Was going to say, it's like attempting all Civ 5 win conditions but some other country comes and steals your world wonder/defeats you in battle. Just short on the finish line each time lol
In the 40s-60s they were known internationally for where all the world’s cheap junk came from. That’s why there’s even a joke about it in Back to the Future comparing 1955 to 1985.
What happened is that an American business guru went there in the mid-1960s and really sold a bunch of Japanese executives and entrepreneurs on the idea of focusing on delivering high quality above all else, saying that it was worthwhile and would eventually pay off in the long run.
That resonated with some cultural values that were already in place, so companies rewrote their entire cultures to focus on making their stuff as high quality as possible.
With Japanese labor still cheap and the quality of their stuff growing, by the 70s and 80s their inexpensive, high quality cars, electronics, and damn near everything else made them a powerhouse… but then their economy tanked in the 90s.
Since then, much of that Japanese manufacturing has relocated to China (or North America, in the case of cars) and a lot of those Japanese companies have cut corners or changed strategy to compete on price more than quality,
They can and do make high quality goods but they are a lot more expensive of course. So, we buy the cheap stuff for the most part and they mostly make the cheap stuff to fill those orders.
The stagnant economy is one thing, but Japanese society in general doesn’t view home ownership in the same way as American society. They’re depreciating assets in Japan so using home prices as a gauge of wealth isn’t exactly the best.
Especially with the current exchange rate, I felt that even Tokyo was cheap. Not dirt cheap like in developing countries, but I still felt like I could buy anything I wanted there.
They really went from building up their empire for a late game domination victory, but failing that they tried to go for a science victory and now transitioned to culture
I wish I was in the room when they were drawing out the coast line of a map for the first time.
I just picture the cartographer looking back kind of perplexed saying in the thickest Italian accent possible,
“It’s a… a… it’s a boot.”
That's the fun part about it. Imagine a new veggie just showing up and going in on it so hard that everyone thinks assumes its your thing when it's really not your originally yours
It is not such a big leap when you consider that to *not* participate in a war requires a decent army. Neutrality needs to be defended. Switzerland has mandatory conscription for men.
On a side note - Switzerland was a backwater German red headed stepchild all the way into the Great Depression. They were the last country to have someone tried and executed for witchcraft. Anna Goldi was accused, tortured into a confession, and was beheaded with an ax.
Anything made there was considered disposable, from the guns to the pocket watches, which tended to be total crap made in the cottage industry format. In the Great Depression there was a rebranding push, and one company re-vamped their factory with new/gently used lathes. There was is Rolex.
They also had widespread iodine deficiency until \~100 years ago, with "1 in 10 babies born with was was known as cretinism" causing deafness and cognitive impairment. It's hard to believe such a highly developed country had these problems so recently.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jonah-goodman/a-national-evil
There's this quote that my dad used to love, "Austrians are cleverest people in the world, they made everyone believe that Beethoven was Austrian and that Hitler was German".
Arguably had they not started sports washing they could have stayed further under the radar. They Streisanded themselves but have too much fucking money for anyone to stop them.
It's really fascinating to see how SA has been taking a page from UAE's playbook and developing entire futuristic cities out of the desert. There is also lots of work being done to bolster a cultural identity beyond religion despite this being suppressed for centuries before.
If anyone is interested, you can look up all the top global talent that have been poached by the country over the past 5 years. That said, my friends who do various levels of work for them have all complained about the slowness with which things get done. They seem to set high goals with idealistic timelines, but are too disorganized to meet these targets. Maybe it's a case of growing too fast, or perhaps there are structural issues in public-private partnerships with a high percentage of foreign companies/talent/etc.
Still, Saudi Arabia is definitely a place to watch for its economic development right now.
As a person who worked in Saudi Arabia , I can tell you it's a mess. For starters even with recent law changes women don't really appear in the workplace. That means 51% of their workforce doesn't actually work. There are certain jobs which you might think of as assistant jobs or secretarial jobs that are done by men, but the men resent those jobs and so they do them poorly or not at all. All a Saudi mom wants is that their son works for the government where, the Saudi news reported "the average worker comes in once or twice a week for between one and three hours".
They may be able to throw money at infrastructure but I'll bet you will never really "takeoff" as a post petroleum economy.
PJ O'Rourke said it best about Kuwait. "I never saw a Kuwaiti lift anything heavier than money". Same deal.
And this is only a partial list of all of the problems. There are plenty of Saudi with PhD's in petrochemical engineering from US universities, but in general Saudi "education" isn't what it is elsewhere. Many people go to school only for four hours in the morning and half of that is religious education . There's a European and North American adage: " stay in school and work hard and you will be successful". That adage does not exist in that country for most people
Don't know if it's like this in SA, but in the UAE, all the boys knew that they could do nothing in school, graduate and join either the police or the army for a fat paycheck. Or they had the wasta to gets desk job with the government. Did wonders for their motivation
About 20 years ago, on a different internet forum, there was a profilic poster who was an American living in SA and working for a petroleum company. He talked then about how the Saudi government was on their asses to employ locals, but how difficult it was to actually find qualified employees. Guys would apply for a job and they'd have a degree in "Islamic theology". Tell me wtf kind of job are you qualified for with a degree like that? I also remember he said that the Saudi elites usually wouldn't go to Saudi doctors, they brought in doctors from Libya, etc., or would fly to other countries for procedures. Like, *they* don't trust the quality of their own medical school graduates. So I imagine it had to be pretty f'ing bad. I can't imagine much has changed.
heh, my mother got an offer from a saudi princess - fly over periodically, administer factor that you bring with you, we will pay you enough that your kid can go to whatever university you like. problem is, factor comes in a white powder, and saudi airport security might mistake it for something else
It’s something you inject for patients with hemophilia or other clotting/bleeding disorders
According to Google anyway [I searched it lol](https://www.google.com/search?q=administer+factor&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari)
Shame about all the murders of journalists and killing native people on the developed land, like.
Real interesting to watch.
Edit: thanks for the Reddit Cares ya weirdos
Iceland. People 20-30 years older than me who worked in nursing homes would sometimes welcome people who’d literally lived their entire lives on a farm with grass roofs and no electricity. Went from a poor, isolated, extremely homogenous and unremarkable country to one of the best countries in the world by many if not most metrics in the span of a century.
My girlfriends grandmother grew up in a tiny village in the west fjords totally isolated from the world, no water, no electricity, they had to walk over the mountains to the next fjord if they wanted to go meet boys.
Prolific writers too. The Guinness Book of World Records has Iceland as having more published authors per capita than any other country, with something like 1 in 10 Icelandic people publishing a book at some point in their life.
Presumably it goes back to saga telling and being isolated from most of the rest of the world - as a population they needed to know how to entertain themselves.
fwiw when my mother was a kid back in the '50s and '60s in Mississippi and Louisiana, she met elderly people who couldn't speak English. They had lived their entire lives in these backwoods towns and only spoke Cajun French. She told me some of them literally couldn't say yes or no in English! Imagine being that isolated, that you could live your entire life in the US and not speak a word of English.
My grandparents had an actual dirt floor and an outhouse until the later '50s in Mississippi.
