We ARE Struggling Together!/Real Life

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• Lots of Anti-Globalization groups have gathered under the common motto "Another world is possible". Which is about the only thing they ever managed to agree on. People whose goal is opposition to uniformity can't agree, what a surprise. Of course, they don't really need to - as a loose alliance which has exactly one specific goal and would be over should they conclusively win.
  • This trope is the reason anti-globalization groups actually have very little to worry about. Ditto for conspiracy theorists who think They are going to roll out the One World Order any day now.
• Emo Phillips did a stand-up routine wherein he sees a man about to commit suicide:

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! Don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" He said, "Like what?" I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?" He said, "Religious." I said, "Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?" He said, "Christian." I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?" He said, "Baptist!" I said, "Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?" He said, "Baptist Church of God!" I said, "Me too! Are you Original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?" He said,"Reformed Baptist Church of God!" I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915?" He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, Reformation of 1915!" I said, "Die, heretic scum," and pushed him off.

• • Which isn't too far from the truth, ultimately. All Christians have in common their belief in God and in Christ as some form of God's exemplar upon earth; the devil seems to be quite literally in the details.
    • And this goes even to the church's history - hence the early church councils at Nicea to solidify the Creed, which basically (at the time) told a huge group of Christians that they didn't actually belong to the church.
  • With the amount of denominations that make up Christianity, coupled with the giant push for missionaries to preach in India, situations like the following have been reported: a group of missionaries enter a village, and find out that the villagers have already been converted to another denomination of Christianity. The missionaries convince the villagers that the Christian faction they've been converted to is wrong, instil their own brand of Christianity onto the villagers, then leave for the next village. Rinse and repeat.
• World War Two provides a B-29 bomber-load of examples.
  • The Axis Powers, despite often being used as the ur-example of Lawful Evil or portrayed as a to-the-death alliance, were mostly friends with each other because they'd each individually managed to piss off all their more useful potential allies (i.e., Germany violating the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invading the USSR, opening up a massively costly second front at a time when its only remaining major engagement was the British army in North Africa). Italy switched sides (after the western Allies had landed in Sicily) and then fell into factional in-fighting mid-war and had to be occupied by German troops to slow the Allied advance up the peninsula. Germany's surrender to the Allies after the Battle for Berlin left Japan to fight China, the US, and the British Empire alone. And while it had its own racist justifications for invading Korea and China, Japan was at most indifferent to and at times actually undermined Germany's racial policies, not being unaware of what those policies had to say about people categorized, like Jews and Slavs, as Asian instead of European.
    • The cooperation between Germany and her smaller European allies didn't always go smoothly, either. For example, when the Soviets started to push the Germans back westwards, the Hungarian government started secretly negotiating with Britain and America. They were caught, however, and the Germans forced them to step down and set up a much more pliable regime led by a hard-line Nazi supporter. Bulgaria, fearing strong pro-Russian sentiment among its population, refused to declare war on the Soviet Union at all. Bulgaria, Romania and Finland switched sides near the end of 1944. Croatia tried at about same time, but the conspiracy was unsuccessful.
    • That was helped by the fact that Germany didn't really have any allies except possibly Italy and even they were quick to change sides once they were rid of Mussolini. They all wanted their own interests(as all allies do)but more important resented the German jackboot and were perfectly willing to get rid of it when they could. That did not stop some of them from being as atrocious as Germans on their own account(they were a mixed bag in that regard and some were worse then others). But in any case Germany's "allies" tended to be motivated by fear, often fear of Germany, or bribery or quarrels with other neighbors or any combination thereof.
  • The various resistance groups in Nazi Germany could only really agree on the fact that Hitler had to go, not on what sort of state should come in his place--and especially who should run it. The lack of consensus helped doom the resistance, as the various groups were often working at cross-purposes (with Gestapo infiltrators encouraging the disunity). This despite the fact that the Reich itself was engaged in constant infighting (from the Night of the Long Knives through the duration of the war), often pitting political or ideological interests against military ones (for example, the expense of maintaining soldiers on guard at the concentration camps who could have otherwise been sent to the front). Many of the professional military officers were holdovers from the old Prussian aristocracy and resented being shunted out of power by the rise of the National Socialists. They were the ones who launched Operation Valkyrie, the failed plot to assassinate Hitler, blame it on the SS and take control. Hitler himself actually sometimes encouraged infighting and confusion between regional governors and the like (occasionally going so far as to give two people overlapping areas of responsibility without telling either of them) in order to prevent them from consolidating power and challenging him.
