Political Institutions in Japan & Australia
This is an excerpt from the paper...
In the course of the half-century before the Second World War, two major powers emerged in the Western Pacific. They were Japan and Australia. The former, after over two centuries as a "hermit" empire, undertook forced Westernization on its own terms, defeated Russia, one of the traditional Western Great Powers, in 1905, and was acknowledged by the Washington Naval Conference in the 1920s as the third-ranked naval power in the world, after only Britain and the United States. The latter, founded as a penal colony in 1792, only achieved political unity as late as 1901, and was technically a British dominion, although its de facto independence was acknowledged by the Balfour Declaration in 1926 (Fisher, 1968, p. 225). A decade earlier, however, during the First World War, Australia had participated as Britain's partner rather than its colony, and had its own seat and its own demands at the Versailles peace conference. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth, then, both nations were faced, though in very different ways stemming from their very different circumstances, with the task of creating themselves as modern nation-states. Perhaps the most fundamental of all the challenges they faced was that of creating political systems that accorded with their heritages while meeting the requirements of a modern major power. Until the 1930s, both were evolving in roughly comparable directions, as constitutional monarchie
. . .
gave way to the Great Depression, sharpening social tensions, the party system offered no outlet for these tensions.
If the parties offered no outlet for pressures from the left, they likewise offered none for pressures from the right. Extremists could be neither incorporated nor effectively marginalized. Instead, the extremes had recourse to direct action, particularly in the form of political assassinations. In 1932, there were three such assassinations, culminating in that of Premier Inukai, the so-called May 15 incident (Berger, 1977, pp. 44-45). In the wake of this action, the parties were officially abolished.
The end of the party system did not come as an abrupt revolution, in the manner of the rise of Fascism in Italy or Nazism in Germany. As mere interest groupings, the parties embodied no values held important by large numbers of Japanese. Indeed, the formal abolition of the party system had been preceded by the effective abandonment of party ideology by Japanese intellectuals.
Those intellectuals on the left were effectively repressed by the police, and the manner of that suppression spoke to the authoritarian structures within the Japanese state that had persisted unchecked through the party era. From the
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Asian Polynesian, Unless Emperor, America Australia, Zealanders Australians--greatly, British Parliament, Meiji Restoration, Restoration Taisho, Japanese Marxist, Parliament Instead, Minister Japan's, party system, fisher 1968, mcminn 1979, duus 1968, shaw 1967, political parties, two-party system, japan australia, rickard 1988, 1968 pp, hughes graham 1968, parties doshikai minseito, federation shaw 1967, fisher 1968 pp, abolition party system,
Approximate Word count = 5017
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Political Institutions in Japan & Australia
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
