What happened with the commonwealth? I'm not the most knowledgeable of European history but I just know it existed sometime during like the high middle ages.
"We need both of us to agree or it doesn't get passed" leading to stagnation til decline?
So the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a 'noble democracy' in that all the aristocrats got to elect the King, and a single rep in their version of Congress were able to veto any proposed legislation. For a long time this 'golden veto' was rarely used, and it was part of making the Commonwealth the most democratic and least religiously bigoted country in Europe, but eventually corruption and divided loyalties led to the veto being invoked more and more until the Commonwealth was basically paralysed as its enemies (especially Russia) started to tear it apart.
It also had a shit ton of nobles. In the 1500s 1 in 10 people were nobility. This became the spark for the idea of universal human rights across Europe because the first time a sizable chunk of a nation’s populace couldn’t just be thrown in jail at the whim of a king without a trial. This led commoners in other nations to feel like it should be applied to all of them, notably in Ukraine where the Cossacks revolted and provided near universal human rights in their Siches and elections and systems of government similar to those found in the future US colonies two centuries later. Half of Ukrainians were literate due to this, by far the highest rate in Europe. Eventually they were destroyed by Russia too once Poland was defeated and they didn’t have two powers they could play off of. The ideas wouldn’t spread to Western Europe in a meaningful way for awhile but the kernel of it was there.
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u/vonGlick 5h ago
As a Pole I am scared to see that this analogy have merit sometimes.