Basically title, because I saw an article from BBC that a few people tried to seize power in Germany. Do they get the power just by occupying the building? Do other states recognise this? What happens to the constitution and the law? Is is a lawless state while they create a new constitution?
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In this case, the answer is that it probably wouldn’t have worked no matter how well they occupied the building.
For a coup to work, you have to remove the people currently leading the government, and somehow coerce or convince the people who are in charge of the apparatus of the state (the generals, the higher bureaucrats, the chiefs of industry, etc) to follow the new government to follow your lead, then gain power of the communication apparatus to make sure that your messages are the only ones getting out, and then the population at large has to be okay enough with the new state of affairs to not revolt.
This is pretty easy in a non-democratic state- why does a peasant care who the current dictator is, and what could he do about it if he did care? It’s much harder in a democratic country where the rewards for following the coup leaders are fairly small.
If you’re the head of the police in Berlin, for example, do you say “Oh, what a good deal if I throw in with this lot!” or “Hey, I’m comfy as I am- round up the boys, crack open the good weapons lockers, and let’s go bust some seditious skulls”?
If you’re really interested, an author named Edward Luttwak wrote a book on the subject of how one works- “Coup d’Etat: A Practical Handbook”
No, occupying the building is symbolic in most senses. However if the building contains the current leader (executive or legislative) of the country, then it is possible to pressure them to leave (or kill them).
For a coup d’etat to work, there needs to be some combination of a substantial control of power (police, military etc), control of the civil government or popular support. The existing government also has to be fairly unpopular.
There are no particular “rules” on how any coup d’etat work. Sometimes it is replacing one dictator with another (just another person at the top with nothing much changing). Other times, it can be really messy – lots of violence and disruption.
There’s really no single answer to your question. Every coup is different and depends on the specific circumstances under which it takes place. At the end of the day, a coup is successful if the person or people doing it actually secure government power and having that power recognized by enough of the country for them to keep it (so no, simply occupying a building is at best, an attempted coup). How they might go about getting that power (and keeping it) is a case-by-case scenario.
Just to clarify, the guys in Germany didn’t try to seize the power, they had plans to try to seize the power. A difference IMO. They have been under police surveillance for a while until the police raided several houses of right conspiracy theorists and arrested them.
It boils down to power. Most of the somewhat pathetic coups we see (and this is definitely one of them) tend to fail because they focus on seizing one important symbolic thing, and the plotters think that if they seize (building/object/scepter/whatever) then everyone will just naturally switch their allegiance to them.
Humans obviously don’t work that way. If you were able somehow to seize the White House, Capitol Building, and Supreme Court building, America wouldn’t suddenly ask you for marching orders. They’d storm the buildings and take them back.
This is why coups have less chance of success in countries where power is decentralized (ie, democracies/republics). They are more successful in countries with heavily centralized power- if a strongman rules the country with absolute power, and I take out the strongman, it is far easier to simply step in and be the new guy issuing orders. My only real task from that point is eliminating competition.
Coups work through sheer violence. That’s it. If everyone is afraid that you will shoot them in the face, and you actually have the power to do that, then they will comply with your demands.
If you *can’t* kill them for not following you, then you have a problem.
Other states recognize coups, again, through sheer violence. If the coups have a sufficiently powerful military that say, a war or police action wouldn’t work against them, then other states really have no choice.
For a perfect example, see the Chinese Civil war and how the CCP overthrew the KMT. The CCP coerced the world into recognizing it through sheer violence- even the US was unwilling to wage a war to return the Taiwan government to ‘rightful’ power, leading the rest of the world to having to acknowledge the CCP as the true government of China.
There’s no secret to a coup. It’s purely the stuff you see on Game of Thrones. Kill everyone that opposes you, in the most efficient manner possible. That’s it. It usually starts a civil war.
Take any intro to political science course and you learn a fundamental rule that most people fail to grasp. Violence solves everything, it is the ultimate power. The very foundations of government and law and civilization exist on the foundation of controlled violence.
We tell children that ‘violence doesn’t solve anything’ because they’re incapable of understanding that a system of laws, courts and government officials that enforce their will through armed police and soldiers is what enables them to live in a society where they aren’t immediately killed at the whim of larger, meaner children. That the decisions to inflict violence should only be wielded by the highly educated or highly regarded.
Without state control of violence, there is no law, peace or stability. Just anarchy in the mad max style. In order for humans to live in peace there must be *someone* deciding who lives and who dies and why, and those people need to be the strongest and most capable of killing those that defy the system.
Basically a Coup d’etat is like someone taking you hostage with a gun. The point of the gun is to make you feel scared so you the perpetrator can take advantage of you and keep you hostage. That what coups do, they storm the government to force the current leader to resign.
There is nice summary video that explains this.
[https://youtu.be/_7nIqdwhdqA](https://youtu.be/_7nIqdwhdqA)
In general you start with infiltrating the current government system. You get your people in key positions.
Once that part is done you move to the public part. You quickly arrest the current government and replace them.
You already have some support in the military, police,justice,…
This will give you legitimacy. You must take control of the media and convince people that there is no point in trying to rebel, because you have already won.
If you succeed in getting domestic legitimacy than foreign one will follow.
What happens to constitution and laws depends. It can be from very little to getting tossed out completely.
The entire point of a coup is to avoid lawless state completely. This is not a popular revolt. Minority is trying to usurp power and their only chance is if the majority accepts it without resistance.
kill the people in power and become the one in power. usually with help of military so others cannot overthrow you.
The simple explanation is whoever has the guns makes the rules.
In counties with a weak central government, sometimes the army is loyal to their commander rather than the government. If enough generals decide to seize power, who will stop them? Again in places with weak central government, the military is often seen as the only effective part of the government, so when they seize power and say they are in charge, it makes little difference to the average person so they go on with their lives.
In countries with strong central governments, it is much harder. In the US for instance, the military swears to protect the constitution of the US against enemies both domestic and foreign. A lot of soldiers and officers I know take that pledge seriously, so if one general tried to lead a coup, they would have trouble finding like-minded soldiers and other commanders ls to follow them. Look at the coup attempt in Turkey, it failed because more people were loyal to the country and the government than whatever commander tried to seize power
As to it being lawless, no in general it usually isn’t. The military declares marshal law then runs the country by force under military rules until an interim constitution or government is formed, with the leaders of tbe coup often taking key positions.
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