Democracy came later: The violent birth of Western supremacy

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

This line from Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order strikes like a hammer on the glass pane of modern illusions. It forces us to confront a truth that contemporary discourse, in its comfort and self-congratulation, often prefers to ignore.

History, stripped of its moral varnish, is a record not of the triumph of noble ideals but of the calculated, ruthless application of force. From the Akkadian Empire to the Mongol Khanates, from the Ottomans to the British Raj, between fifty and seventy major empires have risen and ruled vast swathes of the earth. Each was forged not in the quiet deliberations of a senate, nor in the tranquil exchanges of commerce, but in the roar of cavalry, the crack of muskets, and the smoke of burning cities. These were polities built by warlike peoples—nations or tribes that possessed not merely the will to conquer, but the organizational genius to turn violence into a disciplined instrument of statecraft.

In our own age, intoxicated by the rhetoric of progressivism, libertarianism, postmodernism, and the newer “woke” ideologies, this reality has receded from public memory. The story now told is that the West ascended because it was more democratic, more committed to free trade, more imbued with universal values. This is a pleasant myth, but a myth nonetheless.

The historical record is unambiguous: when the West was at the height of its imperial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries, its nations were neither fully democratic nor committed to open markets in any modern sense. Their internal political systems were often oligarchic, their trade policies protectionist, and their diplomacy underwritten by the threat of naval cannon and expeditionary armies. Democracy and free trade became prominent Western virtues only in the 20th century—ironically, during the very century when Western hegemony began to wane.

Huntington’s observation is therefore less a provocation than a reminder: civilizations rise to dominance not by moral persuasion but by their capacity to project power, and to do so with relentless organization. The superiority that matters in the great contests of history is not that of ideals in abstraction, but of the machinery—political, economic, and military—that can transform violence from chaos into conquest.

We may comfort ourselves with the thought that the modern world has outgrown this ancient truth. But the chronicles of empire suggest otherwise. Beneath the thin ice of our contemporary ideals, the dark waters of organized force still move, as cold and irresistible as ever.