**1. Introduction**

There is an agreement in research about democracy building (democratization) that the previous century consisted of major ideological battles. Scholars on democracy building have argued that the last decades of the twentieth century consisted of a spirit of democracy with a growing number of democratic states around the world. From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, a global spread of new democracies occurred in most regions of the world—except the Middle East—and challenged post-totalitarian and authoritarian states, military regimes and

Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2017 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons

despotic leaders in Southern Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe. These political changes made scholars portray the global changes in terms of "the triumph of democracy," [1] "the end of history," [2] "the democratic revolution" [3] and how democracy had become "globalized" [4] as a third "universal language" aside from money and the Internet [5].

of these waves of democratization [9]. Most scholars who focused on democracy building agreed, however, that Huntington shed light on important historical transformations [10] in a suggested "two steps forward and one step back" pattern. Huntington summarized the historical changes until the early 1990s in three waves of democratization and two reverse waves. The first wave of democratization was the longest in terms of years covered (1828–1926). It was argued that the first wave began with the American and French revolutions and transplanted ideas of what democracy was all about and how democracy could be established. This wave of democratization included the spread of the political right to vote to new previously marginalized groups of society and to newly established states around the world, such as in the West, Australia and South America. The historical record showed how the first wave included democracy building in about 30 states after World War I. The wave of democratization did, however, halt and was reversed with the authoritarian and totalitarian ideologies developed in Germany, Italy and Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, which resulted in reverse democratic setbacks and authoritarian regimes in Eastern and Southern Europe, as well as in

Building Democracy: National and International Factors http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.71984 177

The second wave of democratization (1943–1962) lasted for a far shorter time compared to the first wave and was an outcome of the major international political changes of the balance of power that came with the end of World War II and the defeat and collapse of Nazism and fascism. The collapse of antidemocratic systems resulted in the expansion of new democracies in, for instance, West Germany, Austria, Japan, Turkey, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Costa Rica, Argentina, Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. The aftermath of the war became a window of opportunity for the new spread of democratic regimes, political rights and civil liberties in greater number of states, though primarily with the deviant cases in the communist states in foremost Eastern Europe and East Asia (China). It was the powerful role of the Soviet Union in a post-World War II context that eventually founded the reverse wave of authoritarianism and resulted in the consolidation of communism in the Eastern European states and in limited

The third wave of democratization (1974–1991) was argued to have begun with transitions in Southern Europe in the early 1970s and ended with major democratic transformations in Eastern Europe as a result of a weakened and finally collapsed Soviet Union. Democratization began in Spain, Portugal and Greece and peaked with the transitions in communist ruled Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania and the independence of 15 new states. The third wave of democratic transitions was, however, global in a geographical scope, with numerous new democracies established in Latin America and Asia, outnumbering the previous authoritarian traditions of regimes around the world. The third wave had great global impact on the democratic political landscape. As stated, "the birth of more than ninety democracies in this period represents the greatest transformation of the way states are governed in the history of the world" [11], and as a consequence, many scholars perceived the twentieth

Though the academic community had spent decades of research on how to explain and foresee democratization, the third wave of democratization came as a surprise [13] and sparked

democracy in Latin American states and some East Asian states.

century as the century of progress [12].

South America.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, authoritarianism has gone global and is challenging democratic regimes and the notions of political rights and civil liberties around the world. Recent studies from the early 2000s and forward have pointed at a potentially worrisome trend in new types of authoritarianism and hybrid regimes [6] comprising both authoritarian and democratic institutions. This trend may have left the world community at a crossroads of democracy and authoritarianism. The global spread of democracies during the late twentieth century and the rise of authoritarianism in the early twenty-first century have raised an interest in understanding and explaining how to build democratic states around the world [7]. This study chapter sets out to understand how to build a democracy by identifying national and international favorable factors for democracy building. Section 2 after this introduction illustrates the global patterns of democracy building over time and is followed by Section 3 on the theoretical foundation of democracy. Sections 4 and 5 explain the favorable national and international factors for building democracy. Section 6 concludes this study.
