Revolutionaries (33 page)

Whatever the social composition of such officer corps, the tendency to military rule reflects not so much their character as the absence of a stable political structure. Why is it less common in communist states, some of which were equally ‘backward' before the revolution? Essentially because genuine social revolutions set up both a convincing legitimation of civilian power – the movement of the masses itself and the organizations (parties, etc.) which claim to speak in its name – and also because they immediately set about constructing a machine of government which reaches down to the grass roots. The army which emerges from them therefore tends to be not the creator but the creation of the regime or the party, and it is merely one among several institutions created by it. More; it has two primary functions within it, both of which keep it busy: defence and mass education. This does not entirely eliminate the danger. There are special cases such as Algeria where the ‘movement' was not primary, or rather where the ‘army' coexisted with it independently for long periods before independence, or in Bolivia, where the ‘movement', which had largely destroyed the old army in the revolution of 1952, could not retain control of its own army, perhaps chiefly because both came to depend largely on the United States. But on the whole – and this applies to regimes like the Mexican which, though non-communist, are the outcome of genuine social revolution – the army is or becomes subordinate to the party or the civilian organization.
³

Most of the Third World, however, has not achieved political independence by means of mass movements or social revolutions, Much of it did not even contain the initial bases for a modern state, and indeed, as in so much of Africa, the main function of the new state apparatus was as a mechanism for the production of a national bourgeoisie or ruling class, which previously barely existed. In such countries the legitimation of the state is uncertain. In nineteenth-century Latin America as in mid-twentieth century Africa it may not even be clear what territory the state should occupy, its frontiers being determined by historical accident, such as the administrative divisions of former colonial rule, former imperial rivalry, or economic accidents such as the distribution of large estates. Only military power is real, because the least efficient and experienced of armies is efficient enough to surround the presidential palace and occupy radio station and airport without calling upon any other force, and there is rarely another force to call on, or if there is, the government may hesitate to call upon it. Even that power is often not very real. As the failed coups in parts of former British and French Africa show, a very small European force can often neutralize it. (Conversely, many a putsch has been due in recent years to the official or unofficial encouragement by outside powers.) But broadly speaking the Third World is putschist, because it has had no real revolutions, and today more putschist than ever because both local forces and outside powers wish to avoid revolutions. The much rarer case where soldiers take over because there is a basis for revolution, but no adequate civilian force to carry it out, will be considered below.

Military politics, in advanced countries as in the Third World, is therefore not a special kind of politics, but something that fills the vacuum left by the absence of ordinary politics. It may establish or re-establish ordinary politics when, for one reason or another, these have broken down. At worst they prevent social revolution without putting anything in its place except the hope
that sooner or later an alternative solution to it will turn up. This is the case of so many Latin American military regimes – the Argentinian and Brazilian, or of the Polish ‘colonels' between the wars, and the Greek one at present. If the army coups are lucky, the wheels of the economy will turn, the mills of administration will grind on, and the successful generals can retire to the sidelines or sit out their prolonged term as presidents, benefactors or liberators of their country. If they are less lucky, there may be a slump in primary commodity prices and the wheels of the economy stop, i.e. the taxes stop coming in, the debt cannot be serviced. This has put paid to quite a few military rulers in their time, as in the mid–1950s. If the soldiers are even less lucky, and there is no economy or institutional apparatus behind them, even military government will have no stability. It will last until the next colonel sees his chance to speculate on the big race. The most backward and dependent countries have had the most persistent history of short-lived military regimes.

One reason for this rather negative character of military politics is, that army officers rarely wish to govern themselves, or are competent at any activity except soldiering, and sometimes not even at that. The increasing professionalization and technification of modern armed forces has not substantially changed this. Their qualification and training as a group are wrong for government. A glance at the mess the Brazilian officers made after 1964 when they actually set about administering or purging the administration, is sufficient to prove the point. The normal course of military politics is therefore to decide who is to be the government and then find some civilians to actually carry it on, reserving the right to throw them out when they cease to give satisfaction while perhaps – indeed probably – making the leader of the military coup president or premier. But there may be situations when a more positive role is forced upon them.

These are comparatively rare. ‘Nasserism' – i.e. military coups
which genuinely function as revolutions, or at least as major movements of fundamental social reform, must not be confused with the frequent sympathy of young officers in backward countries for movements of the left – radical, nationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-landlord, etc., or even with their readiness to make political alliances with various sections of the left. The view, widely held in the United States in recent decades, that soldiers are more reliable as well as stable governments of satellite states from an imperial point of view than civilians, is based partly on the belief, taken from western experience, that they are a conservative group, partly on the belief that foreign military advisers and training provide not only technical education but effective political indoctrination, but chiefly perhaps on the capacity of imperial states to bribe them with supplies of the kind of modern equipment and know-how which satisfies the self-esteem of armed forces. In fact it is far from justified. Some of the more revolutionary elements in local armed forces have actually emerged, in Latin America, from among the local military elite trained (e.g. as counter-insurgent Rangers) by the North Americans, as in Guatemala in the middle 1960s.
⁴
In so far as the military is a force for ‘modernization' and social renovation, it is pro-western only so long as the western model appears likely to solve their countries' problems, and this now appears increasingly unlikely in most countries.

Nevertheless, the converse belief, which relatively weak left-wing movements have sometimes held (e.g. at times in Brazil and Venezuela) that the army, or sections of it, can be relied on to bring them to power, is equally ill-advised. Revolutions are rarely successful (unless the result of protracted guerrilla wars) without the breakdown, abstention or partial support of the armed forces, but revolutionary movements which rely
on army coups to bring them to power are likely to be disappointed.

