CdT-ch01-definition

Chapter 1 What Is the Coup d’État? I shall be sorry to commence the era of peace by a coup d’état such as that I had in contemplation. —Duke of Wellington, 1811 … no other way of salvation remained except for the army’s intervention … —Constantine Kollias, April 21, 1967, Athens Though the term coup d’état has been used for more than three centuries, the feasibility of the coup derives from a comparatively recent development: the rise of the modern state with its professional bureaucracy and standing armed forces. The power of the modern state largely depends on this permanent machinery, which, with its archives, files, records, and officials, can follow intimately and, if it so desires, control the activities of lesser organizations and individuals. “Totalitarian” states merely use more fully the detailed and comprehensive information available to most states, however “democratic”: the instrument is largely the same, though it is used differently. The growth of modern state bureaucracies has two implications that are crucial for the feasibility of the coup: the emergence of clear distinctions between the permanent machinery of state and the political leadership, and the fact that state bureaucracies have structured hierarchies with definite chains of command. The distinction between the bureaucrat as an employee of the state and as a personal servant of the ruler is a new one, and both the British and the American systems show residual features of the earlier structure.a The importance of this development lies in the fact that if the bureaucrats are linked to the leadership, an illegal seizure of power must take the form of a “Palace Revolution,” which essentially concerns the manipulation of the person of the ruler. That ruler may be forced to accept new policies or new advisers, or may be killed or held captive; but whatever happens, the Palace Revolution can only be conducted from the “inside,” and by “insiders.” An insider might be the commander of the palace guard, as in ancient Rome or the Ethiopia of the 1960s, and if the dynastic system is preserved, the aim is to replace the unwanted ruler with a more malleable descendant. The coup is a much more democratic affair. It can be conducted from the “outside” and operates in the area outside the government but within the state— the area formed by the permanent, professional civil service, the armed forces, and the police. The aim is to detach the permanent employees of the state from the political leadership, and usually this cannot be done if the two are linked by political, ethnic, or traditional loyalties. In the last dynasty of Imperial China, as in present-day African states, it was primarily an ethnic bond that secured the loyalty of the state apparatus. The Manchu dynasty was careful to follow native Chinese customs and it employed Han Chinese in the civil service at all levels, but the crucial posts in the high magistracy and the army were filled by the descendants of the Jurchens who had entered China with their chiefs, the founders of the dynasty. Similarly, African rulers typically appoint members of their own tribe to the key posts in the armed forces, police, and security services. When a party machine controls civil-service appointments, either as part of a more general totalitarian control or because of a very long period in office (as in postwar Italy till the late 1980s), political associates are appointed to the senior levels of the bureaucracy, partly in order to protect the regime and partly to ensure the sympathetic execution of policies. In the Communist countries of yesteryear, all senior jobs were, of course, held by party apparatchiks. • • • Saudi Arabia provides an instance of “traditional bonds.”b In this case, the lack of modern know-how on the part of the traditional tribal affiliates of the royal house has meant that what could not be done individually has been done organizationally. The modern army, manned by some 100,000 unreliable city dwellers, is outnumbered by the 125,000 or so enrolled in the “White Army” of the Bedouin—or at least nominally Bedouin—followers of the Saudis; officially known as the Haras al Watani (Guard of the Homeland) or National Guard, the so-called White Army, it includes a tribal militia of some 25,000 officially designated the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Mechanized Brigade, based in the capital of Riyadh, and plainly meant as an anti-coup force. Such ethnic or traditional bonds between the political leadership and the heads of the bureaucracy and the armed forces are not typical of the modern state, while looser class or ethnic affiliations will tend to embrace groups large enough to be successfully infiltrated by the planners of the coup. As a direct consequence of its sheer size, in order to achieve even a minimum of efficiency, the state bureaucracy has to divide its work into clear-cut areas of competence, which are assigned to different departments. Within each department, there must be an accepted chain of command, and standard procedures have to be followed. Thus, a given piece of information or a given order is followed up in a stereotyped manner, and if the order comes from the appropriate source, at the appropriate level, it is carried out. In the more critical parts of the state apparatus, the armed forces, the police, and the security services, all these characteristics are intensified with an even greater degree of discipline and rigidity. The apparatus of the state is, therefore, to some extent a “machine” that will normally behave in a fairly predictable and automatic manner. A coup operates by taking advantage of this machinelike behavior both during and after the takeover—during the coup because it uses parts of the state apparatus to seize the controlling levers over the rest, and afterward because the value of the levers depends on the degree to which the state really functions as a machine. We will see that some states are so well organized that the machine is sufficiently sophisticated to exercise discretion, according to a given conception of what is proper and what is not, in the orders that it executes. This is the case in the most advanced