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Democratic Development, Breakdowns, and Fascism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Peter H. Merkl
Peter H. Merkl
Affiliation:
University of California, Santa Barbara.
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Abstract

Theories of democratic development have to account for breakdowns, fascist and other, and to consider phases of incomplete democratization as well as mass democracy. To this end, they may need to relate structural changes to social and political mobilization, explain different kinds of revolution—not only the “true revolution” of leftist ideology—and different types of military coups. “Developmental dictatorships,” fascist or not, are unlikely midwives of liberal democracy. Democratic development can also be related to broad cultural and religious patterns of political civilization that may shape the course of revolutionary or non-revolutionary change.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , October 1981 , pp. 114 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1981

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References

1 This teleological assignment of meaning is quite different, for example, from Max Weber's advice to construe meaning from what each set of contemporaries demonstrably thought and intended to promote.

2 Gregor, A. James, The Ideology of Fascism (New York: Free Press, 1969).Google Scholar

3 See Dahrendorf, Ralf, Democracy and Society in Germany (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967).Google Scholar German liberal writings on German development of the past have tended not to compare their subject with later arrivals to development.

4 See also Gregor, A. James and Chang, Maria Hsia, “Nazionalfascismo and the Revolutionary Nationalism of Sun Yat-sen,” Journal of Asian Studies, XXXIX (November 1979), 21–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For example, Nazi stereotypes on the role of women or on the superiority of rural life greatly differed from the actual developments in female employment and patterns of urban migration in the Third Reich.

6 The problem with defining power as “the extent to which the outcomes of the population's interactions … favor its interests …” is merely one of formulation: power may be the capacity to influence outcomes, but it is hardly the “extent” to which the outcomes are favorable to the group. Most people would define it still more broadly; the same is true of “repression.”

7 See also Louise, Charles, and Tilly, Richard, The Rebellious Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

8 The first wave was that of the years of national foundation, beginning in the 1880s. According to the author, similar sequences can be shown in some other Latin American countries, acompanied by extraordinary population growth and outward expansion.

9 The pre-1933 SA had a far higher membership of workers and peasants than it had of the old middle class of shopkeepers and well-to-do farmers; of Mussolini's Black-shirts, a plurality were agricultural laborers.

10 A “fascist” movement began to exist in Argentina only after October 17, 1945, when a general strike served to create a Peronist workers' party.

11 The nationalist preoccupation with foreign exploiters of Italian and German fascism is akin to the sense of dependencia of nationalist and Marxist spokesmen for the less developed countries, including those in the communist orbit.

12 See also his chapter on a similar subject in Huntington, Samuel P. and Moore, Clement H., eds., Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 339–79.Google Scholar

13 It would be instructive if the effort undertaken by Linz and Stepan were to be duplicated by other scholars with respect to Japan, Turkey, Lebanon, the Philippines, South Africa, and other countries.

14 The book is also available in four separate paperbacks: one theoretical, and on each on Europe, Latin America, and Chile.

15 The absence of the important fascist movements of Hungary and Romania am of the smaller ones of Western and Northern Europe is logical: These countries eithe never had a functioning democratic regime or, if they did, it never broke down excep as a consequence of Axis conquest.

16 Bracher, , Die Auflösung der Weimarer Republic (Villingen: Ringverlag, 1955)Google Scholar

17 See also the phases of political development (the last step is the “potentiation of capabilities” and “exploitation of resources” in an independent fashion) in Merkl, , Modern Comparative Politics, 2d ed. (Hinsdale, 111.: Dryden Press [Holt, Rinehart], 1977), 15–23.Google Scholar

18 Binder, Leonard and others, eds., Crises and Sequences in Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

19 The concept of crisis used in Almond, Gabriel A. and others, Crisis, Choice, and Change (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973)Google Scholar is far more concrete, and the contributors to that volume adhere to it much more closely than those of the present symposium.

20 The title suggests a focus on the source of political authority, but the book is really a comparative and descriptive history of major political cultures. It does not attempt to relate culture to democratic breakdowns, or even to democracy.

21 See Bendix, , Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York: Wiley, 1964).Google Scholar

22 See also Eisenstadt, , The Political System of Empires (New York and Glencoe, Ill. Free Press, 1063).Google Scholar

23 Specifically, the earlier stirrings of revolution (1848) in these countries were nol strong enough to be successful. The author also raises the question of how Scandinavia Switzerland, and the Low Countries managed to partake of revolutionary modernity without an upheaval of their own. The answer may lie in a learning process dating from Napoleonic times, not very different from the one whereby Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, and Japan acquired modernity after 1945.