Modern Dictatorship Research Paper

Following the rule of Julius Caesar, who exercised dictatorial powers for an unconstitutional length of time, the institution disintegrated and rulers assumed extraconstitutional powers in permanence. Rather than a traditional dictatorship, such rule took on the properties of what might more appropriately be called ‘autocracy,’ ‘despotism,’ or, perhaps, ‘tyranny.’

Throughout the Middle Ages and more modern times in Europe, as well as during the institutionalization of dynastic rule in East and South Asia, ‘autocracies’ tended to be regularized through the agency of hereditary right—providing for succession without recourse to violence. Emperors, kings, and sultans could, and frequently would, allocate powers to ‘noble’ subordinates through a relatively well articulated, rule-governed process. At times, as was the case in the rights embodied in the Magna Carta, some substantial rights were accorded subordinates.

1. The Modern Period

With the decline of the Middle Ages, it became increasingly common that adventurers would seize power in emerging city-states and principalities, and rule as despots or benevolent autocrats. The term ‘dictatorship’ was rarely, if ever, employed to identify such rule until the commencement of the modern period.

In regions such as Latin America, the term came into increasing vogue after the liberation from Spanish colonialism, irrespective of the fact that the ideal, throughout Central and South America—influenced by the North American model—was constitutional democracy and political stability. The basic charters of most of the nations of Central and South America had incorporated broad versions of the civil, political, and economic rights of citizens to the point of extravagance (Davis 1961). Unfortunately, governments in Latin America, throughout the remainder of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, regularly came to power through violence and were commonly dislodged by revolution. During a 25 year period, from 1930 to 1955, for example, more than 50 violent, mainly military, revolutions took place in the region—to provide an impressive roster of ‘military dictatorships’ that ruled for variable periods of time (Lieuwen 1960).

In Africa, military dictatorships became the norm in the decades after the decolonization of European holdings that followed the conclusion of the Second World War. The African military—having a monopoly of coercion at its disposal, and often the only institution having logistical reach over the entire territory—acceded to absolute political power over inhabitants. Control, unconstrained by constitutional limitations, was more frequently than not secured by violence or the threat of violence.

In fact, the term ‘dictatorship’ (as distinct from terms like ‘caudillismo’ used in Latin America) came into increased currency in Europe long before its employment elsewhere. At the commencement of the modern period, it came to be used, for example, to designate what was initially understood to be a temporary assumption of full power by what was called the Directorate under Cromwell in England, and in 1793, by the Committee of Public Safety, during the French Revolution.

After the conclusion of the First World War, the term was invoked to distinguish a pattern of rule by ‘dictators’ such as Benito Mussolini in Italy, Primo de Rivera in Spain, or Mustafa Kemal in Turkey. Actually, what such dictatorships signaled was a development that was far more portentous than simply the identification of the exercise of political power by a single ruler in any particular country. What was emerging was a singular political system, having a relatively specific syndrome of properties, that can be legitimately identified as ‘modern dictatorship’ (Talmon 1960).

2. Modern Dictatorship

The dislocations that attended the end of the First World War, gave rise to a wave of revolutionary ferment that involved Eastern and Southern Europe (Lee 1987). In Russia, revolutionaries first overthrew the Romanov monarchy, and then the provisional democratic government of Alexander Kerensky, in order to impose, in 1917, a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ under the leadership of V. I. Lenin.

According to the tenets of classical Marxism (the Marxism of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the dictatorship of the proletariat was to be a transitional form of minority rule that marked the distance between ‘bourgeois democracy’—what Marxists considered to be, in reality, a ‘dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’—and communist democracy. Lenin assumed full power over the emerging political system that followed the ‘proletarian’ revolution by legitimizing it through an appeal to an ideological rationale (Furet 1999).

At approximately the same time, in 1922, Benito Mussolini led a collection of revolutionaries against the parliamentary and monarchial government of peninsular Italy (De Felice 1965). Initially what appeared to be a transitional government, calculated to deliver the nation from the crises that followed the First World War, the government of Mussolini quickly took on the features of a modern dictatorship. Through reforms commencing as early as 1925, Mussolini’s Fascist regime assumed the properties of permanent minority rule under single-party auspices (De Felice 1968).

