Democratization Process Quotes

We have unleashed aspirations of youngsters. Democracy is not going to go backwards. India is too big a country to be run by one person. We are going to accelerate the process of democratization and I think that is the biggest opportunity for Congress party because that is the DNA of the Congress

We keep looking at democratization as an event—like the fall of the Berlin Wall—but it’s actually a process.

Several experts on the Middle East concur that the Middle East cannot be democratized.

We should say to the West: "You have been supporting dictators for too many years. Don't expect the people to introduce democracy over night. It is going to take time." It took time with the French revolution, it took time with the Eastern European revolutions. And it is going to take time there.

With some reservation, it can be said that certain democratic elements are present in Georgia as well; but it is very clear that the government has to pronounce its explicit wish to resign before something is going to happen. On the western front, only Belarus is an exception.

As I understand I took most so-called democratic states about 200 years on average to build their democracies. That is why, when we go to sleep under totalitarian rule and wake up in a democracy, it makes me laugh.

The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in places like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on. So you have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality. All these things gave rise to the black power movement. The black power movement was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuation of this whole process of democratization.

The question now is how best to help the Iraqi people build a democratic and free Iraqi society that ensures respect for the rights of all Iraqis.

At the northern border of Azerbaijan, Daghestan by no means contributes to the democratization of the Caucasus.

In Burma, we need to find out what we have to do in order to keep the democratization process on track. Economic reforms have to be taken one by one. You see it's not just speed that's important, it's sequencing as well. You've got to get the speed right; you have to get the sequencing right.

The advanced levels which the democratic world has attained at the end of lengthy processes may have created the perception in the region that democracy is a distant concept; this perception can be addressed.

The transition from authoritarianism to democracy is not as easy as it appears in position papers – it is a rambunctious affair.

I used to do volunteer work in poor areas of Cairo, and people would gather their money together to get a satellite dish. You'd see them huddling around and for the first time seeing issues being debated on TV that had never been talked about before. And that is the biggest promoter of democracy you could possibly have.

Unless the military of a fledgling democracy becomes Westernized, there democracy will not long last.

I wouldn't call it naive but silly. History does not work like this. If you look at the dynamics of Eastern Europe or even Germany post reunification, you realize that change takes time. No one can deny the fact that we are still not there - I am advocating something which has to go from uprisings to revolutions. It is not coming straight away that it is not going to come but what we have to advocate is that the democratization process is always better than state dictatorship.

I plan to concentrate on helping set up a Pan-European political movement, inspired by the Athens Spring, that will work toward Europe's democratization.

Stable liberal democracy requires more than just a shift in political forms; it also involves eliminating the antidemocratic social, cultural, and economic legacies of the old regime. Such a process takes lots of time and effort, over multiple tries. Historically, most initial transitions have been the beginning of a democratization process, not the end of it—something that the tortured histories of today’s mature liberal democracies make clear.

We have been engaging the Government of Swaziland for some time on this issue of the democratization of Swaziland. In particular, I had asked the Deputy President to engage the Government on this and, indeed, he has. We will continue to do this, because we do think that, as has been communicated to the Government of Swaziland, that Swaziland must go through this democratization process, a constitution-making process in which they have been engaged for some time, and really seek a national consensus about it.