Talk Elections

This thread is going to be my answer to the threads on the Religion and Philosophy board.  Bring up a topic, let's chat about it for a bit.  I am best qualified to talk about subjects relating to 19th and 20th century European history, but have wide-ranging interests.

Ok, I'll shoot and mention something that has interested me recently, what do you think would have been the history of Marxism after WWI had the Russian Revolution never happened/been a failure?

That's (like all counterfactuals) not something that is easily answered, but here we go anyway.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the failure of the revolution doesn't end the crisis for Kerensky's provisional government.  The Kerensky offensive had petered out but Kerensky was in hock to the Entente to stay in the struggle, something that the Russian soldiery had had enough of.  If Kerensky still responds to the whispering around Kornilov by freaking out and sacking the popular head of the Russian military at a time when his popularity was at its lowest like he did IRL, it's not clear how the Provisional Government survives some sort of hostile coup, if not from the Bolsheviks then maybe actually from Kornilov to set up a military dictatorship in Russia (which would likely then capitulate to the Germans under similar terms as Brest-Litovsk because seriously the Germans were marching near-unopposed on Petrograd).  Russia restoring its place as the head of global reaction rather than becoming the head of global revolution has rather mixed results for revolutionaries elsewhere.

So...socialist parties elsewhere were torn between larger pro-government, pro-war factions out of fear and smaller factions that tapped into the popular anti-war attitude.  (See the unsuccessful communist coup in Germany in 1919 and the successful communist takeover in Hungary that same year that lasted all of four months for cases of figures in those smaller parties).  Even without Moscow's presence trying to Leninize all the communist parties into their own revolutionary vanguard parties, massive splits after the war were always likely.  The old guard like Karl Kautsky, despite studying at Engels' feet, were never going to be radical enough in their later years to make up for their utter failure to resist the First World War in the eyes of the communists.  I think you still get the splits in Germany and France and other places between a Socialist Party, rooted in those who had reluctantly supported the war, and a Communist Party rooted in those who opposed it.  However, these communist parties would not be bound by the Third International's absurd mood swings and would be better able to try to relate to the people of their individual countries without going social fascism->popular front overnight and pretending that they had never had the previous position.

That's possibly so, but then wasn't the extreme/messianic end of the socialist spectrum given a massive boost by the events of 1917? There would surely still have been splits, but for the Communist Parties the influence of the Soviet Union cut both ways.

Somewhat related:

Obviously the fact that the first country in which socialists came to power was Russia of all places seemed like an aberration, given Russia's level of industrialization, but as it turned out that was the norm. Certainly the most industrialized societies where socialist governments came to power were East Germany and Czechoslovakia, but in both cases that was by Soviet force of arms. The most industrialized society where socialism took hold without being forced from without was what, Cuba?

What do you know about the interesting historical case of the Khazars?

Other than the famous stuff?  Turkic tribe whose ruler, like so many other rulers in the era of the great migrations, decided to adopt a new religion, but unlike all of the other Turkic tribes converting to Islam or Christianity or Buddhism or (for the early Uyghurs) Manicheanism, their ruler picked Judaism.  The tribe's ordinary members didn't heavily Judaize, but their elites did.  The Khazars aligned with the Byzantines but lost many wars with the Rus principalities and were finally crushed by the pagan Cumans.

I don't think I'm telling you anything new.

There's a long-standing view that today's Jews are mostly Khazar descendants, but given how very few (relatively speaking) Khazars actually converted to Judaism, while it might be possible that later Jews have some Khazar blood in them, they're clearly not the source of Jews elsewhere.

Of course, the remarkable thing is that they chose Judaism. I suppose that it's possible that King Bulan really did convene a debate between representatives of the three major Abrahamic faiths and happened to choose Judaism as the superior religion, but it seems more likely to me that the faith was seen as a middle ground between Christianity and Islam.

On a related note, what do you think would have happened if Vladimir I had chosen Judaism?


Yes, I've encountered that theory among Christians who want to maintain the Hebrew roots of their faith while simultaneously being anti-Semitic.

I believe Genetic evidence has ruled out this as a serious theory (i.e. The Khazars are the origin of European Jewry).

I don't think it was ever something that you could politely describe as a 'serious theory'.

Ah right. This is not my field (to put it mildly) so I thought it taken at least semi-seriously. But then again Arthur Koestler believed it, which isn't always the best sign (attitude to Stalin excepted).

Yeah, I only mentioned it to dismiss it.  I don't think it's too absurd to think that modern Jews might have some Khazar ancestors, to the extent that everyone is descended from everyone else in some way.

Probably Yugoslavia, if you consider the Partisans the ones who established the socialist government rather than the Red Army.

To ask the reverse of Gully's question, what if the Spartacists had succeeded in Germany along with the Bolsheviks taking over Russia? Given their ideological differences and Luxemburg's open anti-Bolshevism, could there be cooperation between Berlin and Moscow or would they lead two  opposed socialist blocs?

That one's even harder to answer, mainly because it leads to questions about the willingness of the Entente to allow a revolutionary state on France's border.  On the one hand, the Entente was utterly exhausted militarily, on the other hand, Germany's military had completely and utterly evaporated after the armistice (something that allowed the Spartakists to be as successful as they were) and a revolution in 1919 would have been seen as creating a state irreconcilable with the aims of the Paris Peace Conference (good luck convincing Revolutionary Germany to hand over Poznan and West Prussia to Poland).  Actually, the Entente would likely have had a particularly vigorous anti-revolutionary ally in Poland, a state bound and determined to get its share of the spoils from the First World War.

Even in the situation where revolutionary Germany took over, it was simply too much of a threat to the post-war eastern European status quo under design in Paris to be allowed to stand, much like Bela Kun's Hungary was on a smaller scale.  With Hungary, the Entente merely turned a blind eye as Romania took them down, but with Germany a more active policy would be likely, especially if the revolution succeeded in January 1919 when a large amount of American soldiers were still available on French soil.  Revolutionary Germany would be, almost by definition, in violation of the armistice, especially if/when (when) it refused to comply with the Paris Peace Conference's edicts.

