The Ashgate Research Companion to the Politics of Democratization in Europe - Concepts and Histories (Electronic book text)

'Democratization' is a concept often used in academic book titles. Yet not many of them deal with the initial breakthrough of democratization. This research companion presents an alternative view to the widespread assumption that Western democracies should be the normative reference for the study of democratization elsewhere. Rather, it questions the universal validity of such an assumption by searching the history of European politics and by paying specific attention to the struggles of democratization accomplished outside Western Europe. This way of reading history highlights neglected dimensions of democratization such as rhetoric, conceptual change, gender and time, all of which serve as new dimensions of a topic that is seemingly well known.The authors apply a comparative approach to analysing debates in the primary sources in a number of countries and languages, with the aim of situating the results into a broader European context. The volume consists of 25 chapters distributed among four main sections that focus on European democratization from different historical and analytical perspectives. Its objective is to discuss the politics, concepts and histories involved in democratization as a complex of changes that has altered the conditions of political action and debate in the continent for the past two centuries.The sections of this title are structured as follows. The seven chapters of the first section, Concepts of Democratization, focus on the historical and typological aspects of the conceptual controversies around democratization. The six chapters of the second section, Democratization Practices, refer to the operative practices in the politics of democratization. The six chapters in the third section, Democratizing Changes, connect democratization with more long-term historical and political changes. The five chapters of the fourth section, Contexts of Democratization, take a definite thematic or national context as their point of departure. There exists no comprehensive volume on the democratization in Europe from the eighteenth century to the present. This volume offers scholars, students, politicians, journalists and other interested readers a picture that avoids anachronisms by reminding of the topics and problems that political agents have faced before the quasi-universal acceptance of democracy.