The Shōwa Political Crisis, July 1940: The Imperial Japanese Army Courts a Breach with its Sovereign

2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 670-688
Author(s):  
Peter Mauch

This article examines a criminally understudied moment in modern Japanese military and political history. It is well known that the Imperial Japanese Army, in July 1940, toppled the cabinet of Prime Minister Yonai Mitsumasa. Yet, the damage thereby inflicted on the army’s relationship with the emperor remains virtually unnoticed. So, too, are the army’s subsequent efforts at repairing its relationship with its emperor. By exploring these issues, this article enters the long-standing and polarized debate concerning the Shôwa Emperor’s role in Japanese aggression in the 1930s and early 1940s.

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-113
Author(s):  
N. E. Anikeeva

In this article the author analyses the development of political process in Spain between the two crises of 2015–2016 and 2019–2020, highlighting the strong suits and problem issues of the domestic political debate, including the Catalan issue, as well as the problem related to the migration aspect. An overview of the evolution of the country’s foreign policy agenda is presented, including the foreign policy course towards the Russian Federation. The author analyzes political and economic aspects after the general parliamentary elections of June 26, 2016, which resulted in overcoming the governmental crisis that began in Spain in December 2015 and establishing Mariano Rajoy the head of the Popular Party (PP) government. The latest cabinet of the PP government was approved in November 2016. Rajoy himself had been serving as a Prime Minister of Spain from December 2011 to June 2018. Soon, a new stage in the political history of the Spanish state began, which was associated with the rise to power of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) led by Pedro Sánchez since 2018. PSOE thus won the parliamentary elections in Spain on April 28, 2019. The next elections in 2019 were held on November 10 and turned out to be much more complex and unpredictable than the previous one. PSOE stroke a similar political balance of power to that of April. Confirmation of Pedro Sánchez as a Prime Minister of Spain in January 2020 ended a protracted political crisis in the country, when the Spanish government had been in an acting status for some eight months.


Author(s):  
R.V. Vaidyanatha Ayyar

This chapter describes the personality and politics of Arjun Singh who was Minister of MHRD for about nine years in two spells (1991–95 and 2004–9), and left a deep imprint on Indian education policies. It also describes the developments during 1991–6, a watershed in Indian economic and political history which among others marked the end of Nehruvian era and the unquestioned sway of hegemony of the liberal-left ideas about nationalism, identity, and secularism which were regnant from Independence. It outlines how Arjun Singh built his political career around a fiery commitment to secularism, leftist economic ideology, and social justice, and how that commitment served him well in his battles with political rivals including the Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao. It also outlines Arjun Singh’s strategic use of MHRD to cultivate ‘progressive’ intellectuals, and further his political agenda. It elaborates the conceptual underpinnings of the perennial controversy about school history books, and offers a blow by blow account of the controversy during period 1967–1996 which includes the reign of Indira Gandhi, Janata Party, and P.V. Narasimha Rao.


Asian Survey ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Aqil Shah ◽  
Bushra Asif

A year after assuming power, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government faced a political crisis fomented by the pro-military opposition leader Imran Khan, who mobilized his supporters to protest alleged electoral rigging in the 2013 poll. Khan had to call off the protests after the Pakistani Taliban’s grisly terrorist attack on an army-run school in retaliation for the army’s offensive against them in North Waziristan.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. van den Berg

Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book is the first study of the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day.


Significance He did not name a new prime minister. Over July 25-26, Saied dismissed Prime Minister Hicham Mechichi, dissolved his government, suspended parliament for 30 days, lifted parliamentary immunity and declared himself chief prosecutor, triggering Tunisia’s worst political crisis in a decade. Impacts The Ennahda party could be persecuted once again, this time on corruption charges, as the reconciliation offered excludes its members. Tunisia may become a new ideological battleground, pitting Turkey and Qatar against the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The EU, the United States and Algeria have some influence on Tunisia and could perhaps play a moderating role.


