Armies in Politics

...In serving as a melting pot for all classes iti stratified populations, it offers opportunities for members of an inferior class to climb to the highest positions, the kind of opportunities offered by the Catholic Church in medieval Europe...

...One of the principal doctrinal points of liberal democracy is that the military must at all times be subordinated to the civilian authority of the government...

...It has an esprit de corps where national consciousness is hardly articulated and where centrifugal (for example, tribal) forces threaten unity...

...For Western ideals Western-type armies seem to be able to fight on the peripheries only: in Rhodesia, in Israel in Vietnam...

...This is an immemorial custom, hard to discard...

...The problem is not that foreign influences are evil things, rather that they allow a weak country no room for maneuver, no option, no opportunity to become an object of bidding by foreign powers...

...The repugnance intellectuals feel toward military regimes can be attributed to a number of causes, chief among them being that armies are reputedly "right-wing" with authoritarian, eventually even with fascist leanings...

...At present, of the three top men in the regime, one is the Communist Party chief, the other two are military men, the governor of Lisbon and the head of military security, both self-admitted Marxists...

...One can see, consequently, that it is hard to say whether the new military are on the Right or on the Left...

...This is, however, not the last word about Western armies...

...Indeed, we hear of military discontent with the state of affairs...

...It seems, then, that in the Western heartland countries the military has suffered the same fate as the government, the churches, the schools, the courts, and the families: an internal demobilization and loss of spirit...

...not only because the white man (or the Japanese businessman) evokes bad memories and a present political pressure, but also because he brings with him the rich man's comfortably liberal mentality...

...The test may not be decided until those who run Portugal have a better grasp than they now have of what will happen in Spain after Franco...

...Portugal is then a test case: how far to the Left, towards Marxism, can the military go...

...In a more industrialized nation the military could easily be absorbed in economic life...

...A wide belt of military regimes now stretches around the globe from Brazil to Indochina and covering almost all of Africa...

...The civilians are either corrupt or are partisans of alien systems whose implantation would bring not only foreign investment but, inevitably, foreign influence too...

...The military regard the Marxists as rivals in the sense also that the latter arrive with a ready-made and prestigious faith under whose pounding the fragile cohesion of the host country might dangerously totter...

...In spite of this theoretical abhorrence, mankind seems to have entered a new military era: armies took over in Ankara (1920), in Cairo (1952), in Athens (1967), in Lima (1968), in Montevideo (1972), in Santiago (1973), and in Addis Ababa and Lisbon (1974)—to mention only a few examples...

...The first appeals to them because it proposes collective effort, rapid development (at least on paper), and national discipline, attractive goals for the soldiers' own mentality and training...

...All this means that the Portuguese army has not said the last word yet about the future of its country and about partnership with the Communists...

...It is rather obvious that even in undemocratic regimes the military do not assume a political position unless there is a vacuum of power and authority...

...Medieval society had its heretical sects (outside both spiritual and temporal authority), post-Renaissance nations had internal ideological exiles, but in both instances the governments were strong and the spiritual power's support was not in question against those labelled "antisocial" or "antinational...

...Furthermore, the military officer in most lands has slipped into the charismatic role of the tribal chief and local elder...

...Yet this is not sufficient to see them as Party puppets, nor to predict that they will continue enjoying their military comrades' confidence...

...abolition or weakening of the parliamentary system...

...But the military equally fear a capitalist penetration...

...these men, even if many may be under arrest or in camps, cannot have vanished nor can the deeply patriotic spirit of the entire army have disappeared...

...In the lingo of the intelligentsia, these epithets denote an absence of any convictions or ideological choice, and an adherence to self-interest and brute force...

...not before chaos had set in, in the third century, did the army take over and become hopelessly politicized, and it yielded first place again to civilians as soon as Christianity endowed the State with a new authority (in Constantinople...

...Needless to say, at this point only conjectures and guesses are in order...

...Before Peron, Argentina was, for better or for worse, a chasse-gardee of Great Britain...

...A further condition is necessary for a Western army to take power: the army in Western countries, unlike that in the Third World, does not have to be a melting pot, nor does it have to possess a near-monopoly on educated personnel and comparatively outstanding technical equipment—but it too must have an esprit de corps and a high degree of patriotic consciousness...

...It is aware of the country's economic and social problems because it draws thus from all strata of society...

...None of these factions, if in power, would return the bulk of national wealth and resources into foreign or even domestic entrepreneurial hands...

...But this is about all...

...Only one genuine question can be raised with regard to Lisbon: "Will the army accept Communist partnership...

...In Argentina, the present internal chaos—which, rightly or wrongly, is regarded as a foreign threat too—has engendered three army sections, each confident that it will soon take power: the peronistas who remain , national-syndicalists...

...But is the world's military really so right-wing...

...It is true, in these countries the army is one with the nation, it is a nation in arms...

...Moreover, in the underdeveloped countries we find that the army fulfills a number of essential functions...

...And military coups d'etat, whether successful or not, cannot be counted any more...

...There is little doubt, on the other hand, that a new leftist-military regime is now added to the growing number of (leftist and rightist) military regimes, perhaps one more "socialist" than most...

...nothing is more normal than to bring him, as to the other two, various gifts when one has dealings with him...

...Their general political preferences are: national independence and vigilance over the nation's cohesion, whether old, as in Asia, or just-emerged, as in Africa...

...Have the latest events in Portugal contributed any new forms of military behavior...

...Thus even today military regimes are referred to in the liberal-Left media as "juntas," the rule by generals who overthrow theoligarchy and claim to govern in the people's interest, but who in reality are themselves the representatives of the oligarchy and as such continue to oppress the people...

