply attain property by mixing their individual labour with the original common property. The privatisation of common property was thus the solution to the problem.

Assuming that land – at the time the most important additional source of wealth – in England was too scarce to provide the vast and rising number of poor with property, Locke looked abroad: ‘Yet there are still great Tracts of Ground to be found, which … lie waste, and are more than the People who dwell on it, do, or can make use of, and so still lie in common.’Footnote ⁷⁸ It was this common land in America which could be used, at least in principle, to furnish all individuals with property and thus make them eligible to full political rights. In short, ‘Locke … was offering the New World, specifically the colonial settlements of America, as validation of his sociopolitical philosophy’.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to this theory, the expansion of liberalism and its subsequent democratisation required three steps: first political rights were to be given to property owners only who would establish a liberal society; secondly, common property could then be expropriated and transformed into private property thus increasing the number of property owners; and thirdly, on the basis of this wider distribution of property, political rights could be extended.Footnote ⁸⁰

Historically, the establishment of liberalism and its eventual democratisation broadly followed the trajectory outlined by Locke. First, land owners and merchants who had become rich from the trade with the colonies – among them Locke's own long-time patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury – increasingly demanded political rights with direct reference to their property which led to a huge increase of members in the House of Commons.Footnote ⁸¹ And these men subsequently used their political power to institutionalise the protection of private property on which their individual freedom rested. In other words, this development led to the establishment of a liberal state characterised by the transference of de jure political power into the hands of commercial and capitalistic interests and the stabilisation of property rights in seventeenth-century Britain.Footnote ⁸²

Once in power, however, these men were not content with securing the existing property arrangements but systematically engaged in the transformation of common into private property – both in the domestic and the international sphere. Thus, Locke's work was frequently cited in Parliament in support of private enclosure acts which, between 1710 and 1815, transferred 6.5 million acres or 20 per cent of the total land from common into private property.Footnote ⁸³

These domestic policies were accompanied by the propagation of colonialism in which the Earl of Shaftesbury and Locke himself played a crucial role. Locke was secretary to the Lord Proprietors of Carolina (1668–71), secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations (1673–4), a member of the Board of Trade (1696–1700), he invested in the slave-trading Royal Africa Company (1671) and the Company of Merchant Adventurers to trade with the Bahamas; he was a Landgrave of the proprietary government of Carolina, wrote parts of the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, handled the day to day correspondence with the colonists in Carolina, and Edisto island was originally called Locke island. His writings, political and theoretical, cover all aspects of colonialism and consistently defend it.Footnote ⁸⁴ And it was these writings, particularly Locke's theory of property, that ‘preachers, legal theorists, and politicians’ used to base first the land claims of the British colonists and then those of the American citizens on the enclosure and cultivation of land.Footnote ⁸⁵ The same argument was also influential in Australia, New Zealand, Canada throughout the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁶ These colonial policies thus allowed European colonists to acquire property and, perfectly in line with the dynamic outlined by Locke, it was in settler societies like New Zealand, the US, and Australia that the promise based on such wider distribution of property – the introduction of universal franchise – was first realised.

In Europe, meanwhile, the gradual democratisation of liberalism was similarly in line with Locke's theory. Until well into the nineteenth century, voting rights were limited by property qualifications and liberals widely and passionately resisted the extension of the franchise on precisely the grounds that Locke had set out: namely that those who did not own property could not be expected to support and maintain laws protecting private property. Such resistance was necessary because the poorer sections of society vociferously demanded political rights. Upheavals, rebellions, and the threat of revolution were widespread and integral features of society: rulers had to be forced to give up power.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet, it was precisely the ruling elite's resistance to extending the franchise which ultimately guaranteed the liberal character of Western democracy.Footnote ⁸⁸ For the enclosure of commonly owned land domestically, colonial appropriation of land internationally, and the industrial revolution all contributed to economic growth that led to a wider distribution of property in society – in line with the widely noted link between economic development and liberal democracy.Footnote ⁸⁹ In other words, a sizable middle class slowly emerged and allowed liberals to lower the property threshold for voting rights gradually, thus extending the franchise – but only to those sections of society that had actually achieved a measure of individual freedom based on private property and who therefore had a stake in upholding the liberal character of government. Thus, general evidence suggests that a successful democratisation of liberalism requires the inviolability of property rights.Footnote ⁹⁰

Moreover, the transformation of common into private property remains at the core of liberal strategies to foster economic growth today. The last two decades have seen a remarkable revival of liberalism in the form of market economics, the privatisation of state-owned industries, and the trimming of welfare benefits by liberal democracies.Footnote ⁹¹ This latest round of ‘privatisation’ and ‘liberalisation’ targeted communal ownership of water and electricity supplies, education, health care, and the establishment of ‘new enclosures’ in the form of intellectual property rights over natural products and their uses.Footnote ⁹² Policies of privatisation and marketisation also lie at the core of the development policies of international organisations like the IMF and World Bank as well as those of individual liberal states.

