Power to the People: Nationally Embedded Development and Mass Armies in the Making of Democracy

Abstract

Much current thinking about democracy and how it can be promoted is based on myths about how democracy was achieved in the West. For example, the association of economic openness with democratisation — the focus of a vast literature and the rationale for most, if not all, major democracy promotion proposals and programme — is based, implicitly or explicitly, on the erroneous assumption that the emergence of democracy in the West was associated, in some way, with the development of more open economies. This article argues that, in fact, the achievement of Western democracy is associated, not with greater economic openness, but with a number of socio-economic changes, such as the wartime mobilisation of workers, that led to the emergence of a relatively more nationally `embedded' capitalism, involving greater restrictions on capital and an increase in state regulatory and welfare functions.