CdT-ch02-when-practical

Chapter 2 When Is a Coup d’État Possible? The Bolsheviks have no right to wait for the Congress of Soviets … They must take power immediately … Victory is assured and there are nine chances out of ten that it will be bloodless … To wait is a crime against the revolution. —Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, October 1917 The process of decolonization that started soon after the end of the Second World War first doubled and then more than tripled the number of independent states, so that the opportunities open to us have expanded in a most gratifying manner. We have to recognize, however, that not all states make good targets for our attentions. There is nothing to prevent us from carrying out a coup in, say, the United Kingdom, but we would probably be unable to stay in power for more than a short time. The public and the bureaucracy have a basic understanding of the nature and legal basis of government, and they would react in order to restore a legitimate leadership. This reaction renders any initial success of the coup meaningless, and it would arise even though the pre-coup government may have been unpopular and the “new faces” may be attractive. The reaction would arise from the fact that a significant part of the population takes an active interest in political life—and regularly participates in it. This implies a recognition that the power of the government derives from its legitimate origin, and even those who have no reason to support the old guard have many good reasons to support the principle of legitimacy. We are all familiar with the periodic surveys which show that, say, 20 percent of the sample failed to correctly name the prime minister, and we know that a large part of the population has only the vaguest contact with politics. Nevertheless, in most developed countries, those who do take an active interest in politics form, in absolute terms, a very large group. Controversial policy decisions stimulate and bring to the surface this participation: pressure groups are formed, letters are sent to the press and the politicians, petitions and demonstrations are organized, and this adds up to a continuing dialogue between the rulers and the ruled. This dialogue does not depend necessarily on the existence of a formally democratic political system. Even in one-party states, where power is in the hands of a few self-appointed leaders, a muted but nevertheless active dialogue can take place. The higher organizations of the party can discuss policy decisions, and, in times of relative relaxation, the discussions extend to the larger numbers in the lower echelons and to publications reflecting different “currents”—though only within the wider framework of the accepted ideology and the broad policy decisions of the leadership. The value of the dialogue that takes place in nondemocratic states varies greatly. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, the Communist Party contrived to remain in control for decades while nevertheless functioning to an increasing extent as a semi-open forum for increas ingly free, increasingly wide-ranging debates on major political issues; the press, though unable to assert truly independent opinions, at least echoed those debates. In the process, while there was still no democracy, the population evolved from subjection to participation, learning to scrutinize and question orders instead of simply obeying them, so that they were increasingly likely to resist a coup. In the Arab world, by contrast, the nominal “ruling parties” that functioned from the 1960s—the Arab Socialist Union (ASU) of Egypt and the Ba‘ath Party of Syria and Iraq—very soon degenerated into mere rubber stamps for the ruling dictators, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Hafez al-Assad, and Saddam Hussein. As time went on, their pretended deference to party councils dissolved, but all along they had made every significant decision by themselves, while the parties could only cheer them on. (When the question came up of whether Egypt’s ASU-dominated National Assembly would accept Nasser’s withdrawal of his resignation following the June 1967 debacle known as the Six-Day War, an observer pointed out that the assembly “will jolly well do what it is told.”) With the Yugoslav Communist Party, the ASU, and the “ruling” Ba‘ath Party now but a memory, the very greatest of questions across the entire horizon of global politics is, of course, the future of the Zhōngguó Gòngchǎndǎng, the Communist Party of China. Until the 2012 appointment of Xi Jinping as party general secretary, president of the People’s Republic of China, and the chairman of the Central Military Commission (significantly the most powerful of all three), the party’s future seemed quite predictable: it was becoming a holding company for all the public wealth and much of the private wealth of China, whereby officials continued to receive their very modest salaries that did not exceed RMB 11,385 or US$1,854 per month in 2015, even in the very highest rank; meanwhile, the party officials collected large amounts in bribes, ensuring a degree of affluence even at the village level, rising to sometimes very great wealth at the top. (As a faithful fan of Beijing’s top discos, I grew accustomed to seeing the young sons of party officials driving up in their Ferraris and Lamborghinis.) But the continued transformation of the Communist Party of China into a megacorporation manned by the ambitious, duly rewarded with increasingly overt payoffs, was interrupted by the decision of Xi Jinping’s high-party colleagues to elevate him to a seat of unprecedented power. They did so, most likely, because they feared that the party’s further degeneration into an openly corrupt enterprise would lead to an outright collapse—the problem with bribes is that their distribution is very uneven, generating corrosive resentments and embarrassing leaks. As a result, Xi Jinping is left with the pretty problem of finding a substitute for both a putrefying ideology and the lost incentive of corruption, with only Han nationalism ready at hand. Still, for the time being, the Communist Party persists, as does subjection rather than citizenship. • • • A running dialogue between rulers and the ruled that precludes any coup can only exist if there is a large enough section of society that is sufficiently literate, well fed, and secure enough to talk back. Even then, certain conditions can lead to a deterioration of the relationship, and this sometimes generates sufficient apathy, or outright distrust of the regime to make a coup possible. The events of 1958 in France were marked by a formal adherence to the