Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

One extreme answer restricts the term “crisis” to long intervals and rare, dramatic upheavals: e.g., just a few times in a lifetime for an individual, and just every few centuries for a nation.

some factors translate straightforwardly from individual crises to national crises. For instance, individuals in crisis often receive help from friends, just as nations in crisis may recruit help from allied nations. Individuals in crisis may model their solutions on ways in which they see other individuals addressing similar crises; nations in crisis may borrow and adapt solutions already devised by other nations facing similar problems. Individuals in crisis may derive self-confidence from having survived previous crises; so do nations. Those are among the straightforward parallels. But we’ll also see that some factors illuminating outcomes of individual crises, while not straightforwardly transferable to national crises, still serve as useful metaphors suggesting factors relevant to national crises. For instance, therapists have found it helpful to define a quality of individuals termed “ego strength.” While nations don’t have psychological ego strength, that concept suggests a related concept important for nations, namely, “national identity.” Similarly, individuals often find their freedom of choice in resolving a crisis limited by practical constraints, such as child-care responsibilities and job demands. Of course nations aren’t limited by child-care responsibilities and job demands. But we’ll see that nations do experience limitations on their freedom of choice for other reasons, such as geopolitical constraints and national wealth. Comparison with individual crise...

why the American Civil War, unlike the Spanish and Finnish Civil Wars, ended with the victors sparing the lives of the defeated.

Factors related to the outcomes of personal crises 1. Acknowledgment that one is in crisis 2. Acceptance of one’s personal responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate one’s individual problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and emotional help from other individuals and groups 5. Using other individuals as models of how to solve problems 6. Ego strength 7. Honest self-appraisal 8. Experience of previous personal crises 9. Patience 10. Flexible personality 11. Individual core values 12. Freedom from personal constraints

Factors related to the outcomes of national crises 1. National consensus that one’s nation is in crisis 2. Acceptance of national responsibility to do something 3. Building a fence, to delineate the national problems needing to be solved 4. Getting material and financial help from other nations 5. Using other nations as models of how to solve the problems 6. National identity 7. Honest national self-appraisal 8. Historical experience of previous national crises 9. Dealing with national failure 10. Situation-specific national flexibility 11. National core values 12. Freedom from geopolitical constraints

Finland tried to maintain a foreign policy based on neutrality, to ignore the Soviet Union, and to hope that no threat would materialize from that direction. The Soviet Union in turn remained suspicious of its bourgeois neighbor that had defeated the communist side during the Finnish Civil War with the aid of German troops.

The poor performance of the huge Soviet army against the tiny Finnish army had been a big embarrassment to the Soviet Union: about eight Soviet soldiers killed for every Finn killed.

Finland adamantly refused German pleas to do two things: to round up Finland’s Jews (although Finland did turn over a small group of non-Finnish Jews to the Gestapo); and to attack Leningrad from the north while Germans were attacking it from the south.

For the Soviet Union, Finland was its major source of Western technology and its major window onto the West. The result was that the Soviets no longer had any motivation to take over Finland,

6 million Finns will never develop the economic advantages of scale enjoyed by 90 million Germans or 330 million Americans. Finland will never succeed in economic spheres dependent on a low standard of living and the resulting ability to pay workers the low wages still widespread outside Europe and North America. By world standards, Finland will always have few workers, who will always expect high wages. Hence Finland has had to make full use of its available workforce, and to develop industries earning high profits.

What Finland and other small countries must do in order to be successful in peacetime.

Until the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s actual ruler was a hereditary military dictator called the shogun, while the emperor was a figurehead without real power.

Until modern industry required importation of oil and metals, Japan was largely self-sufficient in essential resources and had little need for foreign trade—unlike Britain.

after crucifying thousands of Japanese Christians, between 1636 and 1639 the shogun cut most ties between Japan and Europe.

