Perhaps the most beautiful achievement of political life in the latetwentieth century was the international movement for democracy that brought downseveral dozen dictatorships of every possible description -- authoritarian,communist, fascist, military. It happened on all continents, and it happenedpeacefully. It began in the 1970s, with the collapse of the Greek junta and ofthe right-wing regimes in Portugal and Spain; it continued in the 1980s,mysteriously jumping the Atlantic, with the collapse of dictatorships inArgentina, Chile and Brazil; then, vaulting the Pacific, it claimed thedictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Finally, in the early '90s,it spread to South Africa, where the white apartheid regime yielded to majorityrule, and returned to the Eurasian continent where the great Soviet empireitself shuffled off history's stage.