There are similarities between the South Korean protest movement in the 1980s and the regime crackdown and the Arab uprisings since 2011, but one of the differences was that South Korea had already embarked on industrialisation and achieved it. Capitalist relations dominated and thus the struggle for bourgeois democracy was part of that transformation. The slogans and songs by the current protest movements in Sudan and Algeria come to mind when we read the following: Protests inspired by South Korea's "March for the Beloved" See also March for the Beloved
“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.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51