Further studies since emerged [e.g., Lewis, 1999; Ihonvbere, 1999] following the transition program and eventual elections of 1999 which ushered in the
Fourth Republic.
Although the
Fourth Republic, this latest installment of civilian rule, is the longest in the country's checkered history, (30) it has not changed the narrative of violence and political instability that bedevils Nigeria.
The answer surely must involve an exploration of the ups and downs of recent Ghanaian history, and the struggle between state and citizen enacted between the first and
fourth republics.
Blum returned to France triumphant, and again ran the country, briefly, in 1946, after De Gaulle and the Free French established the
Fourth Republic. He negotiated an economic aid agreement with the United States (Truman), and made that relationship an integral part of post-war Europe.
The 1999 elections ushered in the
Fourth Republic. Three political parties contested the elections.
With the opening of crucial private paper collections and government archives in France to academic research, new works began to appear in the 1990s that challenged these earlier negative assessments of the
Fourth Republic. In the first wave of this revisionism appeared the challenge to the view that France was simply an American puppet, shorn of independent initiative in the international arena.
This, the courts seem to have realised in the
Fourth Republic.
The election of Chavez in 1998 represented a popular rejection of the
Fourth Republic's two-party system (ADECO and COPEI), which had run the country ever since the ousting of Marcos Perez Jimenez's dictatorship on 23 January 1958.
To the economic turmoil and social movements it is facing, Tunisia adds what amounts to a political crisis as negotiations to form a Government stemming from the Constituent Assembly drag on, establishing an air of the "
Fourth Republic."
Interestingly, given that the
Fourth Republic is often seen as a failed experiment, sounding the death knoll of Resistance hopes for a renewed French Republic, Wakeman actually argues that the mental picture of Paris in this period was ultimately heroic and she uses the idioms of poetic humanism and poetic space to capture the essence of this imagined landscape.
The success or otherwise of the coming fourth successive election under the
Fourth Republic (1999 to date) in Nigeria depends largely on how actors and stakeholders decide to engage the political system.
Kennedy, in Britain with Harold McMillian, and was known by the French
fourth Republic only with Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou.
