http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1587571,00.htmlDemocratisation is an ugly word, bearing about as much relationship to real democracy as does a forced marriage to romantic love. The idea was the brainchild of political scientists and lawyers, who used it to describe the successive waves of countries that emerged from authoritarianism to liberal democracy during the postwar period and the constitutional alternatives available to help them on their way.
In the last couple of years, however, it has been press-ganged into service by the American government. The argument of the neo-conservatives who surround the Republican administration - and one that occasionally puts in an appearance in the speeches of George Bush - is that planting the seeds of democracy in the Middle East might make the place more resistant to virulent strains of Islamist extremism.
That theory is now under attack. Writing in the latest issue of the prestigious American journal Foreign Affairs, F Gregory Gause III, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, argues that there is no empirical evidence to suggest that democracy snuffs out terrorism.
Far from it, he argues. Gause produces statistics to show that between 1976 and 2004 there were 400 terrorist incidents in democratic India and only 18 in non-democratic China. There is, Gause concludes in his survey, "no solid empirical evidence for a strong link between democracy, or any other regime type, and terrorism, in either a positive or a negative direction". The problem is that democracy is inherently destabilising - if it were a technology, it might be called disruptive - which is why ruling elites have traditionally tried to keep it under control. The most democratic decade in Britain of the previous half-century was probably the 1970s, but few of us want to return there anytime soon.
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