  • The Allied powers weren't all exactly smiles and sunshine with each other, either, consisting of numerous different foreign powers united - in some cases solely - by their opposition to Nazi Germany and/or Imperial Japan. The most prominent rift was the Western capitalists allying with the Soviets but there were dozens of others, such as China allying with the Western powers that had been extorting trade agreements from it only a few years before, the democratic powers "overlooking" the totalitarianism of Stalin, some Asians and Africans under colonial domination electing to fight with their French and British overlords on the grounds that there was--temporarily--a worse option imminent, the US fighting to defend French and British possessions in Asia and the Pacific that it had previously argued they had no right to...you get the picture.
    • Charles de Gaulle, leader of most of the Free French Forces, drove the Americans and British crazy with his refusal to cooperate whenever he felt "French" needs (or his huge ego) were more important. In just one example, on D-Day de Gaulle's public statement-contrary to the strategic needs and the request of the Allies, and the statements of other Allied leaders-implied that D-Day was the invasion itself. His statement threatened to destroy the work and lives spent to fool Hitler that D-Day was just a feint with the real invasion to come at Pas de Calais later. Not for nothing did British Prime Minister Winston Churchill say "the greatest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine" (this being the De Gaulle family emblem).
  • Most of occupied Europe had at least two resistances in each country: one was communist, the other non-communist. For example, the Serbian monarchist Chetniks and communist Yugoslav Partisans in Yugoslavia, who fought each other as much as the occupiers. The Chetniks, who were more willing to cooperate with the occupiers against the Communists, lost, which may have been helped by the Allies backing Tito's Communists with arms and SOE assistance, despite the SOE's man on the ground telling London the Chetniks would be better post-war (right or wrong, we'll never know).
    • Probably wrong from the British point of view. Tito was a Magnificent Bastard who could make Yugoslavia a convenient barrier to the Russians, postwar as well as tying up the Germans. The Chetniks, not so much. And while Tito wasn't very nice, as Churchill cynically pointed out the British did not have to live in Yugoslavia after the war.
    • Poland had at least three separate resistance movements: the non-Communist Home Army under the command of the Government-in-Exile, the Communists ultimately under the command of the Comintern, and various Jewish resistances (often aligned with the Communists, though occasionally with the Home Army as well). Arguably, the Communist resistance and USSR sold out the Polish Home Army in the Warsaw uprising of 1944, leading to Poland being incorporated into the Eastern Bloc post-war. At least everyone did contribute token aid to the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of 1943, and there was sometimes collaboration on the ground level even when the higher-ups were at odds.
      • At least in Poland it's an old tradition.
  • China had the same nationalist vs. communist problem as the European resistances. The Communists pulled back and let the Nationalist Kuomintang (which was itself less a unified movement than an alliance of somewhat like-thinking warlords, including a left-wing faction that was even allowed to remain, though with no power, after Mao won) fight the Japanese invasion alone, which severely weakened the Kuomintang, as planned. Mao Zedong even refused to help other Communist generals, in one infamous example refusing to send aid to a general who was under fire very close to Mao's forces. This ensured that Mao Zedong's rivals, both within and outside the party, would be killed. Only late in the war did Mao do any serious fighting against the Japanese, when the Kuomintang had suffered enormous losses. (After the war, however, Maoist propaganda had it that Mao was the one to suggest that Communists and Kuomintang fight the Japanese together, with the Kuomintang refusing.)
    • Later, Mao's Great Leap Forward wrecked China's economy, and Mao's power in the Party was weakened. He therefore launched the Cultural Revolution, where Red Guard members attacked Party bureaucrats and ordinary people across the country. The Red Guard tried to take on even the army, but failed. Ultimately their power was weakened by fighting each other, in Guard-vs-Guard street battles, where the issue was who really represented Mao's will.
• The leftist factions in 30's Spain initially worked with the republicans to oppose the fascists. Then they decided to have a separate civil war amongst themselves, on top of the civil war with the fascists. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
  • In other words: During the Spanish Civil War, infighting between the moderate liberals, the power-brokering Soviet Union-backed Spanish Communist Party, the radical Trotskyist communists of the POUM and the anarchist CNT-FAI led to the Republican front being unable to form solid opposition to the fascist/conservative front. The fascists were clever enough to save their house-cleaning until after the war.
    • The CP was shooting the POUM and anarchists because they wanted revolution now, not later, while the COMINTERN and CP they controlled were scared it would push the Western powers into the arms of the Nazis. The anarchists were busy trying to make revolution a reality, with agricultural and industrial collectives, at the same time the CP were attacking them, along with POUM and the republican liberals... In Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell, who fought as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, describes the situation:

I knew that I was serving in something called the P.O.U.M. (I had only joined the P.O.U.M. militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with I.L.P. papers), but I did not realize that there were serious differences between the political parties. At Monte Pocero, when they pointed to the position on our left and said: 'Those are the Socialists' (meaning the P.S.U.C.), I was puzzled and said: 'Aren't we all Socialists?' ... Everyone, however unwillingly, took sides sooner or later ... As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories.