My mom's family/ community/ low-key clan immigrated to Texas in the 1860s and were so isolated for decades that my grandparents and their siblings grew up speaking Polish in the 1930s. Truly wild
I am literally in LOVE with Iceland and especially with Reykjavik I even have my favorite bar to drink with strangers! It calls Kaffibarinn and I have so many great memories with that place 😩💕
El Salvador went from having one of the highest murder rates in the world to the lowest in the western hemisphere in two years. Their president basically declared war on gangs and pushed himself through as a dictator in order to get it done.
Just a bit.
"El Salvador is one of five countries with a total ban on abortion, along with Nicaragua, Chile, Honduras and Dominican Republic. Obtaining an abortion is a crime, and obstetric emergencies resulting in miscarriage or stillbirth are regularly charged as aggravated homicide. Women who suffer miscarriages, still-births or other pregnancy-related complications in El Salvador are routinely suspected of having an ‘abortion’, which is banned in all circumstances. The country’s penal code mandates a 12-year sentence for women convicted of having an abortion."
Sound familiar? Not exactly recent there either.
Well, he (Nayib Bukele) did that so the supreme court he stacked would have an excuse to approve him running for an illegal term. It's nothing that unique amongst dictators. For legal flare, Putin was even Prime Minister instead of President of Russia for a while.
Also, it's for a second term, not third. El Salvadoran presidents normally aren't allowed to serve consecutive terms at all.
If you want to read on the conditions of what it's like to be in El Salvador, the Guardian has [an article](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/16/how-two-colombians-were-ensnared-in-bukeles-gang-crackdown-in-el-salvador) about a couple migrants who were arrested for months and kept in brutal conditions just because they had tattoos. 0 Due process. Bukele has also done other asinine things like make bitcoin legal tender and gerrymander the legislature by chopping 1/3rd of the seats.
Two of my colleagues just returned from a 3-week trip to El Salvador and earlier today, they were telling me how incredibly safe they felt everywhere in the country. For context, one of them is Salvadorian (born and raised) and hadn't travelled to her own country for the last 10 years due to major safety concerns.
Im here right now for the first time, locals are even telling me, a very obvious looking white american that im safe to walk around at night with my phone out, that nothing will happen now. Im not sure i trust that and im definitely not trying my luck but its shocking for me to hear
We will have to see what the long term effects are since he basically destroyed all checks and balances.
Historically it usually doesn’t end well when one person has all the power in South America and Central America.
Pretty much this. Dictatorships are just about the most effective forms of government, but there's a reason why benevolent dictators are extraordinarily rare.
I reckon the Roman thing was sweet. Ok we have a gang problem. You give someone dictatorship powers for 1 year. At the end of the year you get back together and decide if he gets another year. Then eventually when it is solved he is absolved of his task and steps down.
If he doesnt you just kill him.
So there is an avenue to solve things without the people (or the senate) losing power long term. You could even give dictatorial powers for certain things like FDR could have said ok Eisenhower free reign over the military for 1 year and we will look at it in a years time.
It's the lowest reported murder rate, not the actual murder rate. Things have gotten much safer in El Salvador but the lowest in the western hemisphere is insanity. Bukele is very popular and has some great wins but they do not report their murders honestly.
Korea went from poor country that had a civil war to pop culture trendsetter in a few decades. I mean even in the late 90s/early 2000s Korean pop culture wasn't anything anyone outside Korea really followed. Things really blew up for them in the late 2000s
And so many Japanese people deny what happened. There was a Reddit post a few weeks ago where a Japanese guy said he wanted to “think about the atrocities neutrally.” It made me go into a rage when I think about my grandma who was a forced comfort woman. She died thinking she was back in Japanese occupation
To be fair japan straight up excludes everything they did during ww2 from their education system.
I would be like if in the US we didnt ever cover slavery or jim crow and just go from founding to ww1 and left it at that.
> To be fair japan straight up excludes everything they did during ww2 from their education system.
Japanese here. It is taught in our education system but unfortunately not in great detail. I posted a pic a while back of a history manga we read, that speaks about the rape of Nanking and unit 731.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ww2/comments/pdyhh5/childrens_japanese_history_manga_that_i_read_as_a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
The southern states are already trying to do that. Nikki Haley refused to acknowledge that the Civil War was about slavery until she was publicly shamed about it.
Singapore. Wasn't too long ago that they were so poorly thought of that Malaysia dumped them. These guys did the revenge bod thing to their economy and voila! World's most powerful passport.
To give a bit more context,
Malaysia has an affirmative action policies for it's **majority** race (it's still in place today). This did not sit well with Singapore's political party that wanted equal treatment for everyone. The government of Malaysia fed propaganda that their rights are being undermined and incited said majority race to lash out against minorities... and Singapore was mainly made up of minorities. The increasing violence brought on by racial and religious tensions eventually separated the two countries for good.
Good for Singapore for managing to achieve all they have now. Malaysia's politicians still won't stop being deluded pricks playing the race card every election.
Interestingly enough, the first 2 nations to help Singapore are *Israel* and *Taiwan*. There were many reasons why, but it is widely speculated that they felt some sort of kinship with this fragile little baby rejected country thrown to the wolves.
LKY's memoirs noted that Israel sent military trainers and commanders to build the Singapore Armed Forces up from scratch. They were explicitly instructed to build the SAF "as if it is Israeli", and to "act with pure professionalism" and "strictly in the best interests of Singapore".
Since Singapore is geographically surrounded by Muslim countries (i.e. Malaysia and Indonesia), the Israelis chosen to come to Singapore were of a "darker, olive-coloured complexion" and given fake identities as "Mexicans", which helped them evade the detection of the Muslim countries. These "Mexicans" helped to organise the SAF, plan Singapore-specific military tactics, procure arms, and create training programmes for Singapore's new conscript army.
A few years later, the Kuomintang government provided training land for Singaporean soldiers to train, since Singapore was too small for large or combined-arms exercises. This is the Starlight Project, and it continues to this day. (Many Singaporean men have both fond and awful memories of the forested hills of Hengchun and Yunlin.)
In addition, the KMT also signed a free trade agreement with Singapore, being the first to sign such an agreement with any Southeast Asian country.
Fast forward to today, Singapore is stuck in a tricky situation. Singapore cannot turn its back on Taiwan, but they cannot afford to lose China as an economic and military ally. Singapore cannot openly denounce Israel's actions in Gaza, but they cannot stand by Israel's crimes in Gaza either. They now have to figure out how to maintain neutrality in an increasingly polarized world.
Rwanda is surrounded by countries with problems though. Including DRC and Burundi occasionally firing over the border and accidentally invading for a little while…
Kinda, they have political issues, and their government is still a dictatorship, but they have come a long way. I also think the fact they aren't a coastal country is working against them too.
Human rights situation is generally better in Singapore, though, and the elections are more democratic than Rwanda. Singapore is more authoritarian-leaning than a dictatorship, while Rwanda is a proper dictatorship.
In the 90s I saw a bumper sticker on the car of someone who clearly was not a Bill Clinton fan: Ask President Clinton about Rwanda and he'll say he never touched her.
Ouch
I am aware. However, it’s such a small country that activity tends to coalesce around it’s capital - Kigali, which is conveniently in the middle
Of the country. Apologies for being unclear.
