How Countries Democratize
Author(s): Samuel P. Huntington
Source: Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 106, No. 4 (Winter, 1991-1992), pp. 579-616
Published by: The Academy of Political Science
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How Countries Democratize
SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON
Between 1974 and 1990 more than thirty countries in southern
Europe, Latin America, East Asia, and Eastern Europe shifted from authoritarian
to democratic systems of government. This '"global democratic revolution
is probably the most important political trend in the late twentieth century. It is
the third wave of democratization in the modern era.
A wave of democratization is a group of transitions from nondemocratic to
democratic regimes that occurs within a specified period and that significantly
outnumbers transitions in the opposite direction in the same period. The first
wave began in America in the early nineteenth century and culminated at the
end of World War I with about thirty countries having democratic regimes.
Mussolini's march on Rome in 1922 began a reverse wave, and in 1942 there were
only twelve democracies left in the world. The Allied victory in World War
II and decolonization started a second movement toward democracy which,
however, petered out by the early 1960s when about thirty-six countries had
democratic regimes. This was then followed by a second reverse movement towards
authoritarianism, marked most dramatically by military take-overs in
Latin America and the seizure of power by personal despots such as Ferdinand
Marcos.
The causes of the third wave, like those of its predecessors, were complex and
peculiar to that wave. This article, however, is concerned not with the why of the
third wave but rather with the question of how third wave democratizations
SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and director of the
John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University, and recent president of the
American Political Science Association. He has published numerous books and articles on the processes
and problems of democracies. This article is drawn from his recent book, The Third Wave:
Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Political Science Quarterly Volume 106 Number 4 1991-92 579
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580 1 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
occurred: the ways in which political leaders and publics in the 1970s and 1980s
ended authoritarian systems and created democratic ones. The routes of change
were diverse, as were the people primarily responsible for bringing about change.
Moreover, the starting and ending points of the processes were asymmetric.
Obvious differences exist among democratic regimes: some are presidential, some
are parliamentary, some embody the Gaullist mixture of the two; so also some
are two-party, some are multiparty, and major differences exist in the nature and
strength of the parties. These differences have significance for the stability of the
democratic systems that are created, but relatively little for the processes leading
to them.' Of greater importance is that in all democratic regimes the principal
officers of government are chosen through competitive elections in which the
bulk of the population can participate. Democratic systems thus have a common
institutional core that establishes their identity. Authoritarian regimes -as the
term is used in this study- are defined simply by the absence of this institutional
core. Apart from not being democratic they may have little else in common. It
will, consequently, be necessary to start the discussion of change in authoritarian
regimes by identifying the differences among those regimes and the significance
of those differences for democratization processes.
AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES
Historically, nondemocratic regimes have taken a wide variety of forms. The
regimes democratized in the first wave were generally absolute monarchies, lingering
feudal aristocracies, and the successor states to continental empires. Those
democratized in the second wave had been fascist states, colonies, and personalistic
military dictatorships and often had had some previous democratic experience.
The regimes that moved to and toward democracy in the third wave generally
fell into three groups: one-party systems, military regimes, and personal
dictatorships.
The one-party systems were created by revolution or Soviet imposition and
included the communist countries plus Taiwan and Mexico (with Turkey also
fitting this model before its second wave democratization in the 1940s). In these
systems, the party effectively monopolized power, access to power was through
the party organization, and the party legitimated its rule through ideology. These
systems often achieved a relatively high level of political institutionalization.
The military regimes were created by coups d'etat replacing democratic or
civilian governments. In them, the military exercised power on an institutional
basis, with the military leaders typically either governing collegially as a junta or
circulating the top governmental position among top generals. Military regimes
existed in large numbers in Latin America (where some approximated the
' See G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Contemporary Democracies: Participation, Stability, and Violence
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), chaps. 5-9; Juan J. Linz, "Perils of Presidentialism,"
Journal of Democracy 1 (Winter 1990): 51-69.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 581
bureaucratic-authoritarian model) and also in Greece, Turkey, Pakistan, Nigeria,
and South Korea.
Personal dictatorships were a third, more diverse group of nondemocratic
systems. The distinguishing characteristic of a personal dictatorship is that the
individual leader is the source of authority and that power depends on access to,
closeness to, dependence on, and support from the leader. This category included
Portugal under Antonio Salazar and Marcello Caetano, Spain under Francisco
Franco, the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, India under Indira Ghandi,
and Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. Personal dictatorships had varied origins.
Those in the Philippines and India were the result of executive coups. Those
in Portugal and Spain began with military coups (which in the latter case led to
civil war) with the dictators subsequently establishing bases of power independent
of the military. In Romania, a personal dictatorship evolved out of a one-party
system. Chile under Augusto Pinochet originated as a military regime but in
effect became a personal dictatorship due to his prolonged tenure and his differences
with and dominance over the leaders of the military services. Some personal
dictatorships, such as those of Marcos and Ceausescu, like those of Anastasio
Somoza, Frangois Duvalier, Sese Seko Mobutu, and the shah, exemplified W
ber's model of sultanistic regimes characterized by patronage, nepotism, cronyism,
and corruption.
One-party systems, military regimes, and personal dictatorships suppressed
both competition and participation. The South African system differed from
these in that it was basically a racial oligarchy with more than 70 percent of the
population excluded from politics but with fairly intense political competition
occurring within the governing white community. Historical experience suggests
that democratization proceeds more easily if competition expands before participation.2
If this is the case, the prospects for successful democratization were
greater in South Africa than in countries with the other types of authoritarian
systems. The process in South Africa would, in some measure, resemble the
nineteenth-century democratizations in Europe in which the central feature was
the expansion of the suffrage and the establishment of a more inclusive polity.
In those cases exclusion had been based on economic, not racial, grounds. Hierarchical
communal systems, however, historically have been highly resistant to
peaceful change.3 Competition within the oligarchy thus favored successful South
African democratization; the racial definition of that oligarchy created problems
for democratization.
Particular regimes did not always fit neatly into particular categories. In the
2 Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1971), 33-40.
3See Donald L. Horowitz, "Three Dimensions of Ethnic Politics," World Politics 23 (January
1971): 232-36; Samuel P. Huntington and Jorge I. Dominguez, "Political Development" in Fred I.
Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, eds., Handbook of Political Science, vol. 3 (Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1975), 74-75.
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582 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
TABLE 1
Authoritarian Regimes and Liberalization/Democratization Processes, 1974-90
Regimes
Processes One-Party Personal Military Racial Oligarchy
Transformation (Taiwan)a Spain Turkey
Hungary India Brazil
(Mexico) Chile Peru
(USSR) Ecuador
Bulgaria Guatemala
Nigeria*
Pakistan
Sudan*
16 5 3 8
Transplacement Poland (Nepal) Uruguay (South Africa)
Czechoslovakia Bolivia
Nicaragua Honduras
Mongolia El Salvador
Korea
11 4 1 5 1
Replacement East Germany Portugal Greece
Philippines Argentina
Romania
6 1 3 2
Intervention Grenada (Panama)
2 1 1
Totals
35 11 7 16 1
Note: The principal criterion of democratization is selection of a government through an open, competitive,
fully participatory, fairly administered election.
a Parentheses indicate a country that significantly liberalized but did not democratize by 1990.
* Indicates a country that reverted to authoritarianism.
early 1980s, for instance, Poland combined elements of a decaying one-party
system and of a military-based martial law system led by a military officer who
was also secretary general of the Communist party. The communist system in
Romania (like its counterpart in North Korea) started out as a one-party system
but by the 1980s had evolved into a sultanistic personal dictatorship. The Chilean
regime between 1973 and 1989 was in part a military regime but also, in contrast
to other South American military regimes, during its entire existence had only
one leader who developed other sources of power. Hence it had many of the
characteristics of a personal dictatorship. The Noriega dictatorship in Panama,
on the other hand, was highly personalized but dependent almost entirely on
military power. The categorizations in Table 1, consequently, should be viewed
as rough approximations. Where a regime combined elements of two types it is
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 583
categorized in terms of what seemed to be its dominant type as the transition got
underway.
In the second wave, democratization occurred in large measure through foreign
imposition and decolonization. In the third wave, as we have seen, those two
processes were less significant, limited before 1990 to Grenada, Panama, and
several relatively small former British colonies also mostly in the Caribbean area.
While external influences often were significant causes of third wave democratizations,
the processes themselves were overwhelmingly indigenous. These processes
can be located along a continuum in terms of the relative importance of governing
and opposition groups as the sources of democratization. For analytical purposes
it is useful to group the cases into three broad types of processes. Transformation
(or, in Juan J. Linz's phrase, reforma) occurred when the elites in power took
the lead in bringing about democracy. Replacement (Linz's ruptura) occurred
when opposition groups took the lead in bringing about democracy, and the
authoritarian regime collapsed or was overthrown. What might be termed transplacement
or "ruptforma" occurred when democratization resulted largely from
joint action by government and opposition groups.4 In virtually all cases groups
both in power and out of power played some roles, and these categories simply
distinguish the relative importance of government and opposition.
As with regime types, historical cases of regime change did not necessarily fit
neatly into theoretical categories. Almost all transitions, not just transplacements,
involved some negotiation - explicit or implicit, overt or covert - between
government and opposition groups. At times transitions began as one type and
then became another. In the early 1980s, for instance, P. W. Botha appeared to
be initiating a process of transformation in the South African political system,
but he stopped short of democratizing it. Confronting a different political environment,
his successor, F. W. de Klerk, shifted to a transplacement process of
negotiation with the principal opposition group. Similarly, scholars agree that
the Brazilian government initiated and controlled the transition process for many
years. Some argue that it lost control over that process as a result of popular
mobilization and strikes in 1979-1980; others, however, point to the government's
4For reasons that are undoubtedly deeply rooted in human nature, scholars often have the same
ideas but prefer to use different words for those ideas. My tripartite division of transition processes
coincides with that of Donald Share and Scott Mainwaring, but we have our own names for those
processes:
Huntington Linz Share/Mainwaring
(1) transformation = reforma = transaction
(2) replacement = ruptura = breakdown/collapse
(3) transplacement = - - extrication
See Juan J. Linz, "Crisis, Breakdown, and Reequilibration" in Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds.,
The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 35;
Donald Share and Scott Mainwaring, "Transitions Through Transaction: Democratization in Brazil
and Spain" in Wayne A. Selcher, ed., Political Liberalization in Brazil: Dynamics, Dilemmas, and
Future Prospects (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 177-79.
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584 1 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
success in resisting strong opposition demands for direct election of the president
in the mid-1980s. Every historical case combined elements of two or more transition
processes. Virtually every historical case, however, more clearly approximated
one type of process than others.
How did the nature of the authoritarian regime relate to the nature of the
transition process? As Table 1 suggests, there was no one-to-one relation. Yet
the former did have consequences for the latter. With three exceptions, all the
transitions from military regimes involved transformation or transplacement. In
the three exceptions - Argentina, Greece, and Panama - military regimes suffered
military defeats and collapsed as a result. Elsewhere military rulers took
the lead, at times in response to opposition and popular pressure, in bringing
about the change in regime. Military rulers were better placed to terminate their
regimes than were leaders of other regimes. The military leaders virtually never
defined themselves as the permanent rulers of their country. They lield out the
expectation that once they had corrected the evils that had led them to seize power
they would exit from power and return to their normal military functions. The
military had a permanent institutional role other than politics and governorship.
