democratic. Classical Athens was not in our sense fully ‘democratic’
since women, slaves and resident foreigners did not vote, although all
full citizens could participate directly in debate and voting on matters
of public policy. The Greeks too were inclined to see the state as
having more of a role in the moral sphere than we are accustomed to in
modern democracies. Similarly, Renaissance city states like Venice
had participative, but not fully democratic, forms of constitutional
rule. As is evident from the use of eighteenth-century Britain as an
example, Crick is not using ‘republican’ in its usual sense of ‘not
monarchic’ but in the broader sense of a state in which affairs are
public. As of 2000 around 63 per cent of modern states can be seen as
representative democracies or, in this terminology, republican
(Diamond in LeDuc et al., 2002: 211). A more detailed analysis of the
degree of democracy in contemporary states can be found on the
websites of the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy project
(www.carleton.ca/cifp) and the World Bank (www.worldbank.org).
Crick’s emphasis on the role of an independent private sphere in
‘republican’ regimes has been echoed in an increasingly strong
emphasis in recent years on the importance of the concept of an
independent ‘civil society’ as a mark of a developed liberal democracy.
East European writers like Vaclav Havel emphasised the moral case
for self-governing social institutions in contrast to their submergence
by the communist regimes they were opposing. This concept from
traditional political theory has been further re-emphasised by
communitarian thinkers and used extensively by policy makers in
international institutions such as the World Bank (see Axtmann,
2003: 82–92).
Autocratic, or ‘authoritarian’ regimes were probably more
common in the past than today, but they are far from extinct, parti-
cularly in the ‘South’. Derbyshire and Derbyshire (1991) classified
165 states by regime type and concluded that in the mid-1980s there
were 16 ‘nationalistic socialist’, 12 ‘authoritarian nationalist’, 14
‘military authoritarian’ and 11 ‘absolutist’ regimes – a total of 53 (or
32 per cent). These regimes were mainly in Africa but with three
from Asia and one each from South America and Oceania. On
Diamond’s figures 72 states were not democratic in 2000 (Diamond in
LeDuc et al., 2002: 211).
‘Totalitarian’ is usually used loosely to describe communist, fascist
and racist regimes. But clearly the intention of such a category is to
include both extreme right (fascist) and extreme left (communist)138 STATES