Balcanica ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 191-217
Author(s):  
Dragan Bakic

This paper analyses the role played by Regent Alexander Karadjordjevic in Serbia?s politics and military effort during the First World War. He assumed the position of an heir-apparent somewhat suddenly in 1909, and then regency, after a political crisis that made his father King Peter I transfer his royal powers to Prince Alexander just days before the outbreak of the war. At the age of twenty-six, Alexander was going to lead his people and army through unprecedented horrors. The young Regent proved to be a proper soldier, who suffered personally, along with his troops, the agonising retreat through Albania in late 1915 and early 1916, and spared no effort to ensure the supplies for the exhausted rank and file of the army. He also proved to be a ruler of great personal ambitions and lack of regard for constitutional boundaries of his position. Alexander tried to be not just a formal commander-in-chief of his army, but also to take over operational command; he would eventually manage to appoint officers to his liking to the positions of the Chief of Staff and Army Minister. He also wanted to remove Nikola Pasic from premiership and facilitate the formation of a cabinet amenable to his wishes, but he did not proceed with this, as the Entente Powers supported the Prime Minister. Instead, Alexander joined forces with Pasic to eliminate the Black Hand organization, a group of officers hostile both to him and the Prime Minister, in the well-known show trial in Salonika in 1917. The victories of the Serbian army in 1918 at the Salonika front led to the liberation of Serbia and the formation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia), while Alexander emerged as the most powerful political factor in the new state.


2021 ◽  
pp. 173-188
Author(s):  
Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay ◽  
Namitha George

This chapter traces the history of Covid-19 in India and the government’s response. India has a long and tarnished history of reaching for emergency powers, which stretches back to the colonial period, in times of political crisis. Although India did not declare a formal constitutional emergency after its first reported case of Covid-19, within just under eight weeks, India went from “no health emergency” to a country-wide twenty-one-day lockdown. Despite a daily record jump in the number of deaths and cases each day since mid-March, India’s Ministry of Health, Family, and Welfare has consistently maintained a narrative that the growth rate of the Covid-19 cases in India has remained linear and not exponential; that its strict twenty-one-day lockdown, whose objective was preventive, has successfully slowed the spread of the virus; that India is “on the path of success and will win the war against the pandemic”; and that the two extensions of the lockdown should be considered an exit strategy. The chapter then discusses the policy instruments invoked to respond to the pandemic and examines some of the challenges and consequences resulting from them: the federal jurisdictional management of a pandemic, particularly in the treatment of informal migrant workers; and the reinforcement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s populism and Hindutva majoritarian nationalism.


Leadership ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-132
Author(s):  
Keith Grint

Power, however defined, is something we usually consider as indelibly linked to leadership, as something all leaders and followers seek to obtain, retain, and deploy for good or ill, for themselves or others. But there are occasions when power might be something to avoid, especially when it comes tainted with deleterious consequences, rather like the Christian fable of the poisoned chalice. In this brief provocation, I provide examples where this is self-evident but often only in retrospect. Thus, the infamous ‘stab-in-the-back’ saw the German Social Democrats take power, just before the armistice was signed in 1918. At the time of writing (October 2019), the British are on the verge of a General Election and whoever wins, whoever becomes Prime Minister, will also be held responsible for the fallout from BREXIT – irrespective of their role in generating the political crisis; sometimes, it might be better not to seek power.


1986 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart Ball

On 24 August 1931 the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, tendered the resignation of the second Labour government. In its place he became the premier of an all-party ‘National’ cabinet. This included both the leader of the Conservative party, Stanley Baldwin, and the acting-leader of the Liberal party, Sir Herbert Samuel, together with a number of their senior colleagues. This temporary emergency administration went on to win a landslide majority in the general election of October 1931, and to govern for the ensuing decade. The crisis which created the National government has proved to be of enduring fascination, as a result of its intrinsic interest as the major political crisis of the inter-war period and its profound consequences for subsequent British history. However, historical attention has been principally focused upon the problems of the Labour government, the decisions of Ramsay MacDonald, and the contribution of King George V. As a result the role of the Conservative party – often portrayed as having been the sole benefactor from these events – has been either neglected for its supposed passivity or misunderstood in its mood and intention.


Significance The governing Socialist Party (PSSh) under Prime Minister Edi Rama is expected to win again. This implies policy continuity by what has hitherto been a successful reformist government. However, the decision by the opposition Democratic Party (PDSh) to boycott the elections creates significant uncertainty about the process and aftermath. Impacts PDSh’s boycott of parliament is blocking the completion of judicial reforms that require approval by a two-thirds majority of deputies. A PDSh boycott of elections would constitute a failure of political institutions and halt Albania’s progress towards EU integration. Disenfranchising a large constituency would escalate the political crisis and could lead PDSh supporters to resort to violence.


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