Sailings of American whaling and trading ships around the Pacific also increased. Inevitably, some of those American ships got wrecked, some of those wrecks occurred in ocean waters near Japan, and some of their sailors ended up in Japan, where they were killed or arrested according to Tokugawa Japan’s isolationist policy.

the new American consul in Japan negotiated a broader treaty that did address trade, and that was again soon followed by similar treaties with Britain, France, Russia, and the Netherlands. Those treaties became regarded in Japan as humiliating and were termed the “unequal treaties,” because they embodied the Western view that Japan did not deserve to be treated in the way that Western powers treated one another. For instance, the treaties provided for extraterritoriality of Western citizens in Japan, i.e., that they were not subject to Japanese laws. A major goal of Japanese policy for the next half-century became the undoing of the unequal treaties.

There was even conflict between the bakufu and the figurehead emperor at the imperial court, on whose behalf the bakufu supposedly acted. For instance, the imperial court refused to approve the 1858 treaty that the bakufu had negotiated with the U.S., but the bakufu proceeded to sign it anyway. The sharpest conflict within Japan arose over Japan’s basic strategy dilemma: whether to try to resist and expel the foreigners now, or instead to wait until Japan could become stronger. The signing of the unequal treaties by the bakufu created a backlash in Japan: anger at the foreigners who had dishonored Japan, and anger at the shogun and other lords who had permitted Japan to be dishonored. Already around 1859, resentful, hotheaded, naïve young sword-wielding samurai began to pursue a goal of expelling foreigners by a campaign of assassination.

On September 14, 1862 a 28-year-old English merchant, Charles Richardson, was attacked by Satsuma swordsmen on a road and left to bleed to death, because he was considered to have failed to show proper respect for a procession that included the father of Satsuma’s daimyo. Britain demanded indemnities, apologies, and execution of the perpetrators not only from Satsuma but also from the bakufu. After nearly a year of unsuccessful British negotiations with Satsuma, a fleet of British warships bombarded and destroyed most of Satsuma’s capital of Kagoshima and killed an estimated 1,500 Satsuma soldiers.

On January 3, 1868 the conspirators seized the gates of the Imperial Palace in the city of Kyoto, convened a council stripping the shogun of his lands and of his position on the council, and ended the shogunate. The council proclaimed the fiction of “restoring” the responsibility for governing Japan to the emperor, although that responsibility had previously actually been the shogun’s. That event is known as the Meiji Restoration, and it marks the beginning of what is termed the Meiji Era: the period of rule of the new emperor.

If the emperor were Japan’s CEO, then the shogun was its COO.

It became as clear to Meiji leaders as it had been to the shogun that Japan was presently incapable of expelling Westerners. Before that could be done, Japan had to become strong by adopting Western sources of strength, meaning not just guns themselves but also far-reaching political and social reforms that provided the underpinnings of Western strength.

The most urgent changes, effected or launched within the first few years of the Meiji Era, were to create a modern national army, to abolish feudalism, to found a national system of education, and to secure income for the government by tax reform. Attention then shifted to reforming the law codes, designing a constitution, expanding overseas, and undoing the unequal treaties. In parallel with this attention to pressing practical matters, Meiji leaders also began to address the challenge of creating an explicit ideology to enlist the support of Japan’s citizens. Military reform began with purchasing modern Western equipment, enlisting French and German officers to train the army, and (later) experimenting with French and British models to develop a modern Japanese navy. The result illustrates Meiji skill at selecting the best foreign model: instead of selecting just one foreign country’s armed forces as the model for all branches of the Japanese military, Japan ended up modeling its army on Germany’s army but modeling its navy on Britain’s navy

in August 1871 the daimyo were told that their domains (and governorships) would now be swept away and replaced with centrally administered prefectures. But the daimyo were allowed to keep 10% of their former domains’ assessed incomes, while being relieved of the burden of all the expenses that they had formerly borne. Thus, within three-and-a-half years, centuries of Japanese feudalism were dismantled.

In a ceremony taking place in the imperial palace’s audience chamber, on a date (February 11) that was the 2,549th anniversary of the day traditionally associated with the empire’s founding, the emperor himself invoked his ancestors and presented the scroll of the new constitution to the prime minister, as the emperor’s gift to Japan.

The Prime Minister is arguably the modern replacement for the Shogun.