Lenin’s proletarian dictatorship and Mussolini’s Fascism provide a syndrome of traits that specifically characterize modern dictatorship (Johnson 1991). In both cases, a charismatic leader exercises almost total control over followers as well as the national community out of which they emerge. Leadership in both cases is epistemarchic in character. That is to say, leadership, in the absence of popular elections, is legitimatized by the leader’s putative possession of an ideology that is an inerrant guide to policy, satisfying the needs of the collectivity (respectively the proletariat, or the nation). The inerrant ideology informs the belief system of an organization of believers, usually identified as a ‘vanguard’ of the revolutionary truth. In the course of time, that vanguard becomes the ‘unitary party’ of the political system—to the exclusion of alternatives. The inerrancy of the ideology and its attendant policy, in turn, is used to justify control over any and all political dissidence (which, under the circumstances, could only be in error) and any initiatives independent of the vanguard leadership (Manoilescu 1941).

In general, modern dictatorships maintain a military adjunct to unitary party rule. In the Bolshevik case that adjunct was the Red Army. In the case of the Fascist revolution, that adjunct was the Blackshirt militia. In the case of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism, that adjunct was the Schutz Staffel While military force remains an ultimate recourse of the system, modern dictatorships tend to be populist in disposition. They seek plebiscitary confirmation through controlled elections. Leadership, in modern dictatorships, because it is characteristically ‘charismatic,’ enjoys life tenure. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea), as a case in point, exemplifies such a system. After the Second World War, Castro’s Cuba, and Mao’s China constituted illustrative instances. The system under the rule of Gamal I Abd’ ElNasser in Egypt, and Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah took on many of the same features. They took on the properties of a modern dictatorship however much their actual practice failed to fully satisfy the criteria for admission into the class.

In most cases, modern dictatorships, whatever their initial character, took on the features of an emphatic nationalism. Having begun as an ideology predicated on class, Bolshevism, as an instantial case, very quickly made recourse to ‘patriotism’ to sustain popular commitment. All classes and segments of classes in the Soviet Union were expected to be supportive of what were unmistakably national purposes, however ‘proletarian’ they were supposed to be.

Similarly, given the traits exemplified by such a class of polities, they all failed to allow for what parliamentary and constitutional systems understand to be voluntary association, formal opposition, free elections, the separation of legislative, judicial and executive powers, as well as popular freedom of expression and individual movement. In almost all cases, the charter constitutions of such systems change with some regularity (the constitutions of the People’s Republic of China, for example, have changed with every change of leadership) and their provisions are subject to unconstrained interpretation (the provisions of the constitution of Fascist Italy, for example, were subject to the regular reinterpretation of Mussolini and the Grand Council of Fascism).

3. Modern Dictatorship And Totalitarianism

By the beginning of the 1930s, a subset of modern dictatorships began to evince characteristics that led political scientists to design them a specific identity: totalitarianisms. Possessed of an elaborate security and control infrastructure, supported by a factitious or real consensus, and animated by an irrepressible conviction of their own aggressive moral superiority, such politically repressive systems destroyed millions of innocents, either as a measure of control, or in the pursuit of utopian intention (Horowitz 1997) .

The numbers killed by Stalin, Hitler, Mao, and the Khmer Rouge will probably never be accurately known—but the victims of Marxist–Leninist regimes probably exceed one hundred million (Courtois et al. 1999). ‘Mild’ totalitarianisms—like those of Mussolini’s Italy, Chiang Kai-shek’s China, or Castro’s Cuba—neither particularly homicidal nor genocidal—employ incarceration and exile, together with the characteristic denial of voluntary association and freedom of expression, as means of control.

Whatever the subsequent qualifications on the use of the term ‘totalitarianism,’ throughout the twentieth century an imprecise subset of modern dictatorships have shared a number of reasonably well-defined traits that qualify them for entry into a specific class of modern political systems (Schapiro 1972, Soper 1985, Gleason 1995). How far into the twenty-first century exemplars of the totalitarian subset of modern dictatorships will persist remains a matter of conjecture.

That such systems can evolve into something like a democratic alternative has been established by the transformation of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang on Taiwan into something very much like a vital democracy. The massive reforms on the mainland of China, that followed the death of Mao Zedong, suggest that such systems have the potential to undergo systemic change. How such change is effected remains uncertain.

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