Politics & Power Quote by Natan Sharansky

Sharansky’s line performs a neat diplomatic two-step: reassure Japan that it doesn’t need to cosplay as “the West” to count as free, while quietly tightening the definition of legitimacy around a liberal axis. The first sentence draws a boundary. “Japan is not a Western democracy” sounds like respect for difference, but it also preempts a familiar critique of democracy-promotion as cultural export. He’s inoculating his argument against the charge of imperial civics.

Then comes the hinge: “kept their traditions, culture and heritage” is praise with a purpose. It frames modern freedom as additive rather than corrosive, suggesting that joining the liberal order needn’t mean surrendering identity. That’s an especially pointed reassurance in discussions where modernization gets cast as Westernization, and where Japan’s postwar political model is often treated as an American-administered exception rather than an indigenous choice.

The real payload sits in “joined the community of free nations.” “Community” is the velvet glove; it implies welcome, mutual recognition, even warmth. “Free nations” is the steel underneath: a moral club with membership requirements. Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident turned freedom advocate, is advancing a worldview where regime type isn’t a neutral internal detail but a passport into global belonging. Japan becomes exhibit A: proof that cultural distinctiveness and liberal alignment can coexist.

Subtext: he’s not only talking about Japan. He’s talking to every state that claims “our culture is different” as a shield for authoritarianism, and to every Western skeptic who treats democracy as ethnically branded. The sentence flatters Japan, but it also recruits it.