Could we have a non-hypothetical question?  More "what" or "why" and less "what if?"

Why didn't the U.S. intervene during China's Communist Revolution?

Well, USA was only really on a fully Cold War footing by 1947-48 and Mao had already made significant progress by then.  I don't have that strong a background on that angle, but I do know that a significant faction in Washington viewed the Nationalists' failures as their own damned fault (rightfully so, of course) and were hesitant about committing to a land-war in China that soon after the Second World War.  The actual reality of Mao's victory in 1949 really cemented the hawks and the Kennan Doctrine of containment and refusal to accept any future communist advances, but only after years of communist victories (the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia was as late as February 1948).  In some ways you could argue that the Truman Administration's all-out backing of South Korea in 1950 was a strange about-face from what it had done towards China, but the fall of China itself was the wake-up call that indirectly led to the Korean War.

To what extent were Russian and British goals and methods in Central Asia in the late 19th century equivalent to each other? At first glance it seems that they would be fundamentally different, since India was merely a colony of the British Empire while Russian holdings in the area were part of the Russian state proper, but on the other hand the Russian strategy with regard to Khiva and Bukhara seems to be analogous to the treatment of Indian princely states.

The first thing to question is the extent to which Russia's transuralic holdings aren't "colonies" simply because they're contiguous to Russia proper.  Prior to the 19th century, Russia's big settlement was Orenburg (near the Russia-Kazakhstan border today), pushed in Catherine the Great's time, and even that settlement had to rely heavily on cooperation from the traditional Muslim elite.  Russia's larger cities in Western Siberia, cities like Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Omsk, etc. were all products of the mid-late 19th century (as something more than frontier forts, at least).

The early 19th century brought the Russian Empire both into the Caucasus (and Transcaucasia into Georgia, Azerbaijan, etc.) and into Central Asia, the former and parts of the latter at the expense of the dying power of Qajarid Persia, which couldn't protect its northern dependencies.  A century before, the British had utilized the chaos of the late Mughal period (especially after Nader Shah's sacking of Delhi) and the inability of the Marathas to cement India to pick off more powers hostile to them (first Bengal, then famously Mysore), coopt their native opponents' enemies (notably Hyderabad), and finally finish off the isolated and chaotic and vulnerable Marathas (in a twenty-year period culminating in 1818) that left them the undisputed masters of India.  Following that, they conquered Sindh and Punjab and exerted significant influence over Afghanistan and Persia. 

At this point, the British and Russian spheres directly conflicted.  Much like with the Ottomans in the 1850s, the Russians would have loved the chance to annex Persia, but allowing them to do so would critically threaten British India, so the British attempted to sink their claws into the dying Qajarid state, thus preventing it from meeting the fate of so many other Asian empires and allowing it to limp into the 20th century.

As for the comparison between the princely states and Russia with Khiva and Bukhara, the Russians did divest both states of much of their territory and treated them as mostly irrelevant rump states.  With Khiva especially, Russia had little interest in directly administering modern Turkmenistan, which was even more outlandishly back-of-beyond than it is today.  In the territory it took from the two states, the Russians had seized (excepting Bukhara itself) all the great settled cities of the old Silk Road, with their settled, somewhat better educated, and often literate in Arabic (to read the Koran) populations, and left the actual emirates in question with irrelevant rump states that were, in any case, in no geographical position to break away from Russian overlordship.

http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Empire-Multi-Ethnic-History/dp/0582234158  This is a fascinating (if somewhat overpriced) tome on the topic of minorities and expansion in Imperial Russia and talks to some length about Central Asia. 

I think you could make the case that the British princely states that did remain (especially after 1857-58) were both to reward powerful local clients of the British for their loyalty and to create some degree of native collusion and "partnership" in the imperial project while the Russian frontier's states were more that Imperial Russia had little interest in or ability to directly administer the deserts of Turkmenistan.

Fun fact: the Emirs of Bukhara were the last ruling dynasty to explicitly claim legitimacy on the basis of Genghisid descent.

Can you talk about how the Hohenstaufens are the greatest HRE dynasty?

Since it's the millenium year, what in you eyes would have been neccessary to hinder the break out of WW1, or at least postpone it for quite a while? Just talk of things that could have been done let's say from 1914 on. 

I tend to agree with this premise.

The Empire's centralizing tendency seen under the Salians had run headfirst into the reformist movement of the Church of the late 11th century: see the massive, massive struggles between Henry (Henrich) IV and V and the Church that raged over the Church's view that the Emperor appointing bishops who had temporal power was simony, though the Church would later give in and grant the King of France that very same right.  That French triumph and German failure is indicative of where the entire Imperial project was destined, and Henry at Canossa is a powerful image of Imperial failure, but the House of Hohenstaufen that would dominate in the late 12th and early 13th century made a solid effort to reestablish Imperial supremacy through close ties with the Church's many Italian opponents (the Ghibellines). 

When Frederick I Barbarossa took the throne, his whole-hearted campaigns into Italy in support of the Ghibellines who supported the Imperial project first and the Church a distant second led him to disastrous defeat by the Pope in the short term, but recognition of him as King of Germany, Burgundy, and Italy and nominal overlord of the north Italians in the short term, and in the longer term managed to marry his son to the heiress of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, thus guaranteeing that his eventual grandson would rule not only the Empire, but the Kingdom of Sicily, and would be prepared to flank the pope from north and south alike when the Papal-Imperial contest revived.

