Alessandro Ferrara’s excellent essay on multiple modernities and democracies is an important stimulus for reflecting on a number of issues that go beyond the borders of the academic debate, overflowing into the public sphere. Allow me to randomly list a number of questions. What is democracy? Is democracy only applied in the West? So what are those forms of government and legitimisation of political power that have at least a few of the characteristics we have come to know in our experience in the West as democracy? Is democracy a universally desirable objective? If so, when necessary, should we march bearing arms towards “exporting democracy”?