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On the Rise of Postwar Military Dictatorships: Argentina, Chile, Greece

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Nicos Mouzelis
Nicos Mouzelis
Affiliation:
University of London
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Extract

Despite marked geographical and sociocultural differences, Greece and the two major southern-cone Latin American countries share a significant number of characteristics which distinguish them from most other peripheral and semiperipheral societies. Although they began industralisation late and failed to industrialise fully in the last century, all three countries managed to develop an important infrastructure (roads, railways) during the second half of the nineteenth century, and they achieved a notable degree of industrialisation in the years following each of the two world wars. Moreover, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all three countries were subjugated parts of huge patrimonial empires (the Ottoman and the Iberian) and thus had never experienced the absolutist past of western and southern European societies. Finally, all three acquired their political independence in the early nineteenth century and very soon adopted parliamentary forms of political rule; and despite the constant malfunctioning of their representative institutions, relatively early urbanisation and the creation of a large urban middle class provided a framework within which bourgeois parliamentarism took strong roots and showed remarkable resilience. It persisted, albeit intermittently, from the second half of the nineteenth century until the rise of military bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and, as the Greek and Argentinian cases suggest, such regimes do not necessarily entail the irreversible decline of parliamentary democracy.

Type
The Development of Development
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 1986 , pp. 55 - 80
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1986

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References

1 On the specificity of western and southwestern European absolutism, see Anderson, P., Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Publications, 1974).Google Scholar

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3 When in this article I contrast ACG to northwestern Europe or, even more broadly, to the “West,” the “capitalist centre,” etcetera, I have primarily in mind countries like England, Belgium, Denmark, and Switzerland, which have not only developed a welfare state but which have also solved in a relatively smooth and egalitarian manner the problem of the distribution of political rights between rulers and ruled. In other terms, development in those countries was characterised by a successful (from the point of view of the consolidation of bourgeois parliamentary democracy) resolution of both the economic and political distribution problems, this double success leading to the formation of a strong civil society which operates as bulwark against state arbitrariness.

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26 I distinguish strength from autonomy because the two dimensions do not always vary in the same direction. For instance, trade unions in Argentina became stronger (in terms of numbers and resources) after the rise of Perón, but they were more strictly controlled by the state.

27 See Skopol, Theda, States and Social Revolution: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge, London, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 51–66, 81–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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51 O'Donnell, , Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism.Google Scholar O' Donnell has restated or reformulated his basic arguments in numerous articles; see, e.g., his “Reflections on the Patterns of Change in the Bureaucratic-Authoritarian State,” Latin American Research Review, 8:1 (1978),Google Scholar O'Donnell's work has also generated a great deal of research and debate: see, e.g., various articles by Cardoso, F. H., Cotter, J., Hirschman, A., Kaufman, R., and others in The New Authoritarianism in Latin America, Collier, D., ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979);Google ScholarReyna, J. L. and Weinert, R., eds., Authoritarianism in Mexico (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1977);Google ScholarErickson, K. P. and Pepper, P. V., “Dependent Capitalist Development, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Repression of the Working Class in Chile and Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives, no. 1 (1976).Google Scholar

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54 As a matter of fact, the explanation adopted in this study by no means excludes economic determinations; it simply introduces them into the analysis in a different manner. If it is accepted that the postwar military interventions must seriously take into account the army's reaction to a growing political mobilisation that was threatening the incorporative/exclusionist character of the relations of domination (and hence its own privileged power position within the state), there are at least two ways in which economic factors enter into the analysis; (I) The incorporative nature of the state-civil society relationship in the semiperiphery is related to both the timing of capitalist industrialisation and its more restrictive and unequal character; and (2) the massive postwar mobilisation and radicalisation and the higher levels of societal inclusion are also strongly, although not exclusively, related to the rapid and highly unbalanced capitalist growth in these formations.