At some point, consequently, the military leaders (other than those in Argentina,
Greece, and Panama) decided that the time had come to initiate a return to civilian
democratic rule or to negotiate their withdrawal from power with opposition
groups. Almost always this occurred after there had been at least one change in
the top leadership of the military regime.5
Military leaders almost invariably posited two conditions or "exit guarantees"
for their withdrawal from power. First, there would be no prosecution, punishment,
or other retaliation against military officers for any acts they may have
committed when they were in power. Second, the institutional roles and autonomy
of the military establishment would be respected, including its overall
responsibility for national security, its leadership of the government ministries
concerned with security, and often its control of arms industries and other economic
enterprises traditionally under military aegis. The ability of the withdrawing
military to secure agreement of civilian political leaders to these conditions
depended on their relative power. In Brazil, Peru, and other instances of
transformation, the military leaders dominated the process and civilian political
leaders had little choice but to acquiesce to the demands of the military. Where
relative power was more equal, as in Uruguay, negotiations led to some modifications
in the military demands. Greek and Argentinean military leaders asked for
the same assurances other leaders did. Their requests, however, were rejected out
of hand by civilian leaders, and they had to agree to a virtual unconditional
surrender of power.6
I See Martin C. Needler, "The Military Withdrawal from Power in South America,"ArmedForces
and Society 6 (Summer 1980): 621-23.
6 For discussion of the terms under which military rulers arranged their exits from power, see
Robert H. Dix, "The Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes," Western Political Quarterly 35 (DeThis
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 585
It was thus relatively easy for military rulers to withdraw from power and to
resume professional military roles. The other side of the coin, however, is that
it could also be relatively easy for them to return to power when exigencies and
their own interests warranted. One successful military coup in a country makes
it impossible for political and military leaders to overlook the possibility of a
second. The third wave democracies that succeeded military regimes started life
under this shadow.
Transformation and transplacement also characterized the transitions from
one-party systems to democracy through 1989, except for those in East Germany
and Grenada. One-party regimes had an institutional framework and ideological
legitimacy that differentiated them from both democratic and military regimes.
They also had an assumption of permanence that distinguished them from military
regimes. The distinctive characteristic of one-party systems was the close
interweaving of party and state. This created two sets of problems, institutional
and ideological, in the transition to democracy.
The institutional problems were most severe with Leninist party states. In
Taiwan as in communist countries the "separation of the party from the state"
was "the biggest challenge of a Leninist party" in the process of democratization.7
In Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and East Germany constitutional provisions
for "the leading role" of the communist party had to be abrogated. In
Taiwan comparable "temporary provisions" added to the constitution in 1950
were similarly challenged. In all Leninist party systems major issues arose concerning
ownership of physical and financial assets - did they belong to the party
or the state? The proper disposition of those assets was also in question - should
they be retained by the party, nationalized by the government, sold by the party
cember 1982): 567-68, for "exit guarantees"; Myron Weiner, "Empirical Democratic Theory and the
Transition from Authoritarianism to Democracy," PS 20 (Fall 1987): 864-65; Enrique A. Baloyra,
"Conclusion: Toward a Framework for the Study of Democratic Consolidation" in Enrique A.
Baloyra, ed., Comparing New Democracies: Transition and Consolidation in Mediterranean Europe
and the Southern Cone (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 299-300; Alfred Stepan, Rethinking
Military Politics: Brazil and the Southern Cone (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988),
64-65; Philip Mauceri, "Nine Cases of Transitions and Consolidations" in Robert A. Pastor, ed.,
Democracy in theAmericas: Stopping the Pendulum (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1989), 225, 229;
Luis A. Abugattas, "Populism and After: The Peruvian Experience" in James M. Malloy and Mitchell
A. Seligson, eds., Authoritarians and Democrats: Regime Transition in Latin America (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 137-39; Aldo C. Vacs, "Authoritarian Breakdown and Redemocratization
in Argentina" in Malloy and Seligson, eds., Authoritarians and Democrats, 30-31;
P. Nikiforos Diamandouros, "Transition to, and Consolidation of, Democratic Politics in Greece,
1974-83: A Tentative Assessment" in Geoffrey Pridham, ed., The New Mediterranean Democracies:
Regime Transition in Spain, Greece, and Portugal (London: Frank Cass, 1984), 54; Harry J. Psomiades,
"Greece: From the Colonels' Rule to Democracy" in John H. Herz, ed., From Dictatorship to
Democracy: Coping with the Legacies of Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1982), 253-54.
7 Tun-jen Cheng, "Democratizing the Quasi-Leninist Regime in Taiwan," World Politics 41 (July
1989): 496.
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586 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
to the highest bidder, or distributed in some equitable manner among social and
political groups? In Nicaragua, for instance, after losing the election in February
1990, the Sandinista government apparently moved quickly "to transfer large
amounts of Government property to Sandinista hands." "They are selling houses
to themselves, selling vehicles to themselves," alleged one anti-Sandinista businessman.8
Similar allegations were made about the disposal of government property
to the Communist party as Solidarity was about to take over the government
in Poland. (In a parallel move in Chile, the Pinochet government as it went out
of power transferred to the military establishment property and records that had
belonged to other government agencies.)
In some countries party militias had to be disbanded or brought under government
control, and in almost all one-party states the regular armed forces had to
be depoliticized. In Poland, as in most communist countries, for instance, all
army officers had to be members of the Communist party; in 1989, however,
Polish army officers lobbied parliament to prohibit officers from being members
of any political party.9 In Nicaragua the Sandinista People's Army had been the
army of the movement, became also the army of the state, and then had to be
converted into being only the latter. The question of whether party cells within
economic enterprises should continue was also a highly controversial issue. Finally,
where the single party remained in power, there was the question of the
relation between its leaders in government and the top party bodies such as the
Politburo and the central committee. In the Leninist state the latter dictated policy
to the former. Yet this relationship was hardly compatible with the supremacy of
elected parliamentary bodies and responsible cabinets in a democratic state.
The other distinctive set of problems was ideological. In one-party systems,
the ideology of the party defined the identity of the state. Hence opposition to
the party amounted to treason to the state. To legitimize opposition to the party
it was necessary to establish some other identity for the state. This problem
manifested itself in three contexts. First, in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
Romania, and Bulgaria, communist ideology and rule had been imposed by the
Soviet Union. The ideology was not essential to defining the identity of the
country. In fact, in at least three of these countries nationalism opposed communism.
When the communist parties in these countries gave up their claim to
undisputed rule based on that ideology, the countries redefined themselves from
"people's republics" to "republics" and reestablished nationalism rather than
ideology as the basis of the state. These changes hence occurred relatively easily.
Second, several one-party systems where democratization became an issue had
been created by national revolutions. In these cases - China, Mexico, Nicaragua,
and Turkey -the nature and purpose of the state were defined by the ideology
of the party. In China the regime staunchly adhered to its ideology and identified
8 New York Times, 9 March 1990; 11 March 1990.
9 Bronislaw Geremek, "Postcommuninism and Democracy in Poland," Washington Quarterly 13
(Summer 1990): 129.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 587
democratic opposition to communism with treason to the state. In Turkey, the
government followed an uncertain and ambivalent policy toward Islamic groups
challenging the secular basis of the Kemalist state. In Mexico the leadership of
the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) held somewhat comparable views
concerning the liberal challenge of the opposition Partido Accion Nacional
(PAN) to the revolutionary, socialist, corporatist character of the PRI state. In
Nicaragua Sandinista ideology was the basis of not just the program of a party
but also of the legitimacy of the state created by the Nicaraguan revolution.
Third, in some instances the ideology of the single party defined both the nature
of the state and its geographical scope. In Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union
communist ideology provided the ideological legitimacy for multinational states.
If the ideology were rejected, the basis for the state would disappear and each
nationality could legitimately claim its own state. In East Germany communism
provided the ideological basis for a separate state; when the ideology was abandoned,
the rationale for an East German state disappeared. The ideology of the
Kuomintang (KMT) defined the government on Taiwan as the government of
China, and the regime saw opposition elements supporting an independent
Taiwan as subversive. The problem here was less serious than in the other three
cases because the ideology legitimated an aspiration rather than a reality. The
KMT government functioned in fact as the highly successful government of
Taiwan even though in its own eyes its legitimacy depended on the myth that it
was the rightful government of all China.
When the military give up their control of government, they do not also give
up their control of the instruments of violence with which they could resume
control of government. Democratization of a one-party system, however, means
that the monopolistic party places at risk its control of government and becomes
one more party competing in a multiparty system. In this sense its separation
from power is less complete than it is for the military when they withdraw. The
party remains a political actor. Defeated in the 1990 election, the Sandinistas
could hope "to fight again another day" and come back to power through electoral
means.10 In Bulgaria and Romania former communist parties won elections; in
other East European countries they had less sanguine expectations of participating
in a coalition government sometime in the future.
After democratization a former monopolistic party is in no better position than
any other political group to reinstate an authoritarian system. The party gives up
its monopoly of power but not the opportunity to compete for power by democratic
means. When they return to the barracks, the military give up both, but
they also retain the capacity to reacquire power by nondemocratic means. The
transition from a one-party system to democracy, consequently, is likely to be
more difficult than the transition from a military regime to democracy, but it is
also likely to be more permanent.1" The difficulties of transforming one-party
10 New York Times, 11 March 1990.
"For a similar conclusion, see I. William Zartman, "Transition to Democracy from Single-Party
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588 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
systems are perhaps reflected in the fact that as of 1990 the leaders of such regime
in Taiwan, Mexico, and the Soviet Union had initiated the liberalization of their
regimes but were moving only slowly toward full democratization.
The leaders of personal dictatorships were less likely than those of military and
one-party regimes to give up power voluntarily. Personal dictators in countries
that transited to democracy as well as those that did not usually tried to remain
in office as long as they could. This often created tensions between a narrowly
based political system and an increasingly complex and modern economy and
society.12 It also led on occasion to the violent overthrow of the dictator, as
happened in Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Iran, and the dictator's replacement
by another authoritarian regime. In the third wave of democratization, uprisings
similarly overthrew personal dictatorships in Portugal, the Philippines, and Romania.
In Spain, the dictator died and his successors led a classic case of democratic
transformation from above. In India and in Chile, the leaders in power
submitted themselves to elections in the apparent but mistaken belief that the
voters would confirm them in office. When this did not happen, they, unlike
Marcos and Manuel Noriega, accepted the electoral verdict. In the cases of sultanistic
regimes, the transitions to democracy were complicated by the weakness
of political parties and other institutions. Transitions to democracy from personal
dictatorship thus occurred when the founding dictator died and his successors
decided on democratization, when the dictator was overthrown, and when he or
she miscalculated the support that the dictator could win in an election.
TRANSITION PROCESSES
The third wave transitions were complex political processes involving a variety
of groups struggling for power and for and against democracy and other goals.
In terms of their attitudes toward democratization, the crucial participants in the
processes were the standpatters, liberal reformers, and democratic reformers in
the governing coalition, and democratic moderates and revolutionary extremists
in the opposition. In noncommunist authoritarian systems, the standpatters
within the government were normally perceived as right-wing, fascist, and nationalist.
The opponents of democratization in the opposition were normally leftwing,
revolutionary, and Marxist-Leninist. Supporters of democracy in both
government and opposition could be conceived as occupying middle positions on
the left-right continuum. In communist systems left and right were less clear.
Standpatters were normally thought of as Stalinist or Brezhnevite. Within the
Regimes: Lessons from North Africa" (Paper presented to Annual Meeting, American Political
Science Association, Atlanta, 31 August-3 September 1989), 2-4.
12 See Richard K. Betts and Samuel P. Huntington, "Dead Dictators and Rioting Mobs: Does the
Demise of Authoritarian Rulers Lead to Political Instability?" International Security 10 (Winter
1985-86): 112-46.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 589
FIGURE 1
Political Groups Involved in Democratization
Attitudes Toward Democracy
Against For Against
Reformers
Government Democratizers Liberals Standpatters
Radical Democratic
Opposition Extremists Moderates
opposition, the extremist opponents of democracy were not revolutionary leftwingers
but often nationalist groups thought of as right-wing.
