Table Of ContentDefiant Dictatorships
Communist and Middle-Eastern
Dictatorships in a Democratic Age
Paul Brooker
DEFIANT DICTATORSHIPS
Also by Paul Brooker
THE FACES OF FRATERNALISM: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy
and Imperial Japan
TWENTIETH-CENTURY DICTATORSHIPS: The Ideological
One-Party States
Defiant Dictatorships
Communist and Middle-Eastern
Dictatorships in a Democratic Age
Paul Brooker
Lecturer in Politics
Victoria University
Wellington
New Zealand
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©Paul Brooker 1997
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First published 1997 by
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 Defiance as a Stabilising Influence 7
2 Communist China 25
3 Communist Vietnam 49
4 Communist North Korea 66
5 Communist Cuba 82
6 Baathist Syria 99
7 Baathist Iraq 114
8 Qadhafi's Libya 131
9 Khomeinist Iran 145
Conclusion 163
Appendix I: Communist Ideology, Economy and
Political Structure - the Orthodox Model 166
Appendix II: Baathist Ideology and Structure 171
Notes and References 175
Bibliography 206
Index 218
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Introduction
The wave of democratisation that swept through the Communist
world and Third World in the 1980s and early 1990s did not eliminate
all the dictatorships - some survived the onset of a democratic age.1
(By 'dictatorship' is meant a regime that is not a democracy nor a
monarchy, and by 'democratic' is meant freely competitive, regular
elections for public office.) Among the most prominent examples of
dictatorships which survived into the mid-1990s were the four
remaining Communist regimes of any significance, namely China,
Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, and also four well-known Middle
Eastern regimes: Baathist Syria and Iraq, Qadhafi's Libya, and Kho-
meinist Iran. These eight dictatorships had avoided even the facade of
democratisation involved in setting up semi-competitive multi-party
elections to reconfirm the regime party and/or leader in power.2 Nor
had their defiant refusal to democratise forced them to reshape their
dictatorship. There had been no parallel to Communist Poland in
1981 and socialist Burma in 1988, when resistance to popular pressure
for some democratisation had led to not just a change in the regime's
leadership but also a shift to open militarisation and rule by a military
junta, respectively the Military Council of National Salvation and the
State Law and Order Restoration Council.
The defiant 'stability under pressure' of these dictatorships had
been so great that in most cases the same personal ruler, senior leader
or collective leadership who had headed the regime in 1980 was still in
power in the middle of the 1990s. Where this was not the case, either
a) the ruler had died of natural causes and been replaced by his
designated successor or deputies, as in North Korea and Iran, or b)
a collective leadership had replaced itself with a new generation of
leaders, as in Vietnam. These regimes' defiance of the trend towards
replacing dictatorship with democracy was therefore only part of their
overall stability and their broader defiance of the political turmoil
occurring in the rest of the Communist world and Third World.
Therefore any answer to the obvious question of why these eight
Communist and Middle Eastern dictatorships have proved so stable
must go beyond providing an explanation for the lack of democrat
isation and instead consider the wider question of their overall sta
bility. Unfortunately, the various explanations that have been put
forward to account for these regimes' lack of democratisation are not
1
2 Defiant Dictatorships
easily transformed into wider explanations of overall stability. For
example, the 'exceptionalism' of the still predominantly non-demo
cratic Arab world in this democratic age has commonly been
accounted for by pointing to Islam as a purportedly anti-democratic
influence upon Arab societies.3 In fact the argument has been applied
on occasion to the whole Islamic world from West Africa to
Indonesia.4 But any explanations based upon religious, cultural or
other long-standing factors cannot explain the overall stability of the
four Islamic defiant dictatorships because such long-standing factors
were clearly unable to prevent the relative /^stability shown by these
Middle Eastern countries in the decades before the onset of a demo
cratic age.
When their political history in the fifteen-year period 1965-79 is
compared with the stability shown by these countries in 1980-94,
there is a marked difference that can hardly be explained by such
long-standing factors as religion or culture. Iran had just completed a
revolution in 1979 that had overthrown the Shah's regime and estab
lished an Islamic Republic under Khomeini's rule. Iraq had seen in
1979 (with Saddam Hussein's succession to the Presidency) the com
pletion of the shift in power from the military to the civilian wing of
the Baathist regime which had originated in a 1968 coup. Syria had
seen in 1970 the coup which brought Defence Minister Asad's faction
to power after years of internal factional conflict within the Baathist
regime, including a 1966 coup by leftist Neo-Baathists. Libya had seen
the monarchy overthrown by a Qadhafi-led coup in 1969 and then in
the later 1970s the complete restructuring of the military regime into a
purportedly direct democracy guided by the Leader of the Revolution.
Explanations based upon religious or cultural factors also have
problems in accounting for the stability of the four remaining Com
munist regimes. It is true that all four experienced a similar degree of
political stability in the 1960s-70s as they have in the 1980s-90s. These
Communist regimes' stability is highlighted only by the standard
contrast with the number of fellow-Communist regimes, including the
superpower Soviet Union, that collapsed in the 1980s-90s. Never
theless, any attempt to use a cultural explanation for this contrast,
such as the influence of 'Confucian' or 'Asian' values, faces the
problem of how to account for the survival of the Cuban Communist
regime in Latin America. Furthermore, the only one of the three
Asian Communist regimes, the Chinese example, which did not follow
on from a long period of foreign, colonial rule was preceded by a half-
century of political instability. By 1950 China had seen the overthrow
Introduction 3
of the monarchy, the descent into warlordism, the establishment of the
Kuomintang party-state regime, its transformation into a military-
party regime under Chiang Kai-shek's rule, and then finally the re
placement of the Kuomintang by a Communist party-state regime. If
Chinese culture was apparently quite unable to exert a stabilising
influence upon the country's political development before the Com
munists took power, it is hard to understand how a cultural factor
could be so influential during the Communist era.
Explanations of stability that are based upon the nature of the
regimes' origins are also difficult to sustain. It is often pointed out
that the few surviving Communist regimes were established through
local revolutionary and armed struggle rather than being imposed (as
most of the East European Communist regimes were) by the
occupying forces of the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Second
World War. However, this argument overlooks two awkward facts.
First, the North Korean Communist regime imposed by Soviet
postwar occupying forces is still defiantly stable and second, the
locally established Yugoslavian and Albanian Communist regimes are
now defunct - and so is the Soviet Union itself.
As for the Middle Eastern examples of dictatorship, all have been
established by local forces, not by an external power, but so, too, had
been all the African dictatorships that collapsed in the 1980s-90s.
What is more, some of these African dictatorships had originated in
a popular struggle against colonial rule - a prestigious heritage which
none of the four Middle Eastern dictatorships can claim. Only the
Iranian regime can rightly claim, thanks to the 1978-9 revolution, to
have originated through any form of popular movement. The other
three regimes claim a revolutionary heritage but in reality were the
product of military coups, and in the Libyan case developed a revolu
tionary programme only several years after the coup. The Baathist
military coups in Syria and Iraq were at least carried out by officers
belonging to or sympathising with the Baathist political movement.
But their seizures of power still lacked the popular support and
mobilisation seen in Iran or in such African anti-colonial movements
as the Guinean PDG, whose party-state regime was overthrown in
1984. Therefore if the origins of the Middle Eastern dictatorships are
to provide some explanation for their stability, it could only be
through the very implausible argument that a dictatorship is more
likely to maintain stability if it originated not as an anti-colonial
movement but as a military coup lacking organised popular support.
As in the case of the Communist regimes, such origins-based
