scholarly journals The Search for an Exit from the Dictatorship and the Transformation of Greek Conservatism, 1967-1974

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Sotiris Rizas

The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of transformation of Greek conservatism that evolved during the dictatorship from a current identified with the restrictive practices of the post-Civil War political system to a tenet of the democratic regime established in 1974. The realization that the military coup was not just the manifestation of anti-communism, the dominant ideology of the post-Civil War period, but also of an anti-parliamentary spirit permeating the armed forces, the prolongation of military rule that led to the crystallization of differences between the military regime and the conservative political class and an apprehension that the dictatorship might fuel uncontrollable social and political polarization are three inter-related factors that explain this transformation.

2009 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boubacar N'Diaye

ABSTRACTThe 3 August 2005 military coup was Mauritania's best opportunity to turn the page on decades of the deposed quasi-military regime's destructive politics. This article critically analyses relevant aspects of the transition that ensued in the context of the prevailing models of military withdrawal from politics in Africa. It also examines the challenges that Mauritania's short-lived Third Republic faced. It argues that the transition process did not escape the well-known African military junta leader's proclivity to manipulate transitions to fulfil suddenly awakened self-seeking political ambitions, in violation of solemn promises. While there was no old-fashioned ballot stuffing to decide electoral outcomes, Mauritania's junta leader and his lieutenants spared no effort to keep the military very much involved in politics, and to perpetuate a strong sense of entitlement to political power. Originally designed as an ingenious ‘delayed self-succession’ of sorts, in the end, another coup aborted Mauritania's democratisation process and threw its institutions in a tailspin. This only exacerbated the challenges that have saddled Mauritania's political system and society for decades – unhealthy civil-military relations, a dismal ‘human rights deficit’, terrorism, and a neo-patrimonial, disastrously mismanaged economy.


Author(s):  
Y. S. Kudryashova

During the government of AK Party army leaders underprivileged to act as an exclusive guarantor preserving a secular regime in the country. The political balance between Secular and Islamite elites was essentially removed after Erdogan was elected Turkish President. Consistently toughening authoritarian regime of a ruling party deeply accounts for a military coup attempt and earlier periodically occurred disturbance especially among the young. The methods of a coup showed the profundity of a split and the lack of cohesion in Turkish armed forces. Erdogan made the best use of a coup attempt’s opportunities to concentrate all power in his hands and to consolidate a present regime. The mass support of the population during a coup attempt ensured opportunities for a fundamental reorganization of a political system. Revamped Constitution at most increases political powers of the President.


2019 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 467-505
Author(s):  
Eyal Weinberg

As young medical students at Guanabara State University, Luiz Roberto Tenório and Ricardo Agnese Fayad received some of the best medical education offered in 1960s Brazil. For six years, the peers in the same entering class had studied the principles of the healing arts and practiced their application at the university's teaching hospital. They had also witnessed the Brazilian military oust a democratically elected president and install a dictatorship that ruled the country for 21 years (1964–85). After graduating, however, Tenório and Fayad embarked on very distinct paths. The former became a political dissident in opposition to the military regime and provided medical assistance to members of the armed left. The latter joined the armed forces and, as a military physician, participated in the brutal torture and cruel treatment of political prisoners. At the end of military rule, Brazil's medical board would find him guilty of violating the Brazilian code of medical ethics and revoke his license.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 55-78
Author(s):  
Federico Battera

This article explores the differences between two North African military regimes—Egypt and Algeria—which have been selected due to the continuity of military dominance of the political systems. Still, variations have marked their political development. In particular, the Algerian army’s approach to civilian institutions changed after a civilian president was chosen in 1999. This was not the case in Egypt after the demise of the Hosni Mubarak regime of 2011. Other important variations are to be found in the way power has been distributed among the military apparatuses themselves. In the case of Egypt, a principle of collegiality has been generally preserved within a body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), which is absent in the case of Algeria, where conflicts between military opposed factions are more likely to arise in case of crisis. How differences generally impact the stability of military rule in these two cases is the main contribution of this paper.


Author(s):  
Acar Kutay

The continued influence of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) on politics characterized the political history of the Turkish Republic, until such influence was first bridled and then ultimately broken by the Justice and Development Party governments during the 2000s. When the new regime was established in 1923, the military identified itself with its founding ideology, namely Kemalism, which was built on the ideas of modernism, secularism, and nationalism. Because the TAF assumed the roles of guardian of the regime and vanguard of modernization, any threat to the foundational values and norms of the republican regime was considered by the military as a threat to the constitutional order and national security. As a self-authorized guardian of the regime and its values, the TAF characterized itself as a non-partisan institution. The military appealed to such identity to justify the superiority of the moral and epistemological foundations of their understanding of politics compared with that of the elected politicians. The military invoked such superiority not only to intervene in politics and take power (1960, 1971, 1980, 1997, and 2007). They also used such identity to monitor and control political processes by means of the National Security Council (established after the 1960 military intervention) and by more informal means such as mobilizing the public against the elected government’s policy choices. In the context of the Cold War, domestic turmoil and lasting political polarization helped legitimate the military’s control over security issues until the 1980s. After the end of the Cold War, two threats to national security drew the TAF into politics: the rising power of Islamic movements and the separatist terrorism of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which posed threats to the constitutional order. Turkey’s EU membership bid is one of the most important aspects that bridled the influence of the TAF on politics. Whereas the democratic oversight of the military and security sector constituted a significant dimension of the EU reforms, events that took place around the nomination of the Justice and Development Party’s candidate, Abdullah Gül, for the presidency created a rupture in the role and influence of the military on politics. Two juristic cases against members of the TAF in 2008 and 2010 made a massive impact on the power of the military, before the ultimate supremacy of the political sphere was established after the coup attempt organized by the Gülenist officers who infiltrated the TAF during the 2000s.


