FURTHER REFLECTIONS
ON TOTALITARIAN AND
AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES
F
acing the prospect of the publication of a study written twenty-five
years ago, inevitably I feel ambivalent .' So much has happened both
intellectually and on the political scene that there is the temptation to
rewrite, extend, and add to the original text . At the same time, I feel
that the original work has value just as it was written in 1973-1974 .
Within the limitations of space imposed then by the editors of the
Handbook of Political Science, the work is in some way the centerpiece
of a trilogy including Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration (Linz,
1978)* and Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation:
Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Linz
and Stepan, 1996). The three cover the period between 1914 and 1989,
which Frangois Furet (1999), Ernst Nolte (1987), and Eric Hobsbawm
(1994) have analyzed as the shortened twentieth century and the age of
totalitarianism.
The 1978 book and my work on fascism (Linz, 1976, 1980) could
be seen as part of the present book insofar as they contribute to our understanding
of why and how democracies broke down and nondemocratic
regimes became established, as well as why some democracies
survived . The work on democratic transitions could well be the last
chapter, since it deals with the crisis of the regimes studied in the present
book, their breakdown, and the transition to stable or fledgling
*All citations in this chapter refer to the notes and bibliography (pages 38-48)
following the chapter. In subsequent chapters, citations refer to the notes and
2
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
democracies. Although my writings on fascism were not related to the
German debate on the theory of fascism as an alternative to the study
of authoritarianism (Kraushaar, 1997), I hope they contribute to our understanding
of one of the great antidemocratic movements of this century.
I underline the focus on fascist movements, since I share, to a
large extent, De Felice's (1975) distinction between fascism as a movement
and as a regime.
Many scholarly efforts to substitute fascism for totalitarianism as a
category for describing or understanding the Nazi regime were based
largely on Marxist, more or less sophisticated theories of fascism. Simultaneously,
new empirical comparative research on fascist movements-their
successes and failures, their leaders, members, and social
bases-was in progress from a non-Marxist or strictly historical perspective
(Lacqueur, 1976 ; Larsen, Hagtvet, and Myklebust, 1980 ; Griffin,
1991 ; and the monumental work by Stanley Payne, 1995, that also
includes the fascist regimes until their demise) . My own writings on
fascism were part of the latter effort.
The relatively short section on sultanistic regimes in the original
Handbook essay has been expanded by Houchang Chehabi and myself
(1998) in a long introduction to a collection of essays dealing in detail
with that type of regime . Sultanism is a regime type that should be seen
as clearly distinct from authoritarian regimes in their various manifestations,
a point that escaped some readers of my original work . Mark
Thompson (1995) has written an excellent monograph on the Marcos
regime in the Philippines from this perspective .
When I wrote on totalitarianism in the early 1970s, the intellectual
community was questioning the concept and ready to abandon it for
good and bad reasons. Among the latter was the largely hopeless debate
about the association of the concept with the polemics generated
by the Cold War, ignoring its intellectual origins before World War II .
Another mistaken reason was that the concept did not allow us to differentiate
Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism . I never doubted the need for
such differentiation, and I hope that I contributed to an appreciation of
it in the Handbook essay. But I also felt strongly that a simple dichotomy
between democratic regimes and nondemocratic rule obscured the
distinctiveness of the totalitarian phenomenon .2 More recently, Sartori
(1993) has argued against a simple dichotomy of democratic and nondemocratic
regimes .
A legitimate reason for questioning the concept of totalitarianism,
one that I tried to take into account, was that by the 1970s and thereafter
further Reflections
	
3
it did not adequately capture the political reality of Soviet-type regimes .
I paid attention to this fact by reviewing the growing literature on
changes in communist countries, particularly the Soviet Union . But I did
not formulate as clearly as I would later the distinctive characteristics of
what I call "post-totalitarian political systems." In part this was the result
of my sheer exhaustion after undertaking the comparative analysis
of all types of nondemocratic regimes ; but it also was due to the nature
of a contribution to a handbook intended to reflect the state of the
art. (A few scholars tried to apply my analysis of authoritarian regimes
to late communist systems, an approach that could contribute some insights,
but one that I found misleading .)
With the liberalization in Eastern Europe, scholars and activists
there discovered the Western literature on totalitarianism (Rupnik,
1984). There was a strange resurgence of the totalitarianism approach
being applied to systems that at one time were clearly totalitarian but
that, in my view, were now better analyzed as post-totalitarian (Linz
and Stepan, 1996 ; Thompson, 1998) . Although in the West some scholars
wanted to ditch the concept of totalitarianism as politically tainted
by the Cold War-these scholars emphasized the positive aspects of
communism compared to the totally negative view of fascism and particularly
Nazism-paradoxically, but understandably, opposition forces
in Eastern Europe (with the significant exception of several authors
writing on Poland [Djilas, 1993 ; Staniskis,1986]) were discovering the
fruitfulness of the totalitarianism perspective . In fact, many opponents
of authoritarian regimes, for example in Spain, felt that to characterize
the regimes as authoritarian-instead of totalitarian-would serve to
legitimize them.
