Comparative Perspective 572
ized power base bequeathed by Rhee. A stronger bureaucracy and military might present obstacles to a thoroughly plunderous agenda (particularly to the extent that it would threaten the country’s territorial integrity and national security), but at the same time a Korean Marcos would not have any need to accommodate himself to local power (conveniently smashed a decade earlier). Because institutions are easier to break down than to build up, one might speculate further that the frustrations of a Filipino Park would be much greater than those of a Korean Marcos.
To return to historical reality, both structure and agency are essential to understanding President Park’s developmental achievements in Korea and Marcos’s predatory debacle in the Philippines.99 I would propose that the patterns of state-society relations and the institutions inherited by President Park of South Korea were necessary but not sufficient elements of his accomplishments. He relied on the structures that preceded him and then brought forth—through his own efforts and vision—the extraordinary transformation of the Korean political economy. Conversely, the personal goals that he pursued with such relentless fervor can also be viewed as necessary but not sufficient elements of his success. Without the inheritance of structures so conducive to his goals, it is difficult to imagine Park achieving such high levels of economic achievement.
While Park is recalled for things both “admirable and appalling,”
Marcos’s name tends to bring forth almost entirely unambiguous memories of brutality, looting, and decay. Paraphrasing Marx very loosely, one can say that while Marcos could not choose the circumstances under which he made history, he inherited extremely favorable circumstances as he systematically plundered his country and subverted its institutions for his own self-aggrandizing goals.
c h a p t e r
t w e n t y
The Perfect Dictatorship?
South Korea versus Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, and Mexico
Jorge I. Domínguez
Authoritarian rule established through an act of force, such as a military coup, poses several distinct challenges for the authoritarian ruler. The first is how to install the regime; that is, how to survive past the initial moments of the overthrow of the old regime in order to establish a pattern of rule that will last. This requires reducing the need for initial repression, unifying the coup leadership, and arranging for succession rules to stabilize and broaden the support coalition for the new dictator. A second challenge is the choice of institutional means. Will the new dictator delegate significant executive decision-making powers to competent civilians in specialized areas in which civilians excel? Will the new regime employ consultative procedures, legislative assemblies, and partisan organizations to shape the new rules for governing, obtain political information, and reduce the resort to repression? And what will be the relative role of the police and the military in enforcing compliance? A third challenge is the choice of a strategy to govern the society. Will regime leaders claim to rule seeking the consent of the governed through explicit ideological appeals? Will the regime tolerate, and make use of, societal pluralism? Will it activate or deactivate citizen engagement?1
A politically effective military dictatorship—the “perfect dictatorship”
—is likely to display the traits listed below to be able to endure while at the same time incurring low costs of repression. Such dictatorships may or may not generate high rates of economic growth and may or may not
Comparative Perspective 574
adapt to unfolding societal trends. The criteria for the “perfect dictatorship” are political.
1. The “perfect dictatorship” provokes little societal resistance at its installation in order to cut its costs.
2. Its leaders at the time of installation act jointly and cooperatively to consolidate the regime.
3. Its leaders at the time of installation broaden the support coalition by agreeing upon succession rules to rotate the presidency through elite agreement within the authoritarian regime to prolong its duration.
4. Regime designers delegate policymaking and executive authority to civilians in areas of their competence, including economic policy.
5. Regime designers choose institutional means that emphasize consultation and employ restricted-scope legislatures and political parties within the authoritarian context to diversify the tool kit for ruling and policymaking, expand the coalition in support of the regime, and gather political information.
6. Regime executives prefer political means to brute repression as ways to cope with opposition and protest in order to reduce the costs of rulership and sustain a broad base of support for the regime.
7. The regime eschews ideological appeals, depriving civil society and the opposition of independent standards to hold the dictator accountable.
8. Regime designers compel political, economic, and social actors into regime-licensed organizations to maximize state control over the society, harness economic and social forces toward the government’s goals, while employing a minimum of military force.
9. Regime executives employ political strategies to deactivate the population politically and constrain independent voices in civil society.