Within the governing coalition some groups often came to favor democratization,
while others opposed it, and others supported limited reform or liberalization
(see Figure 1). Opposition- attitudes toward democracy were also usually
divided. Supporters of the existing dictatorship always opposed democracy; opponents
of the existing dictatorship often opposed democracy. Almost invariably,
however, they used the rhetoric of democracy in their efforts to replace the
existing authoritarian regime with one of their own. The groups involved in the
politics of democratization thus had both conflicting and common objectives.
Reformers and standpatters divided over liberalization and democratization but
presumably had a common interest in constraining the power of opposition
groups. Moderates and radicals had a common interest in bringing down the
existing regime and getting into power but disagreed about what sort of new
regime should be created. Reformers and moderates had a common interest in
creating democracy but often divided over how the costs of creating it should be
borne and how power within it should be apportioned. Standpatters and radicals
were totally opposed on the issue of who should rule but had a common interest
in weakening the democratic groups in the center and in polarizing politics in the
society.
The attitudes and goals of particular individuals and groups at times changed
in the democratization process. If democratization did not produce the dangers
they feared, people who had been liberal reformers or even standpatters might
come to accept democracy. Similarly, participation in the processes of democratization
could lead members of extremist opposition groups to moderate their
revolutionary propensities and accept the constraints and opportunities democracy
offered.
The relative power of the groups shaped the nature of the democratization
process and often changed during that process. If standpatters dominated the
government and extremists the opposition, democratization was impossible, as,
for example, where a right-wing personal dictator determined to hang on to
power confronted an opposition dominated by Marxist-Leninists. Transition to
democracy was, of course, facilitated if prodemocratic groups were dominant in
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590 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
both the government and opposition. The differences in power between reformers
and moderates, however, shaped how the process occurred. In 1976, for instance,
the Spanish opposition urged a complete "democratic break" or ruptura with
the Franco legacy and creation of a provisional government and a constituent
assembly to formulate a new constitutional order. Adolfo Suarez was powerful
enough, however, to fend this off and produce democratization working through
the Franco constitutional mechanism."3 If democratic groups were strong in the
opposition but not in the government, democratization depended on events undermining
the government and bringing the opposition to power. If democratic
groups were dominant in the governing coalition, but not in the opposition, the
effort at democratization could be threatened by insurgent violence and by a
backlash increase in power of standpatter groups possibly leading to a coup
d'etat.
The three crucial interactions in democratization processes were those between
government and opposition, between reformers and standpatters in the governing
coalition, and between moderates and extremists in the opposition. In all transitions
these three central interactions played some role. The relative importance
and the conflictual or cooperative character of these interactions, however, varied
with the overall nature of the transition process. In transformations, the interaction
between reformers and standpatters within the governing coalition was of
central importance; and the transformation only occurred if reformers were
stronger than standpatters, if the government was stronger than the opposition,
and if the moderates were stronger than the extremists. As the transformation
went on, opposition moderates were often coopted into the governing coalition
while standpatter groups opposing democratization defected from it. In replacements,
the interactions between government and opposition and between moderates
and extremists were important; the opposition eventually had to be stronger
than the government, and the moderates had to be stronger than the extremists.
A successive defection of groups often led to the downfall of the regime and
inauguration of the democratic system. In transplacements, the central interaction
was between reformers and moderates not widely unequal in power, with
each being able to dominate the antidemocratic groups on its side of the line
between the government and the opposition. In some transplacements, government
and former opposition groups agreed on at least a temporary sharing of
power.
TRANSFORMATIONS
In transformations those in power in the authoritarian regime take the lead and
play the decisive role in ending that regime and changing it into a democratic
13 See Raymond Carr, "Introduction: The Spanish Transition to Democracy in Historical Perspective"
in Robert P. Clark and Michael H. Haltzel, eds., Spain in the 1980s: TheDemocratic Transition
and a New International Role (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1987), 3-4.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 591
system. The line between transformations and transplacements is fuzzy, and
some cases might be legitimately classified in either category. Overall, however,
transformations accounted for approximately sixteen out of thirty-five third wave
transitions that had occurred or that appeared to be underway by the end of the
1980s. These sixteen cases of liberalization or democratization included changes
from five one-party systems, three personal dictatorships, and eight military
regimes. Transformation requires the government to be stronger than the opposition.
Consequently, it occurred in well-established military regimes where governments
clearly controlled the ultimate means of coercion vis-a-vis the opposition
and/or vis-a-vis authoritarian systems that had been successful economically,
such as Spain, Brazil, Taiwan, Mexico, and, compared to other communist states,
Hungary. The leaders of these countries had the power to move their countries
toward democracy if they wanted to. In every case the opposition was, at least
at the beginning of the process, markedly weaker than the government. In Brazil,
for example, as Alfred Stepan points out, when "liberalization began, there was
no significant political opposition, no economic crisis, and no collapse of the
coercive apparatus due to defeat in war."'14 In Brazil and elsewhere the people
best situated to end the authoritarian regime were the leaders of the regime - and
they did.
The prototypical cases of transformation were Spain, Brazil, and, among communist
regimes, Hungary. The most important case, if it materializes, will be the
Soviet Union. The Brazilian transition was "liberation from above" or "regimeinitiated
liberalization." In Spain "it was a question of reformist elements associated
with the incumbent dictatorship, initiating processes of political change
from within the established regime.""5 The two transitions differed significantly,
however, in their duration. In Spain in less than three and a half years after the
death of Franco, a democratizing prime minister had replaced a liberalizing one,
the Franco legislature had voted the end of the regime, political reform had been
endorsed in a referendum, political parties (including the Communist party) were
legalized, a new assembly was elected, a democratic constitution was drafted
and approved in a referendum, the major political actors reached agreement on
economic policy, and parliamentary elections were held under the new constitution.
Adolfo Suairez reportedly told his cabinet that "his strategy would be based
on speed. He would keep ahead of the game by introducing specific measures
faster than the continuistas of the Francoist establishment could respond to
them." While the reforms were compressed within a short period of time, however,
they were also undertaken sequentially. Hence, it has also been argued that
"By staggering the reforms, Suarez avoided antagonizing too many sectors of the
14 Alfred Stepan, "Introduction," in Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition
and Consolidation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ix.
15 Ibid.; Scott Mainwaring, "The Transition to Democracy in Brazil," Journal of Interamerican
Studies and World Affairs 28 (Spring 1986): 149; Kenneth Medhurst, "Spain's Evolutionary Pathway
from Dictatorship to Democracy in Pridham, ed., New Mediterranean Democracies, 30.
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592 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
franquist regime simultaneously. The last set of democratic reforms provoked
open hostility from the military and other franquist hardliners, but the President
[SuairezJ had greatly gained considerable momentum and support." In effect,
then, Suairez followed a highly compressed version of the Kemalist "Fabian
strategy, blitzkrieg tactics" pattern of reform.16
In Brazil, in contrast, President Ernesto Geisel determined that political change
was to be "gradual, slow, and sure." The process began at the end of the Medici
administration in 1973, continued through the Geisel and Figueiredo administrations,
jumped forward with the installation of a civilian president in 1985, and
culminated in the adoption of a new constitution in 1988 and the popular election
of a president in 1989. The regime-decreed movements toward democratization
were interspersed with actions taken to reassure hardliners in the military and
elsewhere. In effect, Presidents Geisel and Figueiredo followed a two-steps forward,
one-step backward policy. The result was a creeping democratization in
which the control of the government over the process was never seriously challenged.
In 1973 Brazil had a repressive military dictatorship; in 1989 it was a
full-scale democracy. It is customary to date the arrival of democracy in Brazil
in January 1985, when the electoral college chose a civilian president. In fact,
however, there was no clear break; the genius of the Brazilian transformation is
that it is virtually impossible to say at what point Brazil stopped being a dictatorship
and became a democracy.
Spain and Brazil were the prototypical cases of change from above, and the
Spanish case in particular became the model for subsequent democratizations in
Latin America and Eastern Europe. In 1988 and 1989, for instance, Hungarian
leaders consulted extensively with Spanish leaders on how to introduce democracy,
and in April 1989 a Spanish delegation went to Budapest to offer advice. Six
months later one commentator pointed to the similarities in the two transitions:
The last years of the Kadar era did bear some resemblance to the benign authoritarianism
of Franco's decaying dictatorship. Imre Pozsgay plays the part of Prince Juan Carlos
in this comparison. He is a reassuring symbol of continuity in the midst of radical
change. Liberal-minded economic experts with links to the old establishment and the
new entrepreneurial class provide a technocratic elite for the transition, much as the
new bourgeois elites associated with Opus Dei did in Spain. The opposition parties also
figure in this analogy, emerging from underground in much the same way the Spanish
exiles did once it was safe to come out. And as in Spain, the Hungarian oppositionists moderate
in style, radically democratic in substance -are playing a vital role in the
reinvention of democracy.17
16 Paul Preston, The Triumph of Democracy in Spain (London: Methuen, 1986), 93; Donald Share
and Scott Mainwaring, "Transitions Through Transaction: Democratization in Brazil and Spain" in
Wayne A. Selcher, ed., PoliticalLiberalization in Brazil: Dynamics, Dilemmas, and Future Prospects
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1986), 179; Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing
Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 344-57.
17 Jacques Rupnik, "Hungary's Quiet Revolution," New Republic, 20 November 1989, 20; New
York Times, 16 April 1989.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 593
Third wave transformations usually evolved through five major phases, four
of which occurred within the authoritarian system.
Emergence of reformers. The first step was the emergence of a group of leaders
or potential leaders within the authoritarian regime who believed that movement
in the direction of democracy was desirable or necessary. Why did they conclude
this? The reasons why people became democratic reformers varied greatly from
country to country and seldom were clear. They can, however, be grouped into
five categories. First, reformers often concluded that the costs of staying in
power -such as politicizing their armed forces, dividing the coalition that had
supported them, grappling with seemingly unsolvable problems (usually economic),
and increasing repression -had reached the point where a graceful exit
from power was desirable. The leaders of military regimes were particularly
sensitive to the corrosive effects of political involvement on the integrity, professionalism,
coherence, and command structure of the military. "We all directly or
indirectly," General Morales Bermudez observed as he led Peru toward democracy,
"had been witnesses to what was happening to this institution fundamental
to our fatherland, and in the same vein, to the other institutions. And we don't
want that." In a similar vein, General Fernando Matthei, head of the Chilean air
force, warned, "If the transition toward democracy is not initiated promptly, we
shall ruin the armed forces in a way no Marxist infiltration could."'8
Second, in some cases reformers wished to reduce the risks they faced if they
held on to power and then eventually lost it. If the opposition seemed to be
gaining strength, arranging for a democratic transition was one way of achieving
this. It is, after all, preferable to risk losing office than to risk losing life.
Third, in some cases, including India, Chile, and Turkey, authoritarian leaders
believed that they or their associates would not lose office. Having made commitments
to restore democratic institutions and being faced with declining legitimacy
and support these rulers could see the desirability of attempting to renew their
legitimacy by organizing elections in anticipation that the voters would continue
them in power. This anticipation was usually wrong.
Fourth, reformers often believed that democratizing would produce benefits
for their country: increase its international legitimacy, reduce U.S. or other
sanctions against their regime, and open the door to economic and military
assistance, International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans, invitations to Washington,
and inclusion in international gatherings dominated by the leaders of the Western
alliance.