Author(s):  
Oren Barak

Since Lebanon’s independence in the mid-1940s, its military—the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF)—has played a pivotal role in the country’s politics. The political role of the LAF in Lebanon might seem surprising since the Lebanese state did not militarize, and its political leaders have continuously managed to keep their military relatively weak and small. Indeed, in this respect Lebanon has been markedly different from its close neighbors (Syria and Israel), but also from several other Middle Eastern states (especially Egypt and Iraq), where the military, which was large and powerful, was continuously involved in politics. Additionally, both Lebanon and the LAF have persistently striven to distance themselves from regional conflicts since 1949, particularly in relation to the Palestinian issue, albeit not always successfully. Still, and despite these ostensibly unfavorable factors for the military’s involvement in politics in Lebanon, the LAF has played an important political role in the state since its independence. This role, which has been marked by elements of continuity and change over the years, included mediation and arbitration between rival political factions (in 1945–1958, 2008, 2011, and 2019); attempts to dominate the political system (in 1958–1970 and 1988–1990); intervention in the Lebanese civil war (in 1975–1976 and 1982–1984); attempts to regain its balancing role in politics (in 1979–1982 and 1984–1988); and facilitating the state’s postwar reconstruction (since 1991). The political role of the military in Lebanon can be explained by several factors. First, the weakness of Lebanon’s political system and its inability to resolve crises between its members. Second, Lebanon’s divided society and its members’ general distrust towards its civilian politicians. Third, the basic characteristics of Lebanon’s military, which, in most periods, enjoyed broad public support that cuts across the lines of community, region, and family, and found appeal among domestic and external audiences, which, in their turn, acquiesced to its political role in the state.


Subject The political role of the armed forces. Significance The armed forces have recently assumed an unusually high political profile. The current government has appointed generals to high-level positions and ordered a large-scale intervention led by the army in Rio de Janeiro state security institutions. These measures, many of them unprecedented, are an attempt by President Michel Temer to boost his popularity as a ‘tough-on-crime’ leader. The armed forces are one of the few public institutions enjoying high levels of trust among Brazilians. Impacts Despite recent protest calls for a military coup, support for such a move is restricted to a radical minority. Resistance against further reliance on the military for domestic law enforcement will rise, including among senior officers. Bolsonaro will focus his message on crime, promising to bring more military members into his cabinet, including the Education Ministry.


2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 13-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Holger Albrecht ◽  
Dina Bishara

Though there are many expectations regarding the interim character of the current political order, the future of Egyptian democracy remains highly uncertain. A closer look at the take-over of power by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) is imperative to an understanding of a political system at a decisive crossroads, but also of the path-dependent implications of the military’s engagement in politics. We project that, irrespective of the institutional framing and the results of the current political transformation, the military will play a decisive role in the country’s political future. In addressing its role during the current revolutionary events, we account for the reason for the military’s engagement in politics, the path of the take-over of political power, and the military’s management of politics. Thus, our analysis will attempt to provide preliminary answers to three questions: When and how did the Egyptian military intervene directly in revolutionary politics? Why did it intervene? And how does it manage the transformation?


1995 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. A. Brett

Bullets rather than ballots have dominated politics in Uganda since independence, where two governments have been removed by coups, one by a foreign invasion, and another by an armed rebellion. Force has not only dominated the formal political system, but also threatened the economic and social basis on which democratic processes and progressive development depends. For 25 years predatory military rule and civil war have destroyed lives, skills, and assets, undermined institutional competence and accountability, caused widespread per sonal trauma, suppressed autonomous organisations in civil society, and intensified ethnic hostility and conflict. And Uganda is not alone in this – the middle of the twentieth century was dominated by fascism and war, while sectarian or ethnic conflicts in Bosnia, Ulster, Sri Lanka, Somalia, the Sudan, Angola, Liberia, Zaï, Burundi, and Rwanda have inflicted untold damage on people and property.1


Modern Italy ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-472
Author(s):  
Paul Preston

One of the principal justifications for the military coup of 1936 and the subsequent plan of extermination behind right-wing violence in the Civil War was the accusation that the Second Republic was the anti-Spanish instrument of the Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy. Thus, when the conspirators declared that punishment had to be inflicted on freemasons, liberal politicians, journalists, school-teachers, professors, as well as on leftists and trade-unionists, they used the idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world. Of all of the writers who called for an assault on progressive Spain, those who might be termed the ‘theorists of extermination’, the most influential was the Catalan priest, Juan Tusquets Terrats (1901–1998). Awareness and approval of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was promoted through his enormously popular writings. During the Civil War, he became an adviser to Generals Mola and Franco and his file-card index of names of supposed freemasons was part of the infrastructure of repression.


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