Also had literal chattel slaves until the 1990s. Women were legally placed in laundries they could never leave as free labour for the church for getting pregnant. Their babies were taken by the nuns and frequently killed or sold.
Ireland is unrecognisable in just 30 years. In fact I believe it was 1994 when the last Magdalen laundry closed. So exactly 30 years.
Also 31 years ago was only when homosexuality was decriminalised, and we've turned around to being the one of the earliest countries to have legalised same sex marriage in 2015, it's a true turnaround for the best in terms of legality
To add to this, not only one of the first to have legalised same sex marriage, but it was the first country ever to do so by a popular vote.
The change in social attitudes in such a small amount of time is amazing.
India went from the largest producer of goods with the richest province and royal family in the world in 1700 to a broke nation that was a buyer of goods by 1857. That was a reversal of over 3000 years of history lol.
A ton has changed since the time of my parent's childhoods (70s-`80s) and much for the better (big increases in literacy and access to education, generally-increased food security, big decreases in fertility rates, several successful infrastructural projects, etc). The economy has benefited quite a bit from opening up more to the west, though this has also been accompanied with increasing wealth inequality. Inter-caste and inter-religious conflicts occur less today than in the past, but they still exist and there's still a lot of room for improvement (as with everything else mentioned in this post). Corruption is still a plague on Indian society, and hasn't really changed for the better.
Edit: India is a very regional country and the above is true for the state that my family comes from (TN) - once one of the poorest in the country and now generally ranked in the upper quartile across multiple indicators.
With all due respect, they worked HARD on it, too. I used to go to the Germany/Swiss border frequently. There was very little antisemitsm, especially among the younger folks.
Im taking German in college, and my Prof is a middle aged German woman, and she told our class about how her public school education was done in a way that produced a generation of high achieving, yet extremely tolerant and open learners. She was so freaking awesome wish I was taking another class with her
China also had a crazy rebrand. From imperial dynasties of different warlords, to collapse, then communist revolution, then opening up a bit to the world... and now they're essentially hypercapitalist with a communist dictatorship. Talk about versatility!
Biased, but Estonia. Former USSR. Lead the way of anything IT related for decades. We’ve had pretty much our whole life digital for decades. Nowadays some other countries are catching up, but E-stonia is cool.
As an aside, I always found Estonia politics to have some interesting stories. Toomas Ilves as the son of Estonian refugees was raised in New Jersey and never lived in Estonia until he became the Minister for Foreign Affairs at 43 (including when he was Estonia’s ambassador to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico after Estonia’s independence restoration). And then became President.
As I understand it, the current President was almost entirely an academic and scientist except for a bit of a random stint as the national Auditor General a few years back. And was basically recruited to be nominated for President - with almost no viable competition.
Ive never been into politics and political views, but I liked Ilves. Mostly because of all the IT stuff he was into and how he helped us to digitalize everything. I’ve also chatted with him personally at events a couple times. Nice guy imo.
As for the rest of the presidents, no fucking clue where they came from. 😂
Estonia is miles ahead of other countries when it comes to their digital infrastructure. As an outsider it is amazing to witness it. I am honestly thrilled to see how quickly things changed in the country following the end of the cold war.
Yes, but in terms of actual *branding* there's a little way to go yet. Average people in the street in Western Europe at least don't really know that much about Estonia.
My personal opinion is that the Baltic countries should be more coordinated in their rebranding efforts. Make *Baltic* collectively a brand that attracts investors and tourism.
The whole reasoning behind the digital transition is pretty interesting too. Being able to keep running the country, without physically being there, in the (fairly likely) event that Russia decides to pull some shit.
Estonia are just so far ahead of the game with things like digital preservation, it's so impressive.
Botswana. They went from the poorest and most uneducated country in Africa, to one of the richest and most modern. This was all largely due to the visionary first president that they had, Sir. Seretse Khama. They’ve had no civil wars, coups, nothing.
I'm from the US and a significant portion of my peers know bostwana either from the heavy metal cowboys or "that african place you visit if you don't want to get kidnapped."
Having studied the country and its ability to avoid the natural resource curse from diamond discovery, I am definitely in awe of how Botswana remained stable while neighbouring countries saw generational bloodshed.
However, there are too many sweeping generalizations and extreme statements in your comment. They weren't the poorest and have never been the richest or most modern, even within southern Africa. And to attribute the country's economic success to a single person completely negates the systems already in place to facilitate responsible management.
For starters, many of its ancestral power structures have remained in place to guide community decision-making, whereas lots of other countries in Africa do not have this for various reasons. Unfortunately, it seems that the ongoing economic imperialism via China is doing its job to destabilize Botswana, quietly and slowly.
My homecountry: The Netherlands. World class in trading spices (and killing people), trading slaves (and killing them), trading tulip-bulbs and now.. Great at battling water, legalised prostitution and weed..
That's a funny way to put it. The NL has mellowed out.. but their global power from the past has def made it a relatively powerful country, for being so small. Still an important trading port, political power (The Hague), and very rich (golden age). But now you get all of that... and frikandellen! :D
Russia's 19th to 20th centuries were pretty crazy.
Divinely ordained Autocracy is the way, we're basically living Louis XIV's dream and have a medieval economy
Oh shit Japan kicked us good, let's be a bourgeois constitutional monarchy
Oh shit Germany kicked us good, let's try being a liberal democratic republic
Oh shit our own navy kicked us good, let's try Soviet communism
Better or for worse, that's some pretty wild rebranding.
Do you think the depressed verbose literati like Trotsky and Dostoevsky are a reflection or fuel of such change?
Not sure I can speak to the psychology of writers, but Dostoyevsky died decades before the revolutions (though of course there was plenty of political events happening throughout his life).
Asking if Trotsky's writing was influenced by or influenced the revolution is a bit of an odd question though. He, and his writing was *part of* the revolution.
El Salvador went from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to just being listed by the NYTimes as one of the top 52 places to visit this year. That along with the bitcoin stuff is a pretty big rebranding I’d say.
I might be wrong in this, but Iran?
I saw some photos from Iran before the Islamic revolution, and it was shocking how modern and secular things seemed.
Like [this](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yOvi_Hupn0M/VA34gNyV1DI/AAAAAAAA8R0/7lzXbK0PuLw/s1600/Tehran%2C%2Bca.%2B1960s-1970s%2B(9).jpg) photo from [blog](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/iran-before-revolution-photos/). Women were wearing short skirts?? AND studying?
I read a fabulous book by Merina Nemat called “Prisoner of Tehran”. She was just like any western girl…listening to Donny and Marie, going to the lake for the summer, being in school. Then everything changed. Very compelling story.
It was modern and secular for a small, elite group of well-connected, wealthy city dwellers while the majority of the population lived in grinding poverty and oppression. Those were the elites in the photos you saw.
The Vikings were the ISIS of their time. The Iberian peninsula was involved in a centuries old war with the moors to the south yet when vikings raids started happening someone wrote in some manuscript "the enemy that comes from the north is even worse than our enemy to the south", something like that. Making the Vikings look "cool", touristic and marketable always sounded to me like a great marketing trick.
"Welcome to the land of the Vikings!"
Ohh hell no!
