A puppet state, puppet régime, puppet government or dummy government is a state that is de jure independent but de facto completely dependent upon an outside power and subject to its orders. Puppet states have nominal sovereignty, except that a foreign power effectively exercises control through economic or military support. By leaving a local government in existence the outside power evades all responsibility, while at the same time successfully paralyzing the local government they tolerate.
Puppet states differ from allies, who choose their actions of their own initiative or in accordance with treaties they have voluntarily entered. Puppet states are forced into legally endorsing actions already taken by a foreign power.
Characteristics
Puppet states are "endowed with the outward symbols of authority", such as a name, flag, anthem, constitution, law codes, motto and government, but in reality is are appendages of another state which creates, sponsors or otherwise controls the puppet government. International law does not recognize occupied puppet states as legitimate.
Puppet states can cease to be puppets through:
military defeat of the "master" state (as in Europe and Asia in 1945), absorption into the master state (as in the early Soviet Union), achievement of independence
Terminology
The term is a metaphor which compares a state or government to a puppet controlled by a puppeteer with strings. The first recorded use of the term "puppet government" was in 1884, in reference to the Khedivate of Egypt.
In the Middle Ages vassal states existed based on delegation of the rule of a country by a king to noble men of lower rank. Since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, the concept of a nation came into existence where sovereignty was connected more to the people who inhabited the land than to the nobility who owned the land.
An earlier similar concept is suzerainty, the control of the external affairs of one state by another.
Nineteenth-century examples
French revolutionary and Napoleonic clients
The Batavian Republic was established in the Netherlands under French revolutionary protection.
In Italy, the First French Republic encouraged a proliferation of small republics in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. (see also Sister republics).
In Eastern Europe, Napoleon's First French Empire established the Polish client state of the Duchy of Warsaw.
British Empire
In 1896 Britain established a state in Zanzibar.
Early twentieth-century examples
Kingdom of Poland (1916–1918) – The Central Powers' forces occupied Russian Congress Poland in 1915 and in 1916 the German Empire and Austria-Hungary created a Polish monarchy to exploit the occupied territories in an easier way and mobilize the Poles against the Russians (see Polish Legions). In 1918 the state became independent and formed the backbone of the new internationally recognized Second Polish Republic. Kingdom of Lithuania (1918) – after Russia's defeat and the territorial cessions of the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Germans established a Lithuanian kingdom. However it became an independent republic with Germany's defeat. Duchy of Courland and Semigallia (1918) – in 1915 the Imperial German forces occupied the Russian Courland Governorate and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended the war in the east, so the local ethnic Baltic Germans established a Duchy under the German crown in that part of Ober Ost, with a common return of civil administration in favor of military. This state was very swiftly merged with the Baltic State Duchy and the German-occupied territories of the Russian Empire in Livonia and Estonia, into a multi-ethnic United Baltic Duchy. Provisional National Government of the Southwestern Caucasus and Provisional Government of Western Thrace were provisional republics established by the Turkish minorities of Thrace and Caucasia after the Ottoman Empire lost its lands in these regions. Both were the products of the Ottoman Intelligence agency, Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, in terms of organisational structure and organisers, and they had remarkably common features. Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Republic － The state, remotely controlled by the Russian Soviet Republic, was founded by Stalin's close friend Fyodor Sergeyev. But the DKRR was disliked by Lenin. The capital of the republic was soon overthrown by the Germans again, and after the Soviet Red Army regained control of the territory, the country was dissolved at Lenin's request. Republic of Central Lithuania (1920–1922) dependent and fully incorporated by Second Polish Republic by 1922