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A puppet government is a government that, though notionally of the same culture as the governed people, owes its existence (or other major debt) to being installed, supported or controlled by a more powerful entity, typically a foreign power. Such a government is also known as a puppet régime.

The term is partisan and prone to semantic disputes, used almost exclusively by detractors of such governments, whether or not the majority of citizens affected acknowledge the characterization, or object to that kind of government. Often a proclaimed puppet government faces a rival government which uses the puppet government term to weaken the legitimacy of that government. Also usually implied is the government's lack of legitimacy, in the view of those using the term.

For example, each of the two Korean governments have often used the rhetoric that it is in fact the only true ruler of the peninsula, and that the other government is merely a puppet of Russia or the US.

A vassal state may be instituted as the result of a military defeat when the winner does not have enough military power to fully control the defeated or enough population to colonize the new acquisitions. The tribute is a compromise for both the victor and the defeated state.

Governments which take power after foreign military intervention, or the threat thereof, are often called by critics as being puppet governments, for example the government of Hamid Karzai in post-Taliban Afghanistan. Occasionally such accusations are used to destabilize the and encourage coup d'état.

Accusations of puppet states since 1900

World War II

The Allies in World War II accused their enemies, the Axis powers, of setting up puppet states in their conquered territories.

Europe
The fascist-leaning European governments under the domination of Nazi Germany during World War II are now and then called puppet régimes, particularly in Allied literature. These included:

Imperial Japan
During Japan's imperial period, and particularly during the Pacific War (parts of which are considered the Pacific theatre of World War II), Japan established a number of states that historians have come to consider puppet states.

Cold War

In the Cold War, it became widely common to allege that any given state was simply a puppet of another, a tendency that largely reflected the view that the Cold War was predominantly a conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union. Any state that chose to align itself with either the United States or the Soviet Union was vulnerable to allegations of being a puppet state. Consistent with this tendency was the coining of the terms Soviet Empire and "evil empire", terms that portrayed the communist bloc as centrally controlled from Moscow. The United States was known as the "Yankee empire" in other regions of the world, particularly in Latin America, for its support to the "Military Rulers" and "Military Juntas" of the 40s', 50s', 60s' and well into the 70s'.

"Satellite states"
Main article: Satellite state

At the conclusion of the Second World War, there was an understanding between the Allied powers that each state would temporarily occupy the territories they captured during the war before ultimately re-establishing the nations of occupied Europe. For the most part, the territories occupied by the United States and United Kingdom became democracies with market economies aligned with the United States, while the territories occupied by the Soviet Union became communist states aligned with the Soviet Union. This extended so far as to lead to the division of Germany, in which the Soviet occupation sector became East Germany while the United States, United Kingdom, and French occupation sectors became West Germany.

Eastern European members of the Warsaw Pact, Poland, 1948 - 1968, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and East Germany, were Soviet satellite states centrally controlled by Moscow. While Soviet leaders claimed that the Warsaw Pact nations were equals entering into a mutual alliance, the reality was different and decisions were often enforced by Soviet Union with threats of or use of force. For example when Polish communist leaders tried to elect Władysław Gomułka as First Secretary they were issued an ultimatum by Soviet military that occupied Poland ordering them to withdraw election of Gomulka for the First Secretary or be crushed by Soviet tanks*.

Prague Spring in 1968 led to an invasion of Czechoslovakia by the other Warsaw Pact states. As a rationale for this action, the Soviet Union expressed the Brezhnev Doctrine, which stated that it was the duty of all socialist states to protect any socialist state from falling to capitalism. The Western bloc interpreted the Brezhnev Doctrine as an expression of Moscow's authority over other communist states.

American political analysts and the American public believed so strongly that Eastern Europe's communist states were Soviet puppet states that Gerald Ford's insistence during a debate in the 1976 U.S. presidential election campaign that Eastern Europe was not dominated by the Soviet Union was considered a major gaffe, leading his opponent, Jimmy Carter, to reply that he would like to see Ford convince Czech-Americans and Polish-Americans that their countries did not live under Soviet domination. Similarly, in 1987, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, in a speech at the Berlin Wall, challenged not the East German leader, but rather Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbechev to "Tear down this wall".