then constitutional rules but were, nevertheless, analogous to a coup. Twenty years of warfare, which had included the ignominious defeat of 1940, the German occupation, the installation of the authoritarian Vichy regime and, from 1946, long and losing colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, had thoroughly undermined the country’s democratic consensus. The continual changes of government had dissipated the interest and respect of most voters and left the bureaucracy leaderless because the complex business of the ministries could not be mastered by ministers who were only in power for months or weeks. The French army was left to fight the bitter Algerian war with little guidance from the Paris authorities because, more often than not, the ministries were too busy fighting for their survival in the assembly to worry about the other, bloodier, war. The cost of the Algerian war, in both money and lives, antagonized the general public from both the army and the government, and many of the French felt a growing fear and distrust of the army’s leadership, whose nationalist sentiments and martial ideology seemed alien to many of them—and against the spirit of the times. While the structures of political life under the Fourth Republic were falling apart, Charles de Gaulle, the grand heroic figure long in simulated retirement, gradually emerged as the only alternative to the chaos that threatened. When the army in Algeria appeared to be on the verge of truly drastic action and yet another government was on the verge of collapse, de Gaulle was recalled. He was able to impose his own terms. On May 29, 1958, when René Coty, the last president of the Fourth Republic, called on him to form a government (which was invested on June 1), de Gaulle was given extraordinary powers to rule by decree for six months and to write a new constitution. Under the terms of this constitution, presented for consultation in mid-August and approved by referendum in September, elections were held in which de Gaulle’s newly formed Union for the New Republic (UNR Party) won a majority. On December 21, de Gaulle became the first president of the Fifth Republic. He was an American-style president with wide executive powers, but without an American- style Congress to restrain them. By 1958, France had become politically inert and, therefore, ripe for a coup. The circumstances were unique, of course, but while the political structures of all highly developed countries may seem too resilient to make them suitable targets, if acute enough, even temporary factors can weaken them fatally. Of those temporary factors, the most common are: (a) severe and prolonged economic crisis, with large-scale unemployment or runaway inflation; (b) a long and unsuccessful war or a major defeat, whether military or diplomatic; (c) chronic instability under a multiparty system. Italy is an interesting example of an economically developed, socially dynamic, but politically fragile country. Between 1948 and circa 1990, i.e., the end of the Cold War, the persistence of a large Communist Party that opposed Italy’s alignment with the West (if less vehemently after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968) forced the moderate majority to keep voting for the increasingly corrupt Democrazia Cristiana (DC), which itself ruled with the smaller but even more corrupt Socialist Party (its leader, Bettino Craxi, would die a fugitive outlaw in Tunisia). Because even the two parties did not attain a parliamentary majority, every government required a broader coalition whose formation amounted to an intricate puzzle: the DC was the largest party, but with only 30 percent of the votes, it could not rule alone; even with the Socialists, it only reached the 40 percent mark. If it brought in the two small left-of-center parties (the Social Democrats and the Republicans), the right-of-center parties—including the MSI neo-Fascists—would not join in; but, if the latter were invited to join the coalition, the left would break away and no government could be formed. In the end, of course, votes were procured one way or another, mostly by handing over control of parts of the vast array of state-owned businesses (everything from oil and gas to ice cream) in exchange for parliamentary support. The votes, however, did not stay bought for long, and coalitions had short lives: between 1945 and 1994, there were 33 governments, until the 1994 election victory of the television and advertising tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, whose brand-new party, Forza Italia, was originally formed by its own employees and the Milan football team’s fan club. While the DC was unable to modernize Italy’s increasingly outdated state institutions, it nevertheless presided over decades of economic growth. The combination of Communist and Catholic anticapitalism made it impossible to introduce either American-style “hire and fire” labor flexibility or German-style economic discipline enforced by sophisticated trade unionists; but the DC had its own remedy: every time wage rates were pushed too high, it devalued the lira to restore the competitiveness of Italian exports. Equally, the inability to make the state efficient was offset by the lax enforcement of tax collection; thus, Italian entrepreneurs ill served by an inefficient state only had to pretend that they were paying their taxes. First one and then the other of these practices came to an end once Italy adopted the common European currency, the euro, in 1999 prohibiting competitive devaluations, and since then its economy has stagnated, with little or no growth, and chronically high unemployment. Politically, on the other hand, Berlusconi’s combination of (a) economic power (his enterprises could offer very many jobs, consultancies, and contracts), (b) media influence (through the control of publishing houses, newspapers, magazines, and three television channels), and (c) of course electoral power (through the votes he won by vigorous and well-organized campaigning) ensured his political preponderance from 1994 until 2011, even when out of office; as of 2015, the government of Matteo Renzi is sustained by a parliamentary majority that still requires Berlusconi’s votes. Berlusconi’s leading role in Italy’s public life over more than twenty years has coexisted with the most blatant conflicts of interest (he was operating state- regulated businesses), a long series of trials for tax evasion and vote-buying, and numerous personal scandals arising from his delight in cavorting with young or very young prostitutes. Hence, his prominence in Italian politics is quite enough to describe the country’s political