A few years ago, it seemed absurd to question democracy's value or its survival. Formal democracy, in the shape of regular multi-party elections and at least some of the liberties and rights which are meant to accompany them, was no longer a rarity, practised mostly by rich countries. It had become the norm in Africa and Latin America and had taken root in parts of Asia (which also houses the world's largest democracy, India). Much of humanity lived in democracies, many of which, only a decade or two ago, were not democratic. Democracy had also become almost hegemonic in the sense that it was considered the normal, common-sense way of arranging politics: with some isolated exceptions, governments which wanted respectability insisted that they were democratic, whatever reality might suggest. In South Africa, formal democracy ended decades of white minority rule and was widely embraced by most citizens. This mirrored the international trend – modern people were confirmed democrats and the system's only opponents were small groups of hold-outs on the right and left.

This brief period of democratic triumph is now under threat. In contrast to earlier periods of democratic breakdown – the collapse of democracies in Europe in the 1930s and in Latin America in the 1970s – democracies have not been replaced by other forms of government. But champions of the liberal democracy which spread across the globe from 1974, when a coup in Portugal triggered a series of transitions from authoritarian rule, have moved from unbridled optimism to deep anxiety. American scholar Francis Fukuyama's 1992 claim that history had ended because liberal democracy was the only credible political and value system now seems ridiculous – ‘a quaint artefact of a vanished unipolar moment’.