Another advantage is that study of individual crises has yielded a road-map of a dozen factors that help us to understand the varying outcomes. Those factors provide a useful starting point for devising a corresponding map of factors to understand the varying outcomes of national crises. We shall see that 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 crises also brings into sharper relief those features of national crises lacking analogues for individual crises. Among those distinctive features, nations have leaders but individuals don’t, so questions about the role of leadership arise regularly for national crises but not for personal crises. Among historians, there has been a long and still on-going debate about whether unusual leaders really changed the course of history (often termed the “Great-Man” view of history), or whether history’s outcome would have been similar under any other likely leader. (For instance, would World War Two have broken out if a car accident that came close to killing Hitler in 1930 actually had killed him?) Nations have their own political and economic institutions; individuals don’t. Resolution of national crises always involves group interactions and decision-making within the nation; but individuals can often make decisions by themselves. National crises may be resolved either by violent revolution (e.g., Chile in 1973) or by peaceful evolution (e.g., Australia after World War Two); but lone individuals don’t commit violent revolutions.
Those similarities, metaphors, and differences are why I have found comparisons of national crises and individual crises useful in helping my UCLA students to understand national crises.
Readers and reviewers of a book often gradually discover, as they read, that the book’s coverage and approach aren’t what they expected or wanted. What are this book’s coverage and approach, and which coverages and approaches do I not include?
FIG. 1 Map of the World
This book is: a comparative, narrative, exploratory study of crisis and selective change operating over many decades in seven modern nations, of all of which I have much personal experience, and viewed from the perspective of selective change in personal crises. Those nations are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.
Let’s consider, one by one, each of these words and phrases.
This is a comparative book. It doesn’t devote its pages to discussing just one nation. Instead, it divides those pages among seven nations, so that those nations can be compared. Non-fiction authors have to choose between presenting single case studies and comparing multiple cases. Each approach has different advantages and different limitations. In a given length of text, single case studies can of course provide far more detail about that single case, but comparative studies can offer perspectives and detect issues that wouldn’t emerge from studying just a single case.
Historical comparisons force one to ask questions that are unlikely to emerge from a case study: why did a certain type of event produce result R1 in one country, when it produced a very different result R2 in another country? For example, one-volume histories of the American Civil War, which I love reading, can devote six pages to the second day of the Battle of Gettysburg, but can’t explore why the American Civil War, unlike the Spanish and Finnish Civil Wars, ended with the victors sparing the lives of the defeated. Authors of single case studies often decry comparative studies as oversimplified and superficial, while authors of comparative studies equally often decry single case studies as unable to address broad questions. The latter view is expressed in the quip “Those who study just one country end up understanding no country.” This book is a comparative study, with its resulting advantages and limitations.
Because this book divides its pages among seven nations, I’m painfully aware that my account of each nation has to be concise. As I sit at my desk and turn my head, I see behind me, on my study’s floor, a dozen piles of books and papers, each up to five feet high, one pile for the material of each chapter. It was agonizing for me to contemplate condensing five vertical feet of material on post-war Germany into one chapter of 11,000 words. So much had to be omitted! But conciseness has its compensations: it helps readers to compare major issues between post-war Germany and other nations, without becoming distracted and overwhelmed by fascinating details, exceptions, if’s, and but’s. For readers who want to go on to learn more fascinating details, the concluding bibliography of this book lists books and articles devoted to single case studies.
This book’s style of presentation is narrative: that is, the traditional style of historians, going all the way back to the foundation of history as a discipline developed by the Greek authors Herodotus and Thucydides over 2,400 years ago. “Narrative style” means that arguments are developed by prose reasoning, without equations, tables of numbers, graphs, or statistical tests of significance, and with only a small number of cases studied. That style may be contrasted with a powerful new quantitative approach in modern social science research, making heavy use of equations, explicit testable hypotheses, tables of data, graphs, and large sample sizes (i.e., many cases studied) that permit statistical tests of significance.
I’ve learned to appreciate the power of modern quantitative methods. I used them in a statistical study of deforestation on 73 Polynesian islands,1 in order to reach conclusions that could never have been extracted convincingly from a narrative account of deforestation on a few islands. I also co-edited a book2 in which some of my co-authors ingeniously used quantitative methods to resolve questions previously debated endlessly and without resolution by narrative historians: for example, whether Napoleon’s military conquests and political upheavals were good or bad for the subsequent economic development of Europe.