In this chapter, I argue that the regimes that faced the most difficult installation had the strongest incentives to develop a wide array of consultative and information-gathering mechanisms. They were more likely to retain elections and parliaments, albeit in authoritarian contexts, and to find means to deal with organized labor that did not just rely on crude repression. Regimes of difficult installation were less likely to experience a single towering personalist leader and more likely to require a wider elite coalition; the authoritarian regime became consolidated through the institutionalization of rules for presidential succession. In contrast, authoritarian
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575
regimes that faced easier installations did not discover in time the incentives to widen their political base and sharpen their political tools. Thus they were more likely to be short-lived, or less politically effective and more reliant on repression over time. Not surprisingly, nonpersonalist authoritarian regimes were likely to endure longer than those in which a single ruler towered over others; more importantly, nonpersonalist authoritarian regimes governed by civilians were more likely to endure than nonpersonalist authoritarian regimes in which only military officers served as president.
The Countries
The response of the Park Chung Hee regime in South Korea to the three challenges noted at the outset of this chapter can be usefully compared with the similar responses in four Latin American countries also under authoritarian regimes at the same historical moment: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. I will argue that both initial conditions and ongoing economic circumstances suggest that Park’s authoritarian regime was the most likely to succeed politically, that is, rely less on crude repressive measures and last longest. I focus mainly on analytical time, that is, the unfolding of decisions regardless of the starting date of each regime. My examination looks only at regimes established mainly by national military leaders in countries where ethnic, racial, or religious divisions did not play an overt role in the organization of national politics before or after the establishment of the authoritarian regime.
Park Chung Hee’s rule began with the military coup of May 16, 1961.
Dictatorships began in Argentina in 1966 and again in 1976 (after a three-year interlude of civilian rule), in Brazil in 1964, and in Chile in 1973. The Mexican authoritarian regime, a distant heir to the Mexican revolution of the second decade of the twentieth century, was actually founded in 1929, when General Plutarco Elías Calles convened the victorious generals from two decades of civil war to create a single political party that would rule for the next seven decades. This party allocated opportunities and rewards and administered penalties. Thus the Mexican authoritarian regime, too, began as the rule of military leaders accustomed to u
sing force in domestic politics. All five political regimes emerged from the political actions of top-ranking soldiers, and all but Mexico’s were founded between 1961 and 1973. The four Latin American authoritarian regimes out-lived that of Park, who was assassinated on October 26, 1979.
Comparative Perspective 576
South Korean society is much more ethnically and linguistically homogeneous than that of any Latin American country, including the four considered here. Nonetheless, in no Latin American country before 1980 were there nationally organized political parties or social movements based on race, ethnicity, or language. The troubling social differences within the respective societies along these lines had yet to be mobilized politically, and none of these differences was politically significant for the founding or evolution of the various authoritarian regimes.
Park’s South Korea had reason to fear for its international military security and was rightly concerned about a possible invasion from North Korea. As a result, South Korea’s military was much more professional, ready for modern warfare, than its Latin American counterparts. South Korean military leaders experienced the Korean War personally. No Latin American authoritarian regime objectively faced a comparable situation. And yet in the 1970s Argentina, Brazil, and Chile each prepared for war with a neighbor. Argentina and Chile came to the brink of war.2 The Brazilian military leaders who seized power in 1964 had fought on the Italian front during World War II in the Brazilian battalion deployed for war. In the 1970s, the South American dictatorships shared with the Park regime an obsessive fear of domestic subversion associated with international communism, in particular from Cuba.3
In the 1960s, Park’s South Korea adopted a political economy that differed from Latin America’s in significant respects. It emphasized high growth through export promotion with little reliance on foreign direct investment. Historically, Latin America had relied more on import substitution and foreign direct investment. Yet by the end of the 1960s Brazil’s authoritarian regime also adopted a high-growth manufactured export-promoting economy that resembled and succeeded like South Korea’s through the 1970s. In the early 1970s, Chile abandoned import substitution to emphasize exports.
Park inherited a bureaucracy that was already more professional than those in Latin America, though he would make it much more professional, and he also was heir to a weak labor movement. Chile had Latin America’s best bureaucracy. Argentina and Chile had powerful nationally mobilized labor movements while the Brazilian and Mexican labor movements were about as weak as South Korea’s.
