This stems from a discussion I was having with a friend of mine.
Obviously the ideal concept is for all people to live in free and democratic societies. But we have enough trouble managing one here, where we’ve had centuries of democratic concepts both in the US and in the UK. Even there it took centuries of effort to transition from the absolute monarchy system to various forms of representative government.
But some places (yes I am mostly thinking of the Middle East) have no such traditions and efforts to create democracies there don’t always work out very well (see Iraq and Afghanistan). I’m certainly not trying to blame the people, they’ve simply never had any opportunity to learn and no real cultural foundation for these concepts.
So how does this conflict sometimes play out ?
Looking back to history we could consider Iran.
Clearly the Shah was a certainly a top grade SOB but he was relatively progressive on women’s rights and modernizing his nation. Given the current regime, we have an equally repressive system politically and human rights wise, plus even more repression of women and much more danger to world stability. Might things have gone a little better if we had sought to support a continued monarchist type regime ?
Japan after WW2 on the other hand was a society with minimal experience but they have managed to create something of a representative democracy. However in that case we had the Emperor basically ordering everyone to participate, so in an odd way it was an absolutist system ordering the creating of a freer society. This is not the most common pattern, indeed I can only think of a few other examples.
Looking now to Iraq and Afghanistan, might we have a better and more stable society if there was a strongman in charge as the people worked their way to some more open system ?
It’s a tough issue because obviously we had decades of supporting nasty regimes, but is a strong central leader sometimes a better option than a chaotic democracy ?
I’m not entirely certain of my own position on this just looking for some debate and discussion on the topi