I had initially hoped to incorporate modern quantitative methods into this book. I devoted months to that effort, only to reach the conclusion that it would have to remain a task for a separate future project. That’s because this book instead had to accomplish the task of identifying, by a narrative study, hypotheses and variables for a subsequent quantitative study to test. My sample of just seven nations is too small for extracting statistically significant conclusions. It will take much further work to “operationalize” my narrative qualitative concepts such as “successful crisis resolution” and “honest self-appraisal”: i.e., to translate those verbal concepts into things that can be measured as numbers. Therefore, this book is a narrative exploration, which I hope will stimulate quantitative testing.
Among the world’s more than 210 nations, this book discusses only seven familiar to me. I’ve made repeated visits to all seven. I’ve lived for extended periods, beginning as long as 70 years ago, in six of them. I speak or formerly spoke the languages of those six. I like and admire a
ll of those nations, happily revisit all of them, have visited all within the last two years, and seriously considered moving permanently to two of them. As a result, I can write sympathetically and knowledgeably about them, on the basis of my own first-hand experiences and those of my long-term friends living there. My and my friends’ experiences encompass a sufficiently long period of time for us to have witnessed major changes. Among my seven nations, Japan is the one of which my first-hand experience is more limited, because I don’t speak the language and have made only briefer visits extending back in time for only 21 years. In compensation, though, for Japan I have been able to draw on the lifelong experiences of my Japanese relatives by marriage, and of my Japanese friends and students.
Of course, the seven nations that I selected on the basis of those personal experiences aren’t a random sample of the world’s nations. Five are rich industrialized nations, one is modestly affluent, and only one is a poor developing nation. None is African; two are European, two are Asian, and one each is North American, South American, or Australian. It remains for other authors to test to what extent my conclusions derived from this non-random sample of nations apply to other nations. I accepted that limitation and chose those seven because of what seemed to me the overwhelming advantage of only discussing nations that I understand on the basis of long and intense personal experience, friendships, and (in six cases) familiarity with the language.
This book is almost entirely about modern national crises that occurred within my lifetime, permitting me to write from the perspective of my own contemporary experience. The outlier, for which I discuss changes before my lifetime, again involves Japan, to which I devote two chapters. One of those chapters discusses Japan today, but the other discusses Japan of the Meiji Era (1868–1912). I included that chapter on Meiji Japan because it constitutes such a striking example of conscious selective change, because it is still in the recent past, and because the memories and issues of Meiji Japan remain prominent in modern Japan.
Of course, national crises and changes have also occurred in the past, and posed similar questions. Though I can’t address questions of the past from personal experience, such past crises have been the subject of a large literature. Well-known examples include the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian Era; the rise and fall of southern Africa’s Zulu state in the 19th century; the 1789 French Revolution and subsequent reorganization of France; and Prussia’s catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Jena in 1806, its conquest by Napoleon, and its subsequent social, administrative, and military reforms. Several years after I began to write this book, I discovered that a book whose title refers to similar themes (Crisis, Choice, and Change) had already been published by my own American publisher (Little, Brown) in 1973!3 That book differs from mine in including several case studies from the past, as well as in other basic respects. (It was a multi-authored edited volume using a framework called “system functionalism.”)
Research by professional historians emphasizes archival studies, i.e., the analysis of preserved written primary documents. Each new history book justifies itself by exploiting previously unutilized or underutilized archival sources, or by reinterpreting archival sources already utilized by other historians. Unlike most of the numerous books cited in my bibliography, my book is not based on archival studies. Instead, its contribution depends on a new framework derived from personal crises, an explicitly comparative approach, and a perspective drawn from my own life experiences and those of my friends.
This is not a magazine article about current affairs, intended to be read for a few weeks after its publication, and then to fall out-of-date. Instead, this is a book expected to remain in print for many decades. I state that obvious fact just to explain why you might otherwise be astonished to find nothing whatsoever in this book about the specific policies of the current Trump administration in the U.S., nor about President Trump’s leadership, nor about the current Brexit negotiations in Britain. Anything that I could write today about those fast-moving issues would become embarrassingly superseded by the time that this book is published, and would be useless a few decades from now. Readers interested in President Trump, his policies, and Brexit will find abundant published discussions elsewhere. But my Chapters 9 and 10 do have a lot to say about major U.S. issues that have been operating for the past two decades, that are now claiming even more attention under the current administration, and that are likely to continue to operate for at least the next decade.
