are symptomatic of much analysis of democracy
as a form of rule or political system and the
process of democratization in its social and politi-
cal dimensions. All five points relate to the way
we think about democracy in a global context
and they all impinge on the presence within any
global frame of the significance of west/non-
west encounters.
In the first place, it is worthwhile recalling that
many significant historical and geopolitical
events occurring away from the heartlands of the
capitalist west, events which have had a pro-
found impact on the course of social struggles,
have not infrequently been excluded from
western writings on global history. As one exam-
ple, which connects back to the prioritization of
the French Revolution, mentioned earlier, we
might refer to the work of Trouillot (1995).
Trouillot, in his examination of what he denotes
as ‘the silencing of the past’, shows how, in
much western scholarship, both Anglo-American
and French, the Haitian Revolution, with its
crucial connection to the struggle against racism,
slavery and colonialism, has largely been either
erased from theoretical treatments of democracy
or trivialized in terms of its wider import. A long
process of social rebellion from an initial slave
uprising in 1791 through to the proclamation of
independence in 1804 represented an indigenous
struggle for freedom, dignity and autonomy. This
rebellion played a central role in the collapse of
slavery and it also placed on the political agenda
the crucial connections between democratic strug-
gles and opposition to racism and coloniality.
However, such events have been customarily
overshadowed by a concentration on the found-
ing importance of the French Revolution for the
future of democracy, writ universally. But a
global, post-colonial perspective can be
deployed to connect the two revolutions, thereby
questioning the sedimented centrality of the
‘European moment’. As Dubois (2000) argues,
the slave insurgents claiming republican citizen-
ship and racial equality expanded the idea of
rights so that developments in the Antilles actu-
ally went beyond the political imagination of the
metropole, transforming the content of citizen-
ship and challenging the ethnocentric limits of
western political thought in general. But the idea
that a region of the periphery, where the agents
of change are non-western and non-white, might
actually have been more politically advanced
than the centres of western civilization has been
given, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, little
oxygen.
Although there are many other experiences
from the periphery – insurgent movements such
as the Zapatistas in Mexico, or experiments inparticipatory democracy as in Porto Alegre in
Brazil – that hold out lessons for a global con-
text, the example mentioned above is quite
emblematic. This is so since the French Revolu-
tion is always taken as a key origin of the theore-
tization of democracy and human rights,
especially in treatments of radical democracy,
and yet that other Haitian Revolution of the same
era tends to be shrouded in silence. One can be
reminded of the Nietzschean point that at all
‘origins’ there is diversity, and in this example
that diversity can be fruitfully used to disrupt and
to displace one influential current of western
politicaltheory. Furthermore, this point applies
not only to the French Revolution and the
European experience but also to discussions of
the origins of democracy in the United States,
where of course the abolition of slavery followed
on some time after the Haitian Revolution.
Second, when considering the established
view that the west has diffused and continues to
diffuse democracy to other parts of the globe, it
is necessary to remember that the West, and in
particular the United States, has intervened
geopolitically in societies of the periphery to
replace one government by another. Transgressions
of national sovereignty have been well docu-
mented. Niess (1990: 208–9), for instance,
records as many as 33 major armed interventions
by the United States in Latin America alone from
1853 through to Grenada in 1983. It is important
here to distinguish two elements: (1) interven-
tions which have led to the replacement of one
regime for another where the overthrown regime
may not have been democratic, as in the case of
the Manuel Noriega regime in Panama in 1989;
and (2) interventions which have led to the
replacement of democratically elected govern-
ments which were developing policies indepen-
dent of the United States. This is not to implicitly
condone the transgression of sovereignty when
an undemocratic regime is involved, or to forget
the enduring nature of US and western support
for a variety of dictatorial regimes in the Third
World (e.g. Chile, Indonesia, Zaire), but rather to
underline the fact that US interventions have on
a number of occasions led not to the creation of
democracy but to its termination.
With reference to Latin America, that region
of the Third World with the longest history of
independent governments, the post-Second
World War period was witness to a number of
key US interventions that ended particular demo-
cratic experiments. Guatemala in 1954, the
Dominican Republic in 1965, Chile in 1973 and
Nicaragua in the 1980s are all examples where
interventions effectively terminated democratic
processes. With respect to Guatemala, a particularly426 BEYOND THE WEST3029-ch22.qxd 03-10-02 11:01 AM Page 426