The Lockean conception of the establishment and democratisation of liberalism thus appears to be broadly in line with the historical development of liberal democracy in Europe and America. Hence, I will now use the remainder of this section to show that this Lockean integration of the domestic and international, political and economic dimensions of liberal democracy accounts more comprehensively for the historical development of liberal democracy than either of the contemporary approaches.

The political approach, as we have seen, assumes that liberalism has its roots in a particular ‘secular’ or tolerant, ‘tame’, and ‘rational’ political culture in Europe. This claim, however, is directly contradicted by the fact that the period before the emergence of liberal ideas at the end of the seventeenth century was characterised by the bloodiest civil war in English (and European) history – a war, no less, which was in large part religious. The ‘invention’ of liberal ideas, in the case of Locke, for example, was thus not the result of a secular, tame, and rational political culture. Instead, Locke's formulation of what later became core principles of liberalism is more accurately understood as an attempt to find a solution to the problem of religious violence.Footnote ⁹³ This solution lay in the ‘privatisation’ of religion, in a clear distinction between the private and the public sphere. The public sphere, ‘political society’ says Locke, ‘is instituted for no other end but only to secure every man's Possession of the things of this life’ and thus has no right to adjudicate on matters of the afterlife.Footnote ⁹⁴ Conversely, while individuals may follow their particular faiths in the private sphere, they may not ‘obtrude those things upon others, unto whom they do not seem to be the indubitable Doctrines of the Scripture’.Footnote ⁹⁵ This ‘privatisation’ of religion, if practiced, does indeed remove religion as a cause of civil conflict and thus leads to a ‘taming’ of political culture in this respect. But it requires the protection of the private sphere which in turn is based on the protection of private property.

Moreover, this solution to the problem of religious conflict must not be confused with tolerance (despite the fact that Locke called his essay on this question ‘a letter concerning toleration’). For tolerance is conceptually tied to groups, not individuals, and practiced in the public sphere, so that the ‘privatisation’ of religion ‘has elided the problem of tolerance, obviated the necessity to be tolerant, rather than make people tolerant’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Hence, secularisation, the ‘taming of politics’, and ‘tolerance’ are historically not a cultural precondition for the emergence of liberalism but rather its consequence and as such based on the economic and legal development of private property and the private sphere.

And it is this protection of private property which also provides a more plausible explanation of technological and economic growth than the inheritance of a logical and rational ancient Greek culture. For even if Greek (or Muslim, for that matter) culture play a role in the technological and economic development generated in Europe, it is ‘the development of property rights over discoveries and intellectual goods, along with the existence of a competitive market economy and a tradition of academic freedom to experiment’Footnote ⁹⁷ that explains its timing.

Hence, the origins of liberal ideas are better explained by the interests of rich land owners and merchants (as well as Locke himself in the employ of one of these) who pursued political rights for the purpose of securing their property, and thus also their freedom, from state intervention. If liberalism is subsequently not associated with providing economic benefits to larger sections of the population,Footnote ⁹⁸ this does not prove its independence from economic foundations but rather the opposite: It was because voting rights were based on property that there was no need to make economic concessions to poorer sections of the population – until the latter had gained sufficient political strength to challenge this arrangement. In short, the roots of liberalism lie, as Locke and the contemporary economic approach hold, in the protection of private property.

Further, the claim that the logic of liberal values leads to democratisation and that this logic was ultimately internalised by ruling elites and, conversely, that the main hindrance to the introduction of democracy lies in a traditional political imaginationFootnote ⁹⁹ is equally undermined by the history of radical political upheavals in Europe throughout this entire period – attesting not to a traditional but rather to a radical political imagination.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ ‘The evidence’, conclude Acemoglu and Robinson, ‘is … consistent with the notion that most moves toward democracy happen in the face of significant social conflict and possible threat of revolution. Democracy is usually not given by the elite because its values have changed. It is demanded by the disenfranchised as a way to obtain political power and thus secure a larger share of the economic benefits of the system’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Indeed, it was the resistance of the ruling elite that ultimately ensured the liberal character of Western democracy because it provided time for economic development and consequently a wider distribution of property within society. When, finally, political concessions had to be made, voting rights could be extended gradually to propertied citizens alone who now had a stake in upholding a political system based on the protection of property.Footnote ¹⁰²

Contemporary explanations by both approaches for the differential pace of democratisation in Europe and America are similarly unsatisfactory. The political approach assumes a more progressive political imagination of the American population. And yet, the radical and violent history of Europe during that period clearly contradicts the assumption of a backward attachment to hierarchical political structures in Europe. Meanwhile, the assumption of the economic approach that early American democratisation was triggered by advanced economic development does not account for the fact that British technological and economic development for much of that period surpassed its American counterpart without leading to early democratisation.