• The Soviet Union actually institutionalized infighting with the military, the KGB, and the Communist Party in constant power struggles with each other. Any time one of them seemed to be getting too big for their britches, the other two would combine forces and take them down a few pegs, a more informal and bloodier system than the American constitutional system of checks and balances.
• The factions in the Mexican Revolution (not enumerated here because there were something like seven distinct "sides" involved) could agree on nothing except that the country needed democracy. Things dragged on for more than a decade because of the complexity of the disputes. The Other Wiki has more information.
  • And while we're on the topic of Mexico: From 1824 to the end of the French Intervention was a period of intermittent civil war between the "Liberales" ("Liberals", who wanted to establish a Federal Republic akin to the U.S.) and the "Conservadores" ("Conservatives", who wanted to preserve the old government structures from the Colonial period, with noblemen ruling over the country), causing a permanent state of revolving door presidencies and unstable government policies. This period of civil wars is also to blame for Mexico losing half of its territory in the Mexican-American war, since the armies of both sides were more busy fighting each other instead of going against the advancing American armies.
• The American civil rights movement: All civil rights groups agreed change was needed. Yet they vehemently disagreed on how to get that change. Basically it boiled down to the more moderate reformist groups, led by people like Martin Luther King Jr. who wanted integration and coexistence with white America, and more radical, militant Black Power activists who wanted black Americans to separate themselves from, or even overthrow, the existing, white-dominated power structure. Though reforming the Power structure, and integration was also some of the radicals goal as well, they even wanted reform for poor white people (this side of the story is never told for some reason, only the scary, angry, black man side), but they had a more "by any means necessary" approach. The division more or less centered around all of the civil rights alphabet soup organizations like the--SCLC vs. NAACP vs. BPP vs. NOI vs. AIM vs. WUO etc--were involved in this dispute. A lot of those divisions were set up deliberately by the Powers That Be, through infiltrations and dirty tricks, part of the FBI's COINTELPRO effort.
  • Even within those groups there were "splinter groups" over the years along the lines of race, gender, age, class, region and religion. It in fact has been pointed out by many feminists (e.g. Donna Haraway) that, for some time, the worst thing to be from a civil rights standpoint was a black woman. These divisions still more or less exist today. Speaking of which, said divisions were definitely highlighted during the 2008 election season during the Democratic primaries.
  • And then before that there was the whole W.E.B. Du Bois vs. Booker T. Washington fall out.
  • "Subverted" by the relationship between (radical) Malcolm X and (reformist) Martin Luther King, who are sometimes still seen as antagonists but had in fact reached a sort of "understanding" (in spite of their very real differences) where the former would scare the shit out of white people so that, when the latter stepped in with a less terrifying alternative, he was more likely to be listened to. Well Martin Luther King was an alternative until the media turned against him when he started criticizing the war. Basically painting him as another angry black man, and Malcolm X lite. Curiously, around the time he was assassinated, just a couple years before MLK came out against the war, Malcolm X was himself becoming somewhat more moderate in his views, having broken off from the Nation of Islam.
• American culture also does this. Political scientists and geographers agree that there are three primary American cultures. The Moralists view government as a means to create a better society and that everyone must work together for the greater good. The Traditionalists view government as a way to keep the status-quo, and hold that the social structure already provides sufficient support for those truly motivated to progress up the social ladder. The Individualists view government as merely a means to keep crime and fraud from happening as well as to protect national sovereignty, and that individuals should be self reliant and hard-working. While each of these three models have their valid points, the result when these collide is that Americans tend to dislike Americans from some regions and get along well with Americans from others. This leads to stereotypes and misconceptions, and Hilarity Ensues.
  • The fact that there are TWO nationally-viable political parties for the three to choose from doesn't help. (The Libertarian party is almost pure Individualist thinking and the Greens are strongly Moralist, but neither has been able to gain national traction.) Inevitably, a party has to get two of the groups to recognize their common interests to win a ruling coalition. The main achievement of the "Reagan revolution" lay in convincing the Traditionalists and Individualists that they both cared enough about fiscal conservatism to set aside their differences on social issues. The seams in that coalition have recently resurfaced in the debates over how to revitalize the Republican party following the 2008 electoral defeat, with some arguing that social conservatism is a dead-letter and fiscal conservatism a la the Tea Party movement is the way forward and others that the party needs to become more socially conservative to hold onto its base. The Democrats themselves have some serious rifts between their Individualist and Moralist wings.