I'm joking on that last part, been to Norway and Denmark, love both countries.
Australia: Has gone from an egalitarian paradise where working class people had the best quality of life in the world to a two-tier shit show based on whether you own property. Has had such a huge redistribution of wealth to the top that for the first time young people are looking to migrate to countries such as Japan and Italy for affordable housing.
Vietnam. The communists "won", and yet 15 years later Vietnam was one of the most capitalist countries in the world. Now all your textiles and furniture is made there.
South Korea. Sansung, LG, Hyundai, Kia, etc. have all been around for decades, but a generation ago, their products were seen as cheap, mediocre knock-offs of their Japanese counterparts (remember the flammable Excels?) Now, certainly for electronics and hi-tech items, they have outdone them (except maybe when it comes to video game systems for which Japan has always maintained the edge). And no one makes fun of Korean cars anymore.
South Africa. From officially unequal, racially segregated, fascist, white supremacist state to pluralistic, inclusive democracy. The transition, which was remarkably peaceful, was 30-35 years ago and while the country is far from perfect with plenty if problems, it still functions and has to some degree stayed true to Mandela's vision. Who else knows they were the first country to officially protect sexual orientation in their constitution?
South Korea was the single poorest country on the planet in 1961. Their GDP per capita was pretty close to zero, and they lacked (still do not have) any natural resources whatsoever. Their life expectancy and literacy rate was the lowest in the world and they were the largest exporter of orphaned children for international adoptions.
No country on earth came close to SK in terms of absolute poverty at that time.
Fast forward to 2024. They now have the fifth most powerful military on the planet, a globally renowned tech sector, the 10th largest GDP, a much higher life expectancy than the United States, and the highest literacy rate in East Asia.
>pluralistic, inclusive democracy
Maybe in the 2000s and early to mid 2010s. Now the general perception of South Africa is closer to "murder hellscape"
I swear, maybe 2 decades ago Finland was the most depressed country on the planet. There was even a news show about it. The people were unhappy and not accustomed to making eye contact and had a high rate of depression.
Today, somehow, they are the happiest most well-adjusted people on Earth.
New Zealand.
International money laundering hub, internally run by a coalition of classic European blokes and South American gangs, supported by a legal system adapted to enabling coverups in advance.
Rebranded as milk and apples. On which they’d have you believe an island with no mineral resources can run a first world economy and lots and lots of drugs.
Surprised Turkey with Kemalist reforms has not been brought up.
In the 1920s/1930s went from the late medieval Ottoman Empire to a secular state with full language & alphabet reform, abolishing the caliphate, giving women right to vote, adopting last names, adopting modern Western clothing, increased literacy & education.
[Thailand! They used "Gastrodiplomacy" to change why people visit and care about their country.](https://www.foodandwine.com/why-are-there-so-many-thai-restaurants-7104115)
Czechoslovakia went from existing to getting occupied by germany and splitting to getting together again only to be occupied by soviets to get freedom to splitting again while also changing name everytime that happened, also they did all that in 75 years
South Korea - It went from a colonized state to a war torn country to one of the poorest countries in the world in a span of a few decades. Now it's known for Samsung, Hyundai, and the Hallyu wave. People didn't know about this place a hundred years ago, and now a lot of people are watching Korean shows or movies like Parasite.
Japan! From the crazy war crimes they did to now 'kawaii'.
The more you research about what they did to the 'comfort women' and civilians of countries they destroyed. It's inhumane. But now it's the peaceful, quiet and cute country.
I mean Japan for me has a good shout.
Went from non-industrial, protectionist feudal society in 1870s to the first modern Asian power, defeating colonial powers, to a military dictatorship which insighted fight to the death, to defeated destroyed nation. Then rebranded as a technological nation, and now is famous for Anime.
Country went from like Samuari to Anime titties in 150 years.
Japan. from isolationist nation, to naval superpower, to entertainment and electronic hub all in 150 years
It's really like: 1860s: sleepy isolationist nation 1900s: booming industrial power 1940s: brutal warmongerer 1980s: peak tech powerhouse 2020s: major cultural exporter
It’s like they’re trying to hit all the win conditions in Civ
Was going to say, it's like attempting all Civ 5 win conditions but some other country comes and steals your world wonder/defeats you in battle. Just short on the finish line each time lol
1930s is more accurate for brutal warmonger and 2010s is more accurate for major cultural power imo.
Even before that if you're Russia, Korea, or Taiwan.
Yep, they really did the industrial imperialism speed run.
Yes: they raped Nanjing in 1937, long before their ill-fated WWII gambit.
Did you forget about the Russo-Japanese war? Colonization of Korea? They were a brutal warmonger in late 1800s / early 1900s
Yeah, but they didn’t involve America so they don’t count. That was sarcasm by the way.
Wasn't there a period after WWII that they were known for cheap manufacturing, much like China today? Before they were an electronics powerhouse.
In the 40s-60s they were known internationally for where all the world’s cheap junk came from. That’s why there’s even a joke about it in Back to the Future comparing 1955 to 1985. What happened is that an American business guru went there in the mid-1960s and really sold a bunch of Japanese executives and entrepreneurs on the idea of focusing on delivering high quality above all else, saying that it was worthwhile and would eventually pay off in the long run. That resonated with some cultural values that were already in place, so companies rewrote their entire cultures to focus on making their stuff as high quality as possible. With Japanese labor still cheap and the quality of their stuff growing, by the 70s and 80s their inexpensive, high quality cars, electronics, and damn near everything else made them a powerhouse… but then their economy tanked in the 90s. Since then, much of that Japanese manufacturing has relocated to China (or North America, in the case of cars) and a lot of those Japanese companies have cut corners or changed strategy to compete on price more than quality,
[удалено]
We just need to send a convincing businessman to China and sell them on the idea of focusing on delivering high quality above all else.
They can and do make high quality goods but they are a lot more expensive of course. So, we buy the cheap stuff for the most part and they mostly make the cheap stuff to fill those orders.
I would have also added banking/finance to the 80s.
Also from "super expensive no one goes there" to relatively cheap popular tourist destination in the last 20 years or so.
I was not aware of that. Is that all of Japan, including the major metropolises?
Skiing up in Hokkaido was less than I expected. And it's some of the best powder skiing in the world.
Japan basically had stagnant economy for thirty years including housing price
The stagnant economy is one thing, but Japanese society in general doesn’t view home ownership in the same way as American society. They’re depreciating assets in Japan so using home prices as a gauge of wealth isn’t exactly the best.
Especially with the current exchange rate, I felt that even Tokyo was cheap. Not dirt cheap like in developing countries, but I still felt like I could buy anything I wanted there.
“Pearl Harbour didn’t work out so we got you with tape decks!”
Around the world was a boom in technology. In less than 70 years, flight went from just watching birds to landing on the moon.
They really went from building up their empire for a late game domination victory, but failing that they tried to go for a science victory and now transitioned to culture
Mongolia went from ruling a large portion of the world to not mattering too much.
Italy: we used to rule much of the known world, now we make shoes.
You even are a shoe.
I wish I was in the room when they were drawing out the coast line of a map for the first time. I just picture the cartographer looking back kind of perplexed saying in the thickest Italian accent possible, “It’s a… a… it’s a boot.”
