Peter Watson’s piece in today’s Times – Here’s an improvement on democracy – has a lousy title but is spot-on otherwise:
The inconvenient truth is that the West should be exporting secularism around the world before it exports democracy. Democracy implies not just one person one vote but – no less important – that the political process proceeds by rational means, by argument, by persuasion, and is based on knowledge that is as objective, as scientific, as one can make it. The objective knowledge has to come first.
In other words, secularism is a necessary precondition for effective democracy. Without it, nascent democracies rarely survive.