Gorbechev ultimately renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine, jokingly calling his policy the "Sinatra Doctrine" after the song "My Way" because of its explicit allowance of Eastern European countries to decide their own internal affairs. Within only a couple years of Gorbechev's abandonment of the Brezhnev Doctrine, Eastern Europe's communist regimes all fell and their states sought better relations and integration with the West, abandoning ties to Soviet Union.

The Korean and Vietnam Wars
During the 1950-1953 Korean War, South Korea was accused of being an American puppet state by North Korea and its allies. At the same time, the United States alleged that North Korea was a Soviet puppet state. The de facto end of the war and decades of intervening time have distanced these allegations to most, but to this date, North Korea's government reiterates the accusation about South Korea, citing law that places the South Korean army under American command in time of war.

The Vietnam War was largely seen as a proxy war with accusations that any given belligerent was merely a puppet to the extent that the Paris Peace Accords were preceded by months of intensive negotiations over the shape of the table that the peace negotiations would take place at—issues arose, for instance, over whether the National Front for the Liberation of Vietnam (which was a part of what the Americans called the Viet Cong) should be treated as an independent party or as a puppet of North Vietnam. Many historians also say that the South Vietnam government was nothing more than an American-backed puppet government.

An independent course
It was largely due to a desire for more perceived independence that many states either joined the Non-Aligned Movement or withdrew from Cold War politics entirely. Even a number of avowedly socialist states followed this path, choosing not to align with Moscow. An example of this is Yugoslavia, which founded the Non-Aligned Movement to stay out of Cold War politics. North Korea is another socialist state that has charted an independent course, embracing complete isolationism under the Juche ideology.

When the Communist Party of China finally defeated the Kuomintang in 1949 in the Chinese Civil War, many in the West believed that Joseph Stalin's assistance to the People's Republic of China made China a Soviet puppet state. The later Sino-Soviet split disabused the West of this notion, leaving China as an independent power in its own right and allowing President Richard Nixon to take advantage of the split in 1972, visiting Mao Zedong in China to open diplomatic relations. See Ping Pong Diplomacy.

Communist Albania had a history of changing allegiances throughout the Cold War. Despite being initially friendly to Stalin and hostile to Yugoslavia's Tito, Albania also drifted from the USSR in 1956 toward China, then away from China toward Yugoslavia in the 1970s.

The "War on Terrorism"

In more recent times, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and 2003 invasion of Iraq have led to largely U.S.-led regime change efforts in these two nations, fostering accusations among critics of the administration that the governments established under U.S. occupation, particularly the Iraqi Interim Government, were American puppet states.[http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/sep2002/afgh-s07.shtml Supporters of the invasions dispute this label.

Zionism and Israel

Some conspiracy theories allege that the United States is a puppet state of Zionists. Those who subscribe to this theory often refer to the Zionist-Occupied Government or ZOG. These theories are generally considered to be anti-Semitic.

Separatist entities as puppet states

Some smaller unrecognized states owe the continuation of their existence to the patronage of larger states nearby, such as Northern Cyprus.

Former unrecognized puppet states of South Africa

During the 1970s and 1980s, four ethnic bantustans, some of which were extremely fragmented, were carved out of South Africa and given nominal sovereignty. Two (Ciskei and Transkei) were for the Xhosa people; and one each for the Tswana people (Bophuthatswana) and for the Venda people (Venda Republic). All four were reincorporated into South Africa in 1994.

Historic puppet states

Examples from earlier centuries include:

See also

Political terms | International relations | Alleged puppet states | pejorative political terms

Vasalstaat | Marionettenregierung | Nukuriik | Gobierno títere | Gouvernement fantoche | ממשלת בובות | Governamento fantoche | 傀儡政権 | 괴뢰 정권 | Vazalstaat | Puppet state | 傀儡政權

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Puppet state".

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