The parts of Asia we are looking at have more than half of the world's population, but the issue of how democratization occurs and why is even bigger than just an Asian matter. It is global, and at its heart is something that has been a controversial process in at least parts of the world for well over two centuries. The following papers show that the diversity of experiences within Asia itself—even within any of its major subregions, East, Southeast, and South Asia—is so great that it might seem foolhardy to claim that some common ideas transcend region and encompass not only Asia but all of humanity. But I want to try. In addition, I want to emphasize, as the other papers on democratization in this issue also demonstrate, particularly the one by Mark Thompson, that insisting on an “Asian” compared to a “Western” vision of what democracy means is drastically misleading. The struggle over conflicting ideas at the heart of the matter has taken place everywhere, and still does.

The story begins with the West European Enlightenment that conventionally is said to have begun in the mid-seventeenth century. Spinoza and sometimes Descartes are frequently cited as its intellectual fathers, but of course it was something that went far beyond a few individuals. It had profound scientific, political, religious, and moral implications that have been explored in an enormous number of scholarly studies and taught for generations as the foundation of Western modernity (Israel Reference Israel2001). It was a diverse movement, and its participants hardly agreed about all of its aspects, but on the whole they had much in common. If one were to think of a single phrase that captures the spirit of the Enlightenment, it would be Immanuel Kant's famous introduction to his short essay on what it meant. “Enlightenment,” Kant wrote, “is man's exit from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one's intellect without the direction of another…. ‘Sapere aude! (Dare to know!)’…. ‘Have the courage to make use of your own intellect!’ is hence the motto of enlightenment” (Kant [1784] Reference Kant and Kleingeld2006, 17). Free thought, rather than dependence on received authority, tradition, or official texts was a better guide to understanding the natural and social worlds. Such understanding could liberate people from past constraints on progress and make them better individuals—that is, more creative and ethical. Kant meant to free humanity from the tyranny of religious dogma and imposed authority, and to convince his readers that the new science and moral philosophy he championed would bring an enlightened, rational society.

To be sure, John Locke, David Hume, Montesquieu, and many others already had been aiming at this for some time before Kant wrote those words, and many more would follow. Perhaps the most thorough exposition of the social, political, and moral implications of the Enlightenment appeared in the works of Adam Smith. These went far beyond the narrow prescription to free economic markets in order to let the “invisible hand” operate, something economists love to cite without always paying attention to the much richer content of Smith's published work (Phillipson Reference Phillipson2010; Smith [1759] Reference Smith, Raphael and Macfie1982, [1776/1904] Reference Smith and Cannan1977). What Smith called for was giving individuals the right to make their own free choice about many other aspects of their lives, not just in the economy, and also the need to restrain all kinds of elite power from imposing the invariably selfish moral, political, and economic constraints that had for centuries blocked progress, liberty, and more widely spread prosperity. It was not, as we may know it today, modern democracy, but it was a philosophical outlook that was an essential foundation of what would evolve into democracy.

That, in short, was what the Enlightenment was about. But it is a fundamental error to think that somehow in the West a pleasantly Whiggish interpretation of history holds water. On the contrary, in the West, from the very start, the Enlightenment was bitterly contested, often violently. Nor was this limited to the beginning of the movement, or ended by some of its subsequent successes. Opposition in the West continued throughout the nineteenth century, and intensified a century after Adam Smith's most famous book, even as Enlightenment ideas were starting to spread into Asia and important parts of the Muslim world. In the first part of the twentieth century, in fact, the Enlightenment came very close to dying in Europe and Asia as European and Japanese fascism seemed to be on the verge of dividing up those continents between themselves, and the only alternative many saw was Stalinist communism. Today, the battle of ideas between the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment in its various forms continues and is in some ways even more virulent than it was in the late twentieth century after both fascism and communism had appeared to fail, and religious dogmatism was thought by many to be a waning phenomenon. Were that this was so. It was not. The wars over the Enlightenment do not pit “Western” against “Asian” values, but are fought in every region, within all countries and societies. This is as true for China as it is for the United States, for South and Southeast Asia as it is for Europe, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. That conflict of ideas is basic to the struggle about democracy, though it sometimes appears to be neglected by overly materialist interpreters of contemporary events.

