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Take a look at English history, say, Roman times (43 AD) to present. It's fascinating on multiple counts. I'm sketchy on this myself, but a rough outline: The Romans were, of course, a foreign occupying force, but they served to keep other foreign occupying forces out. Once the Romans left (~450 AD), that stopped being the case, and England was successively invaded by Norsemen ("Northmen", a/k/a Vikings, Normandy is also settled by the Norse), and Saxons (from present day Holland / Netherlands), mostly. William the Conqueror (Norman) was the last foreign invador to both substantially engage the dominant British inhabitants on their own soil, the last to defeat England (absent invited parties, e.g., Mortimor and the Prince of Orange). 1066 was the last time until the first World War that England was subject to any significant foreign attack, and the last time until the second World War that London itself was engaged by an enemy. I find that pretty significant. There were numerous almost (though not quite) always peaceful devolutions of power from the Crown to an ever expanding scope of at first nobles, and finally commoners. The Magna Carta (1215), War of Roses (1485), the English Civil Wars (1642 & 1648), Commonwealth of England (1649), the Protectorate (1653-1659), the Bill of Rights (1689), Chartism (1838-1858) (the UK's answer to the Revolutions of 1848 and their populist reforms), Local Governance Acts (1888, 1894), and increasing welfare-state reforms of the 1930s - 1950s. Throughout almost all of this has been a devolution of power from the centre to the periphery. It's also occurred largely by the fact that those claiming additional power -- barons, lords, a growing merchantile and political class, and finally the proletariat -- could effectively make such demands, threatening disruption otherwise. The concept of a revolution in the modern sense seems, well, quite modern: France (1794), Europe generally (1848), Russia (1917) and the subsequent Communist Revolutions of China and Cuba. (I'm excluding the Communisation of Eastern Europe which was in fact an act of imperial oppression by Soviet Russia). The Fascist revolutions of Italy and German (a strongly cautionary tale). The fall of the USSR and Communist Eastern Europe, though should fit. I'd include the Iranian Revolution (1979), though that was not in the Liberal tradition. More generally, power transitions are from one oligarchical group to another, though frequently playing on public sentiments. |