Difference between East and West in Europe

 I tried to explain to a friend the difference between West and East in Europe, but just now an example came to my mind.

Philip 2 of Spain has a secretary that he wanted him dead. The secretary found out and run to Catalonia. Despite being few km away from Madrid, the king of Spain, Netherlands,Portugal and of America, could not fetch him, because local parliament opposed.

But Philip couldn't just invade the place cut heads of parliamentarians, and pillage the city like central Asian Hordes did?

No, the powerful king choose to respect the treaty that gave Catalans their rights, and choose to sent inquisition after unfortunate secretary 

King James of England, asked himself what is the difference between him and a tyrrant. The difference he said is that I act within the law .

Friedrich the great wanted to buy a wind mill from a peasant, in order to build his palace. The peasant didn't want and sued the king of Prussia and won.

Machiaveli notices the difference between France and Turkey.

In France the king had the power limited by the lord's, it was hard to rule France, and even harder to conquer it After you overthrow the king you had to defeat the lords one by one.

Sultan of Turkey had more power because it hadn't lord's and could rule easier but the country was easier to conquer: you remove the sultan and everyone obeys by force of habit 

Ukraine is more like France, and Russia is more like Turkey.

The reason for this situation in Western Europe is geography and history.

Mountains and big rivers limit the expansion of empires, and in remote regions minorities can survive fragmentigs the political power : bascques in Pirrinee, celts, in Ireland, Bretagne,Cornwall and Walles.

All the Western powers formed by agglutination of smaller entities:

The land of free peasant was taken by counts, counts married or were conquered and formed duchies, and dukes, formed kingdoms or were allied with royal family.

Anyway during this period privileges of the small entities were preserved 

And the king's tolerated them because the political mentality then was to keep the things how they are, to rule better 

This ended with Napoleanic wars, when France uniformizez everything inside, and force other countries to the same.

In the East in the other side you have big planes that are no obstacles for empire expansion, the defense is expensive because you need cavalry.

There is cultural diversity and this means that intermarriage between ruling families is low. Mongols/Tatars and Turks were Muslim, Russian,Ukrainians, Romanians were orthodox,Poles and Hungarian Catholics 

So a low transfer of customs and respect for privileges 

Also this cultural diversity didn't help in creating a common way of conflict resolution.

In the East it was always total war. Tatars burned down villages and cities of Romanian and poles, and sent their captives in slavery 

Vlad the impaler impaled people in Ottoman empire and in German cities from Transilvania.

Meanwhile up till reformation, all the west was catholic, so they didn't burned down the monasteries and cathedrals.

Also in early middle ages, to prevent human losses, kings preferred to have a duel and the winner to call the victory.

This habit was seldom used in the East.

In short the fact that the west had small and equal entities with a common Christian culture, help them to develop a rule based society, basis for parliamentarianism,pluralism and democracy.