The United States was built on the core idea of Enlightenment. Much as its founders differed about the specific details of the new democracy they were trying to build, they accepted its basic premises, that freedom of thought was essential, that hereditary privilege was not a good basis for sound government, and that any kind of absolute power or dogma was dangerous. Yes, there was more than a little bit of hypocrisy involved among some of the most enlightened of those founders, notably Thomas Jefferson, who knew perfectly well that slavery was wrong, but who was never able to liberate his own slaves on whom his spendthrift ways depended. The persistence of slavery and its aftermath remain the single biggest contradiction in America, and reverberate to the present. And, yes, the imperialism of the supposedly most liberal and enlightened of European nations, England and France, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was also a direct violation of those principles. But the idea remained that genuine liberty and freedom were basic values, and the persistence over centuries of that idea has been the basis for an unending drive to reform and conform more to the ideal than to the entrenched interests that resisted. Without the strength of such an idea, and its deep philosophical roots in the West, those reforms would have failed and been completely marginalized a long time ago.

Resistance, however, never disappeared. In the American South, a whole racist Counter-Enlightenment ideology developed that sought to nullify the promise of freedom for slaves and their descendants by claiming that some races are better off enslaved than free (Fitzhugh [1857] Reference Fitzhugh and Woodward1960). Much to Jefferson's despair in his later life, the revival of markedly superstitious forms of religion seemed to be gaining ground in the United States. The powerful resurfacing of such trends in our own times denies the very basis of scientific rationality, which is as important a part of Enlightenment thinking as the defense of individual liberty. Worse, Jefferson's suspicion of central power, his idealization of agrarian values, and his support for states' power became a staple of Southern, pro-slavery thinking (Montgomery and Chirot Reference Montgomery and Chirot2015, 169).

In Europe, it took a long time for the Catholic and some Protestant churches to accept the claim that traditional dogma could be questioned. More than this, the excesses of the French Revolution turned much intellectual opinion against the Enlightenment and in favor of traditional monarchy and religion. Later, Counter-Enlightenment movements were changed into something even more dangerous by attaching themselves to a kind of ugly, often anti-Semitic, and always anti-foreign nationalism. Nor was this merely a matter of ignorance and blind prejudice, as the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a concerted intellectual attack on Enlightenment rationality and freedom. From both the left and the right, disillusionment with the hypocrisies, corruption, and seeming exhaustion of ideas of Enlightenment liberalism produced philosophical attacks that fatally weakened what was dismissively called “bourgeois democracy.” Karl Marx, and even more his most important later disciple, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, railed against the very principles that had originally nourished their hopes. On the other side, great minds such as the hugely popular French philosopher Henri Bergson and, eventually, the Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger extolled communal solidarity and mystical irrationalism over modern science and individual freedom of choice. Even Friedrich Nietzsche's questioning of the modern Enlightenment played an important delegitimizing role, though more often through his later admirer, the Frenchman Georges Sorel, who in turn was much appreciated by Benito Mussolini. Mark Thompson's article in this issue is right to point to German intellectual trends that were anti-democratic in imperial Germany, but this was hardly limited to Germany.

There is no need to go over the dismal history of what the Counter-Enlightenment eventually led to in Europe, or what might have happened if World War II had turned out differently. As George Kennan once wrote, if Hitler had not violated his pact with Stalin, the United Kingdom would have been hard pressed to survive, and an allied Germany, Soviet Union, and Japan would have made it impossible for the United States to defeat them (Kennan Reference Kennan1951, 74–75). The Enlightenment project, in other words, had almost died by late 1940.

