I get asked to answer questions on Quora. Now I understand that it is not an indication of any special interest that people take in my answers but the way that system works. Still I try to take people’s questions seriously and respond to as many as I can. The above question was asked by someone I assumed English is not their fist language so a bit of guessing is involved. I thought I would share my speculation here and see if it was of interests to anyone.
It is a good question. The answers will be speculative.
First we have to ask what they have in common and that would be the horde. Mongolian culture is very strange. It is not tribal although to us it looks tribal. I would say it is a civilization on horseback. So what is a civilization? I would say it is an artificial form of eusociality. The only true eusocial animals as far as I know are the insects, ants, bees, etc. So eusociality in humans is easily broken and by extension the advancement of civilization.
Static civilization corrupted Mongolian culture and vice versa. Something stopped the social development of the East that was way ahead of the West until fairly recently. In the case of Russia and China I would say the horde was a major factor. They had the same effect on the Islamic culture which was on its way to losing it’s tribal roots before being devastated by the Mongols. So to answer your question maybe we should imagine what Western Europe would look like if it had been conquered by the horde. That is confused by the fact that the threat to Western Europe was the Turks who had absorbed the Eastern Roman Empire. They had already adopted static civilization. If the same Mongols that conquered China conquered Western Europe is the question.
The reason we need to look at the Mongols as a civilization as opposed to a tribal state is that they were fairly developed in terms of eusociality. So what was broken was not exactly eusociality. What was broken was the chain of technological advancement. Not only physical technologies but technologies that influence cultural evolution within the abstract world of ideas. The Moguls were completely absorbed into the cultures they conquered but they still had an influence. That influence I’m suggesting in a way stopped cultural evolution in terms of political ideas. The why is more complicated but I would suggest it is the oddity of Mongolian civilization to develop without physical culture of its own.
My assumption is that if the Mongols had conquered Western Europe liberal democracy would never have developed. Your question then is what if China and Russia had never been conquered by the Mongolians. Would they have developed liberal democracy? My guess is yes. Liberal democracy is closely tied to the economic system that evolved in the West. It isn’t exactly capitalism and capitalism in some form has always been present in Russia and China. What is important is the rise of the political power of merchants, bankers and industrialists in the West. That forced people to think about how democracy could be expanded from the traditional upper classes of every civilization to include these new groups of political players. The people that thought about it realized that you don’t just vote at the ballot box but with your money and your feet and by everything else that you do. It cuts across all classes so liberal democracy was born.
I think that without the Mongol invasion China would have had it’s own scientific revolution. Maybe not that is the problem with speculation. But the scientific revolution is a player in democracy because it cuts the tie between god and the king. There was no scientific evidence of why the king should rule by divine rights. Take that away and you had to come up with some other system.