Table Of ContentTwentieth-Century
Dictatorships
The Ideological One-Party States
Paul Brooker
TWENTIETH-CENTURY DICTATORSHIPS
Also by Paul Brooker
DEFIANT DICTATORSHIPS: Communist and Middle Eastern
Dictatorships in a Democratic Age
THE FACES OF FRATERNALISM: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy,
and Imperial Japan
Twentieth-Century
Dictatorships
The Ideological One-Party States
Paul Brooker
Lecturer in Politics
Victoria University of Wellington
tt
© Paul Brooker 1995
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First published 1995 by
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ISBN 0-333-61110-1
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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Contents
Introduction 1
1 The Twentieth-Century Dictatorships'
Challenge to Democracy 5
1 The Modernity of the New Form of
Dictatorship 6
2 The Variety and Political Creativity of the
Twentieth-Century Dictatorships 8
3 The Failure of the Challenge to Democracy:
The Personalist Flaw 9
2 Analyzing the Ideological One-Party States:
Components, Leadership and Types 14
1 Components 14
2 Individual/Collective Leadership and
Personal Dictatorship 17
3 The Party-State and Military-Party Types 19
PART I THE PARTY-STATE TYPE
3 The Fascist Examples 23
1 Mussolini's Regime in Italy 23
2 Hitler's Regime in Germany 36
4 The Communist Regime in the Soviet
Union from 1917 to 1945 51
1 Communist Ideology 52
2 The Communist Party 57
3 Lenin's Leadership of the Regime 66
4 Stalin's Rise to Personal Rule 68
5 The Party under Stalin's Leadership
and then Personal Rule 77
5 A Survey of the Communist Regimes from
the 1940s to 1980s 82
1 The Soviet Union after Stalin 82
v
vi Contents
2 The East European Communist Regimes 85
3 Communism in Asia: China, Vietnam and
North Korea 91
6 Third World Case Studies 99
1 Nkrumah's Ghana 99
2 Toure's Guinea 112
PART II THE MILITARY-PARTY TYPE
7 The Quasi-Fascist Examples 129
1 Primo de Rivera's Regime in Spain 129
2 Franco's Regime in Spain 138
8 Third World Socialist Case Studies 148
1 Nasser's Egypt 148
2 Ne Win's Burma 158
9 Third World 'Multi-Party' Case Studies 170
1 Peron's Argentina 170
2 Suharto's Indonesia 181
PART III TRANSFORMATIONS FROM
ONE TYPE TO ANOTHER
10 From Party-State to Military-Party Regime 197
1 Kuomintang China 197
2 Communist Poland 210
11 From Military-Party to Party-State Regime 217
1 Post-Revolution Mexico 217
2 Castro's Cuba 231
12 From Party-State to Military-Party to
Democratic Regime: Turkey since 1908 239
1 The Party-State Regime of the Committee
of Union and Progress 240
2 The Shift to a Military-Party Regime
under Kemal 242
3 From Personal Rule to Democracy 250
Contents vii
Conclusion 254
Notes and References 257
Bibliography 294
Index 302
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Introduction
As with many other political terms the meaning of * dicta
torship' has changed markedly over the years. The origi
nal meaning dates back to the ancient Roman office of
Dictator, which conferred virtually unlimited powers on a
temporary ruler installed by his fellow citizens to deal with
an emergency. Nowadays any regime is likely to be called a
dictatorship if it is neither a democracy nor one of the few
remaining monarchies. Using this more recent and wider
meaning of the term, it is easy to claim that the twentieth
century has been the century of dictatorship. For certainly
dictatorship has been the most common form of regime,
much more common than democracy.
However, one reason for there having been so many dicta
torships is that most of them have been short-lived regimes.
In fact often they claim, in a manner reminiscent of the older
conception of dictatorship, to be intending to rule only tempo
rarily. The military dictatorships are especially prone to present
themselves in this fashion. They usually proclaim that the
military have intervened in politics solely to save the nation
and will return to the barracks as soon as possible. Such
apparently temporary, emergency dictatorships are not really
equivalents or rivals of any form of regime that, like monar
chy and democracy, seeks to be a permanent fixture. But
after the First World War there emerged a modernized form
of dictatorship with a longer-term perspective than the
previous forms. Although it would never be as numerous
as the old-style dictatorships continued to be, the modern
ized form of dictatorship became a real contender for the
title of being the century's pre-eminent form of regime.
Certainly it was the distinctively twentieth-century form of
dictatorship, and its examples can be viewed as being in
that sense the twentieth-century dictatorships.
The characteristic feature of the modernized, twentieth-cen
tury dictatorships was their possession of an official ideol
ogy and political party. In some cases this involved simply
an otherwise old-fashioned military dictatorship establishing
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