• A similar situation exists with various Palestinian militant organizations today: The three big ones were Fatah (vaguely leftist nationalist), Hamas (Islamist), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Marxist). The PFLP has shrunk to relative insignificance (thanks in large part to The Great Politics Mess-Up), leaving just Fatah and Hamas fighting for most of Palestinian public opinion on how to settle the big issue--Fatah backs the Oslo system, while Hamas is holding out (at least for the moment--Hamas itself is divided on whether they should eventually accept the peace process, or stay out of it entirely). As a result of the elections of 2006 that left Hamas with a majority of the Palestinian parliament, they were forced to share power--which they might have been able to do had Israel and the West not cut off most of the Palestinian Authority's funding as a protest against Hamas. In 2007, this broke out into open war, with Hamas taking the Gaza Strip and expelling or killing members of Fatah, and Fatah solidifying its hold on the West Bank by expelling or killing members of Hamas. Fatah has since tried to clean up its act (the main reason Fatah lost the '06 elections was that it had earned a reputation for being completely corrupt during its ten years in power) and appointed an independent technocrat, Salam Fayyad, as Prime Minister to just build up the Palestinian economy and bureaucracy while the political problems get settled.
  • As an interesting historical side note, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), during its period of popularity and activity, was even more prone to this than the other groups - witness the splitting off by (in order of establishment) the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front (PPSF), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and the Popular Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PRFLP).
• In the pre-state period in Israel, the situation was similar, though the Jewish Agency and the Haganah (its militia) were dominant; the Jewish Agency was dominated by leftish types, and the elite strike force (the Palmach) was known to be a hotbed of far-left, even Communist activity. However, there was a strong Revisionist (read: right-wing ultranationalist) tendency led by the Irgun (also known as Etzel), which had its own militia and some other rudimentary institutions. Once the state was declared, the Agency and the Irgun kept a wary truce, with the Irgun units ouside Jerusalem (which was officially under international administration, although the reality on the ground was more complicated) being integrated into the Israel Defense Forces for the first few weeks of the war. However, when the Irgun attempted to import arms in direct contravention of a United Nations embargo--which the Israeli Provisional Government was trying to uphold for PR reasons--the government, after some heming and hawing, decided to shell the ship and fight the Irgunites who had come to pick up the weapons. At this point, the government forced the Irgun to join the IDF as individuals rather than as units. People on the losing side of the dispute got (and have stayed) rather angry about this; as recently as 2011, a Ministry of Defense invitation for an event commemorating the incident used the term murdered to refer to to people who died on the ship (the current Israeli government of the time was led by Likud, which traces its ideological and institutional ancestry to the Irgun.)
  • A third resistance group, the Lehi, splintered from the Irgun because it was not extreme enough for their taste; it was a really small group, so much so that the British referred to it as the Stern Gang, but did more damage than their numbers might indicate. It was the first organization the Israeli government recognized as a terrorist organization, and was the original reason for their anti-terrorist legislation. Ironically, Lehi members who had joined the Likud were instrumental in using the same laws written to destroy them to crack down on the Palestinian insurgencies of the 1980s. (On the bright side, the same ex-Lehi members, informed by their experience, were also instrumental in guaranteeing access to the civilian courts for review of those detained indefinitely without charge--even when those are Palestinian.)
• Colorism and Intra-Racism have caused factionalism within the black community and between minority racial and ethnic groups. Particularly pronounced are the class divide within the black community which began in The Eighties or maybe even during Reconstruction, or The Harlem Renaissance depending on who you ask. Primarily among upper-middle class blacks vs. working class blacks vs. impoverished blacks.
• In the late 19th and early 20th century, when Russia was still an empire governed by the Tsars, there were numerous rebel groups who all agreed that the country's absolute monarchy had to change, but all had their own visions on what it should look like. These groups ranged from supporters of a British-style constitutional monarchy to radicals who desired a Marxist revolution. Once the Tsar was overthrown, the rebel groups then fought for control of the country, with the Communist Bolsheviks seizing power.
  • Cadets, Socialist Revolutionaries (splitting just after the February Revolution into left and right SRs and causing a big old headache with ballots), Social Democrats (which itself came out of a factional struggle) first split into the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and the Mensheviks had a split-off called Menshevik-Internationalists. There was even a Non-Factional Faction in the RSDLP headed by Trotsky, not to mention the sizeable Russian anarchist movement. Each was suppressed by force in turn as the workers and peasants realized the current government would not redistribute land to the peasants, let workers have control of the factories, or give them free rein to force the nobles and factory owners to do the same.
