Would a non-European dominated world develop democracy?

Most likely non-European region to develop democracy?

  • East Asia

    Votes: 9 18.4%
  • North Africa and the Middle East

    Votes: 9 18.4%
  • India

    Votes: 10 20.4%
  • The New World

    Votes: 15 30.6%
  • Indochina and the Indies

    Votes: 4 8.2%
  • Other

    Votes: 2 4.1%

  • Total voters
    49
That's interesting, how did the British model influence the Franco-German Enlightenment though? Through John Locke?

Through John Locke and British institutions as a model. De Montesquieu was very explicit about how English institutions were the model to be followed.

But it's worth pointing out that the Franco-German enlightenment was used to justify absolutist monarchical rule in Prussia, Austria etc. France would have also gone that way under Napoleon if it hadn't been for outside intervention. Even the return of the Bourbons would have been done on an absolutist basis had the Austrians and Russians decided. It was the British that pushed constitutionalism and then that was the template to live up to. The Orleanists were Anglophiles too.
 
These were not natural developments of Early Modern Ottoman institutions but imitations of the West, and indeed the reforming monarchs eliminated or weakened the traditional informal curbs on monarchic absolutism (the janissaries, the seyhülislam). Also, the Ottoman “democratic institutions” as you call them were founded after all major European powers except Russia already had them.

Russia had literal veche republics from its foundation, elected and expelled princes, called meetings of estates for decisions of state importance, and was composed to a large degree of self-governing urban, cossack and rural communes locked in perpetual struggle with the nobility and landed gentry. Some of it was bloody and the republican interests lost by the late 16th c. but seriously, the fact that there was a struggle of the estates speaks a lot about shared power existing.

Even the most repressive/autocratic parts of Russian government were basically carbon copies of Ottoman ones (and western ones after the 18th c.) Russia was never less "democratic" than the Ottoman Empire, basically.
 
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Without the West, I'd put my money on maybe the Indian sub-continent. Probably not the 'The nail that sticks out shall be hammered down' cultures of the far east and not the Islamic world where the ideals of individual liberty and freedom aren't compatible with conservative Islamism.
 
In general, I think the notion that all of Asia would somehow have moved towards democracy in the absence of imperialism is itself 1) Eurocentric, as it takes European development to be the norm; 2) Whiggish, for the same reasons; 3) presentist. R. Bin Wong’s China Transformed is a pretty good book on how late imperial China simply did not have the political background necessary for representative government, not because it lagged behind but because it took a different path, one of “fractal” government.
I dont think anyone is arguing that without European imperialism, democracies would have popped up everywhere. Rather, that there were enlightenment style values in many places with potential for democratic development.


The Iroquois aren’t really relevant to OP because they couldn’t plausibly have dominated the world.
Ah gotcha.


Democracy, assuming we’re talking about representative democracy which all modern (country-sized) democracies are based upon, comes from representative institutions that reflect attempts to defuse a state-elite conflict. This sort of conflict dynamics did not exist in China, where the state was ideologically committed to small government and unobtrusive rule (Ming and Qing China had some of the lowest tax rates and official : population ratios in the world) and where the local elite and central state shared the same priorities (the perpetuation of jiaohua). So no representative government.
Representative democracy as we know it? Of course not, but it wouldnt require much for that to be averted in its own right.
But there was and has been an expectation of representation in china for centuries. The modern protests in which a new beauracrat is sent to avoid embarrasment is an old tradition.


The liberal revolutions of 1789 onward, whether with the Estates General or the role of the Diet of Hungary in 1848, were predicated on the (prior or current) existence of representative institutions.
Yes.


The PLC was not democratic, and nor was the (fairly autocratic in terms of the Maharaja’s authority) Khalsa state.
Direct democratic institutions are not democratic now?
Yes the Maharaj had strong authority, but that isnt unusual for the time period.


These were not natural developments of Early Modern Ottoman institutions but imitations of the West, and indeed the reforming monarchs eliminated or weakened the traditional informal curbs on monarchic absolutism (the janissaries, the seyhülislam). Also, the Ottoman “democratic institutions” as you call them were founded after all major European powers except Russia already had them.
First at the underlined, thats an absurd standard.
Countries and cultures dont exist in isolation, it would be equally absurd to say that Northern Europe didnt naturally develop constitutional rule just because it was developed earlier by the mediterranean cultures.
Secondly, the Ottomans had democracy in the 1840s, where many european countries wouldnt untill the next century.
 
It's really not though. "No taxation without representation" is a thing in the West because of its heritage of conflict between royal and noble interests. In late imperial China, however, both the central state and the regional elite shared the same overall goal of creating a hands-off government and stable society aligning to Confucian ideals. The interests of the local gentry were rarely at odds with that of the state, so there was no need for taxation to be justified by concessions (i.e. representation at the central government).

I'm reasonably comfortable that you can avoid the problems of taxation without representation by charging low levels of tax; that solves the problem from one direction.

I'm more inclined to skepticism that the ruling ideology of imperial China was very strongly that the state shouldn't enact high taxes to employ a large civil service and complete lots of government projects, even if it could, unopposed, or that representation evolves to solve a unique conflict of ideology and interests between government and taxpayers that existed only in Europe. The conflicts that representation and local representatives came to resolve were local conflicts between the government and local elites / taxpayers, rather than an overarching vision of the state, and my limited reading is that these conflicts between the authority and interests of local elites and the government were no less prominent in late imperial China than other nations on the whole.

I also would tend to echo Tanc49's comment about how higher dependence on taxation (and so drawing in representation) results from pressures where governments have to tax; what is the minimum viable low-tax minimal state that can achieve much like modernity? (Especially if we're in a scenario without much opportunity for learning).
 
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