order as fragile—he could not have survived in a fully functioning democracy that requires of its leaders some semblance of discretion in their personal conduct and the careful concealment of significant conflicts of interest. The Preconditions of the Coup In 1958, France was a country where the dialogue between the government and the people had temporarily broken down. But much of the world’s population lives in countries where a dialogue cannot take place at all. If we draw up a list of those countries that have experienced coups, we shall see that, though their ethnic and historical backgrounds differ very considerably, they share certain social and economic characteristics. By isolating these factors, we can develop a set of indicators that, when applied to the basic socioeconomic data of a country, will show whether it will make a good target for a coup. Economic Backwardness In countries without a developed economy and the prosperity that accompanies it, the general condition of the population is characterized by disease, illiteracy, high birth and death rates, and periodic hunger. Average citizens in this state of deprivation are virtually cut off from the wider society outside their village and clan. They have little to sell. They have little with which to buy. They cannot read the forms, signposts, and newspapers through which society speaks. They cannot write, nor can they afford to travel, so that a cousin living as a city dweller might as well be on the moon. They have no way of knowing whether a particular tax is legal or merely the exaction of the village bureaucrat; no way of knowing about the social and economic realities that condition the policies that they are asked to applaud. Their only source of contact with the outside world are mass media that may be governmental for all they know, but in any case they do know from past experience that mass media are invariably biased in some way, and may be outright deceitful. The complexity of the outside world and the mistrust that it inspires are such that the defenseless and insecure villagers retreat into the safe and well-known world of the family, clan, and tribe. They know that the traditional chiefs of tribe and clan prey on their very limited wealth, and they often know that their mutual interests are diametrically opposed; nevertheless, the tribe and clan represent a source of guidance and security that the state is too remote and too mysterious to offer. The city dweller has escaped the crushing embrace of traditional society, but not the effects of ignorance and insecurity. In such conditions, most people are politically passive, and their relationship with the political leadership is one-way only. The leadership speaks to them, lectures them, and rouses hopes or fears, but never listens; the bureaucracy taxes them, bullies them, may take their sons away to serve in the army, and can take their labor for the roads, but gives very little in return. At best, in honest regimes, a dam or highway is being built somewhere, far away from their village. Such projects will not bring them any direct benefit, will not lift them from their misery, but at least they are a consolation, a hope of a better future for their sons. Elsewhere, the poor are even denied the consolation of hope—their taxes have been spent on palaces, weapons, imported champagne, and all the other bizarre and whimsical things that politicians and their wives absolutely need. The urban poor—living by expedients, barely surviving in the day-to-day struggle for the necessities of life —are treated to the spectacle of the cocktail parties, limousines, and grandiose villas of the ruling elite.a The mass of the people is politically passive, but it is a passivity of enforced silence, not inertia. All the time the terrible anger caused by deprivation and injustice is there, and, at times, it explodes. The mob may not have a clear political purpose, but its actions do have political consequences. The 1952 coup in Egypt, which led to the end of King Farouk’s “white telephone” (phony-European) monarchy and the rise of the Nasser regime, followed over seventy years by the presidencies of Anwar Sadat and then Hosni Mubarak, was preceded by one of these sudden explosions. “Black Saturday,” as it became known, January 26, 1952, was the appointed date of an organized demonstration against the presence and activities of the British forces in the Canal Zone. The poor of the city streamed out from their hovels and joined the procession, among them the agitators of the Muslim Brotherhood, who incited the crowd to arson and violence against the infidel and all his sinful doings. The agitators succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. The poor seized the opportunity to destroy the facilities of the rich: hotels, department stores, Cairo’s aristocratic Turf Club, and the liquor stores and fashion shops in the center of the city, which was given the appearance of a battlefield in one short day; only the wealthy suffered, as these were places that had always been closed to the poor. The organizers of the original demonstration had no wish to destroy their own favorite gathering places; the nationalists did not want to deprive Egypt of the 12,000 dwellings and businesses that were destroyed. They spoke of anarchy, intrigue, and madness. For the poor, however, it was a general election: without voting rights, they resorted to voting with fire. Apart from the violent and inarticulate action of the mob in response to some simple and dramatic issue, there is no arguing with the power of the state; there is no interest in, and scrutiny of, the day-to-day activities of government and bureaucracy. Thus, if the bureaucracy issues orders, they are either obeyed or evaded, but never challenged or examined. All power, all participation, is in the hands of the small educated elite. They are literate, even educated, more certainly well fed and, therefore, radically different from the vast majority of their countrymen. The masses recognize this and accept the elite’s monopoly of power; unless some unbearable exaction leads to desperate revolt, they will accept its policies. Equally, they will accept a change in government, whether legal or otherwise. After all, it is merely another lot of “them” taking over. Thus, after a coup, the village police officer comes to read out a proclamation, the radio says that the old government was corrupt and that the new one will provide food, health, schooling, and sometimes even glory. The majority of the people will neither believe nor disbelieve these promises or accusations, but merely feel that it is all happening somewhere else, far away. This lack o