A major problem for liberal historians, particularly those in the West, is that they tend to see democracy as the basic form of responsible representative government. Any system that does not accord with that notion is regarded as falling short of an ideal. However, thinkers and leaders from other cultures dismiss this as an example of Western presumption. Western values are not definitive and should not, therefore, be regarded as prescriptive. As Nyerere was concerned to point out, democracy was not an end but a means and there was no absolute value attaching to it. Context and practical considerations, not an abstract notion, should determine what the ideal system was for a particular region. Nyerere, indeed, claimed that the two-party system as it operated in Britain and other Western countries was a barrier to, not a guarantee of, genuinely representative government.
Although all the systems in this book claimed to be revolutionary, not all were so in practice, or in effect. Later chapters will show that a number of them looked back as much as forward:
• Nazism was essentially an appeal to the past, an attempt to restore the traditional volkisch values and virtues of German history (see Chapter 3).
• Nyerere declared that the socialism he was adopting as the way forward for the new Tanzanian nation was drawn directly from the collective values of Africa's tribal past (see Chapter 9).
• Castro's personalized form of communism was an expression of his desire to rid Cuba of its colonial inheritance and return his people to a precolonial form of national purity (see Chapter 7).
• Nasser worked under the banner of socialism, but his primary aim was to assert the independence of Egypt and lead his nation in a resurgent Arab and African world (see Chapter 6).
• Peron took a similar line in Argentina. His wish was to see his country modernize by basing its growth on the traditional virtues and skills of the Argentinian people (see Chapter 8).
World History