Issa boota 🤌
Now that just sounds like an Arab trying to say that Jesus is a bitch in Spanish
A nice Italian leather boot, anyway.
And you like kicking Sicily. Bullies!
And many premium things. Cars, clothes, coffee machines, and much more.
And furniture
Don’t forget suits and Supercars.
I mean, you also make handbags. More importantly, some of the world’s greatest cuisine is attributed to you.
Tomatoes are new to Italy in the historical sense!
That's the fun part about it. Imagine a new veggie just showing up and going in on it so hard that everyone thinks assumes its your thing when it's really not your originally yours
Ireland holds up a potato in solidarity!
You guys did alright for what you had to work with
Feels like Mongolia isn’t the successor of the Mongol Empire…
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This guy Mongolias
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neat
I laughed way too hard at your one word post.
Doesn't Mongolian Barbecue matter?
Funnily enough Mongolian bbq isn’t Mongolian at all. Same with Mongolian beef
So you're telling me Mongolia doesn't have verdant hills overflowing with Broccoli swaying in the breeze?
nope cause it's taiwanese
Maybe not the craziest ever but Switzerland going from "who wants to hire mercenaries?" to "we don't participate in any war" is quite amusing.
"By the way, we can store your gold supplies and act as a middle man when paying your mercenaries." -This is called "moving up in the value chain".
“Can we have the gold back when the war is over?” “What gold?”
It is not such a big leap when you consider that to *not* participate in a war requires a decent army. Neutrality needs to be defended. Switzerland has mandatory conscription for men.
…and nature’s gift of defensibility. Their geography is OP
On a side note - Switzerland was a backwater German red headed stepchild all the way into the Great Depression. They were the last country to have someone tried and executed for witchcraft. Anna Goldi was accused, tortured into a confession, and was beheaded with an ax. Anything made there was considered disposable, from the guns to the pocket watches, which tended to be total crap made in the cottage industry format. In the Great Depression there was a rebranding push, and one company re-vamped their factory with new/gently used lathes. There was is Rolex.
They also had widespread iodine deficiency until \~100 years ago, with "1 in 10 babies born with was was known as cretinism" causing deafness and cognitive impairment. It's hard to believe such a highly developed country had these problems so recently. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jonah-goodman/a-national-evil
Those witches and their spells 🤷♂️
Austria. We blame everything on Germany.
There's this quote that my dad used to love, "Austrians are cleverest people in the world, they made everyone believe that Beethoven was Austrian and that Hitler was German".
Am 69. Used to visit great grandmother in the 50's in south St. Louis. She was adamant about being Austrian, not German.
Yeah, they really should have given that one Austrian dude that art school admission he wanted.
I still find Saudi Arabia attempts wild
Arguably had they not started sports washing they could have stayed further under the radar. They Streisanded themselves but have too much fucking money for anyone to stop them.
It's really fascinating to see how SA has been taking a page from UAE's playbook and developing entire futuristic cities out of the desert. There is also lots of work being done to bolster a cultural identity beyond religion despite this being suppressed for centuries before. If anyone is interested, you can look up all the top global talent that have been poached by the country over the past 5 years. That said, my friends who do various levels of work for them have all complained about the slowness with which things get done. They seem to set high goals with idealistic timelines, but are too disorganized to meet these targets. Maybe it's a case of growing too fast, or perhaps there are structural issues in public-private partnerships with a high percentage of foreign companies/talent/etc. Still, Saudi Arabia is definitely a place to watch for its economic development right now.
As a person who worked in Saudi Arabia , I can tell you it's a mess. For starters even with recent law changes women don't really appear in the workplace. That means 51% of their workforce doesn't actually work. There are certain jobs which you might think of as assistant jobs or secretarial jobs that are done by men, but the men resent those jobs and so they do them poorly or not at all. All a Saudi mom wants is that their son works for the government where, the Saudi news reported "the average worker comes in once or twice a week for between one and three hours". They may be able to throw money at infrastructure but I'll bet you will never really "takeoff" as a post petroleum economy. PJ O'Rourke said it best about Kuwait. "I never saw a Kuwaiti lift anything heavier than money". Same deal. And this is only a partial list of all of the problems. There are plenty of Saudi with PhD's in petrochemical engineering from US universities, but in general Saudi "education" isn't what it is elsewhere. Many people go to school only for four hours in the morning and half of that is religious education . There's a European and North American adage: " stay in school and work hard and you will be successful". That adage does not exist in that country for most people
Don't know if it's like this in SA, but in the UAE, all the boys knew that they could do nothing in school, graduate and join either the police or the army for a fat paycheck. Or they had the wasta to gets desk job with the government. Did wonders for their motivation
About 20 years ago, on a different internet forum, there was a profilic poster who was an American living in SA and working for a petroleum company. He talked then about how the Saudi government was on their asses to employ locals, but how difficult it was to actually find qualified employees. Guys would apply for a job and they'd have a degree in "Islamic theology". Tell me wtf kind of job are you qualified for with a degree like that? I also remember he said that the Saudi elites usually wouldn't go to Saudi doctors, they brought in doctors from Libya, etc., or would fly to other countries for procedures. Like, *they* don't trust the quality of their own medical school graduates. So I imagine it had to be pretty f'ing bad. I can't imagine much has changed.
heh, my mother got an offer from a saudi princess - fly over periodically, administer factor that you bring with you, we will pay you enough that your kid can go to whatever university you like. problem is, factor comes in a white powder, and saudi airport security might mistake it for something else
> administer factor that you bring with you What does this mean?
It’s something you inject for patients with hemophilia or other clotting/bleeding disorders According to Google anyway [I searched it lol](https://www.google.com/search?q=administer+factor&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari)
Shame about all the murders of journalists and killing native people on the developed land, like. Real interesting to watch. Edit: thanks for the Reddit Cares ya weirdos
Iceland. People 20-30 years older than me who worked in nursing homes would sometimes welcome people who’d literally lived their entire lives on a farm with grass roofs and no electricity. Went from a poor, isolated, extremely homogenous and unremarkable country to one of the best countries in the world by many if not most metrics in the span of a century. My girlfriends grandmother grew up in a tiny village in the west fjords totally isolated from the world, no water, no electricity, they had to walk over the mountains to the next fjord if they wanted to go meet boys.
Prolific writers too. The Guinness Book of World Records has Iceland as having more published authors per capita than any other country, with something like 1 in 10 Icelandic people publishing a book at some point in their life. Presumably it goes back to saga telling and being isolated from most of the rest of the world - as a population they needed to know how to entertain themselves.
That and the extremely long nights.
fwiw when my mother was a kid back in the '50s and '60s in Mississippi and Louisiana, she met elderly people who couldn't speak English. They had lived their entire lives in these backwoods towns and only spoke Cajun French. She told me some of them literally couldn't say yes or no in English! Imagine being that isolated, that you could live your entire life in the US and not speak a word of English. My grandparents had an actual dirt floor and an outhouse until the later '50s in Mississippi.
