Adam wrote: Italians, Germans, and Japanese who have lived in
imposed Democratic regimes since the middle of the last century may
provide some evidence that imposed social change is something you
can do with war.
There were actually two wars last century after which allied forces
tried to impose democracy on Germany. The first one failed; in
fact, the Versailles treaty was the shovel with which the
anti-democractic parties buried the Weimar Republic. It was not
that the treaty was inherently unjust: but it created a strong
resentment among Germans, no matter what their political tendencies
were. And the USA, Great Britain, and France were seen as the
reason for it.
The second one succeeded. Not because of the dearth of adult young
men, as suggested elsewhere. But, unlike in 1918, nobody had the
least desire to identify with the regime that was responsible for
the war. In particular, all three branches of government and the
press were firmly in the hand of lifelong democrats and Nazi
victims (Adenauer had been a repeat prisoner of the Gestapo;
Schumacher and Ollenhauer had spent the years between 1933 and 1945
in concentration camps and exile, respectively). Germany,
essentially, became a democracy because it wanted to. Unlike 1918,
there was also fairly little resentment against allied forces on
which anti-democratic forces could feed (aside from the
denazification programs). The Marshall plan, the humanitarian aid
("raisin bombers") for a Berlin besieged by Soviet forces -- all
that cemented a strong and durable friendship between Germany and
the Western Allies.
As an aside, it is probably also hard to judge by an outsider how
much the German people had learned to loathe war by 1945; the
phrase "never again shall a war start on German soil" was pretty
much the political consensus, and has lasted to this day. It has
its own
place in the German Constitution, and is given teeth by the
penal code. (Which is also, incidentally, why the German government
cannot possibly supply forces to the war in Iraq without a
UN resolution.)
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