Visions of the use of freedom: Competing concepts of socio-political order

The third wave of democratisation and especially the breakdown of the Warsaw Pact after 1989 led to Fukuyamas diagnosis that liberal democracy in combination with a liberal economy was the only viable option in the face of “a total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism”. Twenty years after this statement we know better. There are still numbers of states with political and economic systems following different lines of thought. When the “Arab Spring” began in 2011 the hopes that democracy will be established in a quasi-automatic process came up again and the mixed outcome up to date shows that democracy does hardly establish itself quasi-automatically.

The experiences of Africa South the Sahara after the democratic movements came up in 1989 offer a very good example for the changes of authoritarian socio-political systems challenged by democracy. We observe that once a certain political freedom was there - provided top-down or hard-won by protest movements - the unleashed political powers pursued competing models of socio-political order such as liberal democracy, neo-traditionalism,  neo-patrimonialism, theocracy or socialism. The interesting point is, that in many cases the result of this competition is a society and a state with a plurality and ambiguous intertwining of orders implying frictions and contradictions and multi-polar balances of power. Contrary to what many expect, some of these pluricentric (or heterarchic) systems show a surprising permanence. Socio-political systems in modernity may be much more diversified than Fukuyama had expected