Somewhat paradoxically, it was precisely as Enlightenment thinking was meeting greater resistance in the late nineteenth-century West that its ideals began to spread dramatically in parts of Asia and the Middle East. Probably the best-known Muslim scholar and reformer who tried to prove that the Qur'an, if properly interpreted, points the way to greater scientific and social openness was Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97), who astutely noted in 1883 that all religion is at some point opposed to rationality and science, but eventually, as Christianity already had, it was possible to be reformed. Thus, he hoped that soon Islam would do the same, even if it was not yet there. This was the essence of Al-Afghani's response to Ernest Renan's claim that Islam was hopelessly anti-scientific (reprinted and translated in Kurzman Reference Kurzman2002, 108). Al-Afghani, unfortunately, turned out to be overly optimistic about both his religion and at least some parts of Christianity. In any case, he was hardly alone among Muslim intellectuals of that period. But today it is more the rejection of everything Western, including free thought, individual rights, and democracy, that prevails in much of the Muslim world, and al-Afghani's example, along with that of the early twentieth-century Islamic religious reformers, has been mostly cast aside (Kurzman Reference Kurzman2002). We know that the struggle is certainly not completely over; but Sayyid Qutb (1906–66), executed by Gamal Abdel Nasser because he had become a leading ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood, seems to have been the better prophet. It is his theological interpretations damning every liberal ideal of the Western Enlightenment, and imbued with virulent anti-Semitism, that make up the far more influential intellectual beacon in contemporary Islam than the ideas of earlier reformers (Calvert Reference Calvert2010).

What, then, can be said about East Asia with respect to its troubled history of accepting much of the scientific-technical part of the Enlightenment while repeatedly rejecting those important ideas that are required if its promise of greater individual freedom of thought and personal rights to liberty are to have a sound base? Here a little history is required, because it is misleading to think that this is merely a contemporary issue.

Many Japanese thinkers studied Western progress and came to the conclusion that the Western Enlightenment had given Western nations their overwhelming power. Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835–1901) and others who learned about the West helped shape a new Japan. But by then, much of the Western Enlightenment had been filtered through ideas proposed by Charles Darwin, and even more by Herbert Spencer. This fed into a Japanese sense of racial superiority because, presumably, the “survival of the fittest” could be interpreted as meaning that Japan's rapid modernization after the Meiji Restoration and its rising military strength proved its racial superiority over other Asians (Howland Reference Howland2000; Montgomery and Chirot Reference Montgomery and Chirot2015, 186–87; Watanabe Reference Watanabe and Benfrey1991). Indeed, the tragedy of Japan was that its leading thinkers and leaders came to think that they could dispense with the moral side of the Western Enlightenment, and that this was in fact necessary to avoid the disintegrating social effects of liberal modernism. Only by such rejection could the order, communal solidarity, and traditional culture they idealized (and mythologized) be maintained. By 1937, a small official book put out by Japan's Ministry of Education made it explicit that it was absolutely essential to reject the evils of the Western Enlightenment. Kokutai no Hongi proclaimed:

Kokutai no Hongi then goes on to extol what is better about superior Japanese principles, including loyalty and patriotism, meaning obedience to the Emperor and “casting aside our little selves to live under his august grace.” Filial piety, harmony, and subordination to the age-old traditions of the unique Japanese way is far better than the evils spawned by Occidental individualism such as “democracy, socialism, communism, anarchism, etc.” (Kokutai in Morris Reference Morris1963, 48–52). Whatever interpretation one gives to this particular assessment of the West, it is clear that if this is the official philosophy, the fairly brief period of increasing democratization in Japan in the 1920s was, by the 1930s, philosophically anathema. This was not just material for children and the masses, but a well thought out set of ideas supported by major Japanese philosophers such as Kuki Shūzō, who had been inspired by his years of study of French and German philosophical proponents of anti-rational, anti-modern nationalism, particularly Martin Heidegger (Pincus Reference Pincus1996, 229–32).

