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I'm interested in knowing how democracy was implemented so successfully in these countries by the US when they had no democratic tradition in their history. How was the US able to make these countries successfully democratic but today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have failed.
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Apr 18, 2015 13:40
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Wizgot posted:I'm interested in knowing how democracy was implemented so successfully in these countries by the US when they had no democratic tradition in their history. How was the US able to make these countries successfully democratic but today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have failed. I'm only an amateur historian, but my recollection is that both Germany and Japan had elements of democracy before WWII - the Weimar Republic was a parliamentary democracy and Japan also had an elected body of representatives - in practice the Emperor was not an absolute ruler. As for the failure of democracy in Iraq/Afghanistan, you could easily write volumes about it, but the short answer is a lack of nationalism - to hold a democracy together, the citizens must be loyal to their country over all, not their region/religious faction(Iraq) or local leader/warlord(Afghanistan). For a successful democracy, you also need a strong middle class, a reasonably educated populace, and a decent infrastructure - you can't just install a type of government and expect it to flourish, something that US leaders/policy makers either don't understand or don't care about.
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Apr 18, 2015 15:17
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JnnyThndrs posted:I'm only an amateur historian, but my recollection is that both Germany and Japan had elements of democracy before WWII - the Weimar Republic was a parliamentary democracy and Japan also had an elected body of representatives - in practice the Emperor was not an absolute ruler. On the Japan side of things, Japan had tried to create a democracy during the beginning of the Showa Era (WWI, a bit after WWI), but militarism and nationalism became dominant, giving the emperor/military shogunate control over almost all of the government. Military control coincided with Japan's annexation over most of Asia, before WWII.
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Apr 18, 2015 15:26
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ntan1 posted:On the Japan side of things, Japan had tried to create a democracy during the beginning of the Showa Era (WWI, a bit after WWI), but militarism and nationalism became dominant, giving the emperor/military shogunate control over almost all of the government. Military control coincided with Japan's annexation over most of Asia, before WWII. All true, of course, and the Weimar wasn't exactly a rousing success either, just trying to give a bit of perspective as to the fact that neither country went from directly from a King/Emperor to a full democracy overnight; it was more of an evolutionary move than one might think at first glance.
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Apr 18, 2015 17:12
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I would say that war exhaustion played a pretty big part in it too. Both nations had just suffered on the hard end of the largest war ever and nobody was in much mood for an insurgency. In Japan there was maybe more of a chance of resisting occupation, but after the war the US would not have tolerated any poo poo what so ever, and I'm sure that was made very clear. Plus they had just been nuked twice, which would settle anyone down I should think. West Germany was also grateful to be rescued from the USSR and would have been very hesitant to do anything that might jeopardise that. Compare that to the very fast, "clean" wars in Iraqi and Afghanistan, with the total destruction of the old regimes within weeks or less. I'm certainly not saying the coalition should have drawn it out into a 5 year slug fest with massive casualties and indiscriminate civilian bombing, but if that had happened people would probably be a lot more hesitant about joining an insurgency.
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Apr 18, 2015 23:06
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Someone already mentioned the Weimar republic. Democracy wasn't really a foreign concept to most Germans, even if it never managed to gain much traction against the prevailing powers before the end of WW1. Saying that the birthplace of Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx does not have a democratic tradition is a bit of a stretch. From german acadameic circles, all the way into the middle class, democracy was seen more like one of the many possible implementations of the 'Rechsstaat' or Rule of Law.
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Apr 19, 2015 00:27
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Pharnakes posted:I would say that war exhaustion played a pretty big part in it too. Both nations had just suffered on the hard end of the largest war ever and nobody was in much mood for an insurgency. In Japan there was maybe more of a chance of resisting occupation, but after the war the US would not have tolerated any poo poo what so ever, and I'm sure that was made very clear. Plus they had just been nuked twice, which would settle anyone down I should think. I think there probably wasn't really a major resistance to occupation. The war was already incredibly unpopular among many Japanese families before it ended. Recall that before the atom bombs were dropped, the United States executed many air raids across different major cities, including Tokyo, Nagoya, Kawasaki, and Okinawa. Many families were destroyed because the husband would be drafted into the military and die in on combat.
