Democratic Transition and the Challenge of Transformation

Ours is an age of democracy. Democracy as a form of government, characterized by elections and the installation of a “representative government, has been becoming a global phenomenon. The fall of the socialist world and domestic and global changes in Latin America, Africa, and Middle East have brought democracy to places and shores where it was undreamt of a few years ago, giving people a taste of freedom. But the globalization of democracy as a form of more legitimate representative government has not been accompanied by genuine efforts to tackle the problems of democracy (such as the tension between equality and liberty, the dictatorship of the majority, the actual as well as manufactured disinterest on the part of the so-called citizens not to participate in the electoral process resulting in as much as 50% of them not fulfilling their constitutional obligation to vote – the problems highlighted by no other than the most thoughtful observer of democracy as a practice, Alexis de Tocqueville--) and to widen the universe of democracy in accordance with the historical changes taking place in social systems as well as in the light of a desired agenda of transformation. The present paper aims at presenting some of the crucial gaps in the theory and practice of democracy and suggests the way we can rethink democracy as a prelude to and a model of a genuine transformative engagement.