countries, and, in such circumstances, a coup is very difficult to carry out. In a few states, the bureaucracy is so small that the apparatus is too simple and too intimately linked with the leadership to allow room for a coup, as is still the case perhaps in the ex-British protectorates of southern Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland. Fortunately, most states are between those two extremes, with bureaucratic machines both large and unsophisticated, and thus highly vulnerable to those who can identify and seize the right levers. One of the most striking developments of the twentieth century was the great decline in general political stability. Since the French Revolution, governments have been overthrown at an increasing pace.c In the nineteenth century, the French experienced two revolutions, and two regimes collapsed following military defeat. In 1958, the change of regime that brought Charles de Gaulle to enduring power was a blend of both those elements. Peoples everywhere have followed the French example, and the life span of regimes has tended to decrease while the life span of their subjects has increased. This contrasts sharply with the relative attachment to the system of constitutional monarchy displayed in the nineteenth century: when Greeks, Bulgarians, and Romanians secured their freedom from the Turkish colonial system, they immediately went over to Germany in order to shop around for a suitable royal family. Crowns, flags, and decorations were designed and purchased from reputable (English) suppliers; royal palaces were built; and where possible, hunting lodges, royal mistresses, and a local aristocracy were provided as fringe benefits. Twentieth-century peoples have, on the other hand, shown a marked lack of interest in monarchies and their paraphernalia; when the British kindly provided them with a proper royal family, unhappy Iraqis made numerous efforts to dispense with it before finally succeeding by massacre in 1958. Military and other right-wing forces have, meanwhile, tried to keep up with violent mass movements, using their own illegal methods to seize power and overthrow regimes. Why did the regimes of the twentieth century prove to be so fragile? It is, after all, paradoxical that this fragility increased, while the established procedures for securing changes in government were becoming more flexible. The political scientist will reply that, although the procedures became more flexible, the pressures for change were also becoming stronger, and the increase in flexibility did not keep up with the increased social and economic stresses.d Violent methods are generally used when legal methods of securing a governmental change are useless because they are either too rigid—as in the case of ruling monarchies where the ruler actually controls policy formation—or not rigid enough. It was once remarked, for example, that the throne of Russia was, until the seventeenth century, neither hereditary nor elective but “occupative.” The long series of abdications forced by the great Boyar-landlords and by the streltsý, the Kremlin palace guards, had weakened the hereditary principle, so that whoever took the throne became czar—precedence by birth counted for little. Some contemporary republics have ended up in this position, which comes about when a long series of illegal seizures of power leads to a decay of the legal and political structures needed to produce new governments. Thus, Syria went through more than a dozen coups before the Assad family dynasty was established by Hafez al-Assad’s 1970 coup, and the provisions for open general elections, written in the Hourani constitution, could no longer be applied because the necessary supervisory machinery decayed and disappeared. Assuming, however, that there is an established procedure for changing the leadership, then all other methods must fall within some category of illegality. What we call theme depends on what side we are on, but, skipping some of the details, we use one of the following terms: Revolution The action is conducted, initially at any rate, by uncoordinated popular masses, and it aimsf at changing the social and political structures, as well as the personalities in the leadership. The term revolution has gained a certain popularity, and many coups are graced with it because of the implication that it was “the people” rather than a few plotters who did the whole thing. Thus, the obscure aims Abd al-Karīm Qāsim had in mind when he overthrew the Iraqi regime of King Faisal II and Prime Minister Nuri es-Said are locally known as the “sacred principles of the July 14th Revolution.” Civil War Civil war is outright warfare between elements of the armed forces and/or the population at large. The term is perpetually unfashionable: whenever there is a civil war, all sides typically deny its existence, variously passing it off as an international war (such as the “War between the States” of the Confederacy) or, more often, as a foreign aggression, though in Franco’s Spain, the civil war of 1936–1939 was always la cruzada—“the crusade.” Pronunciamiento This is an essentially Spanish and South American version of the military coup d’état, but many recent African coups have also taken this particular form. In its original nineteenth-century Spanish version, it was a highly ritualized process: first came the trabajos (literally, “the works”), in which the opinions of army officers were sounded. The next step was the compromisos, in which commitments were made and rewards promised; then came the call for action and, finally, the appeal to the troops to follow their officers in rebellion against the government. The pronunciamiento was often a liberal rather than a reactionary phenomenon, and the theoretical purpose of the takeover was to ascertain the “national will”—a typically liberal concept. Later, as the army became increasingly right wing while Spanish governments became less so, the theory shifted from the neoliberal “national will” to the neoconservative “real will” theory. The latter postulates the existence of a national essence, a sort of permanent spiritual structure, which the wishes of the majority may not always express. The