After Frederick's famous drowning in the Third Crusade, his son Henry VI attempted to further consolidate Imperial power and draw Sicily into the realm, proclaiming himself universal ruler and attempting to make the Imperial throne hereditary.  After his untimely death in 1197, Frederick's talented grandson Frederick II took the throne of Sicily and, following the defeat of the Welf Emperor Otto IV, became Holy Roman Emperor and King four times over: King of Germany, Burgundy, Italy, and Sicily.  An avowed opponent of Papal authority, Frederick regularly waged war against the Papacy and was excommunicated an astonishing four times.  Combining the Norman Sicilian skepticism of Papal authority of his de Hauteville ancestors and the centralizing Imperial drive of his Hohenstaufen ancestors, Frederick dreamed of a realm stretching from the Baltic to Malta completely under Imperial control, with the Pope firmly relegated to a supporting role rather than an equal.  Frederick successfully took Jerusalem in an unauthorized Crusade and added King of Jerusalem to his list of titles.

After Frederick's death, the Papacy authorized an all-out effort to try to stamp out Frederick's heirs to make sure that Sicily and the Empire would never be united again, awarding Sicily to Charles of Anjou and vigorously supporting his efforts to gain that kingdom (Charles of Anjou is an amazing figure in his own right, the ultimate opportunist who attempted to put together a vast Mediterranean Empire out of nothing).  A Hohenstaufen princess married into the Aragonese royal family proved enough of an incentive for the Kingdom of Aragon to snatch the island of Sicily, thus dividing the lands of the Kingdom of Sicily in two.  The end of the Hohenstaufens thwarted the imperial project, drastically increased papal power and weakened Imperial power in northern Italy (and destroyed it in southern Italy) and changed the nature of the HRE dramatically.

Though it's a bit on the casual side, I highly recommend http://www.amazon.com/Europes-Last-Summer-Started-Great/dp/0375411569/ref=cm_lmf_tit_2

It's a good summary of just how many irons were in the fire in 1914. 

Basically, there are two different questions: Could war between Austria and Serbia be avoided, and could war between Austria and Serbia avoid becoming a World War?  Those two questions are interconnected, obviously, but perhaps a more interesting question is "why did the war happen when it did?"  Fromkin is of the opinion that there was a great deal of fear of growing Russian industrial and economic might in Imperial Germany and that von Moltke the Younger and those around him desired war with France and Russia sooner rather than later because they felt that the situation was rapidly changing in an unfavorable direction and that such a war would be unwinnable if postponed, and that there was much desire among the German high command to turn Austria's pending war with Serbia into that great war with France and Russia.

It's a question that can never truly be answered, because so many players could've averted the July Crisis if there had been true will to avert it, not least of which being the Austrian government, which squandered any goodwill it received from the initial assassination by coming across as unreasonable and looking as if squashing Serbia was itself the goal, not avenging the death of the archduke which, obviously, it was in the ultimatum against Serbia.  Very few actually sincerely mourned Franz Ferdinand, excepting, rather oddly, his sincere friend Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

The two Balkan wars in the previous years had let the world realize how strong the Balkan minors really were.  Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria conspiring to drive the Ottomans almost completely out of Europe and then Greece and Serbia stripping Bulgaria of most of its spoils of war in a dramatically quick process not only highlighted how dead the Ottomans were, but how tiny Serbia packed a punch and obviously, blatantly eyed newly-Austrian Bosnia.  Slapping down the upstart kingdom was a popular policy in Vienna well before the assassination and the Austrian high command was bound and determined to get its war with Serbia out of the crisis.  What few in Austria desired was war with Russia or France or Britain, and they counted on the German blank check to scare off the Entente.

It's a tragic affair all around, and I don't want to place all the blame on the Germans (Russia deserves its fair share, of course), but the Germans were the ones ready and eager for a two front war to try out their new strategy, and were the ones whose strategy involved breaking Belgian neutrality (It's not like the British would've stayed out of the war had Belgian neutrality not been violated, but it was a fantastic excuse to bypass partisan bickering and come to the aid of Plucky Little Belgium).  The easiest way to prevent the war from breaking out when it did in the summer of 1914 would have been for the Germans to refuse to unequivocally hand Austria a blank check with regards to Serbia and to insist on mediation, as the Austrian government would never take that kind of important action without Berlin's approval.  The problem is, Berlin approved for a reason: war now seemed more favorable than war later.

When and why did Charles de Gaulle change his mind about Algerian independence?

http://www.amazon.com/The-Invention-Decolonization-Algerian-Remaking/dp/080147454X  It's been a few years since I read this book, but it's all about the topic of Algerian independence.

It's a tough question, because de Gaulle, when he took France over in 1958, was already equivocating.  His famous line "I have heard you" didn't imply that he took the concerns of the pieds-noirs seriously.  De Gaulle knew perfectly well that an Algeria that was 85% Arab Muslim couldn't be ruled by 15% pieds-noirs and Sephardic Jews against the Arabs' consent.  The thing is, originally there was still hope of gaining the Arabs' consent through extensive concessions, and that widespread citizenship and social reform would calm down tension in the colonies (though the French soon realized that granting their colonial subjects the economic benefits of French citizenship wouldn't be economically tenable).

In 1958 there was still a ghost of a hope of keeping the French colonial empire alive, though the 1956 Suez Crisis had proven France's ultimate impotence.  De Gaulle was well aware that the war in Algeria was bleeding France dry and was morally and economically untenable and moved to resolve it swiftly, severing Algeria (which, after all, was an integral part of Metropolitan France and not a "colony" legally).  In 1958 he famously advocated binding referenda in every colony to determine whether or not they'd remain part of France and only Guinea voted for independence, despite the results, by 1960 he was following the British example and shoving countries out the door, putting up a local flag, and proclaiming colonialism over.  Algeria, with its heavy colonist base and deep emotional ties to France, was a harder case, but the war wasn't going to be won because the French army was alienating the Arab public they'd need for a peaceful solution.

I wish I remembered that book better, it went deep into depth about the dramatic sea change of French attitude after the Suez and the 1958 settlement and de Gaulle's desire to somehow get the Algeria crisis behind France no matter what the solution was.

Something which has interested me is Nationalism's relationship to the left-right political spectrum. We all know that is a very simplistic way to schematize ideology, but it's not without its benefits. To me, it seems like Nationalism emerged on what was the left in the late 18th century, but over the 19th century moved to the right, until by World War 1 nationalism was obviously a right-wing position. I'd be interested in hearing your take on why that happened (if you agree with the premise of course).