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Apr 19, 2015 04:13
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How did democracy impact these countries. What were the major changes in society and the normal way of life. In Iraq was there a power shift from one social class to the other? etc.
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Apr 19, 2015 09:39
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The German Empire had an elected national parliament with universal male suffrage; its constituent states had had local legislatures before 1871, although with varying amounts of election to them. It also had interventionist monarchs with wide-ranging executive powers, and a head of government that was directly responsible to the crown instead of the legislature, but that's a very long way from "no democratic tradition".
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Apr 19, 2015 10:00
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JnnyThndrs posted:I'm only an amateur historian, but my recollection is that both Germany and Japan had elements of democracy before WWII - the Weimar Republic was a parliamentary democracy and Japan also had an elected body of representatives - in practice the Emperor was not an absolute ruler. There were also political considerations. One of the proposed solutions in Iraq was to split it up into 3 states, with the Shia, the Shiites, and the Kurds, each having their own states. But setting up an independent Kurdish state would have royally pissed off Turkey, which has been fighting Kurdish separatist groups like the PKK for decades, so setting up an independent Kurdistan in Turkey's back yard wasn't really diplomatically feasible.
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Apr 19, 2015 10:10
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Since Iraq is predominantly Muslim, sharia law must play a big role as to why democracy cannot function properly. Are there more factors at play?
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Apr 19, 2015 23:54
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Indonesia (250 million people, 90% Muslim), Pakistan (200 million people, 97% Muslim) and Turkey (75 million, 70% Muslim) are all functioning democracies.
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Apr 20, 2015 02:56
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I'll give you Indonesia. But Pakistan and Turkey? Uh, let's define functioning, shall we?
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Apr 20, 2015 04:05
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They're not particularly liberal compared to developed countries, but they are compared to Iraq, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. Maybe not Pakistan, but Turkey at least
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Apr 20, 2015 05:36
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Wizgot posted:Since Iraq is predominantly Muslim, sharia law must play a big role as to why democracy cannot function properly. Why do you say that?
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Apr 20, 2015 06:07
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icantfindaname posted:They're not particularly liberal compared to developed countries, but they are compared to Iraq, Iran, or Saudi Arabia. Maybe not Pakistan, but Turkey at least Turkey is an oddball case where the military has historically been more Westernized than the general public, and has had veto powers over civilian authority since Ataturk. Any politician that went too extremist going too Communist or too Religious, risked the wrath of the military, and could expect a coup, followed by general elections set by the generals. It was not a great system for Democracy, but it did provide something approximating checks and balances. Erdogan has used his time in power to replace everybody that might oppose him and shut down all independent press. On paper Turkey is a democracy, in actual practice, not so much.
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Apr 20, 2015 09:18
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Wizgot posted:Since Iraq is predominantly Muslim, sharia law must play a big role as to why democracy cannot function properly. Are there more factors at play? Kellsterik posted:Why do you say that? Islamic law tries to legislate for every single aspect of an individual's life, the individual is not at liberty to think or decide for himself, he has but to accept God's rulings as interpreted infallibly by the doctors of law. The fact is we do not have, nor can such a complete ethical code exist in a liberal democracy; we do not and cannot have an all -embracing, all-inclusive scale of values.
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Apr 20, 2015 09:28
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Not to sound like a dick, but you're showing your ignorance about Iraq and Islamic law when you say that. European/American politicians and academics have been making the argument that Islam is uniquely and fundamentally backwards and incompatible with self-rule (to justify their continued occupation and control over Islamic countries- sound familiar?) since like, 1830, and you're reproducing that claim without critically thinking about whether it applies to your own society or actually describes Iraq. Here's what I would say: -Sharia law is and always has been open to interpretation and differing interpretations (as much as US law is anyway) because there's such a huge corpus of sources for it. It also isn't the defining feature of life in a Muslim-majority country. -Iraq isn't a time capsule where the culture and law of 700 CE has continued more or less unchanged to the present. -Why has US democracy been compatible with slavery, Prohibition, effectively mandatory church attendance, and other extremely intrusive and moralistic law codes, but Sharia law isn't?
