>From: joand315 <joand315 at ameritech.net>
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I hope you don't think I was trumpeting Kipling's ode to imperialism. My point was that it takes democracy a while to evolve. You can't just snap your fingers and have a democratic nation. In country after country we have held elections first, only to have those states fail, because we did not ensure that those countries had sufficient institutional infrastructure to function. I ---
I think there is an added element: There is a tendency to think that "democracy" however defined is the default mode of human social organization, something that everybody really wants, and left to their own devices that is the system they would willingly adopt. Despite its (sort of) having existed for only about 150 years or so.
Do people in tribal socieities really want "democracy" as we understand the term?
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