For some in Afghanistan, the road to democracy began in the cold and dark, as early as 3 a.m., on October 9, 2004, as they awoke and prepared to travel for hours to polling stations. In doing so, they made history: defying threats from the Taliban and casting their votes in the country's first-ever democratic presidential election.

For the people of Afghanistan, the election was a dramatic milestone on the long, often hard road to freedom and democratic government. But they are not traveling this road alone. Over recent decades, peoples throughout the world have increasingly traveled the road to democracy.

As President Bush said in an address to the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, "We've witnessed, in little over a generation, the swiftest advance of freedom in the 2,500-year story of democracy."

Democracy's advance has been neither certain nor foreordained, but it does reflect the power and universality of its fundamental precepts. Individual freedom, rule of law, human rights, representative government, legitimate elections, civil society: these principles have been embodied in the great democratic movement that historians may well mark as the most significant phenomenon of the past generation — and as Afghanistan demonstrates, for the next generation as well.

The global progress of democracy refutes the skeptics who claimed that democracy was a uniquely Western phenomenon, ill-suited to other regions. Through the dedication, vision, and sacrifice of millions, democracy has taken root in recent years in Eastern and Northern Europe, in Asia, and in the Americas — now largely a hemisphere of democracies.

Although the principles of democracy are universal, its practice is as varied as the cultures in which it thrives. Democracies function as constitutional monarchies and federal republics. They have flourished in times of peace and prosperity — and survived in times of war, poverty, and internal division. Once dismissed by some as a luxury that only affluent societies could afford, freedom and democracy are now recognized as critical to sustained economic development and prosperity.

Secretary of State Colin Powell cites the experience of one region in a March 2004 address:

Asians have proven that modernization isn't the same thing as Westernization.... We Americans came to such ideals through our European heritage, but Asians came to the same ideals through their own heritages in the their own ways.... And today the ideas of democracy, of market economics, of human freedom, of the dignity of men and women, all within the rule of law — these are very powerful, beyond any physical scale; so powerful that they are setting roots in Asian countries with past political forms as diverse as South Korea's military government and Mongolia's communist rule.