Now, presumably, it is all different. Japan, like its former colonies of Taiwan and at least the southern part of Korea, is so institutionally bound to democracy that it is hard to imagine that this could change (at least as long as Taiwan remains independent). Or is this so certain? Ultimately it remains true that institutions, even strong ones, are weak in the face of crisis if there is not a core belief in the idea of individual freedom to think and choose. This does not have to cite centuries-old Western philosophical sources, but it has to accept some of those venerable Enlightenment beliefs, even if they are couched in more local terms.

This is why developments in China and Southeast Asia are more than a little worrying for those who understand that democracy has to be based on those liberating values of the Enlightenment if it is to have the ability to resist the opposition that never goes away and resurfaces strongly in moments of economic and political setbacks.

Chinese reformist intellectuals came to study and admire Western Enlightenment thinking and democracy a bit later than those in Japan, and then followed a partly different trajectory. The distinguished scholars who came to be associated with Peking University, China's first and most prestigious modern institution of higher learning, were avid readers of Western Enlightenment and nineteenth-century texts. Peking University then played a key role in the May 4, 1919, or Chinese Enlightenment movement, which began as a protest against Japanese seizure of Chinese territories but was actually part of a much larger manifestation of Chinese intellectuals' desire for democracy, rejection of Chinese tradition, and promotion of modern nationalism (Schwarcz Reference Schwarcz1986). But the Western Enlightenment was no longer what it had been. As in the case of Japan, Social Darwinism seized the imagination of reforming Chinese intellectuals. Herbert Spencer's and Thomas Huxley's additions to Darwin emphasizing the notion of struggle and survival of the fittest are what fascinated these intellectuals. Yan Fu's (1854–1921) translation of Huxley into an elegant Chinese text called Heavenly Evolution (1898) as well as other translations of the Western canon inspired much of this Chinese Enlightenment (Pusey Reference Pusey1983). But whether the liberal side of the Enlightenment ever had a chance to become dominant in Chinese thought remains an open question. Parts of it certainly inspired the May Fourth movement, but the chaos, unending civil wars, and later Japanese invasions, as well as the attractive example of two European political movements, fascism and communism, made this close to impossible.

Mao Zedong said that he had read Adam Smith, Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Spencer, and Montesquieu (Snow Reference Snow1968, 144), but what formed him much more was Li Dazhao's celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, of Lenin, and his introduction of Marxism to a reading group at Peking University. Mao was one of those in this group (Spence Reference Spence1990, 306–7). Mao had trouble accepting the racist view then popular in Europe that white Europeans were so successful in the competition for survival because they were biologically superior, and instead turned to the ideas of Friedrich Paulsen, a German philosopher and educational reformer who emphasized the importance of will and military spirit to further a nation's progress (Wakeman Reference Wakeman1975, 201–4). That combination of Leninism and German aggressively militaristic philosophy added to Mao's faith in “the masses” and was anything but conducive to accepting Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, or to recognizing the virtues of promoting individual rights and freedom of thought.

Elizabeth Perry's paper in this issue nicely addresses the implications of turning away from an individualistic approach to human and political rights toward one of direct mass participation, particularly in the apposite story about a Chinese protester at Tiananmen Square in 1989 cited by Craig Calhoun (Reference Calhoun1997, 243–44). By telling an American reporter that his interpretation of democracy was similar to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's, this young Chinese intellectual was not only referring to the most contradictory of the French Enlightenment's famous philosophers, but also, as Professor Perry points out, reverting to a similar Chinese philosophical tradition. Rousseau's ideas have often been accused of fomenting, or at least legitimizing, the worst of the French Revolution's excesses during the Reign of Terror. By demeaning overly intellectualized individual reasoning and urging a return to immersion in a more natural human community, Rousseau was rejecting the very essence of the Enlightenment he at other times defended. Ernst Cassirer's wonderful, short book on Rousseau cites the phrase, “L'homme qui médite est un animal dépravé” (The man who thinks deeply is an animal who has lost his moral bearings; Cassirer [1954] Reference Cassirer and Gay1989, 56–57). Returning as much as possible to the natural inclinations of the masses is better, claimed Rousseau, and the way to obtain true democracy is through the popular will. This may also correspond to some traditional Chinese thinking, but hardly seems singularly “Asian” or even necessarily traditional. It is also mirrored in Mao's thinking. In his famous little red book, Mao repeats something he said earlier, “All work done for the masses must start from their needs and not from the desire of any individual.… There are two principles here: one is the actual needs of the masses rather than what we fancy they need, and the other is the wishes of the masses, who must make up their own minds instead of our making up their mind for them” (Mao Reference Tse-Tung1966, 124–25). Those who have accused Rousseau of being an original proponent of totalitarianism have a point. Dismissing the individual's capacity to reason and interpret reality in favor of a “natural” human community, or in Mao's words, the “masses” means forgoing the open debate of representative institutions and elections in which individuals with varying interests and ideologies compete openly to apply their ideas. Who then decides what the community wants—the all-knowing Party and Leader who supposedly have a mystical connection to that community.