Bouncing off your answer on Algeria, was there any chance of a France-Algeria solution mirroring that of Spain and Morocco today (a few coastal enclaves like Oran being part of metropolitan France, the rest being part of an independent Algeria)?

Hamster, sorry I haven't gotten around to a serious answer to your question, will post tonight.

Snowstalker: I don't think that was ever seriously proposed.  It would have had some really bizarre implications on French politics, though: over a million pieds noirs in electoral areas without Metropolitan French voters to cancel them out.  I could well see Oran going 80% for the FN in a modern election in that setup.

In your view, why has the Saudi government, i.e. the House of Saud, not been overthrown, and replaced by a more modern government, one in which a family does not own the country?

The family, in essence, owns all the wealth.

Is it because the government keeps the citizens in a good standard of living?

The days when a family rules a nation is a concept from the middle ages.

How did the Great Powers of Europe view post-Meiji Japan and (later) Nationalist China? Were they regarded as equals to any extent or was it more like "oh isn't that cute the natives are pretending to be like us"?

I've been thinking of race relations in the USA, specifically between the black minority and the white majority (but not necessarily including the white elite power brokers) post-1965.  It seems like things were becoming normalized from about the mid-60s through the 70s and into the early 80s.  Then, starting sometime in the mid- to early-80s, things started getting weird.  By the 90s identity was strong.  Society has become increasing fragmented along racial and ethnic lines.  Nowadays, I can't even turn on the television without hearing about some race riot or other, or about racially-motivated criminal or civil actions.  What was the turning point?  Was it a single event 30 years ago?  Was it a series of events?  How did we s start moving in the wrong direction with regard to race relations?

The House of Saud is impossible to understand without looking at its origins as the military wing of the Wahabbi movement.  The austere desert tribes of Nejd and this pious, fierce rejection of any kind of "shirk" or attribution of divine properties to things besides Allah had built up legitimacy in raiding into Ottoman-protected Hedjaz and modern southern Iraq throughout the 19th century, destroying shrines and such, and when Ottoman power and protection evaporated after the First World War, Abdulaziz ibn Saud and his followers quickly conquered and annexed the Hedjaz, the old Islamic holy land, and promptly began demolishing everything they saw as pseudo-pagan. 

The House of Saud's legitimacy (and, remember, king Abdullah is the son of ibn Saud himself...they're still only one generation in despite the kingdom existing for 90 years now) based its legitimacy on its firm commitment to Wahhabi tenets like destroying the shrines of the Prophet's companions and imposing that austere radical monotheism on the people of the Hedjaz, who had traditionally been far more willing to go to the graves of various major early Islamic figures to ask for intercession when praying.  If you wonder why Saudi Arabia's laws are so harsh, it's because, despite how party-animal-ish the Saudi princes themselves are, their entire rationale for power is the imposition of Wahhabi austerity on the Arab holy land.  Their decadent oil-wealth driven lifestyle does erode their credibility, but it leads them in turn to go back to their founding principles to the extent of spending massive amounts of money to promote Wahabbi principles abroad, even to the extent of funding "missionaries" of sorts to other Sunni Islamic countries to tell them about how they've been practicing Sunni Islam "incorrectly" for the past 1000 or so years.  Basically, ibn Saud inspired his followers and conquered the Islamic Holy Land on the principles of commitment to impose radical, austere, absolute monotheism on said Holy Land, and as corrupt as the House of Saud is in its personal conduct, they take care to outwardly pay lip service to that original mission.


After 1906 and Japan's defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, there was a growing "Yellow Peril" panic with the fear that the massive manpower of Asia, coupled with their adoption of European technology, would create a "tidal wave" of Asian masses of humanity that would end European supremacy.  You can find very scared rhetoric about the coming "race war with Asia."  Japan's ambitions to conquer the chaotic mess that was China provided a double dose of panic because of similar Japanese technology + Chinese manpower = unstoppable Yellow tidal wave thoughts in the 1920s, and Chiang Kai-Shek was able to leverage that fear of Japan dominating China to China's diplomatic advantage in the 1920s to obtain far better treaties with the West.  On the Japanese side, particularly after World War I, there was a growing disenchantment with the West.  First, the Western governments collaborated to shoot down the Japanese-backed racial equality clause in the League of Nations charter, which the Japanese reasonably took as a very offensive sign that they weren't considered equal, and then growing immigration walls in the USA, Canada, and Australia were seen as signs of intense disrespect by those powers.  The end of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902-1921) left the Japanese feeling left out of the post-World War I international system and the Western condemnation of their conquest of Manchuria in 1930 ensured that Japan would end up in the orbit of other other resentful powers that wanted to overturn the post-World War I international system like Germany.


This is a very tricky question that I'll have to get back to later, but the short answer is that the process started in the 1970s and early 1980s with growing disillusionment about the actual effects of desegregation, as the initial luster of the civil rights movements' legal victories in the 1960s wore off and the reality that there were limits to what the effectiveness of changing the laws would mean.  African Americans were still poorer than average, more widely incarcerated than average, less represented in the white collar professions than average, etc. and it caused the discussion to shift to the question of "if ending legal segregation wasn't enough to fix the situation, what is?"  White figures like Daniel Patrick Moynihan start pointing to the breakup of the African American family as a leading cause of social decay and inner-city poverty, as opposed to legal discrimination, while African American leaders alleged that the end of segregation didn't actually change the economic power structure in America and that, because blacks were disproportionately poor, they were likely to end up disproportionately poor as a self-reinforcing underclass.  The new challenges, though obviously less odious than segregation, are far more difficult to combat because they can't be overturned as easily as passing a law ending active government discrimination was.

I'm reading Norman Davies' Vanished Kingdoms atm. I believe you have also read it? Opinions?