  • Similarly, in the Russian Civil War a few years after the Russian Revolution, the Red army was comprised of the Bolsheviks, and the White army was composed of... pretty much everyone else. This included foreign powers like Britain, nationalist minorities demanding independence, Tsarists who wanted the Tsar back on the throne and pretty much every Bolshevik hater in Russia. The Whites outnumbered the Reds, had most of the transport links and most of the country. Meanwhile there was the anarchist Black Army, which fought the Whites and the Reds (allying with them three times only to be betrayed each time) and the so-called Green Army, which were a collection of local militias trying to protect themselves against all sides' marauding soldiers. The Reds won. One of the major reasons for this was that everyone in the White army wanted different things and generally couldn't agree on anything. Some openly despised each other. On the other hand, the Red army was led by the combined might of Lenin and Trotsky, who worked together to keep morale up and do whatever it took to keep the soldiers fighting.
    • The remaining Trotskyists have a reputation for eagerly crumbling into tiny sects - “Two trots, three factions”.
• When Angola became independent, it was plagued by a long civil war between rebel factions who had all been fighting the Portuguese, and then began struggling for control of the country. The Marxist government of FRELIMO was backed by the USSR, while South Africa and the US supported the opposition UNITA. Both sides committed horrible atrocities.
• The feminist movement has produced a great many offshoots, not all of them on good terms with each other. The Other Wiki at the moment lists: Black, Chicana, Global, Postcolonial and Third world feminism; Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Spiritual (whatever this means in context) feminism; Anarchist, Liberal, Marxist and Socialist feminism, and Ecofeminism; Gender, Lesbian, Pro-life, Sex-positive feminism and Transfeminism; Amazon, Cultural, Equity, Individualist, New, Postmodern, Radical, Separatist feminism, Fat feminism and Womanism; and the big divider, Difference and Equality feminism. And there are probably many more not notable enough for Wikipedia. Some of them differ considerably even in their definitions of what makes someone a "woman".
• Like most subsequent successful revolutions, the American Revolution bore fruit in part because the pro-independence faction--which may have been as small as 1/3 of the total population--was quick and effective at suppressing the loyalist opposition and either intimidating or winning partial support from theoretically neutral groups like the Quakers. Many loyalists preferred to pack up and flee to other parts of British North America (particularly Canada and the Caribbean) than to stay and face the repercussions, removing the impetus for further ideological purges after the war. The unification of the colonies behind one cause was greatly aided by George III's swift decision to declare the uprising a rebellion, sending the message that there would be no compromise offered. This pushed a lot of moderates, who had been hoping for a negotiated resolution giving colonists expanded rights to things like Parliamentary representation, towards the independence movement and armed resistance. The rapid unification within the colonies was particularly effective because, across the Atlantic, opinion was deeply split in Parliament and in the general British public, with a significant number of Britons (especially Whigs) willing to admit that the colonists had legitimate complaints--whether they agreed with the means of expressing it or not. After the humiliation of the Treaty of Paris, that faction was able to implement significant reforms in how Britain's other colonies were run, but they were unable to gain that support in time to hold onto America.
• The Quebec separatist movement in Canada has its own internal divisions, most notably in the 1960s between the militant Front de Liberation du Quebec (which sought to create a Marxist-Leninist state through violent means) and the groups that would merge to become the Parti Quebecois (which sought independence through democratic means). Things came to a head c. 1970 with the collapse of the FLQ after both the Trudeau government's enacting of the War Measures Act (which had previously only been used in the World Wars) and the Quebec public's own outrage at the FLQ's kidnapping and murder tactics, the idea of violent secession collapsed and the sovereignty movement rallied around the PQ. In modern times, many Quebec separatists are divided between those factions that seek complete independence and those who seek to retain some sort of association with Canada along the lines of a shared currency, trading agreement or something similar. The Turn Of The Millennium saw the development of a broad consensus around a kind of soft federalism, desiring to remain a province of Canada but with increased autonomy, reflected in the crushing defeat the federalist NDP delivered to the BQ in the 2011 federal election: the Bloc was reduced from 47 seats to 4, all taken by New Democrats, and Gilles Duceppe lost his seat.
• The country of Somalia has been this trope ever since the dictatorship of Siad Barre was overthrown.
• Another subversion comes from the war between Libya and Chad in the 1980s. The Chadian government was plagued with rebel forces and other dissident movements, often encouraged by Libya to destabilize it. When the two countries came to blows, however, the Libyan invasion actually served to reinforce Chadian unity, and many of the factions united to drive them out.
  • ...roughly half of the way in. Until then, the Chadian GUNT pretty much sided with Libya and indeed provided the bulk of Gadaffi's infantrymen and logistical support in the region. It was after Tripoli ticked GUNT off that this trope was subverted.