Finally, in many cases, including Spain, Brazil, Hungary, and Turkey and
some other military regimes, reformers believed that democracy was the "right"
form of government and that their country had evolved to the point where, like
other developed and respected countries, it too should have a democratic political
system.
18 Quoted by Abugattas in Malloy and Seligson, eds., Authoritarians and Democrats, 129, and
by Sylvia T. Borzutzky, "The Pinochet Regime: Crisis and Consolidation" in ibid., 85.
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594 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
Liberal reformers tended to see liberalization as a way of defusing opposition
to their regime without fully democratizing the regime. They would ease up
on repression, restore some civil liberties, reduce censorship, permit broader
discussion of public issues, and allow civil society-associations, churches,
unions, business organizations -greater scope to conduct their affairs. Liberalizers
did not, however, wish to introduce fully participatory competitive elections
that could cause current leaders to lose power. They wanted to create a kinder,
gentler, more secure and stable authoritarianism without altering fundamentally
the nature of their system. Some reformers were undoubtedly unsure themselves
how far they wished to go in opening up the politics of their country. They also
at times undoubtedly felt the need to veil their intentions: democratizers tended
to reassure standpatters by giving the impression that they were only liberalizing;
liberalizers attempted to win broader popular support by creating the impression
they were democratizing. Debates consequently raged over how far Geisel, Botha,
Gorbachev, and others "really" wanted to go.
The emergence of liberalizers and democratizers within an authoritarian system
creates a first-order force for political change. It also, however, can have a
second-order effect. In military regimes in particular it divides the ruling group,
further politicizes the military, and hence leads more officers to believe that "the
military as government" must be ended in order to preserve "the military as
institution." The debate over whether or not to withdraw from government in
itself becomes an argument to withdraw from government.
Acquiring power. Democratic reformers not only had to exist within the authoritarian
regime, they also had to be in power in that regime. How did this
come about? In three cases leaders who created the authoritarian regime presided
over its transition to democracy. In India and Turkey, authoritarian regimes were
defined from the start as interruptions in the formal pattern of democracy. The
regimes were short-lived, ending with elections organized by the authoritarian
leaders in the false anticipation that they or the candidates they supported would
win those elections. In Chile General Pinochet created the regime, remained in
power for seventeen years, established a lengthy schedule for the transition to
democracy, implemented that schedule in anticipation that the voters would
extend him in office for eight more years, and exited grudgingly from power
when they did not. Otherwise those who created authoritarian regimes or who
led such regimes for prolonged periods of time did not take the lead in ending
those regimes. In all these cases, transformation occurred because reformers
replaced standpatters in power.
Reformers came to power in authoritarian regimes in three ways. First, in
Spain and Taiwan, the founding and long-ruling authoritarian leaders, Franco
and Chiang Kai-shek died. Their designated successors, Juan Carlos and Chiang
Ching-kuo, succeeded to the mantle, responded to the momentous social and
economic changes that had occurred in their countries, and began the process of
democratization. In the Soviet Union, the deaths in the course of three years of
Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantine Chernenko allowed GorbaThis
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 595
chev to come to power. In a sense, Franco, Chiang, and Brezhnev died in time;
Deng Xiao-ping did not.
In Brazil and in Mexico, the authoritarian system itself provided for regular
change in leadership. This made the acquisition of power by reformers possible
but not necessary. In Brazil two factions existed in the military. Repression
reached its peak between 1969 and 1972 during the presidency of General Emilio
Medici, a hard-liner. In a major struggle within the military establishment at the
end of his term, the soft-line Sorbonne group was able to secure the nomination
of General Ernesto Geisel for president, in part because his brother was minister
of war. Guided by his chief associate, General Golbery do Couto e Silva, Geisel
began the process of democratization and acted decisively to ensure that he
would, in turn, be succeeded in 1978 by another member of the Sorbonne group,
General Joao Batista Figueiredo. In Mexico, outgoing President Jose Lopez
Portillo in 1981 followed standard practice in selecting his minister of planning
and budgets, Miguel de la Madrid, as his successor. De la Madrid was an economic
and political liberalizer and, rejecting more traditional and old-guard candidates,
chose a young reforming technocrat, Carlos Salinas, to continue the opening up
process.
Where authoritarian leaders did not die and were not regularly changed, democratic
reformers had to oust the ruler and install prodemocratic leadership. In
military governments, other than Brazil, this meant the replacement by coup
d'etat of one military leader by another: Morales Bermudez replaced Juan Velasco
in Peru; Alfredo Poveda replaced Guillermo Rodriguez Lara in Ecuador; Oscar
Mejia replaced Jose Rios Montt in Guatemala; Murtala Muhammed replaced
Yacubu Gowon in Nigeria.19 In the one-party system in Hungary, reformers
mobilized their strength and deposed the long-ruling Janos Kadar at a special
party conference in May 1988, replacing him as secretary general with Karoly
Grosz. Grosz, however, was only a semireformer, and a year later the Central
Committee replaced him with a four-person presidium dominated by reformers.
In October 1989 one of them, Rezso Nyers, became party president. In Bulgaria in
the fall of 1989, reform-minded Communist party leaders ousted Todor Zhivkov
from the dominant position he had occupied for thirty-five years. The leadership
changes associated with some liberalizing and democratizing reforms are summarized
in Table 2.
The failure of liberalization. A critical issue in the third wave concerned the
role of liberal reformers and the stability of a liberalized authoritarian polity.
Liberal reformers who succeeded standpatter leaders usually turned out to be
transition figures with brief stays in power. In Taiwan, Hungary, and Mexico,
liberalizers were quickly succeeded by more democratically oriented reformers.
In Brazil, although some analysts are dubious, it seems reasonably clear that
19 See Needler, "The Military Withdrawal," 621-23 on "second phase" coups and the observation
that "the military government that returns power to civilian hands is not the same one that seized
power from the constitutional government in the first place."
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596 j POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
TABLE 2
Leadership Change and Reform, 1973-90
First
Standpat Reform Reform Democratic
Country Leader Change Leader I Change Leader 11 Election
Nigeria Gowon July 1975 coup Murtala February 1976 death Obasanjo August 1979
Mohammed
Ecuador Rodriguez January 1976 coup Poveda - - April 1979
Lara
Peru Velasco August 1975 coup Morales - - May 1980
Bermudez
Brazil Medici March 1974 succession Geisel March 1979 succession Figueiredo January 1985
Guatemala Rios August 1983 coup Mejia - - December 1985
Montt
Spain Franco November 1975 death Juan - Juan March 1979
Carlos Carlos
Carrero December 1973 death Arias July 1976 ouster SuArez
Blanco
Taiwan Chiang April 1975 death Chiang January 1988 death Lee
Kai-shek Ching-kuo Teng-hui
Hungary Kadar May 1988 ouster Grosz May-October 1989 ouster Nyers-Pozsgay March 1990
Mexico Portillo December 1982 succession De la December 1988 succession Salinas
Madrid
South Africa Vorster September 1978 ouster Botha September 1989 ouster de Klerk
USSR Chernenko March 1985 death Gorbachev
Bulgaria Zhivkov November 1989 ouster Mladenov - - June 1990
Geisel and Golbery do Couto e Silva were committed to meaningful democratization
from the start.20 Even if they did just intend to liberalize the authoritarian
system rather than replace it, Joao Figueiredo extended the process to democratization.
"I have to make this country into a democracy," he said in 1978 before
taking office, and he did.21
In Spain the hard-line prime minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, was
assassinated in December 1973, and Franco appointed Carlos Arias Navarro to
succeed him. Arias was the classic liberal reformer. He wished to modify the
Franco regime in order to preserve it. In a famous speech on 12 February 1974, he
proposed an opening (apertura) and recommended a number of modest reforms
including, for instance, permitting political associations to function but not political
parties. He "was too much of a conservative and Francoist at heart to carry
out a true democratization of the regime." His reform proposals were torpedoed
20 Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics, 32-40; and Thomas E. Skidmore, "Brazil's Slow Road to
Democratization: 1974-1985" in Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil, 33. This interpretation coincides
with my own impression of Golbery's intentions that I formed in 1974 working with him on plans
for Brazil's democratization. For a contrary argument, see Silvio R. Duncan Baretta and John
Markoff, "Brazil's Abertura: A Transition from What to What?" in Malloy and Seligson, eds.,
Authoritarians and Democrats, 45-46.
21 Quoted in Francisco Weffort, "Why Democracy?" in Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil, 332.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE j 597
by the standpatters of the "bunker," including Franco; at the same time the
proposals stimulated the opposition to demand a more extensive opening. In the
end, Arias "discredited aperturismo just as Luis Carrero Blanco had discredited
immobilism."22 In November 1975 Franco died and Juan Carlos succeeded him
as chief of state. Juan Carlos was committed to transforming Spain into a true,
European-style parliamentary democracy, Arias resisted this change, and in July
1976 Juan Carlos replaced him with Adolfo Suarez, who moved quickly to introduce
democracy.
The transition from liberalized authoritarianism, however, could move backward
as well as forward. A limited opening could raise expectations of further
change that could lead to instability, upheaval, and even violence; these, in turn,
could provoke an antidemocratic reaction and replacement of the liberalizing
leadership with standpatter leaders. In Greece, George Papadopoulos attempted
to shift from a standpatter to a liberalizing stance; this led to the Polytechnic
student demonstration and its bloody suppression; a reaction followed and the
liberalizing Papadopoulos was replaced by the hard-line Dimitrios Ioannidis. In
Argentina General Roberto Viola succeeded the hard-line General Jorge Videla
as president and began to liberalize. This produced a reaction in the military,
Viola's ouster, and his replacement by hard-line General Leopoldo Galtieri. In
China ultimate power presumably rested with Deng Xiao-ping. In 1987, however
Zhao Ziyang became general secretary of the Communist party and began to
open up the political system. This led to the massive student demonstrations in
Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, which, in turn, provoked a hard-line
reaction, the crushing of the student movement, the ouster of Zhao, and his
replacement by Li Peng. In Burma, General Ne Win, who had ruled Burma for
twenty-six years, ostensibly retired from office in July 1988 and was replaced by
General Sein Lwin, another hard-liner. Mounting protests and violence forced
Sein Lwin out within three weeks. He was succeeded by a civilian and presumed
moderate, Maung Maung, who proposed elections and attempted to negotiate
with opposition groups. Protests continued, however, and in September the army
deposed Maung Maung, took control of the government, bloodily suppressed
the demonstrations, and ended the movement toward liberalization.
The dilemmas of the liberalizer were reflected in the experiences of P. W. Botha
and Mikhail Gorbachev. Both leaders introduced major liberalizing reforms in
their societies. Botha came to power in 1978 with the slogan "Adapt or die"
and legalized black trade unions, repealed the marriage laws, established mixed
trading zones, granted citizenship to urban blacks, permitted blacks to acquire
freehold title, substantially reduced petty apartheid, increased significantly investment
in black education, abolished the pass laws, provided for elected black
township councils, and created houses of parliament representing coloureds and
22 Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo Fusi Aizpurua, Spain: Dictatorship to Democracy, 2d ed.
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), 198-206.
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598 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
Asians, although not blacks. Gorbachev opened up public discussion, greatly
reduced censorship, dramatically challenged the power of the Communist party
apparat, and introduced at least modest forms of government responsibility to
an elected legislature. Both leaders gave their societies new constitutions incorporating
many reforms and also creating new and very powerful posts of president,
which they then assumed. It seems probable that neither Botha nor Gorbachev,
however, wanted fundamental change in their political systems. Their reforms
were designed to improve and to moderate, but also to bolster the existing system
and make it more acceptable to their societies. They themselves said as much
repeatedly. Botha did not intend to end white power; Gorbachev did not intend
to end communist power. As liberal reformers they wanted to change but also
to preserve the systems that they led and in whose bureaucracies they had spent
their careers.