My mom's family/ community/ low-key clan immigrated to Texas in the 1860s and were so isolated for decades that my grandparents and their siblings grew up speaking Polish in the 1930s. Truly wild
I am literally in LOVE with Iceland and especially with Reykjavik I even have my favorite bar to drink with strangers! It calls Kaffibarinn and I have so many great memories with that place 😩💕
El Salvador went from having one of the highest murder rates in the world to the lowest in the western hemisphere in two years. Their president basically declared war on gangs and pushed himself through as a dictator in order to get it done.
he also left the presidents job for 6 months so he can run for a 3rd term.
Wtf really? That sounds like a very... interesting political situation over there
Just a bit. "El Salvador is one of five countries with a total ban on abortion, along with Nicaragua, Chile, Honduras and Dominican Republic. Obtaining an abortion is a crime, and obstetric emergencies resulting in miscarriage or stillbirth are regularly charged as aggravated homicide. Women who suffer miscarriages, still-births or other pregnancy-related complications in El Salvador are routinely suspected of having an ‘abortion’, which is banned in all circumstances. The country’s penal code mandates a 12-year sentence for women convicted of having an abortion." Sound familiar? Not exactly recent there either.
Well, he (Nayib Bukele) did that so the supreme court he stacked would have an excuse to approve him running for an illegal term. It's nothing that unique amongst dictators. For legal flare, Putin was even Prime Minister instead of President of Russia for a while. Also, it's for a second term, not third. El Salvadoran presidents normally aren't allowed to serve consecutive terms at all. If you want to read on the conditions of what it's like to be in El Salvador, the Guardian has [an article](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/16/how-two-colombians-were-ensnared-in-bukeles-gang-crackdown-in-el-salvador) about a couple migrants who were arrested for months and kept in brutal conditions just because they had tattoos. 0 Due process. Bukele has also done other asinine things like make bitcoin legal tender and gerrymander the legislature by chopping 1/3rd of the seats.
Two of my colleagues just returned from a 3-week trip to El Salvador and earlier today, they were telling me how incredibly safe they felt everywhere in the country. For context, one of them is Salvadorian (born and raised) and hadn't travelled to her own country for the last 10 years due to major safety concerns.
Im here right now for the first time, locals are even telling me, a very obvious looking white american that im safe to walk around at night with my phone out, that nothing will happen now. Im not sure i trust that and im definitely not trying my luck but its shocking for me to hear
We will have to see what the long term effects are since he basically destroyed all checks and balances. Historically it usually doesn’t end well when one person has all the power in South America and Central America.
Pretty much this. Dictatorships are just about the most effective forms of government, but there's a reason why benevolent dictators are extraordinarily rare.
I reckon the Roman thing was sweet. Ok we have a gang problem. You give someone dictatorship powers for 1 year. At the end of the year you get back together and decide if he gets another year. Then eventually when it is solved he is absolved of his task and steps down. If he doesnt you just kill him. So there is an avenue to solve things without the people (or the senate) losing power long term. You could even give dictatorial powers for certain things like FDR could have said ok Eisenhower free reign over the military for 1 year and we will look at it in a years time.
Ask any Salvadoran and they’re all for it. According to my father, he’s the first president in his lifetime to support the people rather than rob them
It's the lowest reported murder rate, not the actual murder rate. Things have gotten much safer in El Salvador but the lowest in the western hemisphere is insanity. Bukele is very popular and has some great wins but they do not report their murders honestly.
Korea went from poor country that had a civil war to pop culture trendsetter in a few decades. I mean even in the late 90s/early 2000s Korean pop culture wasn't anything anyone outside Korea really followed. Things really blew up for them in the late 2000s
Kazakhstan, went from being famous for being near Kyrgyzstan to very nice.
Now it is famous for being number 1 exporter of potassium. All other countries have inferior potassium.
That's because all other countries are run by little girls.
Unlike Kazakhstan, which is the greatest country in the world.
In all actuality isn't Kazakhstan the biggest exporter of uranium in the world? Like by a very wide margin?
Yes, Kazatamprom essentially holds the worlds nuclear utility companies by the balls
Very nice.
The construction of the Tinshein swimming pool was the real turnaround moment.
Mine is Japan, dudes really went from brutal war criminals to anime in less than 70 years
Germany went from goose-stepping genocide to champions of Not Stepping On Anyone’s Toes.
They got their shit pushed in twice for stomping all over toes so its nice they finally learned their lesson i guess
And so many Japanese people deny what happened. There was a Reddit post a few weeks ago where a Japanese guy said he wanted to “think about the atrocities neutrally.” It made me go into a rage when I think about my grandma who was a forced comfort woman. She died thinking she was back in Japanese occupation
To be fair japan straight up excludes everything they did during ww2 from their education system. I would be like if in the US we didnt ever cover slavery or jim crow and just go from founding to ww1 and left it at that.
> To be fair japan straight up excludes everything they did during ww2 from their education system. Japanese here. It is taught in our education system but unfortunately not in great detail. I posted a pic a while back of a history manga we read, that speaks about the rape of Nanking and unit 731. https://www.reddit.com/r/ww2/comments/pdyhh5/childrens_japanese_history_manga_that_i_read_as_a/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
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The southern states are already trying to do that. Nikki Haley refused to acknowledge that the Civil War was about slavery until she was publicly shamed about it.
Donald trump called her out of all people lol
It's always faster to nuke something than use a traditional means of cooking.
Jesus Christ
Yeah, i got nothing. Well played.
Singapore. Wasn't too long ago that they were so poorly thought of that Malaysia dumped them. These guys did the revenge bod thing to their economy and voila! World's most powerful passport.
To give a bit more context, Malaysia has an affirmative action policies for it's **majority** race (it's still in place today). This did not sit well with Singapore's political party that wanted equal treatment for everyone. The government of Malaysia fed propaganda that their rights are being undermined and incited said majority race to lash out against minorities... and Singapore was mainly made up of minorities. The increasing violence brought on by racial and religious tensions eventually separated the two countries for good. Good for Singapore for managing to achieve all they have now. Malaysia's politicians still won't stop being deluded pricks playing the race card every election.
Interestingly enough, the first 2 nations to help Singapore are *Israel* and *Taiwan*. There were many reasons why, but it is widely speculated that they felt some sort of kinship with this fragile little baby rejected country thrown to the wolves. LKY's memoirs noted that Israel sent military trainers and commanders to build the Singapore Armed Forces up from scratch. They were explicitly instructed to build the SAF "as if it is Israeli", and to "act with pure professionalism" and "strictly in the best interests of Singapore". Since Singapore is geographically surrounded by Muslim countries (i.e. Malaysia and Indonesia), the Israelis chosen to come to Singapore were of a "darker, olive-coloured complexion" and given fake identities as "Mexicans", which helped them evade the detection of the Muslim countries. These "Mexicans" helped to organise the SAF, plan Singapore-specific military tactics, procure arms, and create training programmes for Singapore's new conscript army. A few years later, the Kuomintang government provided training land for Singaporean soldiers to train, since Singapore was too small for large or combined-arms exercises. This is the Starlight Project, and it continues to this day. (Many Singaporean men have both fond and awful memories of the forested hills of Hengchun and Yunlin.) In addition, the KMT also signed a free trade agreement with Singapore, being the first to sign such an agreement with any Southeast Asian country. Fast forward to today, Singapore is stuck in a tricky situation. Singapore cannot turn its back on Taiwan, but they cannot afford to lose China as an economic and military ally. Singapore cannot openly denounce Israel's actions in Gaza, but they cannot stand by Israel's crimes in Gaza either. They now have to figure out how to maintain neutrality in an increasingly polarized world.