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Apr 20, 2015 23:41
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evensevenone posted:Indonesia (250 million people, 90% Muslim), Pakistan (200 million people, 97% Muslim) and Turkey (75 million, 70% Muslim) are all functioning democracies. Ah yes Turkey's functioning democracy where the military periodically comes in to clean house. Kellsterik posted:Not to sound like a dick, but you're showing your ignorance about Iraq and Islamic law when you say that. European/American politicians and academics have been making the argument that Islam is uniquely and fundamentally backwards and incompatible with self-rule (to justify their continued occupation and control over Islamic countries- sound familiar?) since like, 1830, and you're reproducing that claim without critically thinking about whether it applies to your own society or actually describes Iraq. Uh. Wizgot posted:I'm interested in knowing how democracy was implemented so successfully in these countries by the US when they had no democratic tradition in their history. How was the US able to make these countries successfully democratic but today, in Iraq and Afghanistan, they have failed. Nukes, for one. The attacks were very effective in cowing the government and populace. Also both Germany and Japan were loving terrified about the soviet union so any dissent to US rule was silenced from fear of the alternative. tsa fucked around with this message at 23:52 on Apr 20, 2015 |
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Apr 20, 2015 23:45
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General McArthur also formed strong alliances with the emperor and family, going out of his way to prevent some princes being tried for war crimes for things like the rape of Nanking.
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Apr 20, 2015 23:56
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I don't know about Japan, but at least in Germany there were several factors that contributed to an "orderly" transition into a western-style parliamentary democracy: - as others already have noted, Germany had a certain democratic tradition already, most remarkably the 1848 revolution and the Weimar Republic (1919-1933, though it abolished itself de facto in 1930). Many of the leading politicians had been involved in politics for the Social Democrats (the German SPD is actually the oldest social democrat party in the world, tracing itself back to the General German Workers' Association founded in 1863 and therefore even older than the state of Germany itself), the Zentrum/BVP (two conservative-Catholic parties which stood for the idea of a strong parliament against the Protestant and authoritarian Hohenzollern monarchy, the former being started in 1870 and the latter as an offshoot of the Zentrum in 1918) or the DVP/DDP (two liberal parties that were strongest in southwestern Germany) for decades, in many cases even going back to Imperial Germany. The first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, had been active for the Zentrum since 1906, for example. - there was a strong drive by most Germans to distance themselves from the Third Reich (hmmm I wonder why?). The massive devastation that the war had brought upon Germany itself also played a large role in establishing the feeling of a new beginning, what with most of its larger cities being reduced to rubble, millions being dead and millions more having been forced to abandon their homes in the former East of Germany. The end of WWII is commonly known as "the hour zero" in Germany because of that. Supposedly the carnival parties of the years 1946-49 were legendary as well. Many people supported the notion of "lokking forward, not looking back" - the main goal was to make Germany livable again. Pondering the horrors of WWII and the holocaust was neither needed nor welcome, which also meant that there was only little anger at the own defeat. - Contributing to the idea of a clean start was the de-nazification program set up by the Allies. While in reality former Nazi officials were judged exceedingly benign in most cases, it also played a part in making this new beginning possible as the Germans could feel that the Third Reich truly was a closed chapter. The benign policy of the Allies also meant that lots and lots of people with a Nazi past were allowed to work for the state authorities again. While this was obviously prblematic, it also meant that the German authorities could rely on their experience and pretty much perform a running start, so to speak. Owing to the aforementioned feeiling of "this is all behind us!", those former Nazis also had (in most cases) zero interest in reviving their old political beliefs, dedicating themselves to the new Germany instead. As far as I know, this didn't happen in Iraq: instead, former Baath officials were fired en masse, leaving a governmental structure whose officials had no idea what they were doing and had to learn everything on the go while simultaneously dumping hundreds of thousands of experiencd and well-connected people on the street, leaving them easy prey for radical Islamists and the like. - Lastly (and most importantly imo) it came down to commitment. While the individual states for the most part had been reinstated by 1946, the overarching structure of a German federal government only was allowed to come back in 1949. Western Germany was occupied territory until 1955 and didn't become fully sovereign until 1990 (!), with the Allied High Commission having extensive rights and control in Germany for at least the first ten years after the war. The Allies followed a determined policy of demilitarisation, de-industrialisation, denazification, democratisation and decentralisation (though with varying success - I also spoke about denazification, but the deindustrialisation wasn't really followed through with as well). Through the Marshal plan, Germany was given lots of aid to rebuild itself. Why this commitment? Easy: through its own defeat against the Soviets, Western Germany had become the last outpost of the West against the "communist hordes", which even had claimed a substantial part of Germany. Rebuilding Germany as quickly as possible was therefore in the Western Allies' best interests, while on the Germans' side it was clear that you either sided with the USA and NATO or you would fall prey to the Eastern bloc with nothing inbetween. Whether this was really the case is a matter of debate, of course, but this was the prevalent feeling of the time and also was a main reason for Germany not trying to avenge itself or whatever. e: Oh, and the fact that Germany experienced an enormous upswing in the economy was a very important factor in all that too, of course.
