constitutive differences between the United
States and the rest of the west, and I have intro-
duced them as one way of underlining the need
to give more analytical oxygen to the specificity
or ‘exceptionalism’ of the United States, and
especially in relation to the projection of US
power. Furthermore, in any discussion of the
difference between Eurocentrism and Euro-
Americanism these three factors of delineation
provide one relevant basis for understanding
the contrasts as well as commonalities within
the west.
There are two further elements here which
because of the limits of space can only be swiftly
‘flagged up’. One concerns the need to further
delineate the differences within the west, that is
not only the need to give greater thought and
attention to the particularity of the United States
within the universe of the west , but also to realize
that within western Europe itself there are other
differences which relate to the historical speci-
ficities of colonialism – for example, the earlier
historical cases of Spain and Portugal (see
Coronil, 1996; Mignolo, 2000). A second element
concerns what is meant by ‘America’ and how
the multiple meanings and histories of this signi-
fier can take us into a discussion of the place of
the indigenous peoples of the Americas and
their specification of what ‘America’ signifies in
their histories and cultural foundations (see, for
example, Brysk, 2000). The term ‘America’ also
raises the issue of how Latin Americans are both
‘americanos’ and citizens of different nation-
states in the Americas. In other words, as a
general observation, it is important to be aware
of the need to avoid conflating the United States
of America with ‘America’.
Having outlined certain important aspects of
Euro-Americanism, including a short section on
the difference that ‘America’ makes, it is now
necessary to take our discussion into the area of
democratic theory, envisaged globally.FOR A POST-COLONIAL
PERSPECTIVE ON DEMOCRATIC
THEORYIt can be suggested that democracy has become
one of the most pervasive signifiers of political
thought. Perhaps like Coca-Cola, democracy
needs no translation to be understood virtually
everywhere. But the ostensible universality of
democracy can act as a screen behind which lies
the complexity of its multiple meanings.
Democracy is of course a classic example of afloating signifier, open to a variety of discursive
frames. In this context, we have a veritable
plethora of descriptors that vie for our attention:
to take one selection we might think of ‘direct
democracy’, ‘social democracy’, ‘liberal demo-
cracy’, ‘associational democracy’, ‘representa-
tive democracy’, ‘participatory democracy’,
‘popular democracy’, ‘radical democracy’, ‘cos-
mopolitan democracy’, ‘market-led democracy’
and so on. These adjectival markers testify to the
continuing struggles over the meaning, defini-
tion, content and political direction of what is to
be meant by democracy. How then do we con-
nect with the limitations of Euro-Americanism
discussed above? And how might we use the
insights of an enabling post-colonial perspective
to go beyond these constraints so that our think-
ing about the democratic and the global might be
able to avoid the customary pitfalls of the ethno-
centric universalism so characteristic of western
thought?
In an important statement on the cultural
particularity of liberal democracy, the political
theorist, Parekh (1993: 167) made the point that
western liberal democracy has often imposed on
other countries systems of government that were
not relevant to the skills and talents of non-
western countries, and that this kind of imposition
has tended to destroy the coherence and integrity
of their ways of life, reducing them to mimics,
unable or unwilling to be true to either their own
traditions or those of the alien norms imported
from outside. As Parekh appropriately concludes,
‘the cultural havoc caused by colonialism should
alert us to the dangers of an over-zealous imposi-
tion of liberal democracy’ (1993: 167). Not only
Parekh but other non-western writers and analysts
(for example, Dhaliwal, 1996; Rivera, 1990;
Sheth, 1995) have pointedly observed that
western representations of democracy and liberal-
ism frequently presume a universal relevance for
institutional arrangements and cultural values that
may not be equally applicable in other regions of
the world. Moreover, the historical and contempo-
rary context of the exclusionary nature of demo-
cratic societies in relation, for instance, to
questions of race and ethnicity, as well as the
geopolitical association of democracy with impe-
rialism, define a rather salient but often neglected
thematic focus. It is exactly these kinds of obser-
vations and critical interventions, emanating from
the work of non-western social scientists, that can
help us develop a series of questions concerning
the geographies of our analytical reference as well
as the prevalence of western ethnocentrism in the
conceptualization of democracy.
As a way of structuring my commentary, I
want to discuss five interrelated problems whichBEYOND EURO-AMERICANISM 4253029-ch22.qxd 03-10-02 11:01 AM Page 425