Assessment of Democratizations under Foreign Rule since 1945.

From the second half of the Nineties, many scholars of international relations, development and comparative politics were interested in democracy promotion which constitutes one of the main features of international organizations (IO) and Western governments foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. Among their works, only those devoted to the political conditionality of the European Union (EU) towards European Central, Eastern and South-Eastern official or potential candidates do challenge to some extent the endogenous paradigm of comparative politics according to which « democracy is a domestic affair par excellence» (Schmitter, 2001). However, this literature does not pay attention to the imposition of democracy by occupying foreign powers. In fact this scenario of democratization has been completely ignored by scholars even if the two thirds of free political regimes registered by Freedom House, at the end of the Nineties, resulted from direct or indirect intervention of external actors (Whithehead, 2001). Our paper will deliver the preliminary results of a three years project (2007-2010) devoted to this topic. Firstly, il will provide a compilation of occupying foreign powers tentatives to impose democracy to a country since l945, with the results of the latter : success ( institution of a stable liberal or consolidated democracy); mitigated success (establishment of a stable hybrid regime); failure ( installation of an unstable hybrid regime or illiberal democracy replaced by an authoritarian regime). Secondly, it will suggest hypotheses susceptible to explain these varying outcomes while evaluating if the latter validate the traditional endogenous theories of democratization. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]