Well instead of 1979 (the “Islamic Revolution” in Teheran) or 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) may I suggest another option or fourth way or model? How about Germany between, say, 1848 (the failure of a middle class revolution and the subsequent rise of Bismark, WW1, and the failed Weimar Republic) and Germany’s ultimate dissolution by 1945 through the carpet bombing of its cities and its invasion by mass armies ( the military conquest of totalitarian Junker Germany by the middle class democracies in an alliance of convenience with the totalitarian Soviet Socialist Republic). LIke the Arabs, for a hundred years the Germans couldn’t get their act together ( and one could say the same about the Japanese after the Meji Restoration); hint, what glows in the dark and were formerly capitals in the middle east?