Now, here is a road-map to my book itself. In my first chapter I shall discuss personal crises, before devoting the rest of this book to national crises. We’ve all seen, by living through our own crises and witnessing the crises of our relatives and friends, that there is much variation among crisis outcomes. In the best cases, people succeed in figuring out new and better coping methods, and they emerge stronger. In the saddest cases, they become overwhelmed and revert to their old ways, or else they adopt new but worse coping methods. Some people in crisis even commit suicide. Therapists have identified many factors, of which I’ll discuss a dozen in Chapter 1, influencing the likelihood that a personal crisis will be successfully resolved. Those are the factors for which I’ll explore parallel factors influencing the outcomes of national crises.
To anyone who groans in dismay, “A dozen factors are a lot to remember, why don’t you reduce them to just a few?”—I reply: it would be absurd to think that the outcomes of people’s lives, or of nations’ histories, could be usefully reduced to just a few catchwords. If you should have the misfortune to pick up a book claiming to achieve that, throw it away without reading any further. Conversely, if you have the misfortune to pick up a book proposing to discuss all 76 factors influencing crisis resolution, throw that book away also: it’s the job of a book’s author, not of a book’s readers, to digest and prioritize life’s infinite complexity into a useful framework. I found that using a dozen factors offers an acceptable compromise between those two extremes: detailed enough to explain much of reality, without being so detailed as to constitute a laundry list useful for tracking laundry but not for understanding the world.
That introductory chapter is followed by three pairs of chapters, each pair on a different kind of national crisis. The first pair concerns crises in two countries (Finland and Japan) that exploded in a sudden upheaval, provoked by shocks from another country. The second pair is also about crises that exploded suddenly, but due to internal explosions (in Chile and Indonesia). The last pair describes crises that did not explode with a bang, but that instead unfolded gradually (in Germany and Australia), especially due to stresses unleashed by World War Two.
Finland’s crisis (Chapter 2) exploded with the Soviet Union’s massive attack upon Finland on November 30, 1939. In the resulting Winter War, Finland was virtually abandoned by all of its potential allies and sustained heavy losses, but nevertheless succeeded in preserving its independence against the Soviet Union, whose population outnumbered Finland’s by 40 to 1. I spent a summer in Finland 20 years later, hosted by veterans and widows and orphans of the Winter War. The war’s legacy was conspicuous selective change that made Finland an unprecedented mosaic, a mixture of contrasting elements: an affluent small liberal democracy, pursuing a foreign policy of doing everything possible to earn the trust of the impoverished giant reactionary Soviet dictatorship. That policy was considered shameful and denounced as “Finlandization” by many non-Finns who failed to understand the historical reasons for its adoption. One of the most intense moments of my summer in Finland unfolded when I ignorantly expressed similar views to a Winter War veteran, who replied by politely explaining to me the bitter lessons that Finns had learned from being denied help by other nations.
The other of the two crises provoked by an external shock involved Japan, whose long-held policy of isolation from the outside world was ended on July 8, 1853, when a fleet of American warships sailed into Tokyo Bay’s entrance, demanding a tr
eaty and rights for U.S. ships and sailors (Chapter 3). The eventual result was the overthrow of Japan’s previous system of government, a consciously adopted program of drastic wide-ranging change, and an equally conscious program of retention of many traditional features that leave Japan today as the world’s most distinctive rich industrialized nation. Japan’s transformation during the decades following the U.S. fleet’s arrival, the so-called Meiji Era, strikingly illustrates at the national level many of the factors influencing personal crises. The decision-making processes and resulting military successes of Meiji Japan help us by contrast to understand why Japan made different decisions in the 1930’s, leading to its crushing military defeat in World War Two.
Chapter 4 concerns Chile, the first of the pair of countries whose crises were internal explosions resulting from a breakdown of political compromise among their citizens. On September 11, 1973, after years of political stalemate, Chile’s democratically elected government under President Allende was overturned by a military coup whose leader, General Pinochet, remained in power for almost 17 years. Neither the coup itself, nor the world records for sadistic tortures smashed by Pinochet’s government, had been foreseen by my Chilean friends while I was living in Chile several years before the coup. In fact, they had proudly explained to me Chile’s long democratic traditions, so unlike those of other South American countries. Today, Chile is once again a democratic outlier in South America, but selectively changed, incorporating parts of Allende’s and parts of Pinochet’s models. To U.S. friends who commented on my book manuscript, this Chilean chapter was the most frightening chapter of my book, because of the speed and completeness with which a democracy turned into a sadistic dictatorship.
Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis Page 2