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In contrast, the American fighters for independence and the revolutionaries in France contributed greatly to an understanding of the need for democracy as a general system. The rebels who forced restraint on the king of England through the Magna Carta saw the need as an entirely local one. The idea of democracy as a universal commitment is quite new, and it is quintessentially a product of the twentieth century. It was in the twentieth century, however, that the idea of democracy became established as the “normal” form of government to which any nation is entitled–whether in Europe, America, Asia, or Africa. Its gradual–and ultimately triumphant–emergence as a working system of governance was bolstered by many developments, from the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, to the French and the American Revolutions in the eighteenth century, to the widening of the franchise in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century. Thereafter, democracy as we know it took a long time to emerge. 1 But it is really in ancient Greece that the idea of democracy took shape and was seriously put into practice (albeit on a limited scale), before it collapsed and was replaced by more authoritarian and asymmetric forms of government. Piecemeal efforts at democratization were attempted elsewhere as well, including in India. The idea of democracy originated, of course, in ancient Greece, more than two millennia ago. This is not to deny that other occurrences have also been important, but I would argue that in the distant future, when people look back at what happened in this century, they will find it difficult not to accord primacy to the emergence of democracy as the preeminently acceptable form of governance. Nevertheless, among the great variety of developments that have occurred in the twentieth century, I did not, ultimately, have any difficulty in choosing one as the preeminent development of the period: the rise of democracy. This essay draws on work more fully presented in his book Development as Freedom, to be published by Alfred Knopf later this year. The following essay is based on a keynote address that he delivered at a February 1999 conference in New Delhi on “Building a Worldwide Movement for Democracy,” cosponsored by the National Endowment for Democracy, the Confederation of Indian Industry, and the Centre for Policy Research (New Delhi). The past hundred years are not lacking in important events.Īmartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for Economics, is Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Lamont University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. Even though that region is going through some financial and economic problems right now, this is not going to nullify the shift in the balance of the world economy that has occurred over many decades (in the case of Japan, through nearly the entire century). We also saw a shift from the economic dominance of the West to a new economic balance much more dominated by Japan and East and Southeast Asia. The century witnessed the rise of communism, and its fall (as in the former Soviet bloc) or radical transformation (as in China). We saw the rise and fall of fascism and Nazism.
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The European empires, especially the British and French ones that had so dominated the nineteenth century, came to an end. I found this to be an unusually thought-provoking question, since so many things of gravity have happened over the last hundred years. In the summer of 1997, I was asked by a leading Japanese newspaper what I thought was the most important thing that had happened in the twentieth century.
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