Hello good people,
I’ve been watching a documentary about Abraham Lincoln and his legacy.
It struck me how hugely this tumult affects society and the relationship of nations to nations.
Is Civil war a requirement of a Nation’s growth, or indeed are there examples of contries which have changed their political systems without the need for mass political conflict/
Egypt is of course on my mind, along with much of the near and middle East.
Peter
I think few make the transition w/o a civil war, but the old Czechoslovakia is one example where it was avoided.
Political conflict or military conflict?
In the US, political conflict between the north and south had been around pretty much since the beginning.
Military conflict is not essential, I think. But political conflict must exist for a nation to change.
The Meiji Restoration went off without a general civil war in Japan – but, there were several small-scale civil conflicts preceding it, and another following it. The Last Samurai is very loosely based on the Boshin War, which was really all about preserving the privileges of the samurai caste. The samurai holdouts were defeated; some fled north and established a short-lived independent state on Hokkaido.)
Given that Japan’s history before the Tokugawa Shogunate was mostly civil wars, that’s actually not a bad record for peaceful transition to modernity.
Can a country undergo large-scale political change without a civil war? Sure. Can a country go for ever without having a civil war? Surely not.
Then South Africa’s transition to post-Apartheid counts. It went off without any general military conflict of any kind. But, that’s more a case of “civil war averted” than “peaceful political progress”.
No.
Australia “won” it’s independence from Britain without a shot being fired, and barely a voice raised in anger.
The whole process has gone so smoothly we haven’t bothered banging the last nail in.
You could also add New Zealand to that list.
And Canada. Though Canada has had internal problems at times.
We tend to make our discontent known through rudeness rather than violence, though. There’s quite a low tolerance here for chaos or public displays of… stuff.
And the UK. Yes, there has been civil wars there, but during the last centuries, the evolution towards a completely democratic system occured without bloooshed.
Except for those pesky Irish.
Germany went from the Weimar Republic to a Nazi state with relatively little bloodshed during the transition; certainly nothing on the scale of the American Civil War. That was a pretty dramatic political shift, and obviously not for the better, given the Holocaust that followed. Then, in the early '90s, West and East Germany integrated with surprisingly little trouble.
Except for the 30 year guerrilla war and terrorist campaign by the ANC against the Nationalist government.
That’s just the point. It could have become a full-blown civil war – it could even have been racial-war-to-the-knife, like in Rwanda – but they managed to avoid all that.
I think the OP’s concept was more that many Western nations had some sort of armed conflict within the nation that resulted in a profound shift in the way that the nation was governed, and in many cases, how it views itself.
The UK had the English Civil War, which established that monarchs only rule with the consent of Parliament.
The French had the Revolution, which while not exactly a “civil war,” was certainly bloody enough, and definitely changed France permanently.
The US had the Civil War, which established the primacy of the Federal government, and the inability for states to secede legally.
Italy and Germany had what would more rightly be called wars of unification, but they served the same purpose as civil wars elsewhere.
I can’t think of any countries who had a sea change in their government without some pretty serious conflict, usually armed. Australia, Canada and New Zealand don’t count- their systems of government didn’t really change that drastically when they spun off from the UK.
Just what in Australian/Canadian/New Zealand independence from the UK was any less of a “sea change in their government” than what occurred in the US’s independence from the UK, without the need for armed conflict.
And as to why Australia/Canada/New Zealand retained parliamentary democracies rather than become presidential republics, maybe the recognision of which is the better model of government?
I was born in the Tidewater area…the cradle of the Civil War. It should have been over in three weeks. The United States was the last country on earth to have slavery as an institution, long after Wilberforce. Robert E. Lee and Henry Jackson were both men of deep moral character and religious principle but still felt led to serve on the side of Virginia. God used these great generals to extend the war and exact judgement on the US for slavery.
You’ll note that I didn’t say that the sea change in the US government was the breakaway from the UK, but rather the Civil War that for the most part, nailed down the relationship between the states and the federal government.
Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, for better or worse, just carried on where the Brits left off- even the Australian federal system dates from the turn of the 20th century.
except that bit about being spun off from the uk was a sea change.
In 1867 Canada was a colonialpossesion of the British with thegovernor general an imperial officer of the crown. The British had sole power to amend our constitution, the power to passlaws that bound Canada and the sole power to govern canada’s i ternational relAtions including the power to take Canada to war (see WWI).
Fastforward to 1982, and all that is changed. Canada is a fully independent nationand the British have no say in our affairs - in other words we reached the same status as the us without going to war with Britain.
Within the context of the OP, the US Civil War would have been a sea change in goverment if the South had won. As it was the outcome essentially returned the pre-existing system of government.