Botha's liberalizing but not democratizing reforms stimulated intensified demands
from South African blacks for their full incorporation into the political
system. In September 1984 black townships erupted with protests that led to
violence, repression, and the deployment of military forces into the townships.
The efforts at reform simultaneously ended, and Botha the reformer was widely
viewed as having become Botha the repressor. The reform process only got
underway again in 1989 when Botha was replaced by F. W. de Klerk, whose more
extensive reforms led to criticisms from Botha and his resignation from the
National party. In 1989 and 1990 Gorbachev's liberalizing but not democratizing
reforms appeared to be stimulating comparable upheaval, protests, and violence
in the Soviet Union. As in South Africa, communal groups fought each other and
the central authorities. The dilemma for Gorbachev was clear. Moving forward
toward full-scale democratization would mean not only the end of communist
power in the Soviet Union but very probably the end of the Soviet Union. Leading
a hard-line reaction to the upheavals would mean the end of his efforts at economic
reform, his greatly improved relations with the West, and his global image
as a creative and humane leader. Andrei Sakharov put the choices squarely to
Gorbachev in 1989: "A middle course in situations like these is almost impossible.
The country and you personally are at a crossroads - either increase the process
of change maximally or try to retain the administrative command system with all
its qualities."23
Where it was tried, liberalization stimulated the desire for democratization in
some groups and the desire for repression in others. The experience of the third
wave strongly suggests that liberalized authoritarianism is not a stable equilibrium;
the halfway house does not stand.
Backward legitimacy: subduing the standpatters. The achievement of power
enabled the reformers to start democratizing but it did not eliminate the ability
23 Quoted in David Remnick, "The Struggle for Light," New York Review of Books, 16 August
1990, 6.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 599
of the standpatters to challenge the reformers. The standpatter elements of what
had been the governing coalition-the Francoist "bunker" in Spain, the military
hard-liners in Brazil and other Latin American countires, the Stalinists in Hungary,
the mainlander old guard in the KMT, the party bosses and bureaucracy
in the PRI, the Verkrampte wing of the National party-did not give up easily.
In the government, military, and party bureaucracies standpatters worked to stop
or slow down the processes of change. In the non-one-party systems -Brazil,
Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala, Nigeria, and Spain - standpatter groups in the military
attempted coups d'etat and made other efforts to dislodge the reformers
from power. In South Africa and in Hungary, standpatter factions broke away
from the dominant parties, charging them with betraying the basic principles on
which the parties were based.
Reform governments attempted to neutralize standpatter opposition by weakening,
reassuring, and converting the standpatters. Countering standpatter resistance
often required a concentration of power in the reform chief executive.
Geisel asserted himself as "dictator of the abertura" in order to force the Brazilian
military out of politics.24 Juan Carlos exercised his power and prerogatives to the
full in moving Spain toward democracy, not least in the surprise selection of
Suarez as prime minister. Botha and Gorbachev, as we have seen, created powerful
new presidential offices for themselves. Salinas dramatically asserted his
powers during his first years as Mexico's president.
The first requirement for reform leaders was to purge the governmental, military,
and, where appropriate, party bureaucracies, replacing standpatters in top
offices with supporters of reform. This was typically done in selective fashion so
as not to provoke a strong reaction and so as to promote fissions within the
standpatter ranks. In addition to weakening standpatters, reform leaders also
tried to reassure and convert them. In military regimes, the reformers argued that
it was time to go back, after a necessary but limited authoritarian interlude, to
the democratic principles that were the basis of their country's political system.
In this sense, they appealed for a "return to legitimacy." In the nonmilitary
authoritarian systems, reformers invoked "backward legitimacy" and stressed
elements of continuity with the past.25 In Spain, for instance, the monarchy was
reestablished and Suarez adhered to the provisions of the Franco constitution in
abolishing that constitution: no Francoist could claim that there were procedural
irregularities. In Mexico and South Africa the reformers in the PRI and National
party cast themselves in the traditions of those parties. On Taiwan the KMT
reformers appealed to Sun Yat-Sen's three principles.
Backward legitimacy had two appeals and two effects: it legitimated the new
24 See Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics, 42-43.
25 Giuseppe Di Palma highlighted the significance of backward legitimacy in "Founding Coalitions
in Southern Europe: Legitimacy and Hegemony," Government and Opposition 15 (Spring 1980):
170. See also Nancy Bermeo, "Redemocratization and Transition Elections: A Comparison of Spain
and Portugal," Comparative Politics 19 (January 1987): 218.
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600 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
order because it was a product of the old, and it retrospectively legitimated the
old order because it had produced the new. It elicited consensus from all except
opposition extremists who had no use for either the old authoritarian regime or
the new democratic one. Reformers also appealed to standpatters on the grounds
that they were preempting the radical opposition and hence minimizing instability
and violence. Suarez, for instance, asked the Spanish army to support him for
these reasons and the dominant elements in the army accepted the transition
because there "was no illegitimacy, no disorder in the streets, no significant threat
of breakdown and subversion." Inevitably, the reformers also found that, as
Geisel put it, they could "not advance without some retreats" and that hence, on
occasion, as in the 1977 "April package" in Brazil, they had to make concessions
to the standpatters.26
Coopting the opposition. Once in power the democratic reformers usually
moved quickly to begin the process of democratization. This normally involved
consultations with leaders of the opposition, the political parties, and major
social groups and institutions. In some instances relatively formal negotiations
occurred and quite explicit agreements or pacts were reached. In other cases, the
consultations and negotiations were more informal. In Ecuador and Nigeria the
government appointed commissions to develop plans and policies for the new
system. In Spain, Peru, Nigeria, and eventually in Brazil elected assemblies
drafted new constitutions. In several instances referenda were held to approve
the new constitutional arrangements.
As the reformers alienated standpatters within the governing coalition, they
had to reinforce themselves by developing support within the opposition and by
expanding the political arena and appealing to the new groups that were becoming
politically active as a result of the opening. Skillful reformers used the increased
pressure from these groups for democratization to weaken the standpatters, and
used the threat of a standpatter coup as well as the attractions of a share in power
to strengthen moderate groups in the opposition.
To these ends, reformers in government negotiated with the principal opposition
groups and arrived at explicit or tacit agreements with them. In Spain, for
instance, the Communist party recognized that it was too weak to follow a
"radical rupturista policy" and instead went along with a "rupturapactada" even
though the pact was "purely tacit." In October 1977 Suarez won the agreement
of the Communist and Socialist parties to the Pactos de la Moncloa comprising
a mixture of fairly severe economic austerity measures and some social reforms.
Secret negotiations with Santiago Carrillo, the principal Communist leader,
"played on the PCE [Partido Comunista de Espafial leader's anxiety to be near the
levers of power and secured his backing for an austerity package."27 In Hungary
26 Stanley G. Payne, "The Role of the Armed Forces in the Spanish Transition" in Clark and
Haltzel, eds., Spain in the 1980s, 86; Stepan, Rethinking Military Politics, 36.
27 Theses presented by the Central Committee, Ninth Congress, Communist Party of Spain, 5-
9 April 1978, quoted in Juan J. Linz, "S'me Comparative Thoughts on the Transition to Democracy
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 601
explicit negotiations occurred in the fall of 1989 between the Com
and the Opposition Round Table representing the principal other parties and
groups. In Brazil informal understandings developed between the government
and the opposition parties, the Movimento Democratico Brasileiro (MDB) and
the Partido Movimento Democratico Brasileiro (PMDB). On Taiwan in 1986 the
government and the opposition arrived at an understanding on the parameters
within which political change would take place and, in a week-long conference
in July 1990, agreed on a full schedule of democratization.
Moderation and cooperation by the democratic opposition- their involvement
in the process as junior partners - were essential to successful transformation. In
almost all countries, the principal opposition parties - the MDB-PMDB in Brazil,
the Socialists and Communists in Spain, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
on Taiwan, the Civic Forum in Hungary, the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria
Americana (APRA) in Peru, the Christian Democrats in Chile - were led by
moderates and followed moderate policies, at times in the face of considerable
provocation by standpatter groups in the government.
Thomas E. Skidmore's summary of what occurred in Brazil neatly catches the
central relationship involved in transformation processes:
In the end, liberalization was the product of an intense dialectical relationship between
the government and the opposition. The military who favored abertura had to proceed
cautiously, for fear of arousing the hardliners. Their overtures to the opposition were
designed to draw out the "responsible" elements, thereby showing there were moderates
ready to cooperate with the government. At the same time, the opposition constantly
pressed the government to end its arbitrary excesses, thereby reminding the military
that their rule lacked legitimacy. Meanwhile, the opposition moderates had to remind
the radicals that they would play into the hands of the hardliners if they pushed too
hard. This intricate political relationship functioned successfully because there was a
consensus among both military and civilians in favor of a return to an (almost) open
political system.28
Guidelines for Democratizers 1:
Reforming Authoritarian Systems
The principal lessons of the Spanish, Brazilian, and other transformations for
democratic reformers in authoritarian governments include the following:
(1) Secure your political base. As quickly as possible place supporters of democratization
in key power positions in the government, the party, and the military.
(2) Maintain backward legitimacy, that is, make changes through the established
procedures of the nondemocratic regime and reassure standpatter groups
in Portugal and Spain" in Jorge Braga de Macedo and Simon Serfaty, eds., Portugal Since the
Revolution: Economic and Political Perspectives (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981), 44; Preston,
Triumph of Democracy in Spain, 137.
28 Skidmore, "Brazil's Slow Road")in Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil, 34.
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602 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
with symbolic concessions, following a course of two steps forward, one step
backward.
(3) Gradually shift your own constituency so as to reduce your dependence on
government groups opposing change and to broaden your constituency in the
direction of opposition groups supporting democracy.
(4) Be prepared for the standpatters to take some extreme action to stop change
(for example, a coup attempt) - possibly even stimulate them to do so - and
then crack down on them ruthlessly, isolating and discrediting the more extreme
opponents of change.
(5) Seize and keep control of the initiative in the democratization process. Only
lead from strength and never introduce democratization measures in response to
obvious pressure from more extreme radical opposition groups.
(6) Keep expectations low as to how far change can go; talk in terms of maintaining
an ongoing process rather than achieving some fully elaborated democratic
utopia.
(7) Encourage development of a responsible, moderate opposition party, which
the key groups in society (including the military) will accept as a plausible nonthreatening
alternative government.
(8) Create a sense of inevitability about the process of democratization so that
it becomes widely accepted as a necessary and natural course of development
even if to some people it remains an undesirable one.
REPLACEMENTS
Replacements involve a very different process from transformations. Reformers
within the regime are weak or nonexistent. The dominant elements in government
are standpatters staunchly opposed to regime change. Democratization consequently
results from the opposition gaining strength and the government losing
strength until the government collapses or is overthrown. The former opposition
groups come to power and the conflict then often enters a new phase as groups
in the new government struggle among themselves over the nature of the regime
they should institute. Replacement, in short, involves three distinct phases: the
struggle to produce the fall, the fall, and the struggle after the fall.
Most third wave democratizations required some cooperation from those in
power. Only six replacements had occurred by 1990. Replacements were rare in
transitions from one-party systems (one out of eleven) and military regimes (two
out of sixteen) and more common in transitions from personal dictatorships
(three out of seven). As we have pointed out, with some exceptions (Gandhi,
Kenan Evren, Pinochet), leaders who created authoritarian regimes did not end
those regimes. Changes of leadership within authoritarian systems were much
more likely in military regimes through "second phase" coups or, in one-party
systems, through regular succession or the action of constituted party bodies.