In adding to the notion of a Rousseauian popular will to guide the nation a Germanic sense that militarized will was needed, Mao also veered closer to his archenemy Chiang Kai-shek, whose program in the early 1930s was modeled on Italian and particularly German fascism (Kirby Reference Kirby1984, chap. 5 and 6; Spence Reference Spence1990, 414–18). Chiang's and Mao's ideologies may have completely diverged with respect to what classes needed to be protected, and what Chinese traditions needed to be sustained, but their contempt for the Enlightenment idea that each individual had the right to freedom of thought and that this should be the basis of democracy were the same. Indeed, this is where fascism and communism converged, not just in Asia, but also globally.

Given this well-known background, it is not particularly clear what democratization with Chinese characteristics might mean today other than rule by some kind of self-appointed elite entitled to interpret what the masses really need. In a revealing essay about the 1989 student protests at Tiananmen Square, Elizabeth Perry noted that what they wanted was much more to fit into the traditional Confucian status of intellectual advisors to the state than any kind of real representative democracy (Perry and Wasserstrom Reference Perry and Wasserstrom1994, 78–81). Whether Confucian or Rousseauian, left or right, totalitarian or just autocratic, this was a far cry from the kind of liberal faith in individual reason and widespread freedom of choice inherent in the writing of Adam Smith or John Locke.

How does all this fit into the contemporary situation in East and Southeast Asia? It suggests that if the prevailing intellectual atmosphere in the state is not receptive to a strong measure of classical Enlightenment liberalism, the prospects of democracy remain shaky, no matter what institutional arrangements exist to govern that state. A particular case in point might be Malaysia and Indonesia, both of which have regular elections and opposition parties. Malaysia has had this since independence, but the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the ruling party since independence, never loses power, manipulates the rules, is sometimes (and these days increasingly) quite willing to play on Malay chauvinism and Islamic religiosity that alienates the substantial minority communities, and imprisons opposition figures using false charges (Wain Reference Wain2012). Its dominant figure and former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has justified himself in a long (and not very readable) autobiography (Mahathir Reference Mahathir2011). What can be garnered from his published speeches and remarks about his accomplishments shows that Mahathir was neither an ideologically fanatic and totalitarian tyrant, nor personally greedy and materially corrupted by power, but that he simply never thought that allowing too much individual freedom of choice, tolerance for open democracy, or respect for the more humanistic side of the Enlightenment merited much respect. Quite the opposite, they were probably bad for Malaysia. In this, he agreed with Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew, who was even more successful in furthering the fortunes of his country. At the same time, the most active and threatening of Malaysia's opposition is driven largely by much more radically inclined Muslims who, unlike Mahathir and UMNO, are openly anti-Western and who reject the very basic tenets of the Enlightenment (Peletz Reference Peletz and Hefner2005, 254–67).

