United States Occupation
Until 1915, Haiti followed an isolationist policy. However, in 1915 the United States invaded Haiti and kept occupation until 1934. During this time, interest in Haitian nationality broadened to embrace the rural majority's "black" culture. A Haitian historical society was founded in 1924, with a focus on their history through the "Black Slave Rebellion" narrative of the Haitian Revolution. Louverture and Dessalines became "great slave revolutionaries", showing the world the power of colonized peoples.
"By the 1970s…had begun to think of their homeland in terms that transcended mere nostalgic attachment to a particular outpost of empire. The new… nationalism precipitates strong tensions between conservative and radical elements within local intelligentsias. Here too, the Haitian experience of the early 1900s, with its armed conflict…Finally, the accelerated urbanization and migration experienced in Haiti, which resulted from the centralizing tendencies of the state, import-dependency, and the extreme exploitation of labor, …trends in the global economy created the impetus for a massive population exodus after World War II."
Since the US occupation, Haiti has been unable to establish an independent civilian police force as an entity separate from the army. Every attempt to do so has resulted in a military overthrow of the presidency.
Haitian Civil-Military Relations:
- Military control for the protection of the state against foreign invaders
- Military control for the management of a crisis
- Civilian control through the demilitarization of the nation
- Civilian control through the professionalization of the army
- Civilian control through the co-optation of the arm
- Civilian control through the democratization of the army
Read more about this topic: History Of Haitian Nationality And Citizenship
Famous quotes containing the words united states, united, states and/or occupation:
“In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes.”
—John Kenneth Galbraith (b. 1908)
“The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.”
—Ashley Montagu (b. 1905)
“It is impossible for a stranger traveling through the United States to tell from the appearance of the people or the country whether he is in Toledo, Ohio, or Portland, Oregon. Ninety million Americans cut their hair in the same way, eat each morning exactly the same breakfast, tie up the small girls’ curls with precisely the same kind of ribbon fashioned into bows exactly alike; and in every way all try to look and act as much like all the others as they can.”
—Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe (1865–1922)
“For myself I found that the occupation of a day-laborer was the most independent of any, especially as it required only thirty or forty days in a year to support one. The laborer’s day ends with the going down of the sun, and he is then free to devote himself to his chosen pursuit, independent of his labor; but his employer, who speculates from month to month, has no respite from one end of the year to the other.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)