Oliver Fernando Hidalgo ^*

• University of Passau, Passau, Germany

Even the latest developments in the theory of modernisation, unlike its classical representatives such as David Lerner, Seymour Martin Lipset or Walt Rostow, no longer assume a quasi-automatic democratic transformation of countries once they have reached the socio-economic and technical standards of the West. Instead, either the interrelationship between economic development and the democratic distribution of power and resources (cf. Vanhanen 1997 and 2003;Inglehart/Welzel 2005) or an intercultural (or multiple) approach to modernity (cf. Zapf 1994;Eisenstadt 2003) are at the centre of their considerations. 2 In this respect, the argument presented here should not fall behind post-structuralist and post-colonial critiques of Western universal claims, as formulated e.g. by Foucault, Derrida, Edward Said or Gayatri Spivak. 3 Such arbitrariness is to be feared within the Western discourse on democracy alone, as it seems to have been clear since the obvious self-contradiction of 'representative democracy' that the concept of 'popular sovereignty' should not be taken too literally. For a comprehensive genealogy of the paradoxical democratic 'discovery' of representation, which leads from Rousseau via Sieyès, Kant and Condorcet to Thomas Paine, see Urbinati 2006.