Since my thinking about the distinction between totalitarian and
authoritarian regimes was initially a reflection of my knowledge of the
politics of Franco's Spain-particularly from the late 1940s to the early
1960s-a number of critics in Spain have stressed the totalitarian character
or tendencies in early phases of the Franco regime (Ramírez,
1978). Some did not ever surrender the totalitarian label for the regime,
perhaps because they felt that it gave greater moral legitimacy to their
opposition. Ironically, this position is the reverse of that held by those
who would question the category totalitarian as a result of the Cold
War. I never would deny the totalitarian ambitions of the Spanish
Falange and the totalitarian tendencies of the Franco regime during the
hegemony of the Axis powers in Europe . 1 would, however, stress the
legacy of limited pluralism in the origin of the regime, which Franco
4
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
subordinated to his personal power and designs . This personalization
frustrated the creation of a true and modern totalitarian regime . Javier
Tusell's (1988) excellent study of Franco during the Civil War tells us
much about the origins of Franco's power and his regime, which made
genuine totalitarianism unlikely, except in the event of an Axis victory
in World War I (and perhaps the displacement of Franco) .3 I also refer
the reader to Stanley Payne's (1987, 1999) excellent history of the
Falange during the Franco years, which shows the complex relation between
the Caudillo and the party, and to my own work on the transformation
of the single party (Linz, 1970) . In addition, studies of the elites
of the regime have described in detail its limited pluralism (Miguel
Jerez, 1982; Amando de Miguel, 1975 ; Viver Pi-Sunyer, 1978) .
As I developed in my essays in Daalder (1997) and SSllner et al .
(1997), my commitment to the concept of totalitarianism is based on an
intellectual need to distinguish a particular historical form of regime
and society from other nondemocratic polities . It is not based as much
on the distinction between democracy and totalitarianism, which I considered
from the start to be obvious, nor on Hannah Arendt's emphasis
on terror, but focuses instead on a regime form for completely organizing
political life and society .
The historian Frangois Furet (1999) reiterated the need to retain totalitarianism
as a distinctive type when he wrote :
Stalinized Bolshevism and National Socialism constitute the two examples
of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. Not only were they
comparable, but they form a political category of their own, which
has become established since Hannah Arendt . I am well aware that
this notion is not universally accepted, but I have yet to discover a
concept more useful in defining the atomized regimes of societies
made up of individuals systematically deprived of their political ties
and subjected to the "total" power of an ideological party and its
leader. Since we are discussing an ideal type, there is no reason why
these regimes must be identical or even comparable in every way ; nor
need the characteristic in question be equally prominent throughout
the history of such regimes . Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia
were two different universes. Nazi Germany was less totalitarian in
1937 than it was in 1942, whereas Stalinist terror was more virulent
before and after the war than during the war . But this does not preclude
the possibility that both regimes, and they alone, set in motion
the destruction of the civil order by the absolute submission of individuals
to the ideology and the terror of the party-state . It was only in
these two cases that the mythology of the unity of the people in and
by the party-state, under the leadership of an infallible Guide, killed
Further Reflections
	
5
millions and presided over a disaster so complete that it destroyed the
history of two nations, the Germans and the Russians, making their
continuity all but inconceivable . . . .
From a "totalitarian" perspective, the relation between the two
regimes refutes the apparent simplicity of their comparison along ideological
lines . Nazi Germany belonged to the family of Fascist
regimes; and Stalin's Russia to the Bolshevik tradition . Hitler imitated
Mussolini; Stalin followed Lenin . Such a classification is supported by
the history of ideas, or of intentions, for it distinguishes two revolutionary
ambitions-one founded on the particular, the nation or the
race, the other on the universal, if we accept that the emancipation of
the proletariat prefigures that of all humanity . This classic point-bypoint
comparison of the two ideologies does not rule out the possibility
that either one of them constituted a closed system, based on an
immanent interpretation of human history and offering something like
salvation to all those suffering the ravages of bourgeois egoism . (pp.
181=181)
I never would question the need for systematic comparison and the
highlighting of the specific differences (as well as similarities) between
the Soviet- and Nazi-type regimes within the genus totalitarianism . Nor
do I dispute the need for a nuanced comparative analysis of communist
totalitarian systems, particularly between the Soviet Union and China
and also between those two giants and other systems like Cuba, North
Korea, Cambodia, and the East European countries . I have insisted that
Poland was, for many years before 1989, closer to the authoritarian
regime type than the totalitarian or the standard post-totalitarian . The
limits on terror in Cuba influenced my thinking toward the view that
totalitarianism did not necessarily require terror on the scale of the Soviet
Union, and the same would be true for the DDR (East Germany) .
Totalitarianism and Post-totalitarianism
In the case of the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent other East European
communist regimes, scholarly questioning of a simplified model
of totalitarianism, together with the realities of the post-totalitarian
regimes, led to the emergence of more sociological- and economicsbased
analyses to replace the political approach . The emphasis of modernization
theory, in particular, was on industrialization, occupational
and educational development, welfare state policies, and a presumed
social contract between rulers and the people . At a later stage, attention
6
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
turned to the failures of the modernization model of economic and
social change : first, stability was attributed to the success of modernization;
later, crisis and a breakdown to stagnation and the loss of dynamism
and the capacity for innovation (Willer, 1997) . In these perspectives,
political and institutional structures, which in my view were
and continued to be central, lost salience .
I would never argue that the more sociological and economic analyses
were not legitimate (and to a greater or lesser extent, empirically
valid); but I do argue that they did not provide the key to understanding
political stability or crisis in these regimes. Totalitarianism was stablenot
only due to coercion, though that was an important factor-during
periods of both economic hardship and growing economic success, and
post-totalitarianism survived for a long time during the increasingly serious
signs of crisis . That crisis, particularly in Eastern Europe, became
more acute