In this book, Somit and Peterson argue that humans are social primates with an innate tendency for hierarchical and authoritarian social and political structures, and that democracy requires very special "enabling conditions" before it can be supported by a state, conditions that require decades to evolve. As a result, attempts to export democracy through nation-building to states without these enabling conditions are doomed to failure.

This echoes your comment the other day at lunch about how there's an eco-system necessary to support the society we have which is missing in other places (middle east, China, India, etc).

The Failure of Democratic Nation Building