The effectiveness of the South Korean authoritarian response to the same set of problems declined from the 1960s to the 1970s. In the 1960s, the Park regime attempted to Brazilianize the labor movement, employing the tools of state corporatism to enhance state control over the unions. It deposed and arrested the union leaders it disliked; it banned some nationwide union federations. It created procedures to interfere regularly with the selection of union leaders and prohibited union political activities. It mandated the creation of joint labor-management committees as the site for collective bargaining. But it also permitted the persistence of industrial-level unions. The South Korean economic “miracle” in the 1960s was closest in some respects to Brazil’s in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Both countries grew at comparably very fast rates during a short time. Yet, in time, they would differ. The Brazilian dictatorship responded to the increased economic significance of labor and activity through a managed opening. President Park installed the repressive yushin regime.
The yushin system eliminated the influence of industrial-level unions and removed the legal basis for collective action. It ruled via emergency decrees, viewing any form of labor protest as a challenge to the regime itself.
The system drove labor union leaders and workers, lacking lawful peaceful means to express their normal grievances, to the opposition.38 The yushin regime faced intensified labor protests in 1978 and 1979 at exactly the same historical moment as the Brazilian dictatorship did. The yushin system collapsed and Park was assassinated (though for reasons unrelated to the labor protest); the South Korean military employed even higher levels of brute repression. The Brazilian military regime’s accommodationist tactics, in comparison, were more effective politically and less costly; the regime endured another half-dozen years.
Compared with President Geisel, President Park was less successful in managing labor politics. Compared with both Geisel and Park, the Mexi-
Comparative Perspective 594
can PRI incarnated genius in managing labor politics. In general, South Korea under yushin and Argentina after 1976 were the least politically effective authoritarian regimes in their handling of the labor question, while Mexico’s and to a lesser extent Brazil’s authoritarian regimes were the most effective.
Governing the Society
An authoritarian regime faces three important choices to govern society.
Will it fashion an ideology to persuade citizens to consent to its rule? Will it tolerate and make use of societal pluralism to permit the articulation of civil society interests? And will it activate or deactivate citizen engagement to advance its ends?
The Mexican authoritarian regime was founded in response to the Mexican revolution but, except during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, it was not particularly revolutionary. It deemphasized both ideological appeals, except in the most general way, and regime-sponsored political activation of citizens. It valued nationalism and the defense of the state’s international sovereignty. Government-sponsored school textbooks exalted the accomplishments and good intentions of Mexican governments over the twentieth century and supported the president’s legitimacy. Government officials spoke the language of social justice, at times genuinely, at times to justify the extensive state involvement in the economy and society. The state promised economic growth and delivered it from the 1930s to the end of the 1960s. But none of this was part of a well-articulated ideology.
There were no “sacred” ideological texts. The government and the PRI avoided creating a standard by which they could be judged. Election turnouts were low. Independent popular political movements were few and fragmented, and most were based only in specific regions. Through the 1950s Mexicans had low interest and low involvement in politics.39
The most important and enduring political legacy of the Lázaro Cárdenas presidency was the corporatist organization of politics. The government fostered the organization of social and economic groups subordinated to the state and the ruling party. The PRI, as noted, was organized into sectors for workers, peasants, and middle-class associations. But the state also required nearly all business firms to join state-chartered business organizations to “represent” and control business interests. The Roman Catholic church, Mexico’s largest, had been militarily and politically defeated by President Calles during the “Cristero” war (1926–1929); it operated politically with great caution. This system of corporatist controls
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functioned relatively effectively, with few changes, from the 1930s to the 1980s. Its breakdown was coterminous with the regime transition toward democracy.40 The corporatist system, though frayed, even helped Mexico overcome its economic depression of the 1980s.41
The Brazilian, Chilean, and both Argentine authoritarian regimes justified their rule in the name of the nation, patriotism, modernization, public order, morality, anticommunism, measures against corruption, economic reorganization and growth, and a deep distrust of “politics.”42 These pronouncements were vague, albeit frequently repeated, providing little guidance for political action and little or no risk of being held as a standard for assessment. These notions—as those of Mexican authoritarians—were what Juan Linz calls “mentalities” rather than ideologies. “It is more difficult to conceive of mentalities as binding,” Linz wrote, “requiring a commitment of the rulers and the subjects irrespective of costs and of the need of coercion to implement them. Mentalities are more difficult to diffuse among the masses, less susceptible to be[ing] used in education.”43 Nor can mentalities be readily used to hold rulers accountable.
