A Post-Western Democratic Global Order

Abstract

Paradoxically, democratization has taken hold in the developing world at the moment that the West is experiencing decline. The balance of power is shifting in favor of newer nations. Samuel Huntington was therefore correct in his prediction that with the end of the Cold War, the West had not triumphed, and that future dynamism in world politics would come from the non-Western world.2 The West “failed to see that the moment when … [it] was basking in the glow of Cold War triumph was also the moment when Confucian, Islamic, and Hindu civilizations (among others) were … stirring.”3 However, Huntington was wrong in thinking that this dynamism would be associated with the rejection of capitalism and democracy by developing countries. On the contrary, “the rise of the rest” is being driven by the embrace of these historically Western institutions by the rest of the world. Rather than the universal spread of capitalism and democracy representing the “triumph of the West,” these changes represent the beginning of a post-Western future for the global democratic project.