The purpose of Sustainable Democracy is to sketch a map of politically pressing and intellectually challenging issues facing new democracies in the South and the East. We seek to identify the principal political and economic choices confronting new democracies and to evaluate the merits and the feasibility of the alternatives in the light of current social science knowledge.

Our concerns originate from two observations, which are by now trivial. The past decade witnessed an unprecedented, worldwide movement toward political democracy simultaneously with a profound, also widespread, economic stagnation. In the past fifteen years, many countries in southern Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa have held competitive elections, the first ever or at least the first in decades. And since this project was initiated, this list has extended to Eastern Europe and several new countries that have emerged from the breakdown of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Never have so many countries enjoyed or at least experimented with democratic institutions. At the same time, models of economic development, which were quite successful during several decades, seem to have collapsed in many countries. The economic crises in the 1980s facing Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico as well as Bulgaria, Hungary, and Poland are without precedent in the history of these nations. As a result, we seem to witness simultaneously an almost fatalistic recognition of economic constraints and a frantic search for new models and new strategies to generate sustained growth.