DBWI Challenge: Democracy Takes Off in Europe

For the most part, Europe is controlled by monarchies and imperial dynasties, many of which oversea long reaching colonial empires. Certainly, many of those nations have a parliaments, but even those are under a monarch with power, if not wholly puppet legislatures.

So the challenge is to have Democratic governments take off in Europe, whether with the monarchy as only figureheads, or without any monarch and only elected representatives.

OOC: POD is that the status quo of the late 19th/early 20th century remains for whatever reason. Maybe a Socialist utopia here or there, but for the most part monarchist states with colonial empires under the most powerful of them.
 
Beats me, Norton. I mean, the Trauma suffered in France with the whole Reign of Terror ending with the reinstating of a Bourbon Monarch and the evolution of Hobbesian ideals is kind of a hard progression to fight against.

I suppose the question is how to make Democracy workable as a form of government--the United States had of course boldly pronounced such ideals, but it turned into a dictatorship under Aaron Burr and collapsed into a pile of warlord states, some of which appointed kings of their own right.

I think the world needs a paradigm shift. Some speak of Human Rights--but this is clearly a myth. The Negros are a lesser race, they pick cotton and this is what makes them happy. The Best People are those chosen by god to live the best way. I mean, this is God's plan for humanity--women stay at home raising infants, whites rule, blacks, browns and yellows work, and children work in the fields and the factories.

It seems a rather odd question to ask. But I'd have to know: Do you really think that all men are created equal? That's an idea that's been proven false time after time. For "Democracy" to work, you'd need a revolutionary state that would meaningfully survive to propose such ideas--but that is not god's will. The United States failed, the French Revolution Failed, and the Polish Constitutionals succeeded in bringing better governance for their people--Russia, Prussia and Austria.

The question that faces us today is how much more power a King or Noble should have over his people. Some, like the Czar of Russia, claim the power of life and death over their people, while England is likely simply to send the miscreants off to Australia to raise sheep. There may be a limit to how much power a king should wield, as the overthrow of Istvan of Hungary should make clear--then again, that was a man who was probably forcing himself on peasant women and killing their husbands.

I think the question is what would have happened if Locke had been correct instead of Hobbes--what if people were better off making their own rules instead of having the best rule with unlimited power? We are slowly learning that this power perhaps should NOT be unlimited, but it is a difficult state of affairs. I for one can't imagine a world where women aren't in the kitchen or in the laundry room, or one where anyone except a noble European runs the factory or the government. It's ours to rule.
 
My guess is that there would have to be a reversal of the political revolutions of the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere with the wars on the European Continent....

Dr. Sun Yat-sen's democratic revolution in 1911 served to prove that democracy, far from being a Western ideal was compatible with the Asian ideas of stability and order. The Inukai Japanese political reforms of 1933 served to provide a model of democratic governments and alliances in the region, leading to the Roosevelt-Inukai Treaty in 1942, which established the East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere...

With the exception during the 1930s/1940s of Subhas Chandra Bose's regime in India, Bogdo Gogen's military dictatorship in Tibet, and the Muslim guerillas led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Asian Continent has been a haven of democracies and self-determination. Somehow you have to get the democratic tradition popularized in Europe prior to the European Alliance in 1940....
 
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