The South Korean, Brazilian, and Argentine regimes installed in the 1960s, Mexico’s after its revolution, and the Chilean in 1973 were all quite novel. In Mexico, the ancien régime had truly collapsed and a new one had to be built from scratch. In the other four countries, the
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577
bureaucratic-military-authoritarian regimes had no parallel in each country’s respective national history. There had been military dictators in South America, but none approximated the experiences of the 1960s and 1970s in the harshness of their rule and the ambitiousness of their efforts to remake society.
On balance, these regime dissimilarities and the range of variation suggest that the task of building a “perfect dictatorship” should have been easiest in South Korea. Park could mobilize public support around a genuine, credible threat of North Korean attack. The South Korean military was professional. The Park regime’s low reliance on foreign direct investment also buttressed nationalist pride and support. South Korea’s high economic growth could rally additional backing for the regime. South Korean rulers had the least reason to worry about ethno-linguistic heterogeneity or organized labor union strength. They could also rely on the best bureaucracy.
South Korea and these four Latin American countries also shared sufficient social, economic, and political traits to permit comparison, as evident in Table 20.1. The time frame is the 1960s, when General Park rose to power and military coups overthrew constitutional governments in Argentina and Brazil. Authoritarian rule prevailed in Mexico. The seeds were also being sown for the Chilean military coup that took place in 1973.
South Korea ranks at or near the median in this comparison, although its specific ranking varies across indicators. South Korea seems closer to Mexico and Brazil than to Argentina and Chile; the latter are consistently more socially and economically developed. South Korea never ranks first; Argentina characteristically outranks it.4
The authoritarian regimes established in South Korea and these four Latin American countries arose from the actions of high-ranking military leaders in societies that were not politically activated along the lines of race, ethnicity, or language and that shared certain characteristics of low to middle levels of social and economic development by world standards. None was among the world’s least educated countries, nor was any of them among the most developed countries. The international circumstances were also remarkably similar. The anticommunist authoritarian regimes of the 1960s and early 1970s were close U.S. allies during the cold war. Anticommunism was a specific motivating element in military intervention in politics in Brazil, Chile, and South Korea. South Korea fits comfortably in a comparison surrounded by Latin American cases, notwithstanding the differences noted above that make South Korea the “most likely to succeed” at becoming a “perfect dictatorship.”5
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The Perfect Dictatorship?
579
The Installation of the Authoritarian Regime What happens the morning after a successful military coup? New authoritarian regimes face two immediate and one medium-t
erm installation problems. First, they must seek sufficient consent from the governed. At a minimum, this consent is passive: acquiescence or tolerance of the new rulers, no or low levels of violent political resistance, and no or low levels of strikes or other forms of nonviolent resistance against the founding coup.
More actively, new dictatorships seek some claim to legitimacy, asserting that the immediate past was unacceptable and had to be overcome to secure a brighter future. Dictatorships seek historical and prospective bases of legitimacy because they lack procedural legitimacy, that is, they have gained power by violating the constitution in the absence of free and fair elections.
The second installation problem faced by new authoritarian regimes is to sort out who is in charge. Sometimes there is one undisputed leader; at other times there is a military junta. This also raises the third or medium-term installation problem: is the dictatorship to be personalist or institutionalized? The most successful authoritarian regimes, historical bureaucratic empires, had means of succession from one monarch to the next and featured bureaucratic organizations for the sharing and exercise of power.6
Military regimes, born from a coup, have had to face this question repeatedly. Samuel Huntington long ago recognized the conflict that, in the aftermath of a coup, soldiers face between “their own subjective preferences and values and the objective institutional needs of society.” New political institutions are needed, he argued, not just to “reflect the existing distribution of power” but also “to attract and to assimilate new social forces as they emerge and thus to establish an existence independent of those forces which initially gave them birth.” These political institutions should also be capable of regulating succession and providing for the transfer of power from one leader or group of leaders to another without recourse to direct action in the form of coups, revolts, or other bloodshed.7
Well-installed authoritarian regimes, therefore, settle upon succession procedures early on to enable the regime to broaden the support coalition and last beyond the lifetime of its founder. One measure of a well-installed dictatorship, therefore, is how many peaceful successions it manages within the framework of the authoritarian regime.
Park Chung Hee Era Page 82