> The playbook of all dictatorships is the same: squeeze tighter and tighter until you can no longer hold on, then collapse.
While a common-enough failure mode, this is by no means universal. Many successful monarchies began as the equivalent of dictatorships, and then opened up further and further over time.
> Many successful monarchies began as the equivalent of dictatorships, and then opened up further and further over time.
And then there's the Roman Empire, which started as a dictatorship (in the literal sense to which all other uses are metaphorical allusions) and went the other direction.
Off the top of my head, Britain, Spain, Portugal, and Chile (and Canada and Australia, if you want to cheat). Do you really think that every liberal Western European democracy had their own version of the French Revolution, or that they've been democracies since time immemorial?
None of those places functioned as modern nation states prior to the Peace of Westphalia. Monarchies were in constant flux, collapsing all the time as brother invaded cousin and so on. How exactly does this refute my point?
I'm not sure why you're bringing up the Peace of Westphalia when the topic is how monarchies transformed into democracies. There weren't many democracies at that time.
Spain for example wasn't a democracy until the 20th century and the first attempt at democracy failed miserably and only the second succeeded after the monarchy backed dictator died and the king didn't follow the late dictator's legacy as planned.
Uh,ok, if you're going to be intellectually dishonest and move the goalposts "here is the single path that dictatorships take (demonstrably not the case in whatever the final dictatorship that transitioned to democracy for each given non-revolutionary countries)...Spain, Portugal, and Chile were all examples from the last half century. How do both this and the general case I described _not_ refute your point?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Civil_War ended with the execution of the Monarch, a brief military dictatorship, and established the principle that the Monarch cannot rule without the consent of Parliament.
Not exactly the French revolution, but hardly a smooth transition either.
The parent comment is an exceedingly narrow description: totalitarians always tighten their hold until they collapse. I wasn't making a correspondingly strong counterclaim that the transition was smooth and bloodless for every/most polities. We can quibble about whether Post-Civil War Britain qualifies as having sufficiently transitioned to democracy (and if not, then Post-CW Britain is the polity in question that transitioned without collapse). But it's easy to refute the ludicrous original claim that polities under totalitarians only ever follow a single path.
The monarchies of old changed hands and flipped over due to war (civil and otherwise) so often that they're not really comparable to a modern state dictatorship. Tons of monarchs had extremely short reigns, far less stable than the Chinese Communist party.
Also, monarchies began in an era when the state generally was far less developed than it is now. The number of state functionaries and the control they exert was far less.
Louis the 14th of France was one of the first Western kings to have something like dictatorial control of a country rather than being quite dependent on the nobles formally under him (as those nobles were in turn dependent on their vassals).
Yes. It's completely valid, since their borders, their laws, and the identities of the people were constantly in flux. Nothing at all like the continuity of modern nation states through successive governments.
Yes. It's completely valid, since their borders, their laws, and the identities of the people were constantly in flux.
You've both made a good point and refuted the absolutist position at the same time. In general, if monarchs change and the borders, the laws, and the identities of the people remain the same, then it's really a continuation of the same regime. Really, "it depends."
While a common-enough failure mode, this is by no means universal. Many successful monarchies began as the equivalent of dictatorships, and then opened up further and further over time.