On 12/31/2021 at 10:02 PM, kerdios said:As far as I know, Britain is special in Europe (and maybe the world among democracies) as the only country that has a higher house of representatives that is not democratically elected. (i.e. the house of lords which is elected by the queen, the church and other lords)
Additionally there are 5 Scandinavian countries including Iceland, so 2 out of 5 is not bad in my book for representing peaceful gradual change from monarchy to democracy.
Sorry for deleting my previous post, I was wrong about something because of a conflation between to conflicts in the same region, Its kind of embarrassing.
Anyways, from what I can tell, the independence of iceland and finland were less peaceful demonstrations by the people trying to bring democracy to their previously monarchical nation and more bureaucratic issues. Iceland and Finland didnt exist as states for a long time before they became independent democracies, and the reason why both were released as democracies were more a result of both states being too cumbersome to handle after their controlling state became too exhausted financially to maintain their territorial claim to sovereignty over the state. Additionally both states were already fairly self governing due to their respective distance and ethnic population density. You could claim this was peaceful in nature but the circumstance seems to imply that the nations that held them previously wouldn't have been able to stop them from declaring independence without asking if they tried to hold on.
I wanna segway to another point however and say a big thing this conversation seems to be missing is context. Modern democracy wasn't born in a vacuum, and the United States and France founded a precedent for how to fight for democracy and against monarchism. After those bloody messes the ghost of revolution haunted monarchs for centuries, and as it became apparent they were less and less effective at ruling and the parliament of these nations started stripping more and more of their power away, constitutional democracy kind of became less of a peaceful acceptance of civil representation and more the final compromise between absolutism and getting your head removed from your shoulder. WW1 kind of put the last nail in the coffin for absolute monarchies in Europe, with WW2 being a massive battering ram through any sense autocracy would be taken seriously at all without open disgust in Europe.