Abstract
In 1968 Samuel Huntington published his classic book Political Order in Changing Societies in which he warned that the outcome of sudden political changes in countries with ineffectual political institutions could be chaotic. A sudden increase in political participation, he wrote, instead of promoting democracy, could lead to a praetorian system. A praetorian system was, according to Huntington, a system in which “social forces confront each other nakedly; no political institutions, no corps of professional political leaders are recognized or accepted as the legitimate intermediaries to moderate group conflict. Equally important, no agreement exists among the groups as to the legitimate and authoritative methods for resolving conflicts (…) Each group employs means which reflect its peculiar nature and capabilities. The wealthy bribe; students riot; workers strike; mobs demonstrate; and the military coup.”2 Huntington’s description of a praetorian system seemed rather adequate to describe the transition period in the Soviet Union from 1988 to 1991—even before the abortive KGB-inspired coup against Gorbachev.
Both Europeans and Americans increasingly assume that peace and calm are the natural order of things in Europe and that the first 45 years of this century, not the most recent, were the aberration. This is understandable since Europe has been free of war for so long that an ever-growing proportion of the Western public, born after World War II, has no direct experience with great-power war. However, this optimistic view is incorrect.1
John J. Mearsheimer
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Notes
J. J. Mearsheimer (1995) “Back to the Future-Instability in Europe after the Cold War,” in M. Brown, S. M. Lynn Jones, and S. E. Miller (eds), The Perils of Anarchy-Contemporary Realism and International Security (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press), pp. 83–4.
S. P. Huntington (1968) Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 196.
J. Snyder (1992) “Averting Anarchy in the New Europe,” revised edition published in S. M. Lynn-Jones (ed.), The Cold War and After-Prospects for Peace (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press), pp. 104–40.
E. D. Mansfield and J. Snyder (2005) Electing to Fight-Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press).
R. Nixon (1992) Seize the Moment America’s Challenge in a One-Superpower World (New York and London: Simon & Schuster), p. 72.
A. Melville (April 13, 1994) Weimar and Russia: Is there an Analogy? Lecture at the “Weimar and Russia Forum,” UC Berkeley. (My italics, MHVH.) Available at http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/pubs/melville.html
S. Sestanovich (January-February 1994) “Russia Turns the Corner,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 1, pp. 83–98.
D. Remnick (January-February 1997) “Can Russia Change?,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 76, No. 1, p. 47. (My emphasis, MHVH.)
A. Umland (1998) The Fascist Threat in Post-Soviet Russia-An Investigation into the LDPR-Ideology 1990–1993, and Some Tentative Suggestions on the Appropriateness of the “Weimar Russia” Metaphor (Brussels: NATO), p. 94. This report of 139 pages is available at http://www.nato.int/acad/fellow/96–98/umland.pdf
N. Ferguson (January 1, 2005) “Look back at Weimar-and Start to Worry about Russia,” The Telegraph.
N. Ferguson (May 28, 2007), “Reviving the Evil Empire,” Los Angeles Times.
O. Matthews and A. Nemtsova (August 15, 2011) “Fascist Russia?,” Newsweek.
Cf. P. Goble (April 9, 2009) “‘Weimar’-Like Threat Justifies Moscow’s Authoritarianism, Russia’s Chief Justice Says,” Window on Eurasia. Available at http://www.windowoneurasia.blogspot.com/2009/04/window-on-eurasiaweimar-like-threat.html
Y. Gaidar (2007) Collapse of an Empire—Lessons for Modern Russia (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press), p. xv.
V. Likhachov (2002) Natsizm v Rossii [Nazism in Russia] (Moscow: Tsentr ‘Panorama’), p. 6. (My emphasis, MHVH.)
W. Laqueur (1993) Black Hundred—The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York: Harper Collins), p. xi.
They included great parts of West Prussia, a part of Silesia and all of Posen (Poznan), which went to the newly-created state of Poland. The Memel region went to Lithuania and the tiny Hultschiner Ländchen (Hlucinsko) went to Czechoslovakia. In the west, Germany lost Alsace and the parts of Lorraine that it had taken from France after the Franco-Prussian war in 1871; the region around Eupen and Malmédy went to Belgium; and northern Schleswig went to Denmark. Some of these territories were not transferred immediately, but only after plebiscites were held such as, for instance, in Eupen-Malmédy, northern Schleswig, and Upper Silesia. Cf. Wolfgang Elz, “Foreign Policy,” in A. McElligot (2009) Weimar Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 50–1.
Elz, o.c., p. 53. Prussia was the greatest loser. According to Horst Möller, “On the basis of the Treaty of Versailles, Prussia lost 56,057,340 square kilometers with a population of 4,601,568 to the neighboring countries Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, and Belgium; the Reich lost in 1918/19 altogether ca. 70,000 square kilometers with 7.3 million inhabitants (…) Prussia was therefore, not only in absolute numbers, but also relatively the only German state that suffered most of the territorial and population losses.” Cf. H. Möller, “Preußen von 1918 bis 1947: Weimarer Republik, Preußen und der Nationalsozialismus,” in W. Neugebauer (ed.) (2000) Handbuch der preussischen Geschichte: Band III. Von Kaiserreich zum 20. Jahrhundert und Große Themen der Geschichte Preußens (Berlin: De Gruyter), p. 224.
P. Béhar (1992) Une géopolitique pour l’Europe—vers une nouvelle Eurasie? (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères), p. 104.
D. Trenin (2011) Post-Imperium—A Eurasian Stoiy (Washington, DC and Moscow: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace), p. 46.
Cf. D. J. K. Peukert (1992) The Weimar Republic—The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill and Wang), p. 201.
Cf. V. R. Berghahn (2005) Imperial Germany 1871–1914: Economy, Society, Culture and Politics (New York: Berghahn Books), p. 38.
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© 2013 Marcel H. Van Herpen
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Van Herpen, M.H. (2013). Russia and the Weimar Republic: Does a “Weimar Parallel” Exist?. In: Putinism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137282811_2
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