...On the other hand, most of the military officers I met on my various visits to Angola and Mozambique were pure patriots, right-wingers, and Christians...

...Entire sections of the population are more or less outside the reach of the nation, its government, and its institutions, or they are moving practically unhindered between the nation and a kind of non-nation in which they constitute themselves somewhere on the undefinable margins...

...Our original premise was that the military are not in the habit of making moves in the direction of power unless the weakness of civilian authority appears to them as a dangerous invitation to internal chaos or to invasion by foreign powers...

...If we suppose that socialism is a new kind of militancy, a crossbreed of an industrial frame of mind and military discipline, we should not be astonished if, independently of civilizational background, the left-wing but nationalistic military man becomes the dominant type east, west, and south in the not-too distant future...

...A strong, even central populist streak remains imbedded in all armies, before and after the seizure or power...

...in Portugal they will probably remain in an army whose leaders, even whose present leaders, cannot afford to let loose thousands of officers and soldiers, potentially dissatisfied trouble makers...

...For more than two centuries after Caesar, although emperors were imperators (military commanders), the Roman army was subservient to the State...

...In prewar Rumania oil, banking, metallurgy, and insurance were in British, French, and Belgian hands...

...the pinochetistas who would like to see a controlled return of foreign investment...

...It is painfully clear that authority in Western countries today is tottering on the brink of disaster...

...the last time in the West that an army could have moved in the national interest, the Algerian crisis in France, it allowed itself to be disarmed by one man, DeGaulle...

...a similar status was the lot of all other semi-colonized countries and, naturally, of all colonies...

...On the other hand, Marxism brings the Moscow connection, the insidiously pursued aim of setting up a state within the State, and a threat to independence...

...The Chilean military compensated the Americans for the copper mines, but did not return possession—just as the generals in Brazil, after the takeover in 1964 from the leftist Goulart, did not dream of denationalizing the petroleum, petrochemical, and steel industries...

...Once we are aware of the "socialist" leanings of the world's military even in the highest ranks, we cannot be surprised by the ideology of the officers' "Movement," not even—although this element is rather novel—by its decision to liquidate the empire...

...Today the spiritual authority is either antinational itself or simply cannot be located on the nation's panorama, and governmental power is at best sporadic and apologetic, at worst subversive of its own position...

...distrust of oligarchs, of the upper middle class (Egypt, Peru, Ethiopia), of foreigners (e.g., in Madagascar, Indonesia...

...wars, it is said, are too serious a business to be left to the generals...

...There is a strong effort to uproot, and severely punish, corruption at all levels...

...In the rest of the Western countries, the armies are fast degenerating into tolerated parasites, compelled to defend their raison d'etre in parliamentary commissions, in the press—and even in advertisements...

...Many army officers in such countries do not necessarily want to rule, but they see no other alternative as they look at their civilian superiors and equals...

...this, however, is generally a dismal failure to such an extent that in Indonesia and Nigeria (two random examples) the people fear the soldiers' plunder and bribe-taking as much as or more than they ever feared the colonialists' exactions, which were at 'least more regular...

...Demoralized in the West Our last question must be directed at the situation in Western democracies between the civilian State and the Army...

...The French spring (1968) and autumn (1974) show what the vacance du pouvoir may mean, while England, Italy, and the United States contribute their own illustrations...

...It is unlikely that the Communists would risk transforming Portugal into their enclave with a several times stronger and more populous Spain remaining "right-wing" either under Franco or under his successors...

...Military Populism It is in the nature of things that the military suspect the civilians in these countries of "neocolonialist leanings...

...The noises come at times from America (where the Vietnam war was openly sabotaged), from England (generals organizing vigilante groups and the expeditionary army in Northern Ireland readying itself for making order at home), from Italy (some officers whispering with right-wing groups about a coup...

...and further: Will it eventually accept a Communist regime—in which, inevitably, the army would be a subordinate branch of the Party...

...and the peruvianos who are non-Marxist yet radical socialists, nationalizers of land and industry, and partisans of cooperatives...

...Recently in Le Monde the French commentator Maurice Duverger balanced his approval of a strong Communist Party in Portugal with his worry that the Portuguese military may still turn out to be right-wingers...

...socialization, education, and the modernization of the transport network in order to increase control over vast and diverse territories...

...Military men in the Third World are relatively new to the ideological game and they generally mistrust both dominant ideologies, Marxism and capitalism...

...In Venezuela, for example, many people from the lower as well as middle classes speak quite favorably of the Perez-Jiminez military-dictatorial years which preceded the democratic parliamentary regime of Romulo Bettancourt...

...The rational economic system of capitalism—maximization of happiness at least cost in terms of sacrifice—is acceptable to Western society because the sacrifice was made long ago, by previous generations, and the maximum happiness is visible on the horizon...

...Some writers who know history predict the phenomenon of caesarism to spread far and wide, and caesars are inconceivable without armies...

...The Greek generals in 1967 did, mutatis mutandis, what Peron in 1943 and the Rumanian generals in the late thirties had done: remove from power the bourgeois-business circles who, through the ideal of liberalism, were also wedded to parliamentary democracy and to Western political influence...

...Finally, the army has both the education (often from foreign military schools) and the equipment to spur economic and technical development...

...But in amorphous societies, as in much of the Third World, the individualistic spirit of enterprise is not found attractive and its benefits are not seen as spreading to large numbers...

...parliament and a large part of the press were also said to be manipulated by them...