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The military dictatorships: aspects and political legacy

In the period between 1945 and 1976, there were numerous military coups around the entire world. In Latin America, only Mexico and Costa Rica remained unscathed. In the same period, the half part of Asian states and two-thirds of the Middle East and North Africa countries experienced the military intervention; only since 1963, after decolonization, uprisings proliferated, carried out by officers of a part of the countries of Sub-Saharan Africa region1. Even in Europe, this particular experience was experimented by the Greece of the Colonels in the seventies, and

Jaruzelski’s Poland in the eighties. Although diffusion has been reduced, nowadays these cases continue to happen, as has recently been, for example, in Mali or Egypt.

The intervention of the militaries in politics has undoubtedly marked the history of many countries in the Twentieth Century. This fact has been considered negatively by Marxism, which has interpreted the ‘military coup’ as the immediate solution to the empowerment of the working class, the left parties or the popular sectors in general2, and from the liberal perspective, the deviation of the liberal constitutional model3; in contrast, other interpretations has identified the military intervention as an initiative to the modernization, able to develop and transform politic systems considerate underdeveloped4.

Recently this experience has been associated with social mobilization and the essence of consolidated political institutions, but also to situations characterized by ethnic divisions, localisms5 or governments unable to respond to the economic problems6. What happens from the institutional and legislative point of view during the management of a military control? Should we consider a dictatorship as a digression in the transition from a civilian government to another and are its consequences temporary? This criterion should be questioned7?

                                                                                                                         1 PASQUINO, Gianfranco, Introduzione, in NORDLINGER, Eric A., I nuovi pretoriani, Milano, ETAS, 1978 [original ed., Soldiers in Politics: Military Coups and Governments, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1976]. 2 VITALE, Luis, Interpretacion Marxista de La Historia de Chile, 3 voll., Santiago de Chile, LOM Ediciones, 2011. 3 NEEDLER, Martin C., «Political Development and Military Intervention in Latin America» in American Political Science Review, 60, 1966, pp. 616-626; McALISTER, Lyne N., «Recent Research and Writing on the Role of the Military in Latin America», in Latin American Research Review, 2, 3/1966, pp. 5-36. 4 HUNTINGTON, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1968; BIENEN, Henry (ed.), The Military and Modernization, Chicago, Aldine, 1971. 5 JACKMAN, Robert W., «The predictability of coups d’etat: A model with African data», in The American Political Science Review, 72, 1978, pp. 1262-1275. 6 JOHNSON, Thomas H., SLATER, Robert O., McGOWAN, Pat, «Explaining African military coups d’etat, 1960-1982», in The American Political Science Review, 78, 1984, pp. 622-640. 7 JOHNSON, John J., The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1962.

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From these questions, Diacronie seeks to address the problem of military governments and their political legacy to successors, focusing on:

1. The phenomenon of politicization of the officer corps once staged the coup; in particular the

analysis of the groups or lobbies8 that preserve civil power during and after the coup, and the problem of the relationship between civil and military in this context9.

2. The ways in which the military regime consolidates itself and use or eliminate existing institutions10; and the respective management of institutional transition of these regimes in the way to develop democratic guidelines.

3. Long and short terms effects over the political control practiced by militaries, understanding changes in the institutional structure of the State or associated to different legislative aspects.

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                                                                                                                         8 NORDLINGER, Eric A., Soldiers in politics. Military coups and governments, cit.; HYMAN, Elizabeth H., «Soldiers in Politics: New Insights on Latin American Armed Forces», in Political Science Quarterly, 87, 1972, pp. 401-418. 9 HUNTINGTON, Samuel P., The Soldier and the State. The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1957. 10 STEPAN, Alfred, Rethinking military politics. Brazil and the Southern Cone, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1988.