Personal dictators, however, seldom retired voluntarily, and the nature of their
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 603
power - personal rather than military or organizational - made it difficult for
opponents within the regime to oust them and, indeed, made it unlikely that such
opponents would exist in any significant numbers or strength. The personal
dictator was thus likely to hang on until he died or until the regime itself came
to an end. The life of the regime became the life of the dictator. Politically and
at times literally (for example, Franco, Ceausescu) the deaths of the dictator and
the regime coincided.
Democratic reformers were notably weak in or missing from the authoritarian
regimes that disappeared in replacements. In Argentina and Greece, the liberalizing
leaders Viola and Papadopoulos were forced out of power and succeeded
by military hard-liners. In Portugal Caetano initiated some liberalizing reforms
and then backed away from them. In the Philippines, Romania, and East Germany,
the entourages of Marcos, Ceausescu, and Erich Honecker contained few
if any democrats or even liberals. In all six cases standpatters monopolized power,
and the possibility of initiating reform from within was almost totally absent.
An authoritarian system exists because the government is politically stronger
than the opposition. It is replaced when the government becomes weaker than
the opposition. Hence replacement requires the opposition to wear down the
government and shift the balance of power in its favor. When they were initiated,
the authoritarian regimes involved in the third wave were almost always popular
and widely supported. They usually had the backing of a broad coalition of
groups. Over time, however, as with any government, their strength deteriorated.
The Greek and Argentine military regimes suffered the humiliation of military
defeat. The Portuguese and Philippine regimes were unable to win counterinsurgency
wars, and the Philippine regime created a martyr and stole an election.
The Romanian regime followed policies that deeply antagonized its people and
isolated itself from them; hence it was vulnerable to the cumulative snowballing
of the antiauthoritarian movement throughout Eastern Europe. The case of East
Germany was more ambiguous. Although the regime was relatively successful in
some respects, the inevitable comparison with West Germany was an inherent
weakness, and the opening of the transit corridor through Hungary dramatically
undermined the regime's authority. The party leadership resigned in early December
1989, and a caretaker government took over. The regime's authority,
however, evaporated, and with it the reasons for the East German state.
The erosion of support for the regime sometimes occurred openly, but, given
the repressive character of authoritarian regimes, it was more likely to occur
covertly. Authoritarian leaders were often unaware of how unpopular they were.
Covert disaffection then manifested itself when some triggering event exposed
the weakness fo the regime. In Greece and Argentina it was military defeat. In
Portugal and East Germany it was the explicit turning against the regime of
its ultimate source of power-the army in Portugal, the Soviet Union in East
Germany. The actions of the Turks, the British, the Portuguese military, and
Gorbachev galvanized and brought into the open the disaffection from the regime
of other groups in those societies. In all these cases, only a few weak groups
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604 1 POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
rallied to the support of the regime. Many people had become disaffected from
the regime but, because it was an authoritarian regime, a triggering event was
required to crystalize the disaffection.
Students are the universal opposition; they oppose whatever regime exists in
their society. By themselves, however, students do not bring down regimes.
Lacking substantial support from other groups in the population, they were
gunned down by the military and police in Greece in November 1973, Burma in
September 1988, and China in June 1989. The military are the ultimate support
of regimes. If they withdraw their support, if they carry out a coup against the
regime, or if they refuse to use force against those who threaten to overthrow the
regime, the regime falls. In between the perpetual opposition of the students and
the necessary support of the military are other groups whose support for or
opposition to the regime depends on circumstances. In noncommunist authoritarian
systems, such as the Philippines, these groups tended to disaffect in sequence.
The disaffection of the students was followed by that of intellectuals in
general and then by the leaders of previously existing political parties, many of
whom may have supported or acquiesced in the authoritarian takeover. Typically
the broader reaches of the middle class-white-collar workers, professionals,
small business proprietors-became alienated. In a Catholic country, Church
leaders also were early and effective opponents of the regime. If labor unions
existed and were not totally controlled by the government, at some point they
joined the opposition. So also, and most important, did larger business groups
and the bourgeoisie. In due course, the United States or other foreign sources of
support became disaffected. Finally and conclusively, the military decided not
to support the government or actively to side with the opposition against the
government.
In five out of six replacements, consequently, the exception being Argentina,
military disaffection was essential to bringing down the regime. In the personal
dictatorships in Portugal, the Philippines, and Romania, this military disaffection
was promoted by the dictator's policies weakening military professionalism,
politicizing and corrupting the officer corps, and creating competing paramilitary
and security forces. Opposition to the government normally (Portugal was the
only exception) had to be widespread before the military deserted the government.
If disaffection was not widespread, it was either because the most probable
sources of opposition-the middle class, bourgeoisie, religious groups - were
small and weak or because the regime had the support of these groups, usually
as a result of successful policies for economic development. In Burma and China
the armed forces brutally suppressed protests that were largely student-led. In
societies that were more highly developed economically, opposition to authoritarianism
commanded a wider range of support. When this opposition took to the
streets in the Philippines, East Germany, and Romania, military units did not
fire on broadly representative groups of their fellow citizens.
A popular image of democratic transitions is that repressive governments are
brought down by "people power," the mass mobilization of outraged citizens
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 605
demanding and eventually forcing a change of regime. Some form of mass action
did take place in almost every third wave regime change. Mass demonstrations,
protests, and strikes played central roles, however, in only about six transitions
completed or underway at the end of the 1980s. These included the replacements
in the Philippines, East Germany, and Romania, and the transplacements in
Korea, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. In Chile frequent mass actions attempted,
without success, to alter Pinochet's plan for transformation. In East Germany,
uniquely, both "exit" and "voice," in Albert Hirschman's terms, played major
roles, with protest taking the form first of massive departure of citizens from the
country and then of massive street demonstrations in Leipzig and Berlin.29
In the Philippines, Portugal, Romania, and Greece, when the regime collapsed,
it collapsed quickly. One day the authoritarian government was in power, the
next day it was not. In Argentina and East Germany, the authoritarian regimes
were quickly delegitimated but clung to power while attempting to negotiate
terms for the change in regime. In Argentina, the successor military government
of General Reynaldo Bignone, which took over in July 1982 immediately after
the Falklands defeat, was "relatively successful" in maintaining some regime
control over the transition for six months. In December 1982, however, mounting
public opposition and the development of opposition organizations led to mass
protests, a general strike, Bignone's scheduling of elections, and the rejection by
the united opposition parties of the terms proposed by the military for the transfer
of power. The authority of the lame-duck military regime continued to deteriorate
until it was replaced by the Alfonsin government elected in October 1983. "The
military government collapsed," one author observed; "it had no influence over
the choice of candidates or the election itself, it excluded no one, and reserved
neither powers nor veto prerogatives for itself in the future. In addition, it was
unable to guarantee either its autonomy in relation to the future constitutional
government or the promise of a future military policy, and, even less -given the
winning candidate -the basis for an agreement on the ongoing struggle against
the guerrillas."30 In East Germany in early 1990 a somewhat similar situation
existed, with a weak and discredited communist government clinging to power,
and its prime minister, Hans Modrow, playing the role of Bignone.
The emphasis in transformations on procedural continuity and backward legitimacy
was absent from replacements. The institutions, procedures, ideas, and
individuals connected with the previous regime were instead considered tainted
and the emphasis was on a sharp, clean break with the past. Those who succeeded
the authoritarian rulers based their rule on "forward legitimacy," what they would
bring about in the future, and their lack of involvement in or connection with
the previous regime.
29 Albert 0. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations,
and States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
30 Virgilio R. Beltran, "Political Transition in Argentina: 1982 to 1985," Armed Forces and Soci
13 (Winter 1987): 217; Scott Mainwaring and Eduardo J. Viola, "Brazil and Argentina in the 1980s,"
Journal of International Affairs 38 (Winter 1985): 206-9.
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606 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
In transformations and transplacements the leaders of the authoritarian regimes
usually left politics and went back to the barracks or private life quietly
and with some respect and dignity. Authoritarian leaders who lost power through
replacements, in contrast, suffered unhappy fates. Marcos and Caetano were
forced into exile. Ceausescu was summarily executed. The military officers who
ran Greece and Argentina were tried and imprisoned. In East Germany punishments
were threatened against Honecker and other former leaders in notable
contrast to the absence of such action in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
The dictators removed by foreign intervention in Grenada and Panama were
similarly subjected to prosecution and punishment.
The peaceful collapse of an authoritarian regime usually produced a glorious
if brief moment of public euphoria, of carnations and champagne, absent from
transformations. The collapse also created a potential vacuum of authority absent
from transformations. In Greece and the Philippines, the vacuum was quickly
filled by the accession to power of Constantine Karamanlis and Corazon C.
Aquino, popular political leaders who guided their countires to democracy. In
Iran the authority vacuum was filled by the ayatollah, who guided Iran elsewhere.
In Argentina and East Germany the Bignone and Modrow governments weakly
filled the interim between the collapse of the authoritarian regimes and the election
of democratic governments.
Before the fall, opposition groups are united by their desire to bring about the
fall. After the fall, divisions appear among them and they struggle over the
distribution of power and the nature of the new regime that must be established.
The fate of democracy was determined by the relative power of democratic
moderates and antidemocratic radicals. In Argentina and Greece, the authoritarian
regimes had not been in power for long, political parties quickly reappeared,
and an overwhelming consensus existed among political leaders and
groups on the need quickly to reestablish democratic institutions. In the Philippines
overt opposition to democracy, apart from the NPA insurgency, also was
minimal.
In Nicaragua, Iran, Portugal, and Romania the abrupt collapse of the dictatorships
led to struggles among the former opposition groups and parties as to who
would exercise power and what sort of regime would be created. In Nicaragua
and Iran the democratic moderates lost out. In Portugal, a state of revolutionary
ferment existed between April 1974 and November 1975. A consolidation of
power by the antidemocratic Marxist-Leninist coalition of the Communist party
and left-wing military officers was entirely possible. In the end, after intense
struggles between military factions, mass mobilizations, demonstrations, and
strikes, the military action by Antonio Ramalho Eanes settled Portugal on a
democratic course. "What started as a coup," as Robert Harvey observed, "became
a revolution which was stopped by a reaction before it became an anarchy.
Out of the tumult a democracy was born."'"
31 Robert Harvey, Portugal: Birth of a Democracy (London: Macmillan, 1978), 2.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 607
The choices in Portugal were between bourgeois democracy and MarxistLeninist
dictatorship. The choices in Romania in 1990 were less clear, but democracy
also was not inevitable. The lack of effectively organized opposition parties
and groups, the absence of previous experience with democracy, the violence
involved in the overthrow of Ceausescu, the deep desire for revenge against people
associated with the dictatorship combined with the widespread involvement of
much of the population with the dictatorship, the many leaders of the new government
who had been part of the old regime -all did not augur well for the emergence
of democracy. At the end of 1989 some Romanians enthusiastically compared
what was happening in their country to what had happened two hundred
years earlier in France. They might also have noted that the French Revolution
ended in a military dictatorship.
Guidelines for Democratizers 2:
Overthrowing Authoritarian Regimes
The history of replacements suggests the following guidelines for opposition
democratic moderates attempting to overthrow an authoritarian regime:32
(1) Focus attention on the illegitimacy or dubious legitimacy of the authoritarian
regime; that is its most vulnerable point. Attack the regime on general
issues that are of widespread concern, such as corruption and brutality. If the
regime is performing successfully (particularly economically) these attacks will
not be effective. Once its performance falters (as it must), highlighting its illegitimacy
becomes the single most important lever for dislodging it from power.
