The fall of its military dictatorship in 1974 not only brought the country full membership in what would become the European Union; it also (along with the transitions in Spain and Portugal at the same time) prefigured the global democratization wave of the 1980s and '90s, first in South America and Southeast Asia and then in Eastern Europe.
Bashar al-Assad's unprincipled and disproportionate military response to the "threat" of the democratization wave, the Arab Spring, with the slaughter of Syrian opposition groups both radicalized the situation and heightened sectarian (Sunni-Shia or Alawi) divisions.
On April 25 , 1974the Carnation Revolution replaced Portugal's authoritarian regime with a multi-party, democratic system, marking the beginning of what Samuel Huntington called the "third wave of democratization".
Portugal's 1974 revolution inaugurated a wave of democratization that swept the globe.
But there are several other factors to bear in mind before leaping to the conclusion that this wave of democratization will reach Chinese shores.
Whether or not Huntington's model stands up to scrutiny, the idea of an ever-expanding wave of democratization remains at the heart of much political analysis.
There, as in other parts of the city, squares and parks were built in a wave of democratization in the 19th century.
From Algeria to Venezuela, he chillingly reminds us, "all of the oil-rich countries of the world remained under or returned to authoritarian rule after 1974 and the third wave of democratization".
"Since the early 1970's, when the third major historical wave of democratization began, the Islamic world, and, in particular, its Arab core, have seen little evidence of improvements in political openness, respect for human rights and transparency," said the new survey, "Freedom in the World 2001-2002".
A decade after the end of the cold war spurred a wave of democratization in Africa, forcing even the most tenacious of dictators to at least hold sham elections to appease international creditors, Congo is one of the few African countries to never have conducted an election.
This hypothesis is tested and largely confirmed on an exhaustive set of 78 cases from the 'third wave' of democratization.
