It is Americans and Western Europeans, and not those in Eastern Europe and Russia and other transitional societies, who need most of all to remember that democracy is never a gift from one people to another, but the hard-won fruit of costly local struggle. It is something to be taken , not given. Moreover, while there are universal ideals that undergird the struggle everywhere, democracy's forms are as various as the struggles through which it is won. In the years before the American revolution, Puritan Massachusetts developed one constitutional system, progressive Pennsylvania another, and the royal charter plantation-slave colonies still others. Our regional institutions today are marked by these differences even today.
Democracy grows up indigenously.
From country to country it is always distinctive. Great Britain has no separation of powers, though we Americans think such a separation of powers is indispensable to the preservation of liberty. Ethiopia's new constitution must address the problems of tribalism. Poland is a deeply Catholic nation and like Ireland has no separation of church and state. Surely they too can afford to look to their own histories and cultures for sources of inspiration.