Planting Parliaments in Eurasia, 1850-1950

Parliaments are often seen as Western European and North American institutions and their establishment in other parts of the world as a derivative and mostly defective process. This book challenges such Eurocentric visions by retracing the evolution of modern institutions of collective decision-making in Eurasia. Breaching the divide between different area studies, the book provides nine case studies covering the area between the eastern edge of Asia and Eastern Europe, including the former Russian, Ottoman, Qing, and Japanese Empires as well as their successor states. In particular, it explores the appeals to concepts of parliamentarism, deliberative decision-making, and constitutionalism; historical practices related to parliamentarism; and political mythologies across Eurasia. It focuses on the historical and "reestablished" institutions of decision-making, which consciously hark back to indigenous traditions and adapt them to the changing circumstances in imperial and postimperial contexts. Thereby, the book explains how representative institutions were needed for the establishment of modernized empires or postimperial states but at the same time offered a connection to the past.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780367691271, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 licence.

Ivan Sablin is a research group leader in the Department of History at Heidelberg University, Germany. Egas Moniz Bandeira is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Introduction 1. Duma, yuan, and beyond: Conceptualizing parliaments and parliamentarism in and after the Russian and Qing Empires 2. Montesquieu vs. Bagehot: Two Visions of Parliamentarism in Japan 3. Public opinion under imperial benevolence: Japanese 'National Essence' leader Torio Koyata's anti-liberal parliamentarianism in the Genro-in and the House of Lords 4. Zemskii sobor (The Assembly of the Land): Historiographies and mythologies of a Russian "parliament" 5. The 22 Frimaire of Yuan Shikai: Privy Councils in the Constitutional Architectures of Japan and China, 1887-1917 6. A Rada for the empire: An invented tradition of Cossack self-governance during the 1905 Revolution 7. Ottoman Parliamentary Procedure in the Chamber of Deputies (Meclis-i Mebusan) and the Great National Assembly of Turkey (Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi), 1876-1923 8. Nominal Democracy in Stalinism: The Soviet Constitution of 1936 9. The Preparations for the First Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the Quest for Legitimacy