(2) Like democratic rulers, authoritarian rulers over time alienate erstwhile
supporters. Encourage these disaffected groups to support democracy as the
necessary alternative to the current system. Make particular efforts to enlist
business leaders, middle-class professionals, religious figures, and political party
leaders, most of whom probably supported creation of the authoritarian system.
The more "respectable" and "responsible" the opposition appears, the easier it is
to win more supporters.
(3) Cultivate generals. In the last analysis, whether the regime collapses or not
depends on whether they support the regime, join you in opposition to it, or stand
by on the sidelines. Support from the military could be helpful when the crisis
comes, but all you really need is military unwillingness to defend the regime.
(4) Practice and preach nonviolence. Among other things, this will make it
32 Myron Weiner has formulated a similar and more concise set of recommendations: "For those
who seek democratization the lessons are these: mobilize large-scale non-violent opposition to the
regime, seek support from the center and, if necessary, from the conservative right, restrain the left and
keep them from dominating the agenda of the movement, woo sections of the military, seek sympathetic
coverage from the western media, and press the United States for support." "Empirical Democratic
Theory and the Transition from Authoritarianism to Democracy," PS 20 (Fall 1987): 866.
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608 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
easier for you to win over the security forces: soldiers do not tend to be sympathetic
to people who have been hurling Molotov cocktails at them.
(5) Seize every opportunity to express opposition to the regime, including
participation in elections it organizes.
(6) Develop contacts with the global media, foreign human rights organizations,
and transnational organizations such as churches. In particular, mobilize
supporters in the United States. American congressmembers are always looking
for moral causes to get publicity for themselves and to use against the American
administration. Dramatize your cause to them and provide them with material
for TV photo opportunities and headline-making speeches.
(7) Promote unity among opposition groups. Attempt to create comprehensive
umbrella organizations that will facilitate cooperation among such groups. This
will be difficult and, as the examples of the Philippines, Chile, Korea, and South
Africa show, authoritarian rulers are often expert in promoting opposition disunity.
One test of your qualifications to become a democratic leader of your
country is your ability to overcome these obstacles and secure some measure of
opposition unity. Remember Gabriel Almond's truth: "Great leaders are great
coalition builders."33
(8) When the authoritarian regime falls, be prepared quickly to fill the vacuum
of authority that results. This can be done by: pushing to the fore a popular,
charismatic, democratically inclined leader; promptly organizing elections to
provide popular legitimacy to a new government; and building international
legitimacy by getting support of foreign and transnational actors (international
organizations, the United States, the European Community, the Catholic Church).
Recognize that some of your former coalition partners will want to establish a
new dictatorship of their own and quietly organize the supporters of democracy
to counter this effort if it materializes.
TRANSPLACEMENTS
In transplacements democratization is produced by the combined actions of
government and opposition. Within the government the balance between standpatters
and reformers is such that the government is willing to negotiate a change
of regime -unlike the situation of standpatter dominance that leads to replacement
- but it is unwilling to initiate a change of regime. It has to be pushed
and/or pulled into formal or informal negotiations with the opposition. Within
the opposition democratic moderates are strong enough to prevail over antidemocratic
radicals, but they are not strong enough to overthrow the government.
Hence they too see virtues in negotiation.
33 Gabriel A. Almond, "Approaches to Developmental Causation" in Gabriel A. Almond, Scott
C. Flanagan, and Robert J. Mundt, eds., Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political
Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 32.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 609
Approximately eleven of thirty-five liberalizations and democratizations that
occurred or began in the 1970s and 1980s approximated the transplacement
model. The most notable ones were in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay, and
Korea; the regime changes in Bolivia, Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua
also involved significant elements of transplacement. In El Salvador and Honduras
the negotiations were in part with the United States government, acting as
a surrogate for democratic moderates. In 1989 and 1990, South Africa began a
transplacement process, and Mongolia and Nepal appeared to be moving in
that direction. Some features of transplacement were also present in Chile. The
Pinochet regime was strong enough, however, to resist opposition pressure to
negotiate democratization and stubbornly adhered to the schedule for regime
change that it laid down in 1980.
In successful transplacements, the dominant groups in both government and
opposition recognized that they were incapable of unilaterally determining the
nature of the future political system in their society. Government and opposition
leaders often developed these views after testing each other's strength and resolve
in a political dialectic. Initially, the opposition usually believed that it would be
able to bring about the downfall of the government at some point in the not too
distant future. This belief was on occasion wildly unrealistic, but so long as
opposition leaders held to it, serious negotiations with the government were
impossible. In contrast, the government usually initially believed that it could
effectively contain and suppress the opposition without incurring unacpeptab
costs. Transplacements occurred when the beliefs of both changed. The opposition
realized that it was not strong enough to overthrow the government. The
government realized that the opposition was strong enough to increase significantly
the costs of nonnegotiation in terms of increased repression leading to
further alienation of groups from the government, intensified divisions within
the ruling coalition, increased possibility of a hard-line takeover of the government,
and significant losses in international legitimacy.
The transplacement dialectic often involved a distinct sequence of steps. First,
the government engaged in some liberalization and began to lose power and
authority. Second, the opposition exploited this loosening by and weakening of
the government to expand its support and intensify its activities with the hope
and expectation it would shortly be able to bring down the government. Third,
the government reacted forcefully to contain and suppress the mobilization of
political power by the opposition. Fourth, government and opposition leaders
perceived a standoff emerging and began to explore the possibilities of a negotiated
transition. This fourth step was not, however, inevitable. Conceivably, the
government, perhaps after a change of leadership, could brutally use its military
and police forces to restore its power, at least temporarily. Or the opposition
could continue to develop its strength, further eroding the power of the government
and eventually bringing about its downfall. Transplacements thus required
some rough equality of strength between government and opposition as well as
uncertainty on each side as to who would prevail in a major test of strength. In
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610 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
these circumstances, the risks of negotiation and compromise appeared less than
the risks of confrontation and catastrophe.
The political process leading to transplacement was thus often marked by a
seesawing back and forth of strikes, protests, and demonstrations, on the one
hand, and repression, jailings, police violence, states of siege, and martial law, on
the other. Cycles of protest and repression in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Uruguay,
Korea, and Chile eventually led to negotiated agreements between government
and opposition in all cases except that of Chile.
In Uruguay, for instance, mounting protests and demonstrations in the fall of
1983 stimulated the negotiations leading to the military withdrawal from power.
In Bolivia in 1978 "a series of conflicts and protest movements" preceded the
military's agreeing to a timetable for elections.34 In Korea as in Uruguay, the
military regime had earlier forcefully suppressed protests. In the spring of 1987,
however, the demonstrations became more massive and broad-based and increasingly
involved the middle class. The government first reacted in its usual fashion
but then shifted, agreed to negotiate, and accepted the central demands of the
opposition. In Poland the 1988 strikes had a similar impact. As one commentator
explained, "The strikes made the round table not only possible, but necessaryfor
both sides. Paradoxically, the strikes were strong enough to compel the
communists to go to the round table, yet too weak to allow Solidarity's leaders
to refuse negotiations. That's why the round table talks took place."35
In transplacements, the eyeball-to eyeball confrontation in the central square
of the capital between massed protesters and serried ranks of police revealed each
side's strengths and weaknesses. The opposition could mobilize massive support;
the government could contain and withstand opposition pressure.
Politics in South Africa in the 1980s also evolved along the lines of the four-step
model. In the late 1970s P. W. Botha began the process of liberalizing reform,
arousing black expectations and then frustrating them when the 1983 constitution
denied blacks a national political role. This led to uprisings in the black townships
in 1984 and 1985, which stimulated black hopes that the collapse of the Afrikaner-dominated
regime was imminent. The government's forceful and effective
suppression of black and white dissent then compelled the opposition drastically
to revise their hopes. At the same time, the uprisings attracted international
attention, stimulated condemnation of both the apartheid system and the government's
tactics, and led the United States and European governments to intensify
economic sanctions against South Africa. As the hopes for revolution of the
African National Congress (ANC) radicals declined, the worries of the National
34 Washington Post, 7 October 1983; Laurence Whitehead, "Bolivia's Failed Democratization,
1977-1980" in Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions
from Authoritarian Rule: Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986),
59.
35 "Leoplitax" (identified as a "political commentator in the Polish underground press"), Uncaptive
Minds 2 (May-June-July 1989): 5.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 611
party government about international legitimacy and the economic future increased.
In the mid-1970s, Joe Slovo, head of the South African Communist
party and the ANC's military organization, argued that the ANC could overthrow
the government and win power through sustained guerrilla warfare and revolution.
In the late 1980s he remained committed to the use of violence, but saw
negotiations as the more likely route for achieving ANC goals. After becoming
president of South Africa in 1989, F. W. de Klerk also emphasized the importance
of negotiations. The lesson of Rhodesia, he said, was that "When the opportunity
was there for real, constructive negotiation, it was not grasped.... It went wrong
because in the reality of their circumstances they waited too long before engaging
in fundamental negotiation and dialogue. We must not make that mistake, and
we are determined not to repeat that mistake."36 The two political leaders were
learning from their own experience and that of others.
In Chile, in contrast, the government was willing and able to avoid negotiation.
Major strikes erupted in the spring of 1983, but a national general strike was
suppressed by the government. Beginning in May 1983 the opposition organized
massive monthly demonstrations on "Days of National Protest." These were
broken up by the police, usually with several people being killed. Economic
problems and the opposition protests forced the Pinochet government to initiate
a dialogue with the opposition. The economy then began to recover, however,
and the middle classes became alarmed at the breakdown of law and order. A
national strike in October 1984 was put down with considerable bloodshed.
Shortly thereafter the government reimposed the state of siege that had been
cancelled in 1979. The opposition efforts thus failed to overthrow the government
or to induce it to engage in meaningful negotiations. The opposition had "overestimated
its strength and underestimated the government's."37 It had also underestimated
Pinochet's tenacity and political skill and the willingness of Chilean
security forces to shoot unarmed civilian demonstrators.
Transplacements required leaders on both sides willing to risk negotiations.
Divisions of opinion over negotiations usually existed within governing elites. At
times, the top leaders had to be pressured by their colleagues and by circumstances
to negotiate with the opposition. In 1989, for instance, Adam Michnik argued
that Poland, like Hungary, was following "the Spanish way to democracy." At
one level, he was right in that both the Spanish and Polish transitions were
basically peaceful. At a more particular level, however, the Spanish analogy did
not hold for Poland because Wojciech Jaruzelski was not a Juan Carlos or Suarez
(whereas Imre Pozsgay in Hungary in considerable measure was). Jaruzelski was
a reluctant democrat who had to be pushed by the deterioration of his country
and his regime into negotiations with Solidarity.38 In Uruguay the president,
36 Steven Mufson, "Uncle Joe," New Republic, 28 September 1987, 22-23; Washington Post
National Weekly, 19-25 February 1990, 7.
37 Edgardo Boeniger, "The Chilean Road to Democracy," Foreign Affairs 64 (Spring 1986): 821.
38 Anna Husarska, "A Talk with Adam Michnik," New Leader, 3-17 April 1989, 10; Marcin
Sulkowski, "The Dispute About the General," Uncaptive Minds 3 (March-April 1990): 7-9.
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612 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
General Gregorio Alvarez, wanted to prolong his power and postpone democratization
and had to be forced by the other members of the military junta to move
ahead with the regime change. In Chile, General Pinochet was somewhat similarly
under pressure from other junta members, especially the air force commander,
General Fernando Matthei, to be more forthcoming in dealing with the opposition,
but Pinochet successfully resisted this pressure.
