The Political Chronotope of Democratic Transitions: A Three-Dimensional Approach to the Contextual Analysis of Political System Change

Democratization is a process of political system change, generally defined as the sustained transition from autocracy to democracy that occurs at a particular time and place. The latter definitional component, which is usually taken for granted, is in fact largely self-explanatory: Democratization is physically and geographically determinable. It can be inter-subjectively observed and described as a temporal and spatial reality across political levels, disregarding certain epistemological objections at this point. Take, for example, the democratization of Chile after almost twenty years of military dictatorship: this predominantly non-violent democratic transition took place in the early 1990s, after the political fall of Pinochet, in the Latin American Southwest, bordering Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. In this respect, of course, each democratization is different because of the unique combination of its specific historical and territorial circumstances, with both a) time and b) space influencing the onset, democratic progression, and systemic outcome of the democratic transition. Therefore, it is certainly essential for theoretical and empirical ‘transitology’ to address democratization as a macro-political process in a two-dimensional setting. I argue, however, that it is not only time and space that should be used as analytical categories in the study of democratic transitions. Rather, there is an inherent conditionality and epistemic synergy that could be described as the third dimension of time-space or, more commonly, space-time. My aim is to innovatively transfer to the political sphere Bakhtin’s pioneering literary concept of the chronotope, which in narratology precisely describes the tempo-spatial interdependence and structural interplay that transcends time and space as separate categories of perceived reality. This is evident, for example, when comparing anachronistically the Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East starting in 2010 with the French Revolution, which began in 1789 and led to the first French Republic and the decline of European absolutism. In 18th century France, individuals possessed the knowledge, skills, and beliefs of that particular time and place, which is why reality, identity, and assumptions about destiny were constructed differently than they are in 21st century Arabia. If we recognize that the temporal and/or spatial diversity makes it highly unlikely that two democratic transitions will ever be identical, the assumption of a more complex spatiotemporal or chronotopic diversity makes this possibility essentially unfeasible. This implies, for example, that there is not only a) the ‘ideal typical’ democratization for Portugal or b) the ‘ideal typical’ democratization for the 1970s. Instead, space and time develop a joint impetus, so that c) the Portuguese democratization of the 1970s is unique due to a specific space-time equilibrium. This insight, to anticipate a final remark, certainly does not lead to a fundamental reorientation of transitology. It is, however, a crucial perspective for basic research, since the theoretically guided abstraction and explication of an intricate reality is always necessary in order to ensure that empirical research on democracy, with its deep analytical focal points and instruments, does not obscure what may be apparent but structurally decisive for the political phenomenon under study.