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The Military Institution Revisited: Some Notes on Corporatism and Military Rule in Latin America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

George Philip
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Extract

Does political science advance or do fashions merely change? There can be no doubt that this past decade has seen a major change in the ways in which the nature of military rule in Latin America has been examined. To a large extent, this has been due to changes in the nature of Latin American governments themselves and, more particularly, to the emergence of the long term military-bureaucratic (sometimes called bureaucratic-authotitarian) government.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , November 1980 , pp. 421 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 The main writings in this category include Huntington, S. P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven Yale Univ. Press, 1968);Google ScholarAnderson, C., Politics and Econonmic Change in Latin America (Princeton Univ. Press, 1967);Google ScholarKenworthy, E., ‘Coalitions in the Political Development of Latin America’, in Groennings, E. et al. , The Study of Coalition Behaviour: Perspectives and Cases from Four Continents (New York, 1970)Google Scholar and Lanning, E., ‘A Typology of Latin American Political Systems’, in Comparative Politics, Vol. 6, No. 3 (1974), though Lanning departs in some important respects from the paradigm considered here.Google Scholar

2 In addition to the writings in f. I., see also specific contributions on the military, such as Stepan, A., The Military in Politics: Changing Patterns in Brazil (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1969)Google Scholar and Rankin, R., ‘The Expanding Institutional Concerns of the Latin American Military Establishments: A Review Article’, in Latin American Research Review, Vol. 9 (1974), pp. 81–108.Google Scholar

3 The broader perspectives about politics used by some of these writers have been excellently dealt with by O'Brien, Donal Cruise, ‘Modernization, Order and the Erosion of a Democratic Ideal: American Political Science, 1960–1970’, in The Journal of Development Studies, Vol. 8 (1971–1972).Google Scholar

4 Pike, F., ‘The New Corporatism in Franco's Spain and some Latin American Perspectives’ in Pike, F. and Stritch, T. (eds.), The New Corporatism: Social-Political Structures in the Iberian World (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1974), pp. 171–209;Google ScholarWiarda, Howard J., ‘Corporatism and Development in the Iberic-Latin World: Persistent Strains and New Variations’,Google Scholar in Ibid, pp. 3–33; and Loveman, Brian and Davies, Thomas Jnr, ‘The Politics of Anti-Politics', in the same authors’ edited collection of essays, The Politics of Anti-Politics: The Military in Latin America (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 3–22.Google Scholar

5 Schmitter, P., ‘Still the Century of Corporatism’, in Pike and Stritch, loc. cit., pp. 85–131.Google Scholar

6 Cardoso, F. H., ‘Associated-Dependent Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications’, in Stepan, A. (ed.), Authoritarian Brazil: Origins Policies and Future (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 142–76.Google Scholar

7 ‘Corporatism can be defined as a system of interest representation in which the constituent units are organised into a limited number of singular compulsory, non-competitive, hierarchically ordered and functionally differentiated categories recognized or licensed (if not created) by the State, and granted a deliberate representational monopoly within their respective categories in exchange for observing certain controls on their selection of leaders and articulation of demands and supports’. Schmitter, op. cit., in Pike and Stritch, loc. cit., pp. 93–4. It is interesting to see how government is replaced here by ‘the State’, a tendency common to those who de-emphasize politics.Google Scholar

8 Schmitter, op. cit., in Pike and Stritch, loc. cit., p. 108.Google Scholar

9 Ibid, pp. 126–7.

10 The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1978).Google Scholar

11 Ibid, p. 113.

12 This is one of the central themes of Chapter 4 of Huntington's Political Order.Google Scholar

13 Vargas was, in any case, a civilian. The fragmented and disparate nature of the Argentine military during this period is described in Potash, Robert, The Army and Politics in Argentina (Stanford Univ. Press, 1969).Google Scholar

14 Compare and contrast Stepan, The Stare and Society… with Philip, G., The Rise and Fall of the Peruvian Military Radicals (London, Athlone Press for the Institute of Latin American Studies, 1978). While there are some significant differences of emphasis here, both writers agree that CAEM itself had little to say about popular participation. Stepan (p. 142) concludes that ‘Virtually none of this (Velasco's) programme is pre-figured in the pre-1968 (CAEM) articles’.Google Scholar

15 Ibid, p. 92, on Ongana's Argentina, says: ‘From the beginning, key civilian allies as well as some major military factions, such as that led by General Lanusse, had serious reservations about General Onganía's corporatist designs for Argentina. As the design became more explicit, and as civilian opposition grew, the division within the military grew apace’. As for Bolivia under Torres in 1970, Stepan says (p. 111) that ‘the organizational unity of the coercive elite was probably so low that it alone would have proved decisive even if the other variables were favourable’. Stepan attributes Bolivian disunity to a lack of ‘prior ideological and institutional preparation for the installation attempt’, but the argument here is that what the military institution and its higher education offer is scarcely preparation.Google Scholar

16 Fitch, J. S., The Military Coup d'Etat as a Political Process: Ecuador, 1948–1966 (Baltimore, Univ. of John Hopkins Press, 1977), pp. 140–1.Google Scholar

17 Stepan, A., ‘The New Professionalism of Internal Warfare and Military Role Expansion’, in his Authoritarian Brazil, p. 58.Google Scholar

18 O'Donnell, G., ‘Modernisation and Military Coups: Theory, Comparison and the Argentine Case’, in Lowenthal, A., Armies and Politics in Latin America (New York, Holmes & Meier, 1976), p. 206.Google Scholar

19 Villanueva, V. makes this point very well in a Peruvian context. ‘CAEM thus rationalised the old rejection of civilian life by the soldier’. Villanueva, El CAEM y la revolución de la fuerza armada (Lima, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1972), p. 170.Google Scholar

20 Although Huntington in Political Order shows clearly that more personalist military regimes were also bad at transferring real power.Google Scholar