The Chilean and Argentine (especially post-1976) dictatorships had a similar approach toward citizen participation: don’t! They banned political parties, smashed many labor unions and social movements, and mostly failed to develop channels to engage popular participation. Military regimes in both countries cultivated friendly labor union leaders, but these efforts had little impact on the broader labor movement. The Pinochet government also employed a national network of Women’s Centers. Although these had charitable purposes, they were also means to obtain support among conservative women.44 But because the government distrusted civil society and especially mass politics, these endeavors failed to activate participation: they emphasized compliance.
In Argentina and Chile, these policies had broader consequences for societal pluralism and the articulation of interests. Organizations to represent workers, peasants, or the poor more generally were repressed. Business organizations, albeit under constraints, continued to function. The constraints on business were greater in Argentina between 1976 and 1980
because government authorities disdained the competence of business executives and intervened in the management of business federations. But the asymmetry in organization and potential for representation between upper-class and lower-class organizations prevented the sort of social pact that was the bread and butter of elite politics in Mexico, where they cushioned the impact of business-government disagreements between 1970
and 1982 and the economic crisis that followed in Mexico in the early 1980s. In Argentina and Chile under dictatorship, for several years the
Comparative Perspective 596
state and business federations had no partners with whom to negotiate.
This regime failure to permit and make use of societal pluralism proved fatal for Argentine dictatorships. In Chile, it required a much larger dose of repression to keep the dictatorship in power at the time of economic crisis in the early to mid-1980s. The Mexican authoritarian regime, however, endured the economic depression of the 1980s, ending only in the 1990s.45
The Brazilian authoritarian regime, though similar to the others in its reliance on mentality rather than on ideology, differed from the Chilean and Argentine dictatorships in its approach to societal pluralism, which it addressed through state corporatism. The Brazilian dictatorship did not activate citizen participation but held elections, tolerated an opposition, and was
less likely to repress than in Argentina or Chile. Employing the 1943
Labor Code, in its first decade the Brazilian dictatorship increased the level of labor repression well above the standards prevailing before the 1964
coup; after 1979, however, its policies toward labor and labor unions became more tolerant. The Brazilian regime for the most part tolerated business organizations; it permitted these organizations to become sources of opposition to government policies in economic and political spheres. Brazilian business leaders understood sooner than their Chilean counterparts that political authoritarianism had costs and that they would wield greater influence under democratic politics. They favored the “softer” themes of the authoritarian regime and in the end would help foster the transition to democracy.46 The Brazilian regime’s approach to societal pluralism came closer to Mexico’s than to Argentina’s or Chile’s.
President Park’s ideas about economic modernization, nationalism, and rejection of democratic politics echo well the themes from Latin American authoritarians. But Park’s ideational formulations went beyond these mentalities. He sought to reshape the school curriculum and affect how Korean families related to the nation. There was an attempt to indoctrinate civil society, not just to repress it. Park displayed anti-elitist and populist values, including egalitarianism, to cope with elements of opposition in cities and especially in universities. He cultivated support in the rural areas, with some success, in part through the New Community Movement.
This movement was more effective in the 1960s than in the 1970s because, with the success of Korean industrialization policies, the size of the rural sector shrank.47
In these ways, the Park regime in the 1960s created ideational standards against which it could subsequently be judged: was the egalitarian populist promise fulfilled and were communities empowered? Although the extent of effective participation in the New Community Movement was limited, it was more extensive than anything promoted by ruling South American
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dictatorships and was exceeded only in Mexico, whose ruling party developed similar forms of limited rural engagement over a longer span of time.
From the 1960s to the 1970s, the Park regime’s approach to societal pluralism veered away from the Mexican comparison and resembled Argentina of 1976 and Chile more closely. As noted earlier, Park emulated Brazilian state corporatism toward labor unions in the 1960s but turned toward sharper repression of urban labor in the 1970s, departing from both the Brazilian and the Mexican patterns. Park’s economic strategy chose certain business firms as “national champions,” nurturing their development as chaebol, subordinating their strategies to governmental objectives managed through highly competent bureaucracies (echoes of the Argentine military’s disdain for business acumen in the late 1970s), and sacrificing the development of a broader-based medium- and small-sized set of business firms that might have served as a proxy for civil society. The lack of strong labor federations and the lack of business federations that might have represented civil society indirectly deprived the South Korean regime of the Mexican-style social pact that might have smoothed political and economic crises. The South Korean government also entered into conflict with Christian churches to an extent unrivaled in Latin America (the only distant parallels were the critical postures of the Chilean and Brazilian Roman Catholic Bishops’ Conference toward dictatorship years after each coup).48
By the late 1970s, the South Korean authoritarian regime was as unable as the Argentine and Chilean authoritarian regimes to address societal pluralism to advance its objectives, harness national efforts toward regime goals, and reduce the costs of repression. The yushin regime gave up on state corporatism, practiced briefly in South Korea during the 1960s, relying more on overt repression of labor and greater guidance of big business.