• Starting in the Dark Ages and continuing into the 19th century, Italy was split into many independent city-states, small principalities, and areas occupied by foreign powers. These small areas fought each other constantly, so no one could gain supremacy over the others for very long - leading to all of them getting progressively weaker. This is still visible today in the cultural and political differences between northern and southern Italy. This was Lampshaded in the 16th century by Niccolo Machiavelli, who lamented the divisions among his fellow Italians and pleaded for unity to drive out its foreign occupiers. His dream would eventually be realized, but not until the 19th century when Giuseppe Garibaldi came along...
  • There must be something about the Italian peninsula. This same situation existed way back when, with the peninsula populated by Sabines, Samnites, Etruscans, Carthagenians, and Magna Graeca.... until they were all conquered by the end of the 3rd century BC, by an upstart little republic called "Rome".
    • Probably the geography naturally lending itself to divisions. As a great example, Europe's many rivers and mountains are a probable reason why it is so divided as well.
• The Kingdom of Germany, or more properly the entire Holy Roman Empire, was cynically described as a persistent and ongoing meltdown rather than a proper nation from the 13th century (with the death of Frederick II) to the 16th. By the time of the Reformation, the Wars of Religion in Germany, and the loss of the Italian, Dutch, and Swiss lands in the HRE, the Emperor effectively had very little authority outside of whatever ancestral lands his family maintained at the time of his election and wherever his army could march. It is perhaps significant that by the time of the Reformation, the 30 Years War was treated not as a civil war like the French Fronde, but instead a war between independent states. The whole mess limped along through the end of the 18th century only to go under completely in upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars.
• The LGBTQQIA community gets this going on a lot too, mostly because it's really a whole passel of very small minorities that have only what we aren't in common. Even the name is a point of contention-the letter-soup term just keeps getting longer and longer as more groups complain about being left out.
  • Indeed, the only two "factions" that do get along decently well are the first two letters, bisexuals either don't exist or need to make up their minds (according to some of the others), transgendered people face a fair amount of prejudice too (especially those who are gay in their target gender), etc etc.
• The Revolutions of 1848 in Austria-Hungary were badly marred by this. Taking on a nationalist character in most Hapsburg lands, the German rulers found themselves opposed by the Hungarians, Czechs, Croats, Slovenes, Poles, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Romanians, Serbs, Italians, and even Germans (specifically, for a unified Germany). With such a drastic division, the Empire should by all rights have simply collapsed. The Czechs and Italians were quickly crushed, while the Hungarians proceeded to systematically alienate every other independence movement in the nation by ending the special administrative status of Transylvania and Croatia-Slavonia and crushing outright the Slovak movement. By effectively driving half of the Empire into the Imperial camp out of self-preservation and creating a three-front war where it had been unnecessary, all of the nationalist causes were lost. The Russian intervention near the end did not help.
• The Irish Republican Army have split a lot..
  • Founded 1916 to achieve Irish independence. Referred to retrospectively as Old IRA. History sees them as White Hats.
  • 1921: British govt. offer control of most of Ireland and Dominion status. Most of the IRA accept this and become the Irish National Army. Anti-treaty IRA fight them in civil war.
  • 1922: Anti-treaty IRA accept defeat in civil war. Very weak movement struggles over the decades.
  • 1969: Split into traditional armed republican Provisional IRA and a Marxist electoral Official IRA. Sinn Fein, the political wing, also splits in Provisional and Official factions too.
  • 1974: Official IRA radicals decide to get back into the fight, becoming the Irish National Liberation Army(INLA), seizing most of the OIRA's arms, with their faction of Official Sinn Fein becoming the Irish Republican Socialist Party. The Official IRA and Official Sinn Fein became The Workers Party.
  • 1986: Provisional IRA decide that Sinn Féin should take seats in the Irish parliament. Those who disagree form the Continuity IRA.
  • The Irish National Liberation Army in 1986 schismed into the Irish People's Liberation Organisation (IPLO).
  • 1997: Provisional IRA members opposed to the peace process form the Real IRA. Responsible for the Omagh bombing in 1998, after the peace treaty was signed, in order to undermine it.
  • Loyalists, meanwhile, had the Ulster Volunteer Force, Ulster Defence Association, Real Ulster Freedom Fighters, Loyalist Volunteer Force, Orange Volunteers, Red Hand Commandos, Red Hand Defenders, Red Branch Knights, Ulster Young Militants, CLMC, ULCCC, Young Citizen Volunteers... Note: the UDA, despite its terrorism, was only criminalized in 1994, after publicly and blatanly Crossing the Line Twice by shooting up a Catholic Hallowe'en party. Before that it was still a militia on the official government side. Cross-membership of UVF and UDA members in the Ulster Defense Regiment (UDR) or (former) Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did not help matters.
    • An old Irish joke has it that the first item on the agenda for any rebellious organization is "the split". As seen above, Truth in Television.