Highly positive.  I'd recommend (as always) remembering that Norman Davies is a colossal troll (see the entire Ireland chapter, also using the Prussia chapter to talk about how pre-Brandenburg union Prussia was a Polish vassal).

I love how chronologically free the book is.  Visigothic Toulouse straight up to the USSR.  Norman Davies can write, and write well.

He did lead me to think that Rzeczpospolita was just the accepted English version of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth before I realized...no, it's just him.

Thank you very much Mikado for your explanation in answer to my question about Saudi Arabia and the House of Saud.  I learned a great deal from your answer.

I am most impressed with your in depth knowledge and understanding of history.

Mikado, any good book recommendations from various parts of European history? I doubt I'll have time to do any extra reading this semester, but just in case...

You'll need to be more specific about the topic, and I'm sure Al would be happy to help out here.

If you needed just a random suggestion, you could do worse than Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies mentioned above.  It's a book about countries that once existed but no longer do, and its 15 chapters are all basically stand-alone (and if you're an e-book guy you can actually get the chapters of that book a la carte).  That nature makes the book go from its rather intimidating 700+ pages to basically a collection of 15 reasonable-length essays.

Personally (having read 13 of the 15 chapters so far) I find the chapters very varying in the quality. The Irish chapter was a trolling exercise which was full of minor factual errors. Some of the chapters - in particular those entitled 'Etruria' and 'Rosenau' - were a bit 'meh' as they focused too much, at least for my taste, on gossip with crowns on disguised as history. He also gets bogged down with detail in long places, especially with the minutiae of trying convince everyone that Poland is/was very important and Historians and commentators are ridiculously biased against Eastern Europe. Both correct, but a bit overdone.

However that isn't to say that I'm not enjoying it. It's a really intriguing work, if a little frustrating.

In terms of specifics, if there are books out there that are on post-Fall of Rome and pre-1300, I might be interested. I took a European History course in high school that started off in 1300 and I was quite disappointed by that, given I was hoping for more "dark ages" type stuff (I know this sounds incredibly crude and uneducated, but bear with me).

Sorry to butt in to Mikado's thread, but there's a few books that I enjoyed that covered parts of the period in question Cathcon.

The Restoration of Rome - Peter Heather: This, basically, is an overview of European history post the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, and focuses heavily upon the successor Kingdoms of the 'barbarians' (the Visigothic Kingdom and the Frankish Kingdom for example), as well as upon the Papacy.

The Inheritance of Rome - Chris Wickham: More academic, perhaps, than Heather's book, its nonetheless worth a read, and more or less covers the same ground.

I'd also recommend, if your interested, John Julius Norwich's boolks on the Byzantine Empire and the Papacy. Whilst I think opinion of Norwich's merits as a historian is somewhat divided (and he certainly allows his own personal biases to creep into his work), his book are enjoyable to read, and do cover the period that your interested in (although the book on the Popes goes right the way up to the reign of JPII, so maybe not).

Just a couple of suggestions.

Funny Cassius should mention Peter Heather, I'm currently reading his Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe.  I'm not far enough in to know whether or not I recommend it, but I had previously read his The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians and that is pretty good.

Chris Wickham's book The Inheritance of Rome is indeed pretty fantastic and, though long, still reasonably accessible and filled with information.

I'm not sure if I'd recommend it, per se, but a few months ago I read Jonathan Riley-Smith's The Crusades: A History.  It is filled with information on the economic, social, military, and political nature of the Crusades.  All of them.  Right down to every random holy war called down on any random Ghibelline princeling in northern Italy.  It's exhaustive...and exhausting.

If we're just thinking of general works, then one worthwhile book that covers that period (and others but whatever) is another by Norman Davies: his monumental and delightful Europe: A History. The main text is a lot of fun, but the appendices are fantastic (and frankly ideal for anyone who has gone to the bother of registering an account on this forum of all forums) as are the freestanding short essays dotted throughout as 'capsules'.

I completely disagree.  There are much more interracial marriages and neighborhood integration. We have a black president and more minorities in positions of power.  Race relations are much better now than 20 and 30 years ago. More locally, NYC was a powder keg and relations are now good.

On news stories much of this revolves around policing stories, no? I think the difference is that in the video age cops are more likely to be taken to task for their bad behavior.  Further, it is a question of what gets reported.  I'm sure the news media has more reports of discrimination now than Jim Crow era Alabama. It is recognized that times are wrong.

Mikado, have you by chance read Paul Johnson's Modern Times? If so what are your thoughts on it?

(This was one of my texts I had to read last year)

I have not read it.  Reading the Amazon reviews, my assumption is that I'd have a fair amount of characterizations I'd dispute, but often with historical writing one person's positive development can become another's negative by shifting adjectives and using certain key words without disagreeing on the actual course of events.

I'm certainly not of the opinion that right wing figures can't write decent history, or that their works should be discounted: I found Richard Pipes' works about the Russian Revolution an extremely useful counterbalance to the other historians I read on the subject, and I'm quite fond of the late Francois Furet, who, if he wasn't exactly right-wing by contemporary standards, was certainly viciously critical of left wing historians.

From what I can gather by the snippets available on Amazon (always rough to judge a book by that), Johnson's main contention is that the defining characteristic of 20th century thought is the death of certitude and the belief in one single truth, whether the Marxist certainty that the world is dominated by class war or the Christian belief in absolute morality, and celebrates the death of the former while bemoans the death of the latter.  If that's an accurate assessment (and again, I've only just scanned what's available in the free preview), that's not a bad starting point for the intellectual track of the world, though there were serious challenges to moral certainty even before the First World War: Nietzsche is a useful figure to point to, but even figures like the Futurists were preaching a doctrine of the destruction of the art, culture, religion, and morals of the past to make way for superior doctrines of a new age.  If any true benefit came out of the two World Wars, it was to make people far less sure of themselves and of the doctrines they held.