But by having earlier emphasized the values of egalitarianism and limited forms of participation in the New Community Movement, the South Korean regime made itself somewhat vulnerable to the criticism that, through the establishment of yushin, it broke its own promises to the Korean nation. It sowed the least effective combination of variables to foster its own political objectives: it created ideological standards, gave up on state corporatism, and increased repression.
The Perfect Dictatorship?
Authoritarian regimes are often politically ineffective because many military officers who create and lead them do not care for or understand poli-
Comparative Perspective 598
tics well. Authoritarian regimes often depend on just one leader, seek to ban politics, and resort to repression as their means of coping with disagreement. The politics of such regimes is at times so primitive that, by the second half of the twentieth century, they were less likely to survive for long in increasingly complex modern societies. Nonetheless, there is variation in the political performance of authoritarian regimes.
The authoritarian regimes under consideration also varied regarding economic outcomes. South Korea and Brazil had generally excellent economic growth results. Chile and the second Argentine dictatorship had poor economic growth results. Chile under General Pinochet has an international reputation for having engineered an economic miracle. Yet the best the Pinochet regime could muster during its second decade in power (1981–1990), after it had presumably purged the Chilean economy of all its viruses, was an annual average growth rate of gross domestic product per capita of 1.4 percent.49 Mexico and the first Argentine dictatorship had periods of excellent economic growth results (in Mexico, this first-rate performance lasted from the late 1930s to the late 1960s) followed by economic downturns. The relationship between dictatorship and economic growth is therefore indeterminate.
The analysis of the political effectiveness of dictatorships in South Korea, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico is summarized in Tables 20.2
20.3, and 20.4.
Argentina in both 1966 and 1976 and, to a lesser extent, South Korea had propitious circumstances at the start of the installation of the Onganía, Videla, and Park regimes. There was low resistance to the respective coups and substantial leadership unity. Where the installation was more difficult because the resistance was greater and there was no leadership unity, as in Brazil and Mexico, the likelihood that regime installers Table 20.2
Comparative rank order for authoritarian political effectiveness: Performance during the installation of the regime Rank
Low Resistance
Leadership Unity
Succession Rules
1 Best
Argentina 1966*
South Korea*
Mexico
2
Argentina 1976*
Argentina 1966*
Brazil
3
South Korea**
Argentina 1976*
Argentina 1976
4
Brazil**
Chile
Argentina 1966*
5
Chile
Brazil
Chile*
6 Worst
Mexico
Mexico
South Korea*
* Indicates ties.
** Indicates a second-level of ties in the “low resistance” column.
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599
Table 20.3
Comparative rank order for authoritarian political effectiveness: Choice of institutional means
Delegate to
Use legislature and
Co-opt > Repress
Rank
civilian elites
political parties
labor unions
1 Best
S. Korea Yushin*
S. Korea 1961–72
Mexico
2
S. Korea 1961–72*
Mexico
Brazil
3
Brazil*
Brazil
S. Korea 1961–72
4
Argentina 1966*
S. Korea Yushin
Argentina 1966
5
Mexico
Argentina 1966*
Chile
6
Argentina 1976
Argentina 1976*
S. Korea Yushin
7 Worst
Chile
Chile*
Argentina 1976
* Indicates ties.
Table 20.4
Comparative rank order for authoritarian political effectiveness: Governing the society
Rank
Eschew Ideology
State Corporatism
Deactivate Participation
1 Best
All alike, except:
Mexico
Mexico
2
Brazil
Brazil
3
S. Korea 1961–72
S. Korea 1961–72
4
Argentina 1966
Argentina 1966
5
Argentina 1976
S. Korea Yushin*
6
S. Korea Yushin
Argentina 1976*
7 Worst
South Korea
Chile
Chile*
* Indicates ties.
would agree on succession rules within the authoritarian regime was much greater. Those authoritarians who had to work harder at stabilizing their coalition at the moment of installation discovered the utility of succession rules early and to good effect. (Chile was an exception; installation was difficult, and yet General Pinochet succeeded in imposing his will over his coup allies and over societal opposition.)
The regimes that experienced difficult installation (Brazil and Mexico) were also more keenly aware of the need to expand and sustain the coalition to support the authoritarian regime and to gather political information useful for governing. They were, therefore, more likely to employ some legislative institutions and one or more political parties to advance their goals. These legislatures and parties were deeply constrained in their powers and their capacities; they differed from legislatures or parties in democratic political systems even though they carried out some of the same roles. Regimes with installation difficulties also learned earlier about
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