popular rule. Gradually, these two camps constituted the modern left
and right.
A similar antinomy opposed, in the international arena, those who
viewed the world as a democracy writ large, a society of sovereign
peoples governed by similar principles and able to cooperate in peace,
and those who clung to a more traditional, hierarchical vision of
international relations, whereby only power, military strength and,
when necessary, war could provide security. In the latter perspective,
even democratic revolutions, should they happen, could not transform
the ways of a world condemned to remain an anarchical society,
prone to violence and governed by force.
By the end of the nineteenth century, two new dimensions were
added to these conflicts, in response to the worldwide expansion of
capitalism. First, the debate about democracy and equality was
extended into a debate about the organization of production and
distribution, pitting conservatives and liberals, both favorable to
capitalism, against socialists of various stripes. This opposition
transformed party politics and shaped, too, the world of work and
industrial relations. Second, on a world scale, the debate about force
and order also became one about imperialism and colonialism, thus
including, at least implicitly, the fate of peoples outside Europe and
the white-settler colonies.
Democracy, peace and war, capitalism and socialism, and the colo-
nial enterprise: these four themes are rarely presented in an inter-
connected fashion when they are examined by historians. The four
questions, however, involved several common principles, and they
were intimately connected, as core issues in the long political conflict
out of which the modern left and right were constructed. It took fierce
ideological battles to give a definite contour to these two broader
visions, but the disagreements that were then defined proved coherent,
and they are still with us today.
Democracy
Until 1776, nothing resembling a national democratic regime existed
in the world.^1 In some merchant cities of Europe and in a few remote
(^1) Charles Tilly,Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000, Cambridge
University Press, 2004, p. 66.
84 Left and Right in Global Politics