About the first one, it is really we Americans and Western Europeans, and and not those of you in Eastern Europe and Russia, Africa and Asia 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 something to be given, as many of you have shown us again, and as America once two hundred years ago showed the world. 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 Massachussetts, progressive Pennsylvania and the slave South, all had different political systems. And our regional institutions today are marked by these differences.
Democracy grows up indigenously and in country after country it looks different, feels different.
Great Britain has no separation of powers, while we Americans think the separation of powers is indispensible. Ethiopia's new constitution tries to address tribalism. Poland is a deeply Catholic nation and cannot efface Catholisism as it develops its own new political institutions. Ireland has no separation of church and state, Germany is federalist, France centralist. These differences among the established democracies suggest that there is a great room for similar differences in new democracies.