What "Eccentric" states could exist today?
- Thread starter Gukpard
- Start date
Who is administering canon law, temporal princes or actual bishops?
Well, the only reason is because it is a pre 1900 thing, but yeah it is an eccentric state.
There was a Brazilian terrorist called Aladino Felix who declared himself the Messiah of the Jewish people in 1968 and did some attacks trying to create a Jewish theocracy in Brazil (according to him aliens told him about his mission), so in a scenario where the Brazilian Jewish population is massive and somehow there is a general collapse of authority we might have him to make a warlord state.
Magistrates trained in canon law run courts spiritual and/or inquisitions. Whether the head of state or government is himself clergy is not what I'm asking.
Central African Empire.
Let's say a bunch of its neighbors go communist or pro-Soviet. France could prop up Jean-Bédel Bokassa if it means fighting against those it considers threats to French interests. That could have interesting consequences, especially if Bokassa turns the country into a theocracy to further legitimize his rule.
Let's say a bunch of its neighbors go communist or pro-Soviet. France could prop up Jean-Bédel Bokassa if it means fighting against those it considers threats to French interests. That could have interesting consequences, especially if Bokassa turns the country into a theocracy to further legitimize his rule.
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Basically all precolonial Confucian countries if they had managed to modernize early enough to be a relevant force in the 20th century.
1. Law in Confucian countries, while no doubt updated to deal with modern circumstances, is basically an extension of 8th century Chinese law, so it is very different to any system in the modern West. For example, it is the state's paternalistic duty to promote virtue among the people, so any activity or thing deemed unvirtuous is banned: the highlights are various drugs, like opium, and various heretical doctrines like the White Lotus - 'heretical' being defined as anything which promotes vice, rebellion, disrespect for Confucian morals and social order, and lese-majeste. Each Confucian country's list of heretical doctrines is different depending on its local traditions and its interpretation of Confucian doctrine - Vietnam includes Christianity and Islam, while Korea includes Christianity and Buddhism. Being a missionary of the wrong religion is highly inadvisable. If you go to a random village, you may be treated to the sight of a local official standing in the village square and lecturing the assembled public about a particular law, along with stories to illustrate it, as part of the state's paternal duty to the people.
2. Whipping is a very common legal punishment for light offenses. Conviction requires confession, and the magistrate is authorized to use torture; basically, just look up Japan's conviction rate and extrapolate from there. If you're a tourist, the government will not care when foreign countries protest over you getting roundly whipped on public television for something you didn't know was a crime. Every time a new emperor comes to the throne, the characters that make up his name are banned from public use, and lese-majeste laws are very much in force. There is also an explicitly multi-tiered justice system in which some people get lighter sentences than others for the same crime - except for certain crimes that not even the emperor is legally able to commute.
3. Confucianism is patriarchy incarnate, in the sense that men > women, family > everything else, father > his family, and this is baked into law in a way that can only be compared with sharia law in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran. And just like how hardcore Christians can quote the entire Bible from memory, basically anyone in government or who wants to be part of government absolutely must learn the Confucian canon by heart, otherwise he will not pass the civil service exam. And even if the civil service exam stops being mostly about quoting the Confucian texts as the country modernizes, you can bet your ass that being proficient in it is still going to be a requirement for passing it. This means that the only way to get ahead in society is to steep yourself in this doctrine, a lot like how all leaders in a theocracy must learn the holy text.
4. Confucianism, like any ideology, has competing branches. Generally, this competition is based around public debates and personality conflicts between the different factions, and is rather bloodless despite all the invective thrown around. Korea is different. Korea is an ideological kudzu which was famous for having nasty purges happen like clockwork every 1-2 generations until one of the imperial in-laws basically took over the government and set his family up as the real rulers of the country in the 1800s. Of course, the ideological factions are still there; they just can't have each other executed for wrongthink anymore.
5. Absolute monarchy is the norm, though the power is mostly in the hands of the bureaucracy rather than the actual emperor. At most, the only form of "democracy" allowed is one where the jinshi (people who passed the highest civil service exam) get to vote, because Confucian doctrine states that the educated, morally-cultivated person is inherently superior to the ignorant rube toiling in the fields.
a. btw, if the Internet is a thing, these countries are 100% guaranteed to have a Great Firewall in order to minimize exposure to foreigners and the harmful doctrines they espouse, like democracy, feminism and human rights and so on. Expect a lot of anti-porn and anti-gaming regulation too - all in the name of promoting virtue, of course! If not for the fact that Christianity is probably banned, this would be a Christian conservative's wet dream.