Malaysia's giant neighbor, Indonesia, has followed a very different path. As Edward Aspinall's paper in this issue demonstrates, it has navigated through a difficult and occasionally violent transition from a long period of dictatorship under Suharto to what is now a functioning democracy with reasonably free elections and peaceful transfers of power to different parties. Nevertheless, despite this marked success, Aspinall is skeptical about the roots of this democracy, and suggests that it is really more of an “illiberal democracy” than a real one. To succeed, it needs to curb corruption; limit the power of the Suharto-era military elite and their institutional descendants; reinforce the rule of law; and create a more rational, efficient, and honest bureaucracy. That is a tall order, and in my mind it brings up the same question. If the leading intellectual and other elite members of the society do not accept the importance of allowing freedom of thought and action, of respecting minority opinions about politics, social norms, and religion, if they do not prize individual over group rights, if they are not energized by a vision of how liberating democracy can be, no mere institutional fiddling with reform will ensure democracy's survival in the long run.

We could look at the fairly recent, monumental failure of Thai democracy as an example of this, or at the vastly exaggerated expectations about democratic reform in Myanmar. Free elections guarantee little if large portions of elite opinion do not find all that goes along with democracy to be legitimate.

To go further afield, despite a long tradition of free elections and the seeming flourishing of democratic institutions, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) has tried to take a sharp turn in the opposite direction. Erdoğan never really believed in democratic freedoms, though he continued for over a decade to rely on his popularity to win elections and make his country autocratic and more religious, intolerant, and anti-Western. In this, he was following the same path as his large northern neighbor, Russia, though unlike Putin, it is still an open question how far he can get away with this in a country where only about half of the population believes in what he is doing, and elections still matter (Arango and Yeginsu Reference Arango and Yeginsu2015). Perhaps ultimately Turkey will indeed turn out to have enough people who believe in the fundamental ideas of democracy to survive Erdoğan's anti-democratic thrust, but that is far from certain.

Vladimir Putin has gone much farther in using the formal institutions of democracy to turn his country into a bastion of anti-Western, Counter-Enlightenment military aggressiveness that bears a strange resemblance to Mussolini's Italy (including his fondness for appearing bare chested in publicity pictures to show how tough and manly he is). As a side note, it is more than a little ironic that Putin's court philosopher, Alexander Dugin, likes to cite Martin Heidegger's celebration of traditional, authentic, communal solidarity over the destructive individualism of Western modernity (Tolstoy and McCaffray Reference Tolstoy and Mccaffray2015).

Saying all this raises more questions than it answers. Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Thailand, Turkey, Russia (the list could be extended to many more cases)—all have vastly different histories and distinctive cultures. Must we fall back into the nearsighted repetition of what Huntington was really aiming at with his discussion about the clash of civilizations, that is, a division of the world into the West and the rest, with only Western Christianity in Europe and its offshoots in America and Oceania privileged to be real democracies? What do we do about India, where, despite Narendra Modi's appeal to a kind of neotraditional, religious Hinduism, and the marked intolerance of his original base, democratic institutions have remained robust (Ghassem-Fachandi Reference Ghassem-Fachandi2012; Varshney Reference Varshney2002)? It would take many pages to explain how a preponderance of elite Indians came to accept much of the tolerance and humane liberalism of the Western Enlightenment, as embodied by Jawaharlal Nehru, and how, despite all of the obstacles, that has remained a vital part of India's ideology. That is far beyond what I can do; but the affection of important Indian intellectuals for the Enlightenment in late colonial times has to be included in any explanation of why India today can still resist powerful forces that do not agree, and why, therefore, India's contentious, sometimes violent politics still remain largely democratic. Perhaps a good place to start would be the new edition of B. R. Nanda's The Nehrus (Reference Nanda2008) that explains how Jawaharlal Nehru's father's firm belief in the Western Enlightenment was conveyed to his son, and how even as he became an intense nationalist Nehru never abandoned his secular, liberal views.

The reality is that since the nineteenth century the Western Enlightenment, even while its core principles were questioned, distorted, and often violated, was something that intellectuals and leaders around the world increasingly had to take into account. They had to find ways of meeting the challenge of these ideas even as they were increasingly organizing resistance to Western imperialism. In so doing, even when, as in Japan and China, they turned against a liberal interpretation of the Enlightenment, they were still interacting with it. Claims that they might be returning to some kind of indigenous tradition had to rely on mythologizing the past in order to address the Western challenge. This remains very much the case today in China as its leaders promote their supposedly Confucian way as a more harmonious, peaceful, and better model than the Western one (Callahan Reference Callahan2013; Osnos Reference Osnos2015).

