Browsing by Author "Klasa, Michael Gerhard"
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- State and Empire Before and During the Napoleonic Era: The effects of liberal revolutions in France, Spain, and Portugal at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuryPublication . Klasa, Michael Gerhard; Freitas, Judite A. Gonçalves deThis master thesis deals in general with the effects of liberal revolutions in France, Spain, and Portugal at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century, to explain the changes in political systems in the Iberian Peninsula. For this, the definitions of streams of thought, ideas and concepts according to their historicity are being considered, in order to understand the meaning ascribed to them at the time. For that reason, the first chapter is about the change from absolutism to liberalism. The two concepts and streams of thought are explained and compared and the theoretical part of the thesis is started with this. At the end of this part a small amount of information on constitutional monarchism is given with this special form of monarchy being the following system of government after the absolute monarchism. In this connection, the following chapter deals with the concept definitions at around 1780 – 1815 as to be named the concept of (nation) “state”, the concept of “empire”, and the concepts of “peace” and “war”. In this stage, the historicity of each idea was analyzed, from the origin to the time of this study. In a third part of the thesis a case study is made showing the situation in and the political relations between France, Spain, and Portugal in these times. The first subchapter deals with France and the precursors of the French Revolution, the second one with the absolute monarchy of Spain, and the third describes the circumstances in Portugal. The fourth chapter of the thesis is the most important one as it is describing and analyzing the turning point, meaning the switch, to new governmental forms with the help of liberal revolutions. The reasons why it came to the French Revolution are covered in this part, too, with this event being the starting signal for a number of revolutions all over the continent. The questions of What changed?, How did it affect France?, How did it affect Spain?, and How did it affect Portugal? are answered and similarities and differences are shown at the end. In the conclusion, the remnants of the ‘new’ ideas that can still be found today are discussed and a parallel is drawn that even nowadays revolutions or even wars are taking place to change existing political systems as seen in the Arabic world, for example. To come to an end of the thesis, this is combined with a profound personal opinion on the topic in which the subjective opinion of the author is evaluating the processes in the three discussed countries.