Meiji Japan profited from an important negative model: China, whose fate of domination by the West made clear what Japan wanted to avoid.

Japan’s military expansion in the Meiji Era was consistently successful, because it was guided at every step by honest, realistic, cautious, informed self-appraisal of the relative strengths of Japan and its targets, and by a correct assessment of what was realistically possible for Japan. Now, compare that successful Meiji Era expansion with Japan’s situation as of August 14, 1945. On that date Japan was at war simultaneously with China, the U.S., Britain, Russia, Australia, and New Zealand (as well as with many other countries that had declared war against Japan but were not actively fighting). That was a hopeless combination of enemies against which to fight.

Non-negotiable core values (factor #11) united the Japanese in their willingness to make sacrifices. High among those values was loyalty to the emperor. That was dramatically illustrated at the end of World War Two, when the U.S. demanded unconditional surrender. Even after the two atomic bombs, and in a hopeless military situation, Japan still insisted on one condition: “that the said [surrender] declaration does not include any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.” Without acceptance of that condition, Japan was prepared to resist the threatened U.S. invasion of the Japanese mainland. The strength of Japanese core values was also illustrated in World War Two by the willingness of large numbers of Japanese soldiers to commit suicide, far beyond the willingness of the soldiers of any other modern nation. Best known were the kamikaze pilots of conventional aircraft and the baka pilots of rocket-powered gliders, who crashed their bomb-carrying machines into enemy warships; and the kaiten sailors who rode and piloted torpedoes launched from Japanese ships into enemy warships. The high-tech kamikaze, baka, and kaiten suicide weapons introduced only towards the end of World War Two were preceded by several years of low-tech suicides, when Japanese soldiers feigning surrender detonated hidden hand grenades to kill their captors as well as themselves. All of those forms of suicide served immediate military purposes by killing enemy troops....

a big negative force is one that Chile does share with many other Latin American countries: Spanish colonists established large land-holdings unlike the small farms established by European settlers of North America. Hence whereas the U.S. and Canada developed broad-based democratic governments from the very beginnings of their settlement by Europeans, in Chile a small oligarchy controlled most of the land, wealth, and politics.

After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union responded by accelerating its programs to develop more powerful nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles. The U.S. responded with the determination that never again would it tolerate the installation of a communist government in the Western Hemisphere. Any American president who failed to prevent such an installation would have been immediately impeached and removed from office for gross neglect of American interests, just as President Kennedy was warned that he would be impeached if he failed to get Soviet missiles out of Cuba. Beginning in the 1960’s, the U.S. also became preoccupied with communist threats in Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries.

“Allende fell because his economic policies depended on populist measures that had failed again and again in other countries. They produced short-term benefits, at the cost of mortgaging Chile’s future and creating runaway inflation.” Many Chileans admired Allende and viewed him almost as a saint. But saintly virtues don’t necessarily translate themselves into political success.

I haven’t heard any plausible explanation for the sadism managed by Pinochet. As one Chilean friend expressed it to me, “I didn’t understand Pinochet’s psychology.” As soon as the junta took power, it rounded up leaders of Allende’s Popular Unity Party and other perceived leftists (such as university students and the famous Chilean folk singer Victor Jara; Plate 4.5), with the goal of literally exterminating the Chilean left-wing. Within the first 10 days, thousands of Chilean leftists were taken to two sports stadiums in Santiago, interrogated, tortured, and killed.

the U.S., which strongly supported Pinochet, shared his hatred of communists, and resumed its loans to Chile immediately after Pinochet’s coup. As is true of some other actions of Pinochet (and of Allende), the motives in this case are not clear.

Did the US give free reign to general Pinochet to take Chile out of the hands of the leftists, even if that meant committing atrocities?

the U.S. government supported Pinochet for more than half of the duration of his military dictatorship—in the U.S.’s case, because of his strong anti-communist stance. U.S. government policy was to extend economic and military aid to Chile, and publicly to deny Pinochet’s human rights abuses, even when those being tortured and killed were American citizens. As American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger expressed it, “… however unpleasantly they [the junta] act, this government [i.e., Pinochet’s] is better for us than Allende was.” That American government support of Pinochet, and that blind eye to his abuses, continued through the presidencies of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and initially Ronald Reagan.

