ATTITUDES TOWARDS DEMOCRACY AMONG LEADERS IN FOUR EMERGENT NATIONS.

This paper analyzes the prospects for democracy in four emergent Caribbean nations. Near the end of the eighteenth century the words "liberal," "radical," and "progressive" did not exist, but their meanings were contained within the term democrat which was just then coming into popular usage. When moderates or conservatives wished to indicate the dangerous drift of the times, or when the more advanced spirits spoke of themselves, they might very well use the words democrat or democracy. Today, in the latter half of the twentieth century, there exists a plethora of terms in common parlance to refer to various shades and meanings of these concepts, and there are the pseudo-aristocrats, heirarchically-minded authoritarians, and reactionaries who abhor democrats and democracy as being dangerously progressive and dedicated to the ruination of orderly and proper governance of society. But now, in the Age of Nation-Building and Development, the more advanced spirits, at least in most of the developing areas, are not often democrats either, by any reasonable definition of that term, but seem intent upon establishing undemocratic political systems not wholly unlike those of some of their ideological opponents.