Yeah, unfortunately. But let’s think positive! How many such events in history can we think of that went relatively violence-free? I can think of two off the top of my head:
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The end of apartheid in South Africa. All they did was to force them to free Nelson Mandela, who then promptly got elected. No major government overthrow.
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East Germany. After the fateful press conference that caused everyone to storm the border crossings, the government basically accepted that their economy could no longer hold up, and they disbanded without a fight.
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Honorable mention: The disbanding of the Soviet Union within Russia. There have certainly been violent revolutions in the other socialist republics, but Russia didn’t need one because Yeltsin could just declare Russia independent from the Soviet Union.
Are there others I missed?
All of these happened in the wake of major crises.
Apartheit in South Africa ended, because of massive protests in the country (including violence), massive international pressure (the UN labelled apartheit as crime against humanity and lots of countries banned imports from South Africa), and the South African economy was collapsing due the price of gold dropping a lot.
East Germany collapsed because of massive economic problems. Storming the border crossings was just the last push. If that would have happened 10 years earlier, the police would just have shot the first row of people trying to cross the border and the rest would have fled. The DDR was already collapsing at that point. And the press conference that caused the storm on the border crossing was actually about East Germany opening the border in a month’s time. So even without the storm on the border crossings, the same thing would have happend, just a month later.
The Sovjet Union, again, collapsed due to economic problems. Their economiy completely collapsed and with it their power over all the different SSRs. Russia, being the largest and most powerful SSR, being able declaring itself independent of all these other countries that really didn’t want to be part of the USSR without having to use violence is really not surprising.
It’s kinda as if Great Brittain declared itself independent of the Brittish Empire.
All these situations you mentioned where already under way for a decade or so, before the events you mentioned did the last push. And all of them where only possible to massive crises.
Right! So the two questions this raises to me are:
- How does our own current crisis compare to those crises that caused those systemic shifts? Are we there yet?
- When our own crisis come to a head and shit goes down fast, what will the next system be?
To the first point: no. There is no wide-spread hunger yet. People on the very low end of the income scale are suffering and many are homeless, but that’s not what the majority of the people experience. The middle class currently mostly takes hits to their savings or to their comfort, but they still have a roof over their heads and they still don’t suffer hunger.
To the second point, I can only speculate. I think the EU has a rather stable system. Individual countries might shift to the left or right, but the whole system of the EU is made to prevent anything really bad. Secession from the EU is something that no current member state of the EU can afford and after Brexit not even rightwing extremists want to seriously leave the EU.
The USA isn’t setup nearly as stable, since they are still running one of the earliest democratic systems in the world. I see two (not mutually exclusive) options there.
- A republican dictatorship, which is not too difficult for them, because all you really need is the president and the surpreme court being corrupt enough to want that power.
- Secession of multipe states. Texas is testing the waters, and if they actually seceede, other states might follow. This might either lead to a new edition of the civil war, or multiple rogue nations with nukes. Either way, the USA’s status as an economic and military superpower would be gone. This again would destabilize Europe, since the EU currently doesn’t have the military power to defend itself without NATO. What will happen from there on is anyone’s guess.