Apparently Modern Times came out in 1985, and I'd be curious to see how its arguments could be presented today, when one more certainty, that of the neoliberal return to free trade dogmatism and economic deregulation and the power of the private sector, can itself no longer be taken for granted quite so easily.  Does the 2008 economic crisis spell the end for the self-confident assumption that Reagan and Thatcher's solutions are always right to the same extent as the late 20th century totally discredited the central planning doctrines of the old Communist bloc?

Anyone else have something?  I enjoy this thread.

Do you think that the Crusades sped up or slowed the decline of the Byzantine Empire?

What are your thoughts on Guamanian statehood?

Which was more important to the development of Jewish religion, culture, identity, etc.: the mythical exile in Egypt, or the actual exile in Babylon?

A rather impossible question to answer.  Certainly Alexius was deeply suspicious of the Crusaders and vice versa right from the start, withdrew any real material support for the Crusaders once they got much into Anatolia, and spent much of the aftermath of the First Crusade squabbling with Bohemond, and of course Alexius' grandson Manuel left the Second Crusade to its fate.  The intense bad blood between the Crusaders and the Byzantines was already in existence in 1204 and wasn't a product of the sack of Constantinople: the relatively limited goals of reconquering Anatolia that Alexius had desired Western support in were not at all the same as the Crusader dream. 

Of course, all of this culminates in 1204 and the sack of Constantinople and the destruction of the Byzantine Empire as one political entity.  There is little doubt that this was a near-fatal blow to the Byzantines: despite the Palaiologus family and Nicaea's restoration project and the end of the Latin Empire, the Byzantines would never again be that formidable a power, and would have to share Greece with a variety of Crusader states (they'd never again hold Athens, for example).  The Byzantine continued survival for as long as they did had a lot to do with the many, many distractions the weak and disunited Turkish states faced: the Mongol invasions, first and foremost.  Said Mongol invasions also put off the day of reckoning for the petty states of Outremer until the 1280s-1290s.

I suppose that my eventual conclusion would be that there's no denying that the Fourth Crusade was devastating to the Empire, but the Empire deserves part of the blame for establishing such hostile and acrimonious relations with the previous Crusades and such a poor working relationship.



Guam is tiny, though admittedly its population is far larger than the theoretical minimum size of a US state.  I would have preferred, if this was going to happen, for it to be part of a larger state including the former Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, but we've since granted them all independence.  I think there's a credible case that Guam is too small to avoid territory status, but I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to statehood.


This is a loaded question, but I think it boils down to the question of whether subjects of the Kingdom of Judah prior to the Babylonian sack were recognizably "Jews" or whether "Judaism" as a religion only developed in the aftermath of that event.  Is this more or less what you were trying to ask?  I'll come back to this one later.

How does Einzige's (AKA Meursault) cowardice in refusing a manly duel rank in all time violations of the code duello?

Not the Northern Marianas (where the trusteeship ended in 1986 after they achieved commonwealth status in 1978). Even if Guam rejected them as "fusion partners" in 1969, they might accept if offered statehood.

The heart of my question was, How does the importance that the Babylonian Exile had on the development of modern Judaism compare with the importance of the Exodus mythos on the development of Judaism in its embryonic stage, and which one was more influential? My hope in asking this question was actually that you would talk about how Judaism developed, which is a topic that's captured my interest lately.

What's your opinion of the Guano Islands Act? Should we give back the islands we took to their respective countries?

OK, the thing about the Judaism question is that it's going to either result in a very long post or a very incomplete one.  I'm still figuring out how to go about this because I don't particularly want to write a number of paragraphs on this topic, as interesting as it is. 

That's fine. I promise to be satisfied with whatever I get :P

OK, let's take a shot at this.  First off, I'd say that this is an impossible question much in the same way as asking if the Trojan War or the Peloponnesian War was more significant to ancient Greek development: you cannot just contrast two events that are separated by over half a millennium, one of which is a deep-seated cultural icon important to the formation of the mythos of the people and the other an (albeit spottily recorded) historical event.  I'm choosing to interpret this question as A. How important is the Exodus story to Judaism, and B. how fully-formed was Judaism prior to the Babylonian Exile vs the extent to which it was created by that epochal event.

A is probably the easiest one to dispense with.  If Moses is a fully legendary figure, which seems very likely, he is probably the single most influential fully legendary figure ever, rivaling King Numa and the Yellow Emperor and surpassing figures like King Arthur and Lycurgus.  The Exodus narrative is critical to the way that the early Israelites saw themselves and their place in the world: as exiled refugees and therefore outsiders in the land of Canaan, as a people who had formed a divine contract with a God far more powerful than the gods of the locals (let's sidestep the issue of whether the earliest Israelites were monotheists for now and focus on that they saw Yahweh as the all-powerful creator of the universe and therefore far superior to any other god that may or may not exist), as a people who had been plucked from the lowest ranks of society to a grand divine mission.  One could easily make the case that, while the Exodus myth faded from the consciousness a bit and was revived by Ezra etc. after the Babylonian Exile as a precedent for that event, the story was still one everyone was familiar with: a people exiled from the land of Egypt are given a set of laws and purpose by their relationship with their God, have violated that relationship, and met with calamity at the hands of the Assyrians and later the Babylonians.  The famous story of Ezra reading the Torah to the recently-returned first wave of Jews back in Jerusalem is a story of the Jews seeing how their ancestors had ignored these rules and disaster had struck.  Would this generation risk the same offenses?

For B. I'd like to address terminology a bit.  There is a difference between the word "Jew" and the word "Israelite," despite their frequent conflation.  The Israelites refer to all twelve tribes at first and later to the inhabitants of the Northern Kingdom of Israel and its ten tribes.  The Jews are the heirs to the Judahites, or inhabitants of the Southern Kingdom of Judah, after the other tribes seceded from rule by the heirs of David in the days of Rehoboam and Jeroboam, according to the Biblical narrative.  Whether the United Monarchy itself was a myth or not, the existence of the the two rival kingdoms is real enough, and until the wars with Assyria, the word Israelite is useful because the Northern Kingdom has radically different views on what the religious practices of the cult of Yahweh entails than their southern cousins.

