The first wave of modern democratisation happened in 1974, when Portugal’s Carnation Revolution toppled Salazar’s fascist regime in Lisbon.1 It was followed swiftly by the overthrow of the military junta in Greece. More or less the same happened in Spain the following year, after the death of General Franco. These closed the accounts on fascism’s defeat a generation earlier. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall that the floodgates really opened. By the turn of the millennium there were more than a hundred democracies worldwide.
