Was America's entrance into WWI justified?

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Cursed be all reductionists.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Germany was a democracy at the time.  Had more liberal voting laws than Britain.

lol

The Reichstag had essentially no power whatsoever; it was basically a cross between a talking shop and a fig leaf. Power lay elsewhere; especially in the military. The people could not change the government*. I mean, this is basic stuff. You might as well call Imperial Russia a democracy because the Duma was elected.

*Which they could, and did, in Britain. Not that it was exactly democratic by our standards, but most households had a vote (indeed, the class composition of the electorate changed surprisingly little in 1918).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

LOL right back art you.

This is funny because I do actually know a few things about this subject

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The Reichstag was pretty much the definition of a toothless parliament. Read any reputable work on the Kaiserreich. Bulow's fall, for example, had little to do with losing a vote in the Reichstag, and everything to do with losing the confidence of the Kaiser and his inner circle; another excuse would have been found if the vote had passed, because that's the way things work in sham democracies.

Maybe you'll be arguing that Poland under the Sanacja regime was a democracy next!

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Very true. But more households had the vote before the Fourth Reform Act than is often realised (this wasn't intentional, of course. There are some seriously amusing reports of horrified middle class political activists finding out that a very high percentage of residuum housholds in the East End had the vote...). The class composition of the electorate before 1918 wasn't as different to after 1918 as was once (naturally) assumed. By the standards of today, Britain was certainly not a democracy in 1914. It was, however, more democratic than was the norm for the time.

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It was, however, rendered toothless a few years before 1914.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Bulow lost the confidence of the Kaiser becuase he could not get legislation passed in the Reichstag.

Think it probably had more to do with the Daily Telegraph interview, but that's neither here nor there. The key point is that he resigned because he lost the confidence of the Kaiser, not because the Reichstag removed him. It couldn't. Which, as far as I'm concerned, says it all.

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The fundamental difference between Britain and Germany in 1914 was that the government in the former was accountable to the electorate, while the government in the latter was not. The former was a country that was quite clearly democratising (if at a rather slow pace) even if it was not yet what I would came a democracy, while the latter was an authoritarian regime that derived its power from the military and which also happened to have something of a parliamentary facade (and not a very good one). Of course, elections in Germany (at least at a national level; regional and municipal elections were something else entirely) were more democratic than elections in Britain, but that's only part of the picture, and perhaps not the most important one.

As an aside, while calling Britain, France and Italy c. 1914 'democracies' is a questionable (especially the last one!), they were all liberal states at a fundamental level and in a way that very few countries outside North America are these days.

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You miss the point of later reform efforts. Since the struggle over the People's Budget, the House of Lords has no real power; it can block and it can amend, but it cannot vote anything down. Even it's blocking and amending can be defeated by the Commons. Later reform efforts have focused not on what it does, but on how it's members are elected (or, rather, not). In the long, slow process of democratisation in Britain, the castration of the Lords was one of the most important events. And it perhaps shows a fundamental difference between Britain and Germany in the period in question; in the latter the landowning classes still called the shots. In the former, they'd very recently lost almost all of their power as a direct result of the repeated electoral defeat of their backers in the Commons.