Introduction to the Special Issue on Music and Democratic Transition

Abstract

The so-called ‘third wave of democratisation’, commencing with Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in 1974 and extending to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s, was widely received as marking an inevitable process towards liberty, even (to use the resonant prediction of Frances Fukuyama) ‘the end of history’. Yet historical research has more recently demonstrated that the processes of transition from authoritarianism undergone by countries around the world was troubled and incomplete, and marked by sharp conflicts over what democracy was to look like. In this, they reflected Pierre Rosanvallon’s diagnosis of democracy as representing both a promise and a problem for a society: ‘a promise insofar as democracy reflected the needs of societies founded on the dual imperative of equality and autonomy; and a problem, insofar as these noble ideals were a long way from being realized’. As we prepared this issue for submission to Twentieth-Century Music, Russia – once brandished as the crown jewel within this third wave of democratization – embarked upon an unprovoked military invasion of a neighbouring country and a repressive domestic crack-down on independent media and free speech, confirming a democratic collapse that is now widely regarded as two decades in the making. There could be no clearer symbol of the risks that accompany processes of democratization, and the tendency for new democracies (and indeed old ones that were once new) to retain imbalances of power from previous political arrangements. As political science has shown, democracy is an inherently contestable category. History evidencesmany different ways of imagining ‘rule by the people’, and any particular realization of core democratic principles carries costs as well as benefits, and reflects some interests in preference to others. This contestability is especially apparent in the political context of the transition to democracy after an authoritarian regime, often giving rise to a pronounced struggle between different ideas and practices of democracy. Reflecting this, our special issue of Twentieth-Century Music examines how musical practices in different national contexts formed ways of imagining democracy, and how these practices participated in the wider social struggle to define freedom and equality in the late twentieth century. Taking as a historical premise Samuel Huntington’s notion of the ‘third wave of democratisation’, the issue explores case studies from Greece, Spain, the German Democratic Republic, South Korea, South Africa, and Chile. How did musical practices instantiate ideas of democracy in these contexts? Inversely, how did different ideas of democracy inform musical practice? How