Would democracies and liberal ideas (such as freedom, right of free speech etc) develop in a non-European dominated world
Non-European dominated world = some other region colonizes the rest of the world, like Europe in OTL.
Looking from a glance, it seems like Europe had the necessary factors to start the Age of Enlightenment which ultimately consolidated later on in the 19th and 20th centuries to create the system of government many countries in the world are using today (not all though, North Korea & Saudi Arabia im looking at you)
For example, would a world centered on the Middle East develop democracy and liberal ideas along the same lines as Europe? If so, why?
I know some folks may disagree.....but honestly, this is not at all an impossibility, by any stretch.
Not necessarily, because the basis for liberalism most ultimately derives from medieval European norms about autonomy and the contract between the monarch and the nobility, which did not exist in (for example) China.
When it comes to political/institutional liberalism, this may well be at least partly true(England, in particular, would have had the Magna Carta to fall back on).
This does not mean that an East Asia-dominated world would be any worse in terms of government systems than the OTL world.
Sure.
The natural progression of East Asian systems of government would appear to be a sort of bureaucratic meritocracy, for instance, which might as well be more efficient and better-ran than the typical Western democracy.
Not necessarily, TBH, re: the bold. In fact, more traditionalist systems, at least, would actually be quite vulnerable to inefficiency, corruption, etc., than otherwise, partially as such would be quite dependent on the sort of ruler & clique running the country-hell, this would be true of non-democratic authoritarian systems in general(for a particularly disastrous non-monarchical example, look at China under Mao IOTL).
Of course, to be fair, such would hold true everywhere, and not just in the Middle East/East Asia-plenty of pre-modern Western examples can show us this as well.
If they were able to develop some form of democracy or liberalism, they would be very different from our own.
They
could be. But this isn't necessarily inevitable, by a long shot-they could also be rather similar, if not
exact copies, perhaps, of Western systems.
Considering that what we today label “democracy” or “liberalism” are oftentimes the result of happenstance,
Somewhat so, perhaps(mainly, and especially, when it comes to
economic "liberalism")but not really to a large extent; hell, (relative)
social liberalism in particular has been around in one way or another since the beginning of civilization, long before the term was even coined. Honestly, the biggest question might well be if democracy, where it develops, ends up being more universal, or if it's more limited.
imagine what would happen if some similar cluster of ideas was set to emerge in China, or India, or the Arab World. Maybe they are closer to Athenian Democracy, maybe their democracy features, like our modern liberal democratic system does, on institutions rather than the “will of the people”.
Perhaps, but our modern system hardly ignores "The Will Of The People", as it were.
On the pro:
- "No taxation without representation" is a reasonably pan-human norm and even governments which offered a rational form of neutral, nominally impartial form of goverment would have difficulties raising taxes without it. The idea of being virtually represented in the government because anyone "can" enter by their merit is not, I suspect enough to offset a lack of direct accountability at election.
- Democracy offers a form of peaceful stable succession as an alternative to cliques of bureaucrats, courtiers and Praetorians trying to win favour, influence or control over the top autocrat (whether it's President-For-Life Xi, the Tsar, whomever), or repeated cycles of civil war.
- Expanding the franchise provides a way to deal with the stresses of mass literacy, mass urbanisation, mass shift of the workforce out of agriculture and mass political awareness, beyond the use of repression (surveillance, secret police and force) and beyond raising the specter of foreign domination to force conformity.
Those are ideas that seem like they could occur to persons from any tradition of civilization (everyone's smart enough and those problems are pan-human, maybe pan-sapient), and at the right time can be locked in with a dialogue about human moral rights (which all traditions stress to provide legitimacy) that develops under the influence of new technologies and science that will question core cultural traditions.
On the con though, how much can you actually use these ideas without traditions of using Parliaments to raise revenue, or the examples of selecting certain classical and even post-classical city states as examples of stable or glorious democratic traditions?
Quite a few valid points here-the real question isn't so much of
if such ideals could come to play.....but
when, and
how.