Pinochet’s junta partners were as surprised as was the CIA by his ruthlessness and determination to cling to power,

How does he know?

As president, Sukarno blamed Indonesia’s poverty on Dutch imperialism and capitalism, abrogated Indonesia’s inherited debts, nationalized Dutch properties, and turned over the management of most of them to the army. He developed a state-centered economy that the army, the civil bureaucracy, and Sukarno himself could milk for their benefit. Not surprisingly, Indonesian private enterprise and foreign aid both declined. Both the U.S. and the British governments became alarmed and sought to destabilize Sukarno’s position, just as the U.S. had tried to destabilize Allende in Chile. Sukarno responded by telling the U.S. to “go to hell with your aid”; then in 1965 he expelled the American Peace Corps and withdrew from the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund.

Fundamental to any functioning democracy are widespread literacy, recognition of the right to oppose government policies, tolerance of different points of view, acceptance of being outvoted, and government protection of those without political power. For understandable reasons, all of those prerequisites were weak in Indonesia.

Definition of a democracy

the four leading parties each obtained between 15% and 22% of votes and parliamentary seats. They could not compromise and fell into political gridlock. That breakdown of compromise among several parties equally matched in strength is already familiar to us from Chile and its Pinochet coup

When a country is divided among several groups of roughly equal strength, expect violence!

President Sukarno ended the gridlock by proclaiming martial law, then replaced Indonesian democracy with what he termed “guided democracy,”

In order to ensure that parliament would mutually cooperate with his (Sukarno’s) goals, more than half of the seats in parliament were no longer elected offices but were instead appointed by Sukarno himself and assigned to so-called “functional groups” rather than political parties, the army being one such “functional group.” Sukarno became convinced that he was uniquely capable of divining and interpreting the wishes (including the unconscious wishes) of the Indonesian people, and of serving as their prophet. After the 1955 Bandung conference of Asian and African states, Sukarno extended his goals to the world stage and began to view it as his personal responsibility to have Indonesia play a leading role in Third World anti-colonial politics at a time when Indonesia’s own internal problems were so pressing (Plate 5.2). In 1963 he let himself be declared president-for-life.

New Guineans who had been on the verge of independence from the Netherlands launched a guerrilla campaign for independence from Indonesia that is continuing today, over half-a-century later.

The coup leaders, plus Sukarno, to whom the fast-moving situation may have been as confusing as it was to Suharto, now gathered at Halim air force base, because the air force was the branch of the Indonesian armed forces most sympathetic to the communists.

Did the US and Britain attempt to organize a coup because Indonesia was starting to veer towards communism?

the Indonesian killings were not carried out with the meticulous organization and documentation of the Nazi killings in World War Two concentration camps, there is much uncertainty about the number of Indonesian victims. The highest estimates are about 2 million;

Was Indonesia a battlefield between the US and China/Russia? And did the US win that battle, and extend its sphere of influence to Indonesia?

Suharto’s belief that his subjects were incapable of governing themselves postponed for several decades the opportunity for Indonesians to learn how to govern themselves democratically.

Does the author really believe that countries divided into opposing groups of equal strength can be democratic? Doesn’t the history of Indonesia and Chile prove just the opposite? I think that the democratic regime can only be applied to countries were discordance remains below a certain threshold. Methods of achieving that are twofold: 1) weaken at least one of the discordant parties, as has happened in Indonesia and Chile, 2) divide the country into several smaller countries, as is being attempted in the Middle East; namely, assigning different ethnic minorities such as the Kurds to different regions.