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Apr 21, 2015 16:56
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The God-King Konrad Adenauer came down from the heavens and created democracy from the rubble of Allied bombings. Also the economic miracle.
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Apr 21, 2015 17:37
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There's a lot to be said for the organizing structures of nationalism and a centralized bureaucratic state that can exert influence over the provinces-- Japan and Germany could just replace the "head" as it were but those structures didn't really exist in the Middle East countries the U.S. invaded and needed to be created whole cloth, to obviously poor results.
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Apr 21, 2015 17:58
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System Metternich posted:I don't know about Japan, but at least in Germany there were several factors that contributed to an "orderly" transition into a western-style parliamentary democracy: excellent, thank you. From what I have read Japan had a similar situation. Iraq on the other hand, is totally different and impossible to compare with either.
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Apr 21, 2015 18:17
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Kellsterik posted:Not to sound like a dick, but you're showing your ignorance about Iraq and Islamic law when you say that. European/American politicians and academics have been making the argument that Islam is uniquely and fundamentally backwards and incompatible with self-rule (to justify their continued occupation and control over Islamic countries- sound familiar?) since like, 1830, and you're reproducing that claim without critically thinking about whether it applies to your own society or actually describes Iraq. Because most religions, in general, are not compatible with a liberal democracy. There's a reason most (if not all?) successful liberal democracy's have strong separations of church and state. You can have an official state sponsored religion, but that religion must be separate from the rule of law for a liberal democracy to work.
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Apr 21, 2015 18:57
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Shbobdb posted:The God-King Konrad Adenauer came down from the heavens and created democracy from the rubble of Allied bombings. Also the economic miracle. Yes, because this is exactly what I said?  It wasn't Adenauer, it was a combination of the Allies' efforts, the desire of the Germans to cooperate and the economic miracle, but I thought I already had lined that out in my post. Sorry if I wasn't being clear.
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Apr 21, 2015 19:04
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Because most religions, in general, are not compatible with a liberal democracy. There's a reason most (if not all?) successful liberal democracy's have strong separations of church and state. You can have an official state sponsored religion, but that religion must be separate from the rule of law for a liberal democracy to work. Agreed. It's not like Islam is unique in that regard. Protestants, Catholics, Hindus and Buddhists certainly had their own eras where their religions were simply incompatible with democracy. It's very difficult to have a representative system when you also have a special class of people that can unilaterally impose inviolable laws.
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Apr 21, 2015 19:13
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e: not the place
Kellsterik fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Apr 21, 2015 |
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Apr 21, 2015 23:42
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Kaal posted:Agreed. It's not like Islam is unique in that regard. Protestants, Catholics, Hindus and Buddhists certainly had their own eras where their religions were simply incompatible with democracy. It's very difficult to have a representative system when you also have a special class of people that can unilaterally impose inviolable laws. There's an important difference between Islam and Christianity in this regard, though. The bible was written by dozens of people over a thousand years, and then the 2nd half of it says you don't have to follow the first half of it. It's as far from a unified document as it could be, and as a result, no one knows how to interpret the thing. This allows Christianity to change with the times. The Koran, on the other hand, is the words of one man, and it contains explicit instructions on how to live every aspect of one's life and how everything should be done. The end result is that Muslims are required for all time to live like 7th century arabs.