In other countries changes occurred in the top leadership before serious negotiations
with the opposition began. In Korea the government of General Chun Doo
Hwan followed a staunch standpatter policy of stonewalling opposition demands
and suppressing opposition activity. In 1987, however, the governing party designated
Roh Tae Woo as its candidate to succeed Chun. Roh dramatically reversed
Chun's policies, announced a political opening, and entered into negotiations
with the opposition leader.39 In Czechoslovakia the long-in-power standpatter
Communist party general secretary, Gustav Husak, was succeeded by the mildly
reformist Milos Jakes in December 1987. Once the opposition became mobilized
in the fall of 1989, however, Jakes was replaced by the reformer Karel Urbanek.
Urbanek and the reformist prime minister, Ladislav Adamec, then negotiated
arrangements for the transition to democracy with Vaclav Havel and the other
leaders of the opposition Civic Forum. In South Africa, de Klerk moved beyond
his predecessor's aborted transformation process from above to transplacementtype
negotiations with black opposition leaders. Uncertainty, ambiguity, and
division of opinion over democratization thus tended to characterize the ruling
circles in transplacement situations. These regimes were not overwhelmingly committed
either to holding on to power ruthlessly or to moving decisively toward
democracy.
Disagreement and uncertainty existed not only on the government side in transplacements.
In fact,, the one group more likely to be divided against itself than
the leaders of a decaying authoritarian government are the opposition leaders
who aspire to replace them. In replacement situations the government suppresses
the opposition and the opposition has an overriding common interest in bringing
down the government. As the Philippine and Nicaraguan examples indicate, even
under these conditions securing unity among opposition leaders and parties may
be extremely difficult, and the unity achieved is often tenuous and fragile. In
transplacements, where it is a question not of overthrowing the government but
of negotiating with it, opposition unity is even more difficult to achieve. It was
not achieved in Korea, and hence the governmental candidate, Roh Tae Woo,
was elected president with a minority of the vote, as the two opposition candidates
split the antigovernment majority by opposing each other. In Uruguay, because
its leader was still imprisoned, one opposition party- the National party- rejected
the agreement reached between the two other parties and the military. In
39 See James Cotton, "From Authoritarianism to Democracy in South Korea," Political Studies
37 (June 1989): 252-53.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 613
South Africa a major obstacle to democratic reform was the many divisions
within the opposition between parliamentary and nonparliamentary groups, Afrikaner
and English, black and white, and among black ideological and tribal
groups. At no time before the 1990s did the South African government confront
anything but a bewildering multiplicity of opposition groups whose differences
among themselves were often as great as their differences with the government.
In Chile the opposition was seriously divided into a large number of parties,
factions, and coalitions. In 1983, the moderate centrist opposition parties were
able to join together in the Democratic Alliance. In August 1985 a broader group
of a dozen parties joined in the National Accord calling for a transition to
democracy. Yet conflicts over leadership and tactics continued. In 1986 the
Chilean opposition mobilized massive protests, hoping to duplicate in Santiago
what had just happened in Manila. The opposition, however, was divided and
its militancy frightened conservatives. The problem, as one observer put it at the
time, was that "the general is not being challenged by a moderate opposition
movement that has got itself together under the leadership of a respected figure.
There is no Chilean Cory."40 In Poland, on the other hand, things were different.
Lech Walesa was a Polish Cory, and Solidarity dominated the opposition for
most of a decade. In Czechoslovakia the transplacement occurred so quickly that
differences among opposition political groups did not have time to materialize.
In transplacements democratic moderates have to be sufficiently strong within
the opposition to be credible negotiating partners with the government. Almost
always some groups within the opposition reject negotiations with the government.
They fear that negotiations will produce undesirable compromises and they
hope that continued opposition pressure will bring about the collapse or the
overthrow of the government. In Poland in 1988-89, right-wing opposition
groups urged a boycott of the Round Table talks. In Chile left-wing opposition
groups carried out terrorist attacks that undermined the efforts of the moderate
opposition to negotiate with the government. Similarly, in Korea radicals rejected
the agreement on elections reached by the government and the leading opposition
groups. In Uruguay, the opposition was dominated by leaders of moderate political
parties and extremists were less of a problem.
For negotiations to occur each party had to concede some degree of legitimacy
to the other. The opposition had to recognize the government as a worthy partner
in change and implicitly if not explicitly acquiesce in its current right to rule.
The government, in turn, had to accept the opposition groups as legitimate
representatives of significant segments of society. The government could do this
more easily if the opposition groups had not engaged in violence. Negotiations
were also easier if the opposition groups, such as political parties under a military
regime, had previously been legitimate participants in the political process. It was
I Economist, 10 May 1986, 39; Alfred Stepan, "The Last Days of Pinochet?" New York Review
of Books, 2 June 1988, 34.
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614 | POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
easier for the opposition to negotiate if the government had used only limited
violence against it and if there were some democratic reformers in the government
whom it had reason to believe shared its goals.
In transplacements, unlike transformations and replacements, government
leaders often negotiated the basic terms of the regime change with opposition
leaders they had previously had under arrest: Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Jorge
Batlle Ibanez, Kim Dae Jung and Kim Young Sam, Walter Sisulu and Nelson
Mandela. There were good reasons for this. Opposition leaders who have been
in prison have not been fighting the government, violently or nonviolently; they
have been living with it. They have also experienced the reality of government
power. Governmental leaders who released their captives were usually interested
in reform, and those released were usually moderate enough to be willing to
negotiate with their former captors. Imprisonment also enhanced the moral authority
of the former prisoners. This helped them to unite the opposition groups,
at least temporarily, and to hold out the prospect to the government that they
could secure the acquiescence of their followers to whatever agreement was
reached.
At one point in the Brazilian transition, General Golbery reportedly told an
opposition leader, "You get your radicals under control and we will control
ours."'4' Getting radicals under control often requires the cooperation of the other
side. In transplacement negotiations, each party has an interest in strengthening
the other party so that he can deal more effectively with the extremists on his
side. In June 1990, for instance, Nelson Mandela commented on the problems
F. W. de Klerk was having with white hard-liners and said that the ANC had
appealed "to whites to assist de Klerk. We are also trying to address the problems
of white opposition to him. Discussions have already been started with influential
sectors in the right wing." At the same time, Mandela said that his own desire
to meet with Chief Mengosuthu Buthelezi had been vetoed by militants within
the ANC and that he had to accept that decision because he was "a loyal and
disciplined member of the A.N.C."42 De Klerk obviously had an interest in
strengthening Mandela and helping him deal with his militant left-wing opposi-
tion.
Negotiations for regime change were at times preceded by "prenegotiations"
about the conditions for entering into negotiations. In South Africa, the government
precondition was that the ANC renounce violence. ANC preconditions were
that the government unban opposition groups and release political prisoners. In
'1 Quoted by Weffort, "Why Democracy" in Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil, 345, and by
Thomas G. Sanders, "Decompression" in Howard Handelman and Thomas G. Sanders, eds., Military
Government and the Movement Toward Democracy in South America (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1981), 157. As Weffort points out, this advice was somewhat beside the point in Brazil.
Before starting its transformation process the Brazilian military regime had physically eliminated
most of the serious radicals. The aide's advice is much more relevant in transplacement situations.
42 Time, 25 June 1990, 21.
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HOW COUNTRIES DEMOCRATIZE | 615
some cases prenegotiations concerned which opposition individuals and groups
would be involved in the negotiations.
Negotiations were sometimes lengthy and sometimes brief. They often were
interrupted as one party or the other broke them off. As the negotiations continued,
however, the political future of each of the parties became more engaged
with their success. If the negotiations failed, standpatters within the governing
coalition and radicals in the opposition stood ready to capitalize on that failure
and to bring down the leaders who had engaged in negotiations. A common
interest emerged and the sense of common fate. "[I]n a way," Nelson Mandela
observed in August 1990, "there is an alliance now" between the ANC and the
National party. "We are on one boat, one ship," agreed National Party leader
P. W. Botha, "and the sharks to the left and the sharks to the right are not
going to distinguish between us when we fall overboard."43 Consequently, as
negotiations continued, the parties became more willing to compromise in order
to reach an agreement.
The agreements they reached often generated attacks from others in government
and opposition who thought the negotiators had conceded too much. The
specific agreements reflected, of course, issues peculiar to their countries. Of
central importance in almost all negotiations, however, was the exchange of
guarantees. In transformations former officials of the authoritarian regime were
almost never punished; in replacements they almost always were. In transplacements
this was often an issue to be negotiated; the military leaders in Uruguay
and Korea, for instance, demanded guarantees against prosecution and punishment
for any human rights violations. In other situations, negotiated guarantees
involved arrangements for the sharing of power or for changes in power through
elections. In Poland each side was guaranteed an explicit share of the seats in the
legislature. In Czechoslovakia positions in the cabinet were divided between the
two parties. In both these countries coalition governments reassured communists
and the opposition that their interests would be protected during the transition.
In Korea the governing party agreed to a direct, open election for the presidency
on the assumption, and possibly the understanding, that at least two major
opposition candidates would run, thereby making highly probable victory for the
government party's candidate.
The risks of confrontation and of losing thus impel government and opposition
to negotiate with each other; and guarantees that neither will lose everything
become the basis for agreement. Both get the opportunity to share in power or
to compete for power. Opposition leaders know they will not be sent back to
prison; government leaders know they will not have to flee into exile. Mutual
reduction in risk prompts reformers and moderates to cooperate in establishing
democracy.
43 Mandela quoted in Pauline H. Baker, "A Turbulent Transition," Journal ofDemocracy 1 (Fall
1990): 17; Botha quoted in Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 14-20 May 1990, 17.
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616 j POLITICAL SCIENCE QUARTERLY
Guidelines for Democratizers 3:
Negotiating Regime Changes
For democratic reformers in government. (1) Following the guidelines for
transforming authoritarian systems, first isolate and weaken your standpatter
opposition and consolidate your hold on the government and political machinery.
(2) Also following those guidelines, seize the initiative and surprise both opposition
and standpatters with the concessions you are willing to make, but never
make concessions under obvious opposition pressure.
(3) Secure endorsement of the concept of negotiations from leading generals
or other top officials in the security establishment.
(4) Do what you can to enhance the stature, authority, and moderation of your
principal opposition negotiating partner.
(5) Establish confidential and reliable back-channels for negotiating key central
questions with opposition leaders.
(6) If the negotiation succeeds, you very probably will be in the opposition.
Your prime concern, consequently, should be securing guarantees and safeguards
for the rights of the opposition and of groups that have been associated with your
government (e.g., the military). Everything else is negotiable.
For democratic moderates in the opposition. (1) Be prepared to mobilize your
supporters for demonstrations when these will weaken the standpatters in the
government. Too many marches and protests, however, are likely to strengthen
them, weaken your negotiating partner, and arouse middle-class concern about
law and order.
(2) Be moderate; appear statesmanlike.
(3) Be prepared to negotiate and, if necessary, make concessions on all issues
except the holding of free and fair elections.
(4) Recognize the high probability that you will win those elections and do not
take actions that will seriously complicate your governing your country.
For both government and opposition democratizers. (1) The political conditions
favorable to a negotiated transition will not last indefinitely. Seize the
opportunity they present and move quickly to resolve the central issues.
(2) Recognize that your political future and that of your partner depend on
your success in reaching agreement on the transition to democracy.
(3) Resist the demands of leaders and groups on your side that either delay the
negotiating process or threaten the core interest of your negotiating partner.
(4) Recognize that that agreement you reach will be the only alternative; radicals
and standpatters may denounce it, but they will not be able to produce an alternative
that commands broad support.
(5) When in doubt, compromise.
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