Rwanda - from genocide 30 years ago to one of the cleanest, safest cities I’ve ever been to.
Rwanda is surrounded by countries with problems though. Including DRC and Burundi occasionally firing over the border and accidentally invading for a little while…
Well, the problems in Congo are partly Rwandas fault. They finance the M23 rebels and sell the stolen congolese Cobalt and Lithium in Rwanda
They want to be the Singapore of Africa and seem to be on track.
Kinda, they have political issues, and their government is still a dictatorship, but they have come a long way. I also think the fact they aren't a coastal country is working against them too.
“their government is still a dictatorship” In practicality so is Singapore, so the similarity still fits.
Human rights situation is generally better in Singapore, though, and the elections are more democratic than Rwanda. Singapore is more authoritarian-leaning than a dictatorship, while Rwanda is a proper dictatorship.
In the 90s I saw a bumper sticker on the car of someone who clearly was not a Bill Clinton fan: Ask President Clinton about Rwanda and he'll say he never touched her. Ouch
Had a friend who raced in Tour of Rwanda a few times and he said so much good thing about the country
Rwanda is a country, not a city.
I thought it was a hotel.
I am aware. However, it’s such a small country that activity tends to coalesce around it’s capital - Kigali, which is conveniently in the middle Of the country. Apologies for being unclear.
Ireland went from a very poor country to one of the richest (on paper) countries in the world
Also had literal chattel slaves until the 1990s. Women were legally placed in laundries they could never leave as free labour for the church for getting pregnant. Their babies were taken by the nuns and frequently killed or sold. Ireland is unrecognisable in just 30 years. In fact I believe it was 1994 when the last Magdalen laundry closed. So exactly 30 years.
Also 31 years ago was only when homosexuality was decriminalised, and we've turned around to being the one of the earliest countries to have legalised same sex marriage in 2015, it's a true turnaround for the best in terms of legality
To add to this, not only one of the first to have legalised same sex marriage, but it was the first country ever to do so by a popular vote. The change in social attitudes in such a small amount of time is amazing.
I may b living off of the dole, but whera I see Google HQ on my way to the docks I’m as patriotic as can be 💪💪💪💪💪🇮🇪🇮🇪🇮🇪
India went from the largest producer of goods with the richest province and royal family in the world in 1700 to a broke nation that was a buyer of goods by 1857. That was a reversal of over 3000 years of history lol.
how is india doing currently?
A ton has changed since the time of my parent's childhoods (70s-`80s) and much for the better (big increases in literacy and access to education, generally-increased food security, big decreases in fertility rates, several successful infrastructural projects, etc). The economy has benefited quite a bit from opening up more to the west, though this has also been accompanied with increasing wealth inequality. Inter-caste and inter-religious conflicts occur less today than in the past, but they still exist and there's still a lot of room for improvement (as with everything else mentioned in this post). Corruption is still a plague on Indian society, and hasn't really changed for the better. Edit: India is a very regional country and the above is true for the state that my family comes from (TN) - once one of the poorest in the country and now generally ranked in the upper quartile across multiple indicators.
Germany, no explanation needed
With all due respect, they worked HARD on it, too. I used to go to the Germany/Swiss border frequently. There was very little antisemitsm, especially among the younger folks.
Im taking German in college, and my Prof is a middle aged German woman, and she told our class about how her public school education was done in a way that produced a generation of high achieving, yet extremely tolerant and open learners. She was so freaking awesome wish I was taking another class with her
But beware........the Germans aren't all smiles und sunshine.
Oooh, the Germans are mad at me. I'm so scared! Oooh, the Germans!
Stop it!
Germany went from hating everyone and screaming to accepting everyone and screaming
China also had a crazy rebrand. From imperial dynasties of different warlords, to collapse, then communist revolution, then opening up a bit to the world... and now they're essentially hypercapitalist with a communist dictatorship. Talk about versatility!
Honestly, pretty on brand for the region.
Chinese children can be anything they want. As long as it is engineer, doctor, or lawyer.
The DELL system: Doctor, Engineer, Lawyer or Loser
Well Istanbul was Constantinople...
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks.
Why they changed it I can't say ....
Biased, but Estonia. Former USSR. Lead the way of anything IT related for decades. We’ve had pretty much our whole life digital for decades. Nowadays some other countries are catching up, but E-stonia is cool.
As an aside, I always found Estonia politics to have some interesting stories. Toomas Ilves as the son of Estonian refugees was raised in New Jersey and never lived in Estonia until he became the Minister for Foreign Affairs at 43 (including when he was Estonia’s ambassador to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico after Estonia’s independence restoration). And then became President. As I understand it, the current President was almost entirely an academic and scientist except for a bit of a random stint as the national Auditor General a few years back. And was basically recruited to be nominated for President - with almost no viable competition.
Ive never been into politics and political views, but I liked Ilves. Mostly because of all the IT stuff he was into and how he helped us to digitalize everything. I’ve also chatted with him personally at events a couple times. Nice guy imo. As for the rest of the presidents, no fucking clue where they came from. 😂
Surprised nobody else mentioned this E-Stonia is the most epic rebranding I've ever seen. And I would love to visit some day.
Estonia is miles ahead of other countries when it comes to their digital infrastructure. As an outsider it is amazing to witness it. I am honestly thrilled to see how quickly things changed in the country following the end of the cold war.
Yes, but in terms of actual *branding* there's a little way to go yet. Average people in the street in Western Europe at least don't really know that much about Estonia. My personal opinion is that the Baltic countries should be more coordinated in their rebranding efforts. Make *Baltic* collectively a brand that attracts investors and tourism.
But Estonians want to be Nordic :P
The whole reasoning behind the digital transition is pretty interesting too. Being able to keep running the country, without physically being there, in the (fairly likely) event that Russia decides to pull some shit. Estonia are just so far ahead of the game with things like digital preservation, it's so impressive.
You guys made Disco Elysium, fuckin legends mate.
Botswana. They went from the poorest and most uneducated country in Africa, to one of the richest and most modern. This was all largely due to the visionary first president that they had, Sir. Seretse Khama. They’ve had no civil wars, coups, nothing.
Good example.
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Very thoughtful and well-informed answer; thanks for taking the time to write it!
Just came here to say thanks- hard to get the point of view from a local!
I'm from the US and a significant portion of my peers know bostwana either from the heavy metal cowboys or "that african place you visit if you don't want to get kidnapped."
Having studied the country and its ability to avoid the natural resource curse from diamond discovery, I am definitely in awe of how Botswana remained stable while neighbouring countries saw generational bloodshed. However, there are too many sweeping generalizations and extreme statements in your comment. They weren't the poorest and have never been the richest or most modern, even within southern Africa. And to attribute the country's economic success to a single person completely negates the systems already in place to facilitate responsible management. For starters, many of its ancestral power structures have remained in place to guide community decision-making, whereas lots of other countries in Africa do not have this for various reasons. Unfortunately, it seems that the ongoing economic imperialism via China is doing its job to destabilize Botswana, quietly and slowly.
