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On the Rise of Postwar Military Dictatorships: Argentina, Chile, Greece
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
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Despite marked geographical and sociocultural differences, Greece and the two major southern-cone Latin American countries share a significant number of characteristics which distinguish them from most other peripheral and semiperipheral societies. Although they began industralisation late and failed to industrialise fully in the last century, all three countries managed to develop an important infrastructure (roads, railways) during the second half of the nineteenth century, and they achieved a notable degree of industrialisation in the years following each of the two world wars. Moreover, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all three countries were subjugated parts of huge patrimonial empires (the Ottoman and the Iberian) and thus had never experienced the absolutist past of western and southern European societies. Finally, all three acquired their political independence in the early nineteenth century and very soon adopted parliamentary forms of political rule; and despite the constant malfunctioning of their representative institutions, relatively early urbanisation and the creation of a large urban middle class provided a framework within which bourgeois parliamentarism took strong roots and showed remarkable resilience. It persisted, albeit intermittently, from the second half of the nineteenth century until the rise of military bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and, as the Greek and Argentinian cases suggest, such regimes do not necessarily entail the irreversible decline of parliamentary democracy.
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References
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54 As a matter of fact, the explanation adopted in this study by no means excludes economic determinations; it simply introduces them into the analysis in a different manner. If it is accepted that the postwar military interventions must seriously take into account the army's reaction to a growing political mobilisation that was threatening the incorporative/exclusionist character of the relations of domination (and hence its own privileged power position within the state), there are at least two ways in which economic factors enter into the analysis; (I) The incorporative nature of the state-civil society relationship in the semiperiphery is related to both the timing of capitalist industrialisation and its more restrictive and unequal character; and (2) the massive postwar mobilisation and radicalisation and the higher levels of societal inclusion are also strongly, although not exclusively, related to the rapid and highly unbalanced capitalist growth in these formations.
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