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Chapter 4 explores the processes through which institutions struggle for a place in the democratic order and how they achieve and lose primacy and autonomy. It attends to why it is difficult to find a form of political organization that is perceived as normatively best and also sustainable, securing a stable equilibrium between central government and partly autonomous institutions. The analytical value of ‘autonomy’ as detachment from politics and the apolitical dynamics of change assumed by many New Public Management reforms are questioned, and the interplay between central authority and institutional autonomy is interpreted as an artefact of partly decoupled inter-institutional processes involving the struggle for power among interdependent and co-evolving institutions that are carriers of competing yet legitimate values, interests, behavioural logics, and resources. The issues are illustrated by the cases of public administration and the public university.

This chapter addresses liberalism and pluralism. It explains how traditionally dominant churches have handled the acceptance of a wider range of sexual difference, with the focus on homosexuality, and the growth of religious free markets. The chapter then investigates the role of Orthodoxy in civil-society-building in Russia and the experience of minority Orthodox communities in the USA. For all religious institutions, the pluralism associated with democratic political orders creates real problems. It is suggested that Eastern Orthodoxy has struggled with the democratic experiment in countries where it has traditionally been dominant. An impressionistic survey of the Orthodox experience in America largely mirrors that of the much larger Catholic community. The Russian Orthodox Church's political presence and anti-pluralist stance in a context of incomplete or ‘managed’ democratisation has been one of a number of factors that have hindered the full acceptance of social and political pluralism in Russia.

This concluding chapter argues that from early 2002 until today, American foreign policy has been premised on convictions that are both utopian and imperialist in a fashion quite foreign to the liberal internationalist tradition as it existed prior to 1990s. With its confidence in the ease of a transition from authoritarian to democratic order, its insistence on a “just war” doctrine that overthrew the Westphalian system of states by legitimizing the armed intervention of democracies against autocratic states, and its redefinition of American exceptionalism from a defense of the democratic world to a world-order project that knew no limits, neo-Wilsonianism sabotaged the very tradition from which it had emerged. The question, then, is whether the liberal internationalist tradition can be resuscitated in such a way that it contributes positively to world affairs.

This chapter discusses how, in a large swathe of northern, central, and western Europe, military liberation set in motion a wide-ranging process of constitutional, political, and social change that culminated a few years later in a new democratic order. This outcome was very much less than inevitable, but also something more than chance. Instead, Western Europe's post-war transition to democracy arose from the interplay of four dominant forces. These include the actions of the powers who liberated and, subsequently, occupied Europe; the successful refoundation of national state structures; the consequent demobilization and marginalization of other, more locally based or informal political authorities; and the re-emergence of a structure of political parties that, along with a range of other social associations, became the principal intermediaries between rulers and ruled. Taken together, these factors brought into existence a resilient democratic order, but one which through its limitations betrayed the determining influences on its creation.

Nicholas Rush Smith’s chapter explores collective violence in postapartheid South Africa, where vigilante violence involving an attempt to necklace alleged criminals has been common. That the necklace--placing a gasoline filled tire around the neck of a victim and setting it alight--is frequently deployed is surprising, Smith asserts, because the struggle against apartheid was, in important ways, a struggle for a procedural rights-based legal system, something necklacing undermines. Moreover, necklacing was originally developed as a tool to sanction political threats under apartheid, whereas today it is primarily used as a technique to punish criminals. Why, Smith asks, is necklacing still practiced twenty years after the dawn of democracy given that it was first implemented as part of the struggle against apartheid? Smith’s chapter argues that citizens deploying the necklace challenge the postapartheid state’s-rights-based legal system, which South Africans often argue enables insecurity and immorality, to proliferate; rhetorically and ideologically, this in some ways parallels the criticisms that American lynchers often made of procedural, due process rights. Through its spectacular violence, the necklace dramatizes these critiques of the democratic legal order much like it dramatized critiques of the apartheid state.

Nicholas Rush Smith’s chapter explores collective violence in postapartheid South Africa, where vigilante violence involving an attempt to necklace alleged criminals has been common. That the necklace--placing a gasoline filled tire around the neck of a victim and setting it alight--is frequently deployed is surprising, Smith asserts, because the struggle against apartheid was, in important ways, a struggle for a procedural rights-based legal system, something necklacing undermines. Moreover, necklacing was originally developed as a tool to sanction political threats under apartheid, whereas today it is primarily used as a technique to punish criminals. Why, Smith asks, is necklacing still practiced twenty years after the dawn of democracy given that it was first implemented as part of the struggle against apartheid? Smith’s chapter argues that citizens deploying the necklace challenge the postapartheid state’s-rights-based legal system, which South Africans often argue enables insecurity and immorality, to proliferate; rhetorically and ideologically, this in some ways parallels the criticisms that American lynchers often made of procedural, due process rights. Through its spectacular violence, the necklace dramatizes these critiques of the democratic legal order much like it dramatized critiques of the apartheid state.