The Project-State and Its Rivals by Charles S. Maier

Author:Charles S. Maier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

When Governance Did Not Suffice

With political parties—democratic and authoritarian alike—less capable of providing order or satisfying mass demands, centrist and conservative voices needed to regain control of the policy landscape, at home or internationally, as they had in the 1920s. They could do so by capturing the state, legally through elections or extralegally through military takeover. In some societies, conservative forces, fearful of social revolution and economic radicalism, which they simplified as Moscow-inspired communism, felt they could not tolerate party competition and imposed military dictatorship. In Latin America, the familiar recourse to military intervention became particularly tempting. Following an electoral victory by the left in 1964, the Brazilian military had stepped in to oust President Jo ã o Goulart in 1965 and imposed a harsh dictatorship that would last until the early 1980s. Chile had the most “European” political system, with analogues of the European left and right contesting elections. But in Latin American tradition, it maintained a military that played a far larger political role. Following moderate Christian Democratic electoral victories in the mid-1960s, an avowedly Marxist admirer of Fidel Castro, Salvador Allende, was voted into power in 1968. His policies rapidly polarized the country, which had a strong middle class that resisted his turn toward socialism. The private entrepreneurs, spearheaded by the truck drivers who plied the long roads that knit together Chile’s long north-south geography, and supported by the American administration and pre sumably intelligence, connived in the seizure of power in 1973 by General Augusto Pinochet and the military. Allende died fighting off the attack on the presidential palace: another hero for a left-wing pantheon, another death in the minds of students and the left to chalk up to the machinations of the Central Intelligence Agency. In Argentina three years later, the military returned to claim power from the widow of Juan Per ó n, who had returned to power for the third time in 1973. The Argentine generals and admirals, like the Chileans, instituted a brutal repression against any suspected “left” elements in the media or among the students. Thousands of suspected radicals were imprisoned, tortured, and often made to “disappear,” sometimes as bodies dropped into the sea. Uruguay did not fail to be inspired by its neighbors especially after confronting an urban guerrilla movement. Landlocked Paraguay had long had a military dictator and did not need the prompting of its neighbors. By the late 1970s, the Southern Cone seemed safely in the hands of ultraright armies, whose military activity was directed only inward. But like the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, they would all become vulnerable less to a revolutionary opposition than an inner loss of purpose and conviction.

In the wake of the civil rights movements, followed by waves of feminist mobilization, a growing insistence on acceptance of open homosexual relationships, and recognition of the needs of the disabled, a culture of rights would liberalize Western legal systems from the 1960s on. Divorce and abortion became lawful alternatives even in Catholic redoubts such as Italy and Spain.

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