“Concepts of Democracy and Democratization in Africa Revisited” by Apollos O Nwauwa, in Charles Nieman (ed.), Democracy and Globalization, Kent State University Press, Kent, 2005. (http://upress.kent.edu/Nieman/Concepts_of_Democracy.htm) ***** CONCEPTS OF DEMOCRACY AND DEMOCRATIZATION IN AFRICA REVISITED* APOLLOS OKWUCHI NWAUWA Bowling Green State University, Ohio INTRODUCTION As Chandran Kukathas puts it: “We live in an age of democracy fetishism” and “global political phenomenon of ‘democratization.’” 1 During the Cold War, the United States and its Western allies paraded democracy globally as a means to contain communism, even if quite frequently they embraced autocratic (undemocratic) regimes in Africa. Western governments and media also turned a blind eye to human rights violations by regimes such as Zaire, Kenya, and Sudan, which supported or claimed to support the West. 2 With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the concomitant demise of communism in 1990, however, a spirit of triumphalism swept through the West. The euphoric impression was as if “history had finally ended with the universal victory of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” 3 The post–Cold War era, therefore, offered the West, especially the United States, a unique historical opportunity to impose its political and economic values across the globe with Africa as a prime target. Western democracy and democratization became the precondition for African countries that sought foreign aid and loans, especially from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, in order to redress their dire politico-economic crises. 4 This “marriage of economic ‘perestroika’ and political ‘glasnost,’” as Paul Zeleza describes it, “seemed so radical, so new” in the emergent world order. 5 The critical dynamic for democratization, as Richard Joseph points out, involves the “domination of the world economy by the market-oriented economies, the geostrategic hegemony of western