FT.com / Columnists / Gideon Rachman - Democracy could still ...

In retrospect, the Iranian revolution of 1979 replaced one despotic regime with another – and so cut the country off from the democratising forces that were just beginning to make themselves felt throughout much of the rest of the world. During the 1980s most of the Latin American authoritarian regimes were swept away. Democracy came to the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan in the 1980s – and to central Europe in 1989. In the 1990s apartheid fell in South Africa and so did the Suharto regime in Indonesia.

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