There is a famous incident in the Second Book of Kings where King Josiah's men tear down an interior wall in the Temple during a renovation project and uncover an ancient "scroll of the law" containing various divine decrees that the Kingdom of Judah had never carried out.  There's a long-standing and rather convenient scholarly interpretation that that scroll was the Book of Deuteronomy, potentially forged by those scholars in the context of the crises of the late 7th century BCE.  If so, it reflects just how important the name of Moses was to the Judahite clergy: a forgery in the name of the grand lawgiver would give them all the excuses they needed to implement a program of radical monotheism, iconoclasm and destruction of pagan shrines, and the consolidation of all legitimate religious practice in the Temple of Jerusalem.  Of course, when the Northern Kingdom of Israel had existed, it pointed to the many designated holy spots in its territory (most famously the shrine of Beth El, where Jacob had had his vision of the ladder) as equally legitimate places for worship and sacrifice to God to prevent pilgrims from having to leave the country, but now the Judahite elite could firmly denounce any shrine to God that was not the Temple in Jerusalem as idolatrous and centralize legitimate worship in one Temple, a move that would prove dangerous indeed when Nebuchadnezzar razed the Temple a few decades later.

Pre-Exilic Israelite and Judahite faith had been marked by a strong rivalry between priests who claimed religious authority through their hereditary roles and rituals, and "prophetic" figures who claimed to circumvent all of the pomp and circumstance by speaking directly to the divine.  From the moment Isaiah had his vision of leaving the earthly Temple to enter its divine doppelganger, seeing God in all his splendor with the heavenly host crying "Holy Holy Holy is the Lord of Hosts!  The whole of the Earth is his glory!" the priests had a powerful rival message.  Isaiah's radical egalitarian message is deeply at odds with a hierarchical religion: in light of the recently passed Day of Atonement, a fast day in Judaism, this passage is always appropriate.


Figures like Isaiah pointed to the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians as punishment for its disloyalty to God and threatens Judah with the same fate if it continues its immoral politics.


Of course, after the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the Southern Kingdom of Judah became an autonomous, humbled vassal of the Assyrian Empire.  King Hezekiah sent the golden doors of the Temple to the Assyrians as a surrender tribute.  Isaiah's successors, especially Jeremiah, bear a similar message in the time of the last generation of the Kingdom of Judah.  Jeremiah reminds the Judahites again and again that it's not obedience to rituals God wants, but true good deeds and faith, and the faithless hard-hearted indulgence of the Judahites are leading to imminent destruction.

In short, already before the Exile you have a strand of people (Isaiah and his successors) reinterpreting God from being a tribal deity who will win wars and vanquish his people's enemies, to a universal deity who has a contract with one specific people but is willing to aid its enemies in smashing them if they refuse to hold up their end of the contract.  This shift of God from God of the Israelites to universal deity with a special contract with the Jews, a God who has an emphasis on righteous conduct and care for the impoverished rather than solely interested in rituals, is well underway in pre-Exilic Judaism.  The Exile forced the issue: there is no longer a Temple to sacrifice in or to worship God in the proper way that Deuteronomy suggested.  How can one still be a follower of Yahweh in the city of Marduk?  The messages of the prophets, both radical monotheism and an emphasis on conduct rather than sacrifice and prayer, helped provide an answer to that question.

That was an excellent response to an admittedly vague question. Thank you.

What do you think of Karen Armstrong?

Was Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria a successful monarch?

Mikado, I'm curious as to your educational background as well as to your personal reading habits.

Favorite English monarch prior to the Act of Union?

This is a very difficult question because what "favorite" means is different to different people.  Success at achieving personal goals?  Edward III comes to mind as an amazingly successful figure.  Administrative innovator?  Henry II might be your man.  Military and diplomatic mastermind?  Henry V, obviously, but all of his gains in France were promptly lost under the minority and troubled majority of his son.  To take it before the conquest, I think a real case could be made for Canute for successfully, if briefly, creating a fascinating alternate England, one bound across the North Sea with Scandinavia and one that had the potential of achieving an unprecedented naval dominance.  Canute's England/Denmark/Norway is a tantalizing route not taken.


It's difficult to award kudos to someone who voluntarily signed up to join the Central Powers, but Bulgaria had been through some rough times in the Second Balkan War a few years earlier.  I don't have detailed knowledge of Ferdinand's career in power.


I have a positive attitude towards Karen Armstrong.  I used to be a big fan of hers and I've read about half a dozen of her books, but I haven't touched one since ~2008.


I have both a Bachelor's and Master's in history.  I don't read quite as...intensely as I did in graduate school (no one should have to read 300+ pages a week), but my freereading can be considerably more eclectic and span more subjects now.

At the time, how surprising was Italy's declining to enter the Great War before joining the Entente in 1915?

If you still do this, I have question for you which is quite a difficult to formulate.
In the time prior to World War II, Czechoslovakia was quite the only county in "Central" Europe (Central is a vague term, I know; but let's just say everything west of the Sovjet Union, north of Romania and Yugoslavia, and west of and including Germany, Austria and Italy) to keep democracy in our, modern, standards, and was quite social-democratic as well. Now, many industrial areas then were located in Northern Bohemia, the Eger Valley and at the border to Germany, in an area that post WWI was claimed by Austria. My question now, had Austria received/retained these areas after WWI, would have Czechoslovakia in all likelihood still been a quite democratic, quite social-democratic country, just in OTL. If not, what would have been the consequence, "just" being a more conservative, but still democratic country; or following the path of its neighbouring countries; or something completely different?

I also have a question about Czechoslvakia; and Yugoslavia as well for that matter.

Were their break-ups inevitable? Did a significant demand exist from either of those "countries" to be created, or were they Frankensteins created by the powers that be?