2. Whipping is a very common legal punishment for light offenses. Conviction requires confession, and the magistrate is authorized to use torture; basically, just look up Japan's conviction rate and extrapolate from there. If you're a tourist, the government will not care when foreign countries protest over you getting roundly whipped on public television for something you didn't know was a crime. Every time a new emperor comes to the throne, the characters that make up his name are banned from public use, and lese-majeste laws are very much in force. There is also an explicitly multi-tiered justice system in which some people get lighter sentences than others for the same crime - except for certain crimes that not even the emperor is legally able to commute.
3. Confucianism is patriarchy incarnate, in the sense that men > women, family > everything else, father > his family, and this is baked into law in a way that can only be compared with sharia law in Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia or Iran. And just like how hardcore Christians can quote the entire Bible from memory, basically anyone in government or who wants to be part of government absolutely must learn the Confucian canon by heart, otherwise he will not pass the civil service exam. And even if the civil service exam stops being mostly about quoting the Confucian texts as the country modernizes, you can bet your ass that being proficient in it is still going to be a requirement for passing it. This means that the only way to get ahead in society is to steep yourself in this doctrine, a lot like how all leaders in a theocracy must learn the holy text.
4. Confucianism, like any ideology, has competing branches. Generally, this competition is based around public debates and personality conflicts between the different factions, and is rather bloodless despite all the invective thrown around. Korea is different. Korea is an ideological kudzu which was famous for having nasty purges happen like clockwork every 1-2 generations until one of the imperial in-laws basically took over the government and set his family up as the real rulers of the country in the 1800s. Of course, the ideological factions are still there; they just can't have each other executed for wrongthink anymore.
5. Absolute monarchy is the norm, though the power is mostly in the hands of the bureaucracy rather than the actual emperor. At most, the only form of "democracy" allowed is one where the jinshi (people who passed the highest civil service exam) get to vote, because Confucian doctrine states that the educated, morally-cultivated person is inherently superior to the ignorant rube toiling in the fields.
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But I only recognize who is actually running the government itself, so it seems we are at an impasse.
Perhaps Confucianism would be regarded as an evil ideology in TTL’s West - not as an ingredient to success but as something comparable to Fascism
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Banned
Its absolute ideological opposition to everything America stands for - egalitarianism, democracy, progress over tradition, republicanism, etc - makes this a virtual certainty, especially if America doesn't have something to its ideological left, like Marxism, to distract it.
Most people outside the West would view it as a foreign ideology and obviously not quite their cup of tea, but ultimately more familiar than America's ideology, since most societies place more emphasis on family, tradition and moralism than America did at any point after the Puritans. It also isn't wedded to a specific religion, which is why China integrated Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and pagans into its society without coming into conflict with their religiosity.
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On that note, right-wing Westerners might end up enamored by this Confucian China with a possible scenario being that the fascism-equivalent draws as much from an attempt to adapt Confucianism to a Western context as it drew from its OTL sources. A scenario where the fascism-equivalent is based on a modernized interpretation of philosophers who justified absolute monarchy (like Plato's ideas of a philosopher-king or Hobbes' ideas of an all-encompassing Leviathan) as opposed to a misreading of Nietzche's ubermensch and Social Darwinistic notions in general would be an interesting scenario to look at, speaking of which.
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IOTL the late Qing political figure Kang Youwei wanted to make Confucianism the state religion of China, with a clergy, church services and all the other features of institutionalized religions. Making Kang Emperor seems too unrealistic, but I could see him becoming Prime Minister in a less conservative Qing, preferably with Cixi removed.
On that note, there's an old but fun TL called Superpower Empire which has him become Emperor after the Xinhai Revolution and all that.
Could you flesh the Western analogue out in the Alternate Ideologies thread?
The Republic (both pre-and post-exile) has descendants of Confucius in official hereditary posts to this day. There's no reason they couldn't become emperors if the monarchy was retained.
About Confucianism as Fascism, I had a terrifying thought: an alternate Korean War fucked enough, the northern and southern regimes collapse, the USA and USSR both pull out of the region, and neither China nor Japan move in - maybe nukes were involved, here. Eventually, a hardcore Confucian regime takes over the peninsula; it becomes the Saudi Arabia of the Far East, combining OTL South Korea's technological prowess with laws strict enough to make a Joseon bureaucrat recoil in horror.
South Vietnam or Vietnam under a Catholic theocracy would be quite horrific.
South Korea/Singapore technology/capitalism and north korean governance. Fun.
Deleted member 163405
Nguema keeps up the personality cult in Equatorial Guinea and doesn't threaten to purge his entire family to get himself coup’d. Eventually he's sidelined by his daughter who was in irl raised by Kim Il Sung who she described as her “second father.” So she brings the North Korean model to Nguema’s “Marxist-Hiterlerism”