The Date 2 July 2000 Represented A True Watershed In Mexican politics. For the first time in post-revolutionary Mexico an opposition candidate won the presidential elections. Since 1988, opposition parties on the left and right have slowly eroded the stranglehold on electoral politics of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (the PRI), which has been in power since 1929. Vicente Fox Quesada's victory heralds the end of an era; or does it? A dominant theme in analyses of Mexican politics over the past twenty years has been the tension between continuity and change. In this article I argue that Fox's victory is an important, indeed essential, component of Mexico's slow democratization process; but it does not represent democracy in itself. There are three areas where the longer-term outcome of these elections will be measured: first there is the willingness of Fox to carry out further necessary reforms, particularly in the areas of judicial and fiscal reform. To date he has signalled that these will be important policies of his administration but we must wait for the results. Secondly, even where he is willing to deepen democratic reforms, one must ask to what extent will he be able to do so, both in terms of generating enough support within his own party and in overcoming resistance from the PRI, which still controls significant resources and retains a majority in the senate. And thirdly, it must be noted that Fox displayed some worrying tendencies towards populism in his presidential campaign which serve as a sobering reminder that his own democratic practices may be questionable.

As Recent Demilitarization And Democratic Trends World-Wide have shown, the exit of a dictator of the calibre of Abacha (1993–98) in Nigeria may foster a strong desire among successors for transition to a more democratic order. As in Chile after General Augusto Pinochet, and in Spain after Franco, General Abdulsalam Abubakar, who succeeded General Sani Abacha, presided in Nigeria over a programme of transition to civilian rule. This culminated in the election of General Olusegun Obasanjo (retired) in February 1999, and his subsequent official take-over of government in May 1999. However, since new democracies often revert to dictatorships, the new government faces daunting challenges in Nigeria's search for democracy and political stability.

In The Early 1970S, Dankwart Rustow Stressed The Centrality of national identity as a background condition for democratization. A recently emerging body of literature has raised this important issue again, opening it up for further discussion. Mark Thompson, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, for example, have highlighted the centrality of the national identity question (they use the term ‘stateness’) in their recent work. Henry Bienen and Jeffrey Herbst see the emergence of a sense of national identity as a prerequisite for democratization in Africa, thus confirming Rustow's idea of sequence. Ilter Turan supports Rustow's view on the role of national identity in his analysis of the cases of Iraq and the Central Asian republics, while James Putzel uses the macro variable of the national identity question to explain why democratic politics is more difficult in Indonesia, which faces the risk of disintegration, and in the ethnically-divided Malaysia, with its weak national identity, than in the Philippines where disintegration is not an issue.