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With a half a century of hindsight, what seems absurd is that anyone ever believed that democracy could not take hold in Germany, Italy, or elsewhere in Europe. Today Germany and Italy are liberal democracies with governments that protect the rights of their citizens and peoples  who live at peace with  their neighbours. Hundreds of millions of Europeans have no memory of life without democracy, and would surely pooh-pooh the claim that there is something inherent in European thought and life that makes the Continent unsuitable for democratic life.

Still, some people believe that the success of democracy in Europe tells us little about the chances of democracy succeeding elsewhere. After all, the democracies based in Rome, Berlin and the other capitals of Europe are said to rest on the strongest of foundation: broad middle classes, thriving civil societies, and highly educated populations. Others will correctly point out that these democracies were not built on entirely unfertile ground. The Germans had a brief, albeit unsuccessfull, experiment with democracy before the rise of Hitler. Republics flourished on Italian soil for two thousand years, in the ninetheenth  century, Italians fought for four decades for their liberty.

These arguments cannot be ignored, and had democracy only taken root in the Anglo-Saxon world and on the European Continent, they might be hard to refute. But democracy has spread elsewhere, both two cultures that have almost no experience with democratic life and two places that do not possess what are thought to be the natural building blocks of democracy. 

Excerpted from ‘The case for Democracy’ by Natan Sharansky