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Apr 22, 2015 00:32
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Orange Sunshine posted:There's an important difference between Islam and Christianity in this regard, though. The bible was written by dozens of people over a thousand years, and then the 2nd half of it says you don't have to follow the first half of it. It's as far from a unified document as it could be, and as a result, no one knows how to interpret the thing. This allows Christianity to change with the times. The Koran, on the other hand, is the words of one man, and it contains explicit instructions on how to live every aspect of one's life and how everything should be done. The end result is that Muslims are required for all time to live like 7th century arabs. Wow some hard-hitting theological truths itt 
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Apr 22, 2015 06:22
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Orange Sunshine posted:There's an important difference between Islam and Christianity in this regard, though. The bible was written by dozens of people over a thousand years, and then the 2nd half of it says you don't have to follow the first half of it. It's as far from a unified document as it could be, and as a result, no one knows how to interpret the thing. This allows Christianity to change with the times. The Koran, on the other hand, is the words of one man, and it contains explicit instructions on how to live every aspect of one's life and how everything should be done. The end result is that Muslims are required for all time to live like 7th century arabs. Mmm, I don't think that's particularly true. Both texts are pretty much filled with apocryphal passages and there is plenty of room for disagreement on how they should be interpreted, and indeed what should be considered part of the "core text". Indeed Islamic scholars created a complicated system for identifying and rating the authenticity of passages because there was so much disagreement on what could actually be attributed to Mohammad. It comes down to how the concepts are interpreted, not the words of the texts themselves. Christianity certainly has had its periods of liturgical strictness as well as laxity.
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Apr 22, 2015 07:25
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As is the case throughout history, the source material will say exactly what is convenient for those in power or seeking power. Regardless, it is too early to say whether efforts to establish democracy in Iraq/Afghanistan have failed. Certainly, they now both technically running democratic governments with constitutions. Historically, it's a nonsense to credit German democracy the United States, and simplistic in the case of Japan. Japan's grassroot Taisho democracy, like in the case of Germany, was swept up by a fascist and militaristic national upswing. At the end of these wars, these apparatuses were dismantled and destroyed. The foundation stones were already laid, long before WW2, or even WW1. America's effect on these countries was more economic than political. As to the troubles in the Middle-East, the problems run all the way back to the first half of the 20th Century, first to the British, and then the US and USSR in the Cold War. Strings of puppet leaders and proxy wars has led to a gigantic radicalisation in Islamic culture as a reaction to "Western" interventionism. It's been so long since these countries have had an undisrupted central government, that it's no wonder they have subdivided into almost small fiefdoms delineated by culture or religion.
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Apr 22, 2015 11:30
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Solaris 2.0 posted:Because most religions, in general, are not compatible with a liberal democracy. There's a reason most (if not all?) successful liberal democracy's have strong separations of church and state. You can have an official state sponsored religion, but that religion must be separate from the rule of law for a liberal democracy to work. the musselman untermenschen simply aren't culture compatible with democracy i'm afraid
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Apr 22, 2015 14:12
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Orange Sunshine posted:There's an important difference between Islam and Christianity in this regard, though. The bible was written by dozens of people over a thousand years, and then the 2nd half of it says you don't have to follow the first half of it. It's as far from a unified document as it could be, and as a result, no one knows how to interpret the thing. This allows Christianity to change with the times. The Koran, on the other hand, is the words of one man, and it contains explicit instructions on how to live every aspect of one's life and how everything should be done. The end result is that Muslims are required for all time to live like 7th century arabs. The Quran is far from being the only authoritative text in the theological corpus of Islam. In fact, it's only a small fragment of it, and frequently contradicted.
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Apr 22, 2015 20:40
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