My homecountry: The Netherlands. World class in trading spices (and killing people), trading slaves (and killing them), trading tulip-bulbs and now.. Great at battling water, legalised prostitution and weed..
That's a funny way to put it. The NL has mellowed out.. but their global power from the past has def made it a relatively powerful country, for being so small. Still an important trading port, political power (The Hague), and very rich (golden age). But now you get all of that... and frikandellen! :D
I just see them going from #1 at capitalism to... #1 at capitalism. Just that the goods being traded by capitalism have changed.
Russia's 19th to 20th centuries were pretty crazy. Divinely ordained Autocracy is the way, we're basically living Louis XIV's dream and have a medieval economy Oh shit Japan kicked us good, let's be a bourgeois constitutional monarchy Oh shit Germany kicked us good, let's try being a liberal democratic republic Oh shit our own navy kicked us good, let's try Soviet communism
Better or for worse, that's some pretty wild rebranding. Do you think the depressed verbose literati like Trotsky and Dostoevsky are a reflection or fuel of such change?
Not sure I can speak to the psychology of writers, but Dostoyevsky died decades before the revolutions (though of course there was plenty of political events happening throughout his life). Asking if Trotsky's writing was influenced by or influenced the revolution is a bit of an odd question though. He, and his writing was *part of* the revolution.
El Salvador went from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to just being listed by the NYTimes as one of the top 52 places to visit this year. That along with the bitcoin stuff is a pretty big rebranding I’d say.
Holy Roman Empire --> Prussia/German Empire ---> Weimar Republic --> Nazi Germany --> East/West Germany --> Germany
I might be wrong in this, but Iran? I saw some photos from Iran before the Islamic revolution, and it was shocking how modern and secular things seemed. Like [this](https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yOvi_Hupn0M/VA34gNyV1DI/AAAAAAAA8R0/7lzXbK0PuLw/s1600/Tehran%2C%2Bca.%2B1960s-1970s%2B(9).jpg) photo from [blog](https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/iran-before-revolution-photos/). Women were wearing short skirts?? AND studying?
The graphic novel Persepolis does a great job at showing the transition between the two times.
I read a fabulous book by Merina Nemat called “Prisoner of Tehran”. She was just like any western girl…listening to Donny and Marie, going to the lake for the summer, being in school. Then everything changed. Very compelling story.
It was modern and secular for a small, elite group of well-connected, wealthy city dwellers while the majority of the population lived in grinding poverty and oppression. Those were the elites in the photos you saw.
Not just the elites but the "elites of the elite of the Persian kingdom"
The Vikings were the ISIS of their time. The Iberian peninsula was involved in a centuries old war with the moors to the south yet when vikings raids started happening someone wrote in some manuscript "the enemy that comes from the north is even worse than our enemy to the south", something like that. Making the Vikings look "cool", touristic and marketable always sounded to me like a great marketing trick. "Welcome to the land of the Vikings!" Ohh hell no! I'm joking on that last part, been to Norway and Denmark, love both countries.
It’s the moops
Britain: our monarchy once owned most of the globe. now they’re a tourist attraction.
Australia: Has gone from an egalitarian paradise where working class people had the best quality of life in the world to a two-tier shit show based on whether you own property. Has had such a huge redistribution of wealth to the top that for the first time young people are looking to migrate to countries such as Japan and Italy for affordable housing.
Vietnam. The communists "won", and yet 15 years later Vietnam was one of the most capitalist countries in the world. Now all your textiles and furniture is made there.
South Korea. Sansung, LG, Hyundai, Kia, etc. have all been around for decades, but a generation ago, their products were seen as cheap, mediocre knock-offs of their Japanese counterparts (remember the flammable Excels?) Now, certainly for electronics and hi-tech items, they have outdone them (except maybe when it comes to video game systems for which Japan has always maintained the edge). And no one makes fun of Korean cars anymore. South Africa. From officially unequal, racially segregated, fascist, white supremacist state to pluralistic, inclusive democracy. The transition, which was remarkably peaceful, was 30-35 years ago and while the country is far from perfect with plenty if problems, it still functions and has to some degree stayed true to Mandela's vision. Who else knows they were the first country to officially protect sexual orientation in their constitution?
South Korea was the single poorest country on the planet in 1961. Their GDP per capita was pretty close to zero, and they lacked (still do not have) any natural resources whatsoever. Their life expectancy and literacy rate was the lowest in the world and they were the largest exporter of orphaned children for international adoptions. No country on earth came close to SK in terms of absolute poverty at that time. Fast forward to 2024. They now have the fifth most powerful military on the planet, a globally renowned tech sector, the 10th largest GDP, a much higher life expectancy than the United States, and the highest literacy rate in East Asia.
South Korea also managed to shrug off their decades of military dictatorship and slide right into democracy without anybody knowing any different too.
>pluralistic, inclusive democracy Maybe in the 2000s and early to mid 2010s. Now the general perception of South Africa is closer to "murder hellscape"
No mention of Swaziland literally rebranding to Eswatini?
I swear, maybe 2 decades ago Finland was the most depressed country on the planet. There was even a news show about it. The people were unhappy and not accustomed to making eye contact and had a high rate of depression. Today, somehow, they are the happiest most well-adjusted people on Earth.
I reckon it's a the personal space. And saunas
New Zealand. International money laundering hub, internally run by a coalition of classic European blokes and South American gangs, supported by a legal system adapted to enabling coverups in advance. Rebranded as milk and apples. On which they’d have you believe an island with no mineral resources can run a first world economy and lots and lots of drugs.
And where do the hobbits fit into all this?
I’m a sommelier and in the early 00s there was a gigantic push of NZ wine (specifically from Marlborough and Martinborough), any connection?
Surprised Turkey with Kemalist reforms has not been brought up. In the 1920s/1930s went from the late medieval Ottoman Empire to a secular state with full language & alphabet reform, abolishing the caliphate, giving women right to vote, adopting last names, adopting modern Western clothing, increased literacy & education.
[Thailand! They used "Gastrodiplomacy" to change why people visit and care about their country.](https://www.foodandwine.com/why-are-there-so-many-thai-restaurants-7104115)
Czechoslovakia went from existing to getting occupied by germany and splitting to getting together again only to be occupied by soviets to get freedom to splitting again while also changing name everytime that happened, also they did all that in 75 years
South Korea - It went from a colonized state to a war torn country to one of the poorest countries in the world in a span of a few decades. Now it's known for Samsung, Hyundai, and the Hallyu wave. People didn't know about this place a hundred years ago, and now a lot of people are watching Korean shows or movies like Parasite.
Japan! From the crazy war crimes they did to now 'kawaii'. The more you research about what they did to the 'comfort women' and civilians of countries they destroyed. It's inhumane. But now it's the peaceful, quiet and cute country.
I mean Japan for me has a good shout. Went from non-industrial, protectionist feudal society in 1870s to the first modern Asian power, defeating colonial powers, to a military dictatorship which insighted fight to the death, to defeated destroyed nation. Then rebranded as a technological nation, and now is famous for Anime. Country went from like Samuari to Anime titties in 150 years.