• In Nepal, the "Communist Party of Nepal" is the official name of MANY Communist parties within Nepal. The most famous of the "Communist Parties" is the CPN (Maoist), but...now it has to fight a rebel breakaway faction that calls itself...the CPN (Maoist). Luckily, the main CPN (Maoist) fused with the Communist Party of Nepal (Unity Centre-Masal) and now calls itself the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).
• The British general election of 1979 was contested by the Labour Party, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party, the Communist Party of Britain, the Scottish Labour Party, the Workers' Revolutionary Party, the Independent Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Workers' Party, the Northern Ireland Labour Party, the Democratic Labour Party, the Socialist Unity Party (the ironing is delicious!), the Independent Socialist Party, the Workers Party (Leninist), the Social Democratic Party and the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Not that there weren't important policy differences between different leftist groups, but Jesus. The winner, incidentally, of that particular election was none other than... the Conservative Party.
  • This factionalism got better, but remained endemic during the 1980s which was one of the key reasons why the Conservative Party remained in power until 1997. Things weren't helped by tensions between the left of local Labour parties and councils, which tended to subscribe to more radical ideologies than the national Labour party.
  • However, the Social Democrats later averted this trope by combining with the Liberal Party to form the Liberal Democrat Party, while the Conservatives indulged in this trope with the emergence of the breakaway UK Independence Party, who took enough votes from them in the 2010 election to force them into coalition with the LibDems.
  • Neo-Nazis don't like each other any more than they like the rest of us. There are the British National Party, National Front, Nationalist Alliance, National Socialist Movement, National Democrats, British People's Party, Combat 18 and many more - all fighting for at most 5% of the British electorate between them. As with many other minor groups, it has been suggested that the vast number of racist British parties are actively encouraged by the security services, in order to keep them divided and thus less dangerous. In fact, for a long time it was said that a majority of the members of Combat 18 were actually undercover members of MI 5.
    • A similar thing once was said about breakaway Black Nationalist groups in the US.
• Anarchist movements are susceptible to this, stemming from the "direct action" philosophy being misunderstood as "Write my own personal theories in a manifesto and then give it an Anarcho-Subgenre." Just take a look at all the types of Anarchism on its page at The Other Wiki or the Useful Notes: Political Ideologies page on this very wiki. Communist Anarchism, Collectivist Anarchism, Individualist Anarchism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Anarcho-Primitivism, Anarcha-Feminism, Mutualism, the list goes on... While in theory this is a good thing, as most Anarchists would tell you that each individual idea can contribute, in reality there are plenty of zealous Anarchists who want to convince you that their specific subset of Anarchism is the right one and that the other kinds are completely wrong. See also the page Anarchy Is Chaos.
  • On the other hand, the vast majority of those groups are willing to, at the very least, coexist, and even cooperate on a majority of issues. The real conflicts tend to be between anarcho-capitalists and everyone else, as well as various Individualist Anarchist schools of thought and some Social Anarchist movements. There's some animosity between Anarcho-Primitivists and most of the rest (who may see primitivism as an unnecessary obstacle and modern technology as a means of, among other things, reducing scarcity) but it's by no means widespread. Most of the Anarchist movements named above go under the overarching banner of "libertarian socialism", and conflict between them tends to be friendly. As a rule of thumb, the truly bitter conflict is between Anarcho-Capitalists and the aforementioned libertarian socialists, a considerable part of which simply don't consider Anarcho-Capitalism to be anarchism, with some Anarcho-Capitalists feeling the same in return. It's largely a question of semantics, but in the end, Anarcho-Capitalism really is quite different, while the others tend to differ in ways that are less fundamental or, at any rate, that tend to inhibit cooperation and cohabitation a lot less.
    • Put simply, most "left-Anarchists" propose a society comprised of many self-governing communes. As long as those communes are able to cooperate and resolve their differences peacefully, internal organization is pretty much up to then.
    • Not communes as such, just no inherent structure to society, as they believe any state (free market, fascist, etc) oppresses people. One of the main problems is that most 'left anarchists' believe in abolishing money, completely against anarcho-capitalists.
  • "Cooperate and co-exist"? The Anarchism articles on The Other Wiki are one of the hotspots of perpetual edit-warring.
    • The above comment thread has just proven the point.
• Generally the main difference between the two can split into Individualist anarchism and Social anarchism. They generally argue on what is coercive (rulership). Individualist anarchists think that one has a right to individual sovereignty and argue that means right to ones labour which creates property/possession while social anarchists are agreed on this and focus more on opposition to hierarchies. The main difference in the individualist camps is generally what constitutes property/possession (thus a semantics issue) which is the main point of contention with anarcho-capitalists that have a different view of what constitutes property/possesion from most though not all of the of the original individualists. Each camp generally has small differences inside them but can most of the time get along. The main hostility is almost always with the other camp which means there can be bitter fights between individualist and social anarchists which has been going on forever.
