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German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has banned a major faction of the far-right “Reichsbürger” movement. Some leaders of the group, the “Kingdom of Germany,” have been arrested, including its self-declared king.
German Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has banned the far-right group “Königreich Deutschland” (“Kingdom of Germany”), a faction within the so-called “Reichsbürger” (Reich Citizens) movement, accusing it of trying to establish a “counter-state” within Germany.
The ban came as police on Tuesday conducted raids on the properties of key members of the group in seven German states, making four arrests, including that of Peter Fitzek, the self-declared monarch of the “Kingdom.”
Security authorities believe Fitzek to have founded the group in 2012.
Here’s a list of civil wars just in England and the post-union UK since it’s one of the best-known and longest-standing monarchies. Are we counting a monarchy that was overthrown multiple times as “lasting 1,000 years” (which it would now be close to if you count it from 1066 to the modern day)?
It also seems a bit silly to expect democracies to have lasted a thousand years immediately after making a point about the timeframe of social movements. The tradition of European democracies and the related ones that were spread around the world during the colonial era and the aftermath of it are too recent a movement to have lasted a thousand years. If we want to see if a democracy can last that long, we’ve got about 800-900 years to wait
I think you are focusing too much on the modern world. You’re ignoring the Middle Ages and before, and also eastern monarchies as well. Many of them existed for centuries with petty succession squabbles but in general being the same government, in the sense that they were ruled by the same royal family or one with close ties and maintained over that time similar aims. Every 4 or 8 years our governments have to change aims in response to crises that were caused because our government can only implement projects on a 4 to 8 year basis which is often not enough to fix problems. Something akin to technical debt in software, but societal.
Also I think you forget that Democracies existed in the ancient world and they didn’t last long either. They weren’t modern democracies but democracies nonetheless. And they were famous already for being short lived back then.
I’m not saying that we might not see a long lasting democracy, just that the evidence seems to point that democratic states have by their very nature an expiration date in which they enter a stage of some form of dictatorship until a total collapse happens, which is then followed by a renewal of democratic institutions under a new constitution. Maybe this may be construed as the same that happened with civil wars during monarchies but I think the key difference is that the government changes drastically between stages, even the national identity itself may change in these shake ups.
Just look at the US. One of the longest living democracies in the world right now, founded by some of the smartest men of their time who designed a system that could withstand the inherent weaknesses of democracy and yet it is on shaky ground only 250 years in.
I just gave you a list of civil wars in England dating back to the 11th century? But with regards to earlier democracies, I didn’t forget, I just don’t think they’re especially relevant since they were not all that similar to a modern democracy like Germany. Even Athens barred most of its population from voting. I think if you want to include them, you need to explain why they are a relevant comparison to a modern democracy. If you’re operating solely on whether or not they allow some people to vote, then constitutional monarchies count as democracies for this purpose and the short-lived fascist dictatorships of the 20th century count as monarchies.
I’m focussing on Europe because the article is about Germany, which shares much of its monarchic and democratic heritage with its European neighbours. If you want to bring up other examples, go ahead.
Open civil warfare is not what I’d count as a “petty squabble”. If there’s a years-long war to overthrow a king, that is not stability.
While modern democracies haven’t been around that long in the scale of human history, they have been around long enough to demonstrate that they don’t appear to be falling behind their monarchic peers. Take Finland and Sweden as an example; in the past ~100 years for which Finland has been an independent republic, would you argue it has performed worse than its constitutional monarchy neighbour Sweden? I wouldn’t, despite the fact that Finland started in a far worse position and also fought the Winter War and the Continuation War. And similarly, if we look at the the rest of the world, it doesn’t seem to me like republics are doing worse than monarchies that have had otherwise comparable histories.
But I’m not even arguing that democracies are especially stable. I’m arguing that monarchies aren’t particularly more stable.
What evidence? Again, we have not seen more than a couple of centuries of the modern form of democracy.
If you’re going to exclude actual civil warfare and overthrow of the government from counting as instability for monarchies, you really can’t count a constitutional crisis as the end of a democracy. Maybe this is the end of the USA, but it’s hardly the first time a country has seen a constitutional crisis. It’s not even the first time the USA has seen one. If the USA does fall completely… alright? Even limiting it to large modern era countries, I can just as easily point towards the Qing dynasty that fell after roughly that amount of time, or the Brazilian monarchy which didn’t even make 100, or the Bourbon restoration in France that was even shorter. Pointing to an individual example that hasn’t even actually happened isn’t evidence of a broader rule.