Had the Indonesian government and army displayed even a minimum of tact, they might have negotiated an arrangement to incorporate East Timor with some autonomy into Indonesia. Instead, the Indonesian army invaded, massacred, and annexed East Timor. Under international pressure, and to the horror of the Indonesian army, Indonesia’s President Habibie, who succeeded Suharto, permitted a referendum on independence for East Timor in August 1999. By then, the population of course voted overwhelmingly for independence. Thereupon, the Indonesian army organized pro-Indonesia militias to massacre yet again, forcibly evacuated much of the population to Indonesian West Timor, and burned most of the new country’s buildings—to no avail, as international troops restored order and East Timor eventually took control of itself as the nation of Timor-Leste. The costs to the East Timorese were that about one-quarter of the population died, and that the survivors now constitute Asia’s poorest mini-nation, whose per-capita income is six times lower than that of Indonesia. The costs to Indonesians were that they now have in their midst a separate nation with sovereignty over a potentially oil-rich seabed whose revenues will not flow to Indonesia.

Germany represents an extreme in the magnitude of the crisis that it faced. Meiji Japan was merely threatened by attack; Finland and Australia were attacked but remained unoccupied; but Germany and Japan in 1945 had been attacked, conquered, occupied, and far more devastated than any other nation discussed in this book.

The Western Allies needed West Germany to become strong again, as a bulwark against communism.

The Nazi defendants being prosecuted by Bauer all tended to offer the same set of excuses: I was merely following orders; I was conforming to the standards and laws of my society at the time; I was not the person who had responsibility for those people getting killed; I merely organized railroad transport of Jews being transported to extermination camps; I was just a pharmacist or a guard at Auschwitz; I didn’t personally kill anyone myself; I was blinded by belief in authority and ideology proclaimed by the Nazi government, and that made me incapable of recognizing that what I was doing was wrong.

What the defendants should have said is: “I felt there was a greater risk to myself in not obeying orders then in obeying them.”

Germans do begin to explain themselves to one another by saying, for example, “Ich bin Jahrgang 1945,” meaning “My year of birth was 1945.” That’s because all Germans know that their fellow citizens went through very different life experiences, depending on when they were born and were growing up.

Germany experienced a violent student revolt in the year 1968. On the average, the German protestors of 1968 had been born around 1945, just at the end of the war. They were too young to have been raised as Nazis, or to have experienced the war, or to remember the years of chaos and poverty after the war. They grew up mostly after Germany’s economic recovery, in economically comfortable times. They weren’t struggling to survive; they enjoyed enough leisure and security to devote themselves to protest. In 1968 they were in their early 20’s. They were teenagers during the 1950’s and early 1960’s, when Fritz Bauer was revealing the Nazi crimes of ordinary Germans of their parents’ generation.

German student radicals in 1968 turned to violence far more than did contemporary American student radicals. Some of them went to Palestine for training as terrorists. The best known of those German terrorist groups called themselves the Rote Armee Fraktion = Red Army Faction (acronym RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof gang after two of its leaders (Ulrike Meinhof and Andreas Baader) who became especially notorious. The terrorists began by carrying out arson attacks on stores, then proceeded to kidnappings, bombings, and killings. Over the years the victims whom they kidnapped or killed included leaders of the German “establishment,” such as the president of the West Berlin Supreme Court, a candidate for mayor of West Berlin, Germany’s federal prosecutor, the chief of Deutsche Bank, and the head of West Germany’s Employers’ Association.

when I ask American visitors to Germany whether they perceive the country as authoritarian, I get either of two answers, depending on my respondent’s age. Younger American visitors, born in or after the 1970’s, who didn’t experience the Germany of the 1950’s, instinctively compare Germany today with the U.S. today and say that German society is still authoritarian. Older American visitors like me, who did experience Germany in the (late) 1950’s, instead compare Germany today with Germany of the 1950’s and say that Germany today is much less authoritarian than it used to be.

By October 1918, shortly before the end of World War One, Germany’s last military offensives on the western front had failed, Allied armies were advancing and had been strengthened by a million fresh U.S. troops, and Germany’s defeat had become just an inevitable matter of time. But German armies were still conducting an orderly retreat, and the Allies had not yet reached Germany’s borders. Armistice negotiations were hastened to a conclusion by a mutiny of the German fleet and by outbreaks of armed insurrections in Germany. This permitted post-war German agitators, especially Adolf Hitler, to claim that the German army had not been defeated militarily but had been betrayed by a “stab in the back” from treacherous civilian politicians.