• Everything concerning anarchists can be applied to libertarianism, since the only thing they can agree on is reducing the size of the state. This runs the gambit between left-libertarians, the Libertarian Party, Minarchists, and all the anarchist groups. Even among these individual subsets, there will still be infighting on issues like taxation and aspects of modern capitalism.
  • For that matter, right-libertarians and Objectivists. Right-libertarians draw a great deal of their political philosophy from Ayn Rand's works, while Rand and her followers felt that trying to separate politics from the underpinnings of philosophy led to piss-poor arguments for capitalism. This led to a split within the Objectivist movement itself, between the Ayn Rand Institute (anti-libertarian, founded by Rand's legal heir), and The Atlas Society (pro-libertarian, and essentially an arm of the libertarian think tank The Cato Institute after a funding crisis).
• Author and animal rights activist Vernon Coleman cites this as the reason the animal rights movement has not yet been able to stop vivisection.
• On a fortunately rather less deadly front: fandom. All of fandom -- from the boyfan/girlfan cultural split right down to the subtle but all-important distinction between a new-skool Tenth Doctor/Rose-shipper "Journey's End" apologist and a new-skool Ten/Rose shipper who feels robbed (for any one of about five different reasons).
• Even tropers have sides, with some wanting to rename stuff that uses a name (Joker Immunity, The Scrappy, The Gwen Stacy and others) and those who feel they are fine.
  • SPOONs want more understandable titles, FORKS want cooler titles, and PLATTERs think the whole thing is silly.
• An attempted collaboration between conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Jeff Rense failed miserably, with both of them accusing the other of being a Quisling for The Government and Rense openly advocating that Jones be killed.
• On That Other Wiki, what is probably the most debated process is "Requests For Adminship", where users can be nominated to become an administrator and this is put to a vote. Its discussion page has over 50,000 edits and enough word count to fill several novels, most of which for the past years has focused on reforming the process. As a meta-page points out, it is "clearly too stern, too lenient, too arbitrary, too much of a vote count, and/or not enough of a vote count ... While RFA is our most debated process and nearly everybody seems to think there's something wrong with it, literally years of discussion have yielded no consensus on what exactly is wrong with it, nor on what should be done about that."
• No doubt the Occupy Wall Street movement, for all its popular support, is riddled with problems like this.
  • The specific divisions within Occupy break down more or less as follows: The largest group are general reform-minded liberals who are interested in bringing Big Finance to heel, and, to a lesser extent, implementing related socio-economic reforms. Next, we have various democratic socialist groups who feel that some reform of the actual capitalist system needs to be made and think the liberals don't go far enough. There's communists, who feel the liberals are essentially counter-revolutionary and the democratic socialists are mealy-mouthed Trotskyists who aren't really interested in revolution. We have the left-anarchists, who split roughly in two, half wanting to bring the entire movement together and leave ideology out of it and see where that gets us, the other half wanting to wage violent revolution more or less immediately. Finally, we have the libertarians, who are primarily interested in breaking the power of Big Finance and the government as a way to strengthen capitalism (these are the guys with the Ron Paul signs). The liberals and democratic socialists usually get along okay. The democratic socialists and the communists usually get along okay. The communists and the "diversity-of-tactics" (that is to say, immediately revolutionary) anarchists sometimes get along. The rest of the anarchists try to get along with everyone and usually fail. The libertarians mostly engage with the liberals and occasionally with the non-DoT anarchists. Every other interaction is almost guaranteed to break down into yelling. Confused yet?
  • That's not fully accurate, the anarchists generally don't divide like that, the anarchists who started it decided to go for pacifism, and are the backbone of the movement, the Ron Paul types are generally able to work with anyone who is for small/no government, and generally the liberals can swallow it and work with everyone else. The real problem is Democrats trying to recruit, most see them as shills for 1% trying to derail the movement, the violence they are getting is driving many to the radical.
• The three-way separation of powers that exists in most western democracies between the executive (the body which drafts and proposes new laws), the legislative (the body with the power to vote on those laws) and the judiciary (the body which ensures the validity of those laws and their administration) is in theory essentially a more-or-less peaceful version of this trope; by keeping these bodies largely independent of each other and tasking them with different responsibilities, it ensures that too much power is not concentrated in one place and that should one of the bodies act inappropriately the other two can bring them down a notch (for example, should the executive draft unreasonable legislation, the legislature can vote against it; should the legislature vote for this legislation, the judiciary can declare it invalid, and so forth). This, of course, tends to mean that a lot of tension can arise between them.