Is Personal Freedom a Western Value?

This article argues that personal autonomy and individual self-determination are products not of a specific region or historically based culture, but of recent developments in industrialization, urbanization, transportation, communications, information processing and education. These have already occurred in many non-Western states, often resulting in greater emphasis on human rights. The article also finds nothing inherently "Western" in liberal values and personal freedoms: until recently, most of us lived under communitarian constraints that would have made the Ayatollah Khomeini feel perfectly at home.