We are still left with a few cases of genuinely innovatory soldiers' regimes – Nasser's Egypt, Peru since 1960, perhaps Ataturk's Turkey. We may surmise that they occur in countries in which the necessity of social revolution is evident, where several of the objective conditions of it are present, but also where the social bases or institutions of civilian life are too feeble to carry it out. The armed forces, being in some cases the only available force with the capacity to take and carry out decisions, may have to take the place of the absent civilian forces, even to the point of turning their officers into administrators. They will of course think of doing so only if the officer corps consists of young radical or ‘modernizing' members of a discontented middle stratum, and if these contain a sufficiently large number of literate and technically qualified men. There are even today armed forces which would be as incompetent to run the affairs of a modern state (which is different from ruling over those who do) as the Ostrogothic warriors were to run those of the Roman Empire. Still, though the case is rare, armed forces which attempt to function as revolutionaries are not unknown. It does not follow that civilian revolutionaries will welcome their efforts. And though the net results of their efforts may be substantial – it is virtually impossible to think of Egypt, Peru and Turkey as returning to their respective old regimes – they are unlikely to be as radical as the results of the genuine social revolutions. Army radicalism remains a second-best choice; acceptable only because it is better to fill a political vacuum than to leave it. There is, moreover, at present no evidence to show that it can establish a permanent political solution.

To sum up, military intervention in politics is a symptom of social or political failure. In the developed countries it is a symptom of the breakdown – temporary in the most favourable
cases – of the normal process of politics, or a sign that the
status quo
can no longer contain disruptive or revolutionary pressures. If it were to occur in communist countries, it would also be a sign of analogous crises, but there is too little evidence to gauge how well the political structure of such countries could resist it. In the Third World it is a fairly safe symptom of an incomplete or aborted revolution.

There are two possible qualifications of this negative judgment. It is possible in non-revolutionary countries for military intervention to gain time, allowing an otherwise efficient economy and administration to proceed without disruption by political crisis. In underdeveloped countries it is possible for the military to replace, at least temporarily, the revolutionary party or movement. However, if it does so successfully it must sooner or later cease to be a military force and form itself or part of itself into a party, a movement, an administration. Both these cases are rare. In all other cases the political achievements of the military are negative. It can stop revolutions and overthrow governments, without putting anything in their place; not even – in spite of much talk among technocratic officers, ‘modernization' and ‘economic development'. It can establish order, but contrary to the Brazilian motto which has inspired many generations, ‘order' in this sense is generally incompatible with ‘progress'. It may not even outlast the general or the consortium of officers, which has restored it, for what one conspiracy of officers has achieved may tempt a succession of others.

The tragedy of the underdeveloped world in the 1950s and 1960s was that the United States and its allies, when it came to the point, preferred ‘order' to ‘progress' – Mobutu to Lumumba, Ky or Thieu to Ho-Chi-Minh, any Latin general to Fidel Castro. It is possible that the limitations of this policy have now become obvious, though one can hardly say that it has ceased to tempt governments which fear communism above all else. But in the meantime a large part of the globe has been turned into the
contemporary equivalent of the old banana republics of Latin America, and is likely to remain in this unhappy situation for a considerable time to come.

¹
This is not as impracticable as it might seem. Though only one state (Costa Rica) has actually abolished the army, Mexico has quietly reduced its armed forces to something like seventy thousand – for a country of perhaps fifty millions – with the result that it has not suffered from military coups since the 1930s.

²
José Luis Imaz,
Los Que Mandan
, Buenos Aires, 1968, p. 58.

³
The Mexican case is particularly interesting because the revolution was largely dominated by virtually independent insurrectionary generals, who were only eliminated as a serious political force in the course of perhaps twenty years, incidentally giving Mexico the benefit of a military budget of less than 1 per cent of the country's
GDP
in the 1960s – a lower percentage even than that of Uruguay.

⁴
Turcios Lima, the military chief of the
CP
guerrillas in that country, began his career as a Ranger officer.

Ever since Machiavelli intelligent observers have exploited one of the most effective stylistic devices of nonfiction, the contrast between the official versions and the realities of politics. It is an effective device for three reasons: because it is easy (all one has to do is use one's eyes), because political reality is notoriously at variance with the moral, constitutional or legalistic claptrap which surrounds political actions, and because, more surprisingly, the public can still be readily shocked by pointing this out. Mr Luttwack is obviously an intelligent and excellently informed observer.
¹
One suspects that, like Machiavelli himself, he enjoys truth not only because it is true but also because it shocks the naïve. He has therefore laid out his very able little book on the coup d'état as a manual for potential putschists.

In a way this is a pity, for it both diverts attention from the real interest of the work and somewhat biases his argument. Though it will no doubt be recommended reading in courses organized by the
CIA
or other bodies with an interest in the quick and efficient overthrow of inconvenient governments, it will not tell experts in the field – and in many countries these include every army and police officer from lieutenant upwards – much that they do not already know and practise, except perhaps to apply
some economic rationality to post-coup repression (see the useful Appendix A). Plotters with a literary turn of mind may also benefit from the author's concise, devastating, and very funny analysis of the different types of communiqué announcing that the country is about to be saved. But on the whole Luttwack's information, which has shock value in London or Washington, is common knowledge in Buenos Aires, Damascus, or even Paris, where people's reaction to the appearance of armoured cars at street corners is based on experience. Those who are most likely to make coups patently do not need Mr Luttwack to tell them how.