To think, however, that this is in any sense a uniquely Asian counter to the Enlightenment is simply false. Leaving aside the terminology of Confucianism, the appeal to a more organic, natural, communitarianism model that rejects the excessive individualism and rationalizing secularism of that Enlightenment is just as much of a Western phenomenon as it is of an anti-Western one. There have been and continue to be liberals outside the West, and anti-liberalism has not only persisted in the West, including the United States, but is gaining ground once more, as it did in the late nineteenth century and even more strongly in the 1920s and 1930s.

In the United States, parts of the Republican Party, especially but not only its Christian Evangelical base, have fallen prey to a rejection of American Enlightenment tradition by denying science, most notably on the question of biological evolution and on changes in the climate, but also by attacking the kind of liberal education that has always been used to teach future elites the values of humanism and tolerance (Montgomery and Chirot Reference Montgomery and Chirot2015, 360–78). Fareed Zakaria (Reference Zakaria2015) has argued that rejecting liberal higher education is impractical because such teaching provides important skills, but of course the issue is far more than one about what is or is not practical. It is also part of a general attack on free thought, and about imposing a more traditional respect for religiosity that cannot tolerate skeptical questioning of received dogmas. This tendency also violates the American founders' understanding that rigid religiosity not only closes off the possibility of free thought but leads to the kinds of internal conflicts that produced Europe's terrible religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Hamilton [1787] 2003, 2, and Madison [1788] Reference Hamilton, Madison, Jay and Ball2003, 254, both in Hamilton, Madison, and Jay [1788] Reference Hamilton, Madison, Jay and Ball2003).Footnote ¹

At least in those parts of Asia that reject Western liberalism in their politics, and therefore question the value of the Western way, there does not appear to be any sign of a rejection of Western science. On the contrary, building up modern science is seen as vital. That is not true everywhere, particularly where Islamic extremism has taken hold and everything Western is rejected, but such a turn seems inconceivable in non-Muslim parts of East Asia.

In a recent article decrying the diminishing attraction of democracy, Larry Diamond (Reference Diamond2015) pointed to the distressing fact that American democracy appears to be increasingly paralyzed and ineffective, so that as a model for the world, it holds far less appeal than it used to. This certainly applies as well to the European Union, whose very existence is being questioned by the rise of right-wing parties that are veering toward the kind of ethnocentric, closed nationalism that has long characterized most anti-liberal modern regimes.

It is when elites, including those most intellectually inclined, lose or fail to ever acquire faith in Enlightenment liberalism that the Counter-Enlightenment most easily flourishes. And what happens then, whether in the West or in Asia? We already know the answer. Dogmatic assertions of ethnic nationalism become more easily accepted. Minorities who are not viewed as legitimate parts of the nation are persecuted and are either forced to change their cultures to assimilate, or are entirely excluded. Jingoism becomes more acceptable as the open debates and tolerance of opposition views disappear. This is exactly where much of the world is heading, in the West, in the Middle East, and in parts of Asia.

It is difficult enough to promote democracy when there are serious ethnic, religious, or even regional splits, but whatever institutional arrangements are thought up to do this, a spirit of mutual tolerance and acceptance of different ways of thinking is necessary. When that is lacking, there is no real hope of resolving such differences, either through democratic means or by agreements among various communities' elites.

Ultimately, then, discussions about the future of democratization in Asia are about much more than that. They touch on fundamental problems of where all of humanity is headed, and whether the advances in human liberty unchained by the Enlightenment will continue or be reversed. The ideas furthering this have always been contested, in the West and everywhere else. If we lose awareness of what is at stake, something much deeper and more important than the acceptance or rejection of elections as a way of choosing who is to rule, we will all be in trouble.