Sorry for the delay. I don't know country by country, but I do know that the British and French had a secret agreement with the Italians that they would stay out of the war, and that the Germans weren't aware of this (obviously). That the Italians and Austrians despised each other was, obviously, not secret to anyone, but I do think that Berlin was surprised by Italian neutrality in August 1914. So...I suppose the surprise depends on which side of the war you were on.

To Cranberry's question, there wasn't any serious consideration of breaking up the historical region of Bohemia to pull the Germans into Austria, as the creation of Czechoslovakia was at least as much about punishing Austria (on the Czech side) and Hungary (on the Slovak side) and about building a large, defensible country as it was about self-determination and nationalism. It's always hard to entertain counterfactuals like "what would happen if the German parts of Bohemia ended up in Austria," but it would no doubt have helped at least a bit with rump Austria's "why does our country exist" problem. Of course, a Czechoslovakia that was only predominantly Czech and Slovak areas would be quite a bit smaller and poorer, which gets into the below question.


Inevitable is a nasty word that I'll avoid for now. There was a major idea at the time that "petty" or "minor" nationalities would not make viable states on their own, and that federations of related peoples was a viable alternative. In the case of Yugoslavia, the Serbs saw themselves as the equivalent of Piedmont-Sardinia to Italy or Prussia to Germany, and that their kingdom could annex the rest of the South Slavs, who all spoke highly related languages. Outside of the awkwardness of annexing Allied Montenegro, it was all taking territory off of defeated Austria and Hungary (and a bit off of Bulgaria) that no one in the Entente particularly minded. Pre-WWII Yugoslavia was hugely Serbian-dominated, and post-WWII was a far more balanced entity (Tito was a Croat, after all) that was determined to suppress the ethnic differences as far as possible.

Czechoslovakia is an interesting case, as it took in the Czechs from the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary and the Slovaks from the Hungarian half, who had not previously been united under any sort of jurisdictional unity. The southern half of Slovakia was heavily Hungarian, the eastern part of Czechia was hugely German, and of course, Czechoslovakia before the war had the awkward Subcarpathian Rus territory in its far east as a kind of tail (now the western-most chunk of Ukraine) that was neither Czech nor Slovak. The Czechoslovakian government was firmly committed to its binational character and did not even attempt to come to terms with its German, Hungarian, and Rusyn minorities, and it surprised few that the nearly 20% German minority did eventually clamor for annexation with Germany in 1938. It proved very easy for Hitler to enforce his solution of annexing the Czech half (as Bohemia and Moravia), giving half of the Slovak half to Hungary, and set up the rump Slovakia as a puppet state. When Czechoslovakia was rebuilt after WWII, it lost the Subcarpathian Rus to the USSR and expelled its German minorities en masse, resulting in a far more truly binational Czechoslovakia (ignoring the Hungarians in Slovakia). The end of union between Czech Republic and Slovakia following the end of Communism was amicable and likely avoidable, but has proven to be something of a blessing for the Czech half, which was and remains considerably wealthier than the Slovak half.

Let's do this again.

All right!

Recently, you've been discussing with Vega about the British Empire turning into a federal entity. Given all the feedback his thread received, what do you see as the most plausible scenario for such development?

If World War I was postponed for a year, and Home Rule went into effect, would Britain have been able to get into the war? If not, how long would France and Russia been able to hold out?

This sort of butterfly effect question is impossible to answer completely. First clarification is whether the crisis over the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand doesn't escalate into a general war in 1914 or if the assassination itself is averted. If the former, then Austria will have militarily occupied Serbia over Russian objections and Tsar Nicholas and his government will have done nothing about it, doubling the concerns from 1908 when Austria annexed Bosnia that the Russian government is unable to defend its Slavic brethren. A much weakened and discredited Russia might well take the next crisis event that came along as an opportunity to defend Russian "honor."

Let's get to your question: if the Ulster Volunteers and their sympathizers in the British Army launched an insurrection in 1914, how would the British have responded in 1915? There were already many, many skeptics of general war in 1914, but one of the most compelling arguments to go to war was that a general war might shove aside, at least for the time being, the Irish tensions in favor of a national united front vs a foreign opponent, a union sacrée in the style of the French one. In the event that Ulster and radical Unionists broke out into outright insurgency, this same call for unity (after all, the Ulster Volunteers' big objections revolved around radical loyalism, rather than separatism) might have been seen as a good opportunity to broker a domestic cease-fire and turn that violence outwards. Of course, UK intervention relies as it did IRL in the invasion of Belgium, not so much to get the government on board as to quell the opposition to the war in the House of Commons.

British neutrality (and the attendant neutrality of Britain's dominions and Britain's ally Japan) abolishes Entente naval supremacy and puts the Imperial German Navy as master of the seas, and dramatically lowers the Entente's strategic reach. The Ottomans don't have to worry about attacks from Egypt and Kuwait, the British Expeditionary Force isn't present to slow down German advances in France, without naval supremacy Russia falls under a harsh blockade...my money isn't on the Entente. I also doubt Italy would intervene on the Entente's side and the United States almost certainly would not. British neutrality is a road to a swift Entente victory.


I don't see it working out in the long term for the same reason the French rapidly shied away from the idea upon touching it in the late 1950s: citizenship, especially after WWII, had come to mean more than political rights, it included social rights. Providing universal health care, unemployment insurance, pensions, etc. to all the subjects of British Africa (or, if done earlier, India!) would be unimaginable.

If you're talking about a pre-WWI federation with the "white" dominions, that is also impracticable: while still attached to the British in many, many ways, devolution was done for a reason, Canada had far more to gain by having its own parliament and government than it ever would by sending 25 MPs to Westminster.

Always the voice of realism. :P

I think that if India and Africa (save for South Africa and Kenya) would be granted independence, a country, if not a federation, could be made. This is assuming that health care, education etc. needs could be met. This is all very unlikely, sadly.

If Britain stays neutral, I doubt the Ottomans get involved.  The British provoked the Ottomans into the war, not so much because they wanted to fight the Ottomans, but because they had so little respect for them that they didn't bother to worry about whether the Ottomans would be provoked by their actions.