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On the Putative Universality of "Western" Values



Too often in our appraisal of the success of Western republican democracy do we neglect perspective of its success relative to the diversity of older political structures developed by other times and cultures. America is a living testament to the success of capitalism in a democratic container, but it has only been around for around 200 years. Older, non-codified yet sophisticated methods of preserving liberty and equality do exist.
Weeramantry recognizes that the large democracies in the Third World were imposed from without, from a different political context, no less. The specific brand of government typified by Enlightenment-era thinkers was largely a reaction to specific Western problems. Traditional social organizations were becoming nothing more than names, and the revolutions cast off much of those structures in favor of the individual.
While Western ruling powers had more or less consolidated, Third World correlates (tribes, councils, religious authorities) had formed a natural checks-and-balances system, only no one made this explicit in a Federalist Papers. Power had been distributed between discrete nuclei like family, clan, village, and kingdom, like Chris Matthews would stress, 'All politics is local.