The Lockean approach, in contrast, does not treat the issue as a case of comparative but separate domestic developments. Though early democratisation was indeed made possible in America (and other European settler states) because in these states property was more widely distributed amongst the population. Yet, the reason for this spread of property did not lie in domestic economic development per se. Rather, it was colonialism, the expropriation of indigenous, that is, ‘foreign’, political communities that generated a relatively wide spread of property in America. Expropriation through colonialism, however, does not pitch different sections of the same political community against each other. Instead, it created an alliance of interest between all settlers; ruling elites had nothing to fear, but a lot to gain, from extending the franchise in settler communities. The dynamic relationship between domestic and international politics thus accounts for what in terms of contemporary approaches appears as contradictory evidence: a radical political imagination in Europe, yet early democratisation in America; advanced economic development at least in parts of Europe, yet a wider spread of property in America.

It is this theoretical integration of the domestic and international political and economic dimensions of liberal democracy which provides a more comprehensive account of the constitution of liberalism and its democratisation in general. After all, it was the power differentials between European and non-European societies in the Americas, and later in other parts of the world, that enabled Locke to offer the appropriation of foreign land as a means to widen the distribution of property within domestic European societies as a precondition for the extension of the franchise to wider sections of society – a precondition which liberalism reduced to the domestic sphere could not have met, partly because its protection of private property precluded internal redistribution and partly because further appropriation of domestic communal property met its limit in widespread and violent resistance that could easily have turned into outright revolution. Colonialism, in short, is now widely regarded as having played a crucial role for economic development in Europe.Footnote ¹⁰³ In addition, it provided political and material relief in this fraught situation. It allowed the ruling elite to pursue a large part of its economic goals abroad, thus not adding to the already heavy pressure on the domestic poor. It allowed the domestic poor and politically disenfranchised to emigrate and thus relieved the political pressure on the government. And it allowed the government to export its poor, its criminals, its orphans as well as to offer employment in the administration of the colonies. Colonialism provided common political ground for rich and poor alike and thus bridged the gap between their otherwise mutually exclusive interests. And by doing so, it also enabled European elites to resist demands for political rights long enough for a sizable middle class to emerge. In short, the claim that the development of liberal democracy was historically a domestic or national phenomenon which has only recently been undermined by interdependence or globalisation is simply false. Both European and American economic development as well as the subsequent democratisation of their political institutions have been triggered by, and dependent on, international economic opportunities whose exploitation in turn was dependent on radical power differentials.

The Lockean account, finally, provides a theoretical explanation for some of the systematic contradictions arising out of contemporary democracy promotion policies. It suggests that policies promoting the spread of liberal ideas and institutions are based on the false assumption that ‘the slave must be educated slowly and painfully to understand that he or she is a human being with a unique dignity that can best be recognized by certain kinds of social and political institutions’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Instead, ‘the slave’ is fully aware of his or her dignity and demands its recognition quite frequently. These political demands, however, will only lead to a liberal political culture if they are based on the spread of private property within society. Inasmuch as the survival of individuals and their real existing freedom depends on communal property and redistribution (ethnic, religious, or otherwise), ‘indifference’ towards these communities is not an option – as nationbuilding processes have shown historically.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ In short, the Lockean theory provides an explanation for the ironic fate of many policies focusing on political institutions: while these policies are successful in establishing and spreading such institutions, in the absence of the required economic preconditions the latter are then frequently used to pursue highly illiberal policies.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Similarly, it provides a theoretical explanation for the disjuncture between the economic model and its practice, that is, for the rising gap between rich and poor states that makes economic development in ‘late, late developing countries (mainly in Africa)’ so much more difficult.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Unlike Europe at the beginning of its development, contemporary poor states are also weak states within the international order. They do not enjoy the opportunity of privatising other communities’ property or of exporting the negative consequences of domestic privatisation into the international sphere. On the contrary, they operate within an international economic and political system that has been set up in the interests of the rich and powerful liberal democratic states. And these interests, precisely because the latter have become democratic, continue to lie in growth necessary to provide economic benefits to their own populations. Hence, these states have a strong incentive to keep the terms of the international economic and political order in their favour. The international order thus provides the framework demarcating the possibilities and limits of political and economic development for individual states suggesting that policies of democracy promotion must address these systemic constraints in addition to, and in combination with, their propagation of particular strategies on the part of targets and sponsors.