Liberal democracy in the context of Presidential system

The French Revolution was a period of political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the Coup of 18 Brumaire on 9 November 1799. Many of the revolution's ideas are considered fundamental principles of liberal democracy, and its values remain central to modern French political discourse. It was caused by a combination of social, political, and economic factors which the existing regime proved unable to manage.

Financial crisis and widespread social distress led to the convocation of the Estates General in May 1789, its first meeting since 1614. The representatives of the Third Estate broke away and re-constituted themselves as a National Assembly in June. The Storming of the Bastille in Paris on 14 July led to a series of radical measures by the Assembly, including the abolition of feudalism, state control over the Catholic Church in France, and issuing the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Romania is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe. It borders Ukraine to the north and east, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Bulgaria to the south, Moldova to the east, and the Black Sea to the southeast. It has a mainly continental climate, and an area of 238,397 km (92,046 sq mi) with a population of 19 million people. Romania is the twelfth-largest country in Europe and the sixth-most populous member state of the European Union. Europe's second-longest river, the Danube, empties into the Danube Delta in the southeast of the country. The Carpathian Mountains cross Romania from the north to the southwest and include Moldoveanu Peak, at an altitude of 2,544 m (8,346 ft). Bucharest is the country's capital, largest urban area, and financial centre. Other major urban areas include Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Iași, Constanța and Brașov.

Settlement in the territory of modern Romania began in the Lower Paleolithic, later becoming the Dacian Kingdom before Roman conquest and Romanisation. The modern Romanian state was formed in 1859 with the unification of Moldavia and Wallachia under Alexandru Ioan Cuza, becoming the Kingdom of Romania in 1881 under Carol I of Romania. Romania gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877, formalised by the Treaty of Berlin. After World War I, Transylvania, Banat, Bukovina, and Bessarabia joined the Old Kingdom, forming Greater Romania, which reached its largest territorial extent. In 1940, under Axis pressure, Romania lost territories to Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union. Following the 1944 Romanian coup d'état, Romania switched sides to join the Allies. After World War II, it regained Northern Transylvania through the Paris Peace Treaties. Under Soviet occupation, King Michael I was forced to abdicate, and Romania became a socialist republic and Warsaw Pact member. After the uniquely violent Romanian revolution in December 1989, Romania began a transition to liberal democracy and a market economy.

The revolutions of 1989, also known as the fall of communism, were a wave of liberal democratic movements that resulted in the collapse of most Marxist–Leninist governments in the Eastern Bloc and other parts of the world. This wave is sometimes referred to as the "autumn of nations", in reference to the revolutions of 1848 as the "spring of nations". The revolutions of 1989 were a key factor in the dissolution of the Soviet Union—one of the two superpowers—and abandonment of communist regimes in many parts of the world, some of which were violently overthrown. These events drastically altered the world's balance of power, marking the end of the Cold War and beginning of the post-Cold War era.

The earliest recorded protests, which led to the revolutions, began in Poland on 14 August 1980, the massive general strike which led to the August Agreements and establishment of Solidarity, the first and only independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc, whose peak membership reached 10 million. The main region of the 1989 revolutions was Central Europe, starting in Poland with the 1988 Polish strikes, and continued in Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. On 4 June 1989, Poland conducted the first elections that led to the dissolution of the communist government, with Solidarity winning an overwhelming victory, leading to the peaceful fall of communism in Poland. Influenced by Poland, Hungary organised round table-format talks and began dismantling its section of the Iron Curtain. In August 1989, over a quarter of the Baltic states population physically chained for 675 kilometres (419 mi) in the Baltic Way protesting the occupation by the Soviet Union, while the opening of a border gate between Austria and Hungary set in motion a peaceful chain reaction, in which the Eastern Bloc disintegrated. This led to mass demonstrations in cities of East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which served as the symbolic gateway to German reunification in 1990. A feature common to these developments was the extensive use of campaigns of civil resistance, demonstrating popular opposition to the continuation of one-party rule and contributing to pressure for change. Romania was the only country in which citizens and opposition forces used violence to overthrow its communist regime, although Romania was politically isolated from the rest of the Eastern Bloc.

Representative democracy, also known as indirect democracy or electoral democracy, is a type of democracy where elected delegates represent a group of people, in contrast to direct democracy. Nearly all modern Western-style democracies function as some type of representative democracy: for example, the United Kingdom (a unitary parliamentary constitutional monarchy), Germany (a federal parliamentary republic), France (a unitary semi-presidential republic), and the United States (a federal presidential republic). Unlike liberal democracy, a representative democracy may have de facto multiparty and free and fair elections, but may not have a fully developed rule of law and additional individual and minority rights beyond the electoral sphere.

Representative democracy places power in the hands of representatives who are elected by the people. Political parties often become central to this form of democracy if electoral systems require or encourage voters to vote for political parties or for candidates associated with political parties (as opposed to voting for individual representatives). Some political theorists (including Robert Dahl, Gregory Houston, and Ian Liebenberg) have described representative democracy as polyarchy.

Minority rights are the normal individual rights as applied to members of racial, ethnic, class, religious, linguistic or gender and sexual minorities, and also the collective rights accorded to any minority group. In modern liberal democracy, the protection of minority rights is the main principle.

Civil-rights movements often seek to ensure that individual rights are not denied on the basis of membership in a minority group. Such civil-rights advocates include the global women's-rights and global LGBT-rights movements, and various racial-minority rights movements around the world (such as the Civil Rights Movement in the United States).

Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property, and equality before the law. Liberals espouse various and sometimes conflicting views depending on their understanding of these principles but generally support private property, market economies, individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), liberal democracy, secularism, rule of law, economic and political freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. Liberalism is frequently cited as the dominant ideology of modern history.

Liberalism became a distinct movement in the Age of Enlightenment, gaining popularity among Western philosophers and economists. Liberalism sought to replace the norms of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, the divine right of kings and traditional conservatism with representative democracy, rule of law, and equality under the law. Liberals also ended mercantilist policies, royal monopolies, and other trade barriers, instead promoting free trade and marketization. The philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct tradition based on the social contract, arguing that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property, and governments must not violate these rights. While the British liberal tradition emphasized expanding democracy, French liberalism emphasized rejecting authoritarianism and is linked to nation-building.

Western civilization traces its roots back to Europe and the Mediterranean. It began in ancient Greece, transformed in ancient Rome, and evolved into medieval Western Christendom before experiencing such seminal developmental episodes as the development of Scholasticism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the development of liberal democracy. The civilizations of classical Greece and Rome are considered seminal periods in Western history. Major cultural contributions also came from the Christianized Germanic peoples, such as the Longobards, the Franks, the Goths, and the Burgundians. Charlemagne founded the Carolingian Empire and he is referred to as the "Father of Europe". Contributions also emerged from pagan peoples of pre-Christian Europe, such as the Celts and Germanic pagans as well as some significant religious contributions derived from Judaism and Hellenistic Judaism stemming back to Second Temple Judea, Galilee, and the early Jewish diaspora; and some other Middle Eastern influences. Western Christianity has played a prominent role in the shaping of Western civilization, which throughout most of its history, has been nearly equivalent to Christian culture. (There were Christians outside of the West, such as China, India, Russia, Byzantium and the Middle East). Western civilization has spread to produce the dominant cultures of modern Americas and Oceania, and has had immense global influence in recent centuries in many ways.

Following the 5th century Fall of Rome, Europe entered the Middle Ages, during which period the Catholic Church filled the power vacuum left in the West by the fall of the Western Roman Empire, while the Eastern Roman Empire (or Byzantine Empire) endured in the East for centuries, becoming a Hellenic Eastern contrast to the Latin West. By the 12th century, Western Europe was experiencing a flowering of art and learning, propelled by the construction of cathedrals, the establishment of medieval universities, and greater contact with the medieval Islamic world via Al-Andalus and Sicily, from where Arabic texts on science and philosophy were translated into Latin. Christian unity was shattered by the Reformation from the 16th century. A merchant class grew out of city states, initially in the Italian peninsula (see Italian city-states), and Europe experienced the Renaissance from the 14th to the 17th century, heralding an age of technological and artistic advance and ushering in the Age of Discovery which saw the rise of such global European empires as those of Portugal and Spain.

The executive is the part of the government that executes or enforces the law. It can be organised as a branch of government, as in liberal democracies, or as an organ of the unified state apparatus, as is the case in communist states.

Civic nationalism, otherwise known as democratic nationalism, is a form of nationalism that adheres to traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, and individual rights, and is not based on ethnocentrism. Civic nationalists often defend the value of national identity by saying that individuals need it as a partial shared aspect of their identity (an upper identity) in order to lead meaningful, autonomous lives and that democratic polities need a national identity to function properly. Liberal nationalism is used in the same sense as 'civic nationalism', but liberal ethnonationalism also exists, and "state nationalism" is a branch of civic nationalism, but it can also be illiberal.

Civic nationhood is a political identity built around shared citizenship within the state. Thus, a "civic nation" defines itself not by culture but by political institutions and liberal principles, which its citizens pledge to uphold. Membership in the civic nation is open to every person by citizenship, regardless of culture or ethnicity. Those who share these values are considered members of the nation and, in theory, a civic nation or state does not aim to promote one culture over another. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has argued that immigrants to a liberal-democratic state need not assimilate into the host culture but only accept the principles of the country's constitution (constitutional patriotism).

Japan first participated at the Olympic Games in 1912, and has competed at almost every Games since then. The nation was not invited to the 1948 Games after World War II, and was part of the American-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.

Since its first (ultimately canceled) bid in 1940, Japan has hosted the Olympics four times: in 1964, 1972, 1998, and 2021 (originally 2020). Each occasion coincided with critical turning points in Japan’s domestic development or global standing. The 1964 Tokyo Olympics were a pivotal moment in Japan’s postwar recovery, offering a visual spectacle of modernization that included the unveiling of the Shinkansen bullet train and the rapid reconstruction of Tokyo’s infrastructure. The event symbolized Japan’s reintegration into the international community after its defeat in World War II, marking its transition from a militaristic empire to a peaceful economic power aligned with Western liberal democracies.

A socialist state, socialist republic, or socialist country is a sovereign state constitutionally dedicated to the establishment of socialism. This article is about states that refer to themselves as socialist states, and not specifically about communist states that refer to themselves as socialist states. It includes information on liberal democratic states with constitutional references to socialism as well as other state formations that have referred to themselves as socialist.

Protest policing or public order policing is part of a state’s response to political dissent and social movements. Police maintenance of public order during protest is an essential component of liberal democracy, with military response to protest being more common under authoritarian regimes.

Australasian, European, and North American democratic states have all experienced increased surveillance of protest movements and more militarized protest policing since 1995 and through the first decades of the 21st century.

A police state is a state whose government institutions exercise an extreme level of control over civil society and liberties. There is typically little to no distinction between the law and the exercise of political power by the executive, and the deployment of internal security and police forces play a heightened role in governance. A police state is a characteristic of authoritarian, totalitarian or illiberal regimes (contrary to a liberal democratic regime). Such governments are not exclusive to simply one-party states or dominant-party states, as they can also arise in a democracy or multi-party system.

Originally, a police state was a state regulated by a civil administration, but since the beginning of the 20th century it has "taken on an emotional and derogatory meaning" by describing an undesirable state of living characterized by the overbearing presence of civil authorities. The inhabitants of a police state may experience restrictions on their mobility, or on their freedom to express or communicate political or other views, which are subject to police monitoring or enforcement. Political control may be exerted by means of a secret police force that operates outside the boundaries normally imposed by a constitutional state. Robert von Mohl, who first introduced the rule of law to German jurisprudence, contrasted the Rechtsstaat ("legal" or "constitutional" state) with the anti-aristocratic Polizeistaat ("police state").

Konrad Hermann Joseph Adenauer (5 January 1876 – 19 April 1967) was a German statesman and politician who served as the first chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963. From 1946 to 1966, he was the first leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), a newly founded Christian democratic party, which became the dominant force in the country under his leadership.

As a devout Catholic, Adenauer was a leading politician of the Catholic Centre Party in the Weimar Republic, serving as Mayor of Cologne (1917–1933) and as president of the Prussian State Council. In the early years of the Federal Republic, he switched focus from denazification to recovery, and led his country to close relations with France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. During his years in power, he worked to restore the West German economy from the destruction of World War II to a central position in Europe with a market-based liberal democracy, stability, international respect and economic prosperity.

In international relations, the liberal international order (LIO), also known as the rules-based order (RBO), consists of a set of global, rule-based, structured relationships based on political liberalism, economic liberalism and liberal internationalism since the late 1940s. More specifically, it entails international cooperation through multilateral institutions (like the United Nations, World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund) and is constituted by human equality (freedom, rule of law and human rights), open markets, security cooperation, promotion of liberal democracy, and monetary cooperation. The order was established in the aftermath of World War II, led in large part by the United States.

The nature of the LIO, as well as its very existence, has been debated by scholars. The LIO has been credited with expanding free trade, increasing capital mobility, spreading democracy, promoting human rights, and collectively defending the Western world from the Soviet Union. The LIO facilitated unprecedented cooperation among the states of North America, Western Europe and Japan. Over time, the LIO facilitated the spread of economic liberalism to the rest of the world, as well as helped consolidate democracy in formerly fascist or communist countries.