A French Revolution in Iraq?
This article needs further comment and reflection on the comparative residual attitudes and philosophies arising from the American and Glorious Revolutions against the French Revolution.
Particularly in the American Revolution, an attitude arose and developed of fear of institutions that ultimately leads to stable institutions by creating the institutions natural opposition.
In the French Revolution, the idea of partisan conflict controlling partisan authority created an inherent instability. This lead to five different republican constitutions, two imperial governments, and two installations of monarchs in the same period of time that America had one republic.
The French are very idealistic and found of pure, unmoderated ideas. Reality has little impact in the methodology of analysis taught in French government schools. Pure thought is correct thought.
In the British and American experience thought is empirical, when successful for long periods of time. How else does an idea arise, moderate, and fall without government-destroying revolutions?
The French recent political stability and liberty from Soviet nuclear threats has allowed a natural and almost inevitable philosophical divide between the slow evolutionary change that common law countries exhibit to conflict openly with the revolutionary, idealistic philosophies that the French have perpetuated.
Even so, we are not irreversibly on this course. The Gaullist movement to tear out broken Socialist patterns in employment rules, labor relations, and tax rates shows some evolutionary changes. This is particularly true since Chirac is doing this well into his term and not by sudden, revolutionary changes.
At the same, Chirac's Gaullist psychology (as replete with an inferiority complex -- should I say "Napoleanic complex" -- as it is) is screaming loudly. This is almost the last throes of a dying philosophy.
As the French evolve, may be they change.