army was entrusted with the interpretation and preservation of this “essential Spain” and the obligation to protect it against the government and, if need be, against the people. The pronunciamiento was organized and led by a particular army leader, but it was carried out in the name of the entire officer corps; unlike the putsch, which is carried out by a faction within the army, or the coup, which can also be executed by civilians using some army units, the pronunciamiento leads to a takeover by the army as a whole. Many African takeovers, in which the army has participated as a whole, were, therefore, very similar to the classic pronunciamiento. Putsch Essentially a wartime or immediately postwar phenomenon, a putsch is attempted by a formal body within the armed forces under its appointed leadership. The Kornilov putsch is a clear example: Lavr Kornilov, a general in charge of an army group in northern Russia, attempted to seize the then Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in order to establish a “fighting” regime that would prosecute the war. (Had he succeeded, the city would, perhaps, have borne his name instead of Lenin—as it did until 1991.) Liberation A state may be said (by supporters of the change) to be liberated when its government is overthrown by foreign military or diplomatic intervention. A classic case of this was the installation of the Communist leadership in Romania in 1947. The USSR forced the then King Michael to accept a new Cabinet by threatening direct military force by the Soviet army. War of National Liberation, Insurgency, etc. In this form of internal conflict, the aim of the initiating party is not to seize power within the state but rather to set up a rival state structure. This can be politically, ethnically, or religiously based, as with the Taliban, whose aim is an Afghanistan wholly converted to their own Deobandi,g or Wahhabi Islam, which contrives to be both the official state religion of Saudi Arabia and a rigorously fanatical ideology that denies any legitimacy whatever to any other form of Islam, let alone non-Muslim faiths. As for secessionist insurgencies, they are necessarily ethnically based— though ethnicity can be all in the mind, as with Eritreans and Ethiopians, as with the Kurds of Iraq, as well as Iran and Turkey, the Somalis of Kenya and Ethiopia, the Karen people in Burma, and, formerly, the Nagas of India. The Definition of the Coup d’État A coup d’état involves some elements of all these different methods by which power can be seized, but, unlike most of them, the coup is not assisted by the intervention of the masses or by any large-scale form of combat by military forces. The assistance of these forms of direct force would no doubt make it easier to seize power, but it would be unrealistic to think that they would be available to the organizers of a coup. Because we will not be in charge of the armed forces, we cannot hope to start the planning of a coup with sizeable military units already under our control, nor will the pre-coup government usually allow us to carry out the propaganda and organization necessary to make effective use of the “broad masses of the people.” A second distinguishing feature of a coup is that it does not imply any particular political orientation. Revolutions are usually leftist, while the putsch and the pronunciamiento are usually initiated by right-wing forces. A coup, however, is politically neutral, and there is no presumption that any particular policies will be followed after the seizure of power. It is true that many coups have been of a decidedly right-wing character, but there is nothing inevitable about that.h If a coup does not make use of the masses, or of warfare, what instrument of power will enable it to seize control of the state? The short answer is that the power will come from the state itself. The long answer makes up the bulk of this book. The following is our formal and functional definition of a coup: A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder.

a In Britain, there is the constitutional fiction that civil servants—as their name implies—are the servants of the Crown. In the United States, while the days when party hacks moved en masse to Washington after an election victory are long past, many top administrative positions are still given to political associates rather than left to professionals. b The bonds are religious in origin, since the Saudi royal house is the traditional promoter of the extremely strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. c Historically speaking, the trend was initiated by the American Revolution; its impact on the world at large was, however, attenuated by America’s distance and exotic nature. d Perhaps the ultimate source of destabilizing pressures has been the spectacular progress of scientific discovery and the resultant technological change. This is, however, a problem far beyond the scope of this book. e The equation “Insurgency = Terrorism = War of National Liberation” is particularly familiar. f In the initial stages, no aims are conceptualized, but the scope of the action may be clearly perceived. g Deoband is an inoffensive Indian town north of Delhi, as well as the seat of the immense Darul Uloom Muslim school, which teaches a rigorously extremist Wahhabi Islam (of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792), itself a revival of the maximalist Jihadist doctrine of Aḥmad ibn Taymiyyah. This brand of Islam was imported from northeast Arabia at its 1866 foundation, and its disciples have started perhaps 30,000 schools around the world. Its uncompromising fanaticism (it was a Darul Uloom sentence that authorized the Taliban’s destruction of the colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001) is rewarded by tax- exempt status in India—all is forgiven of Darul Uloom because its extremism includes an anti-Pakistan stance, albeit motivated by its belief that all of India should be Muslim-ruled (!). h The Greek coup of 1967 reinforced this image of the “reactionary coup,” but the Syrian coup of 1966, the Iraqi coup of 1958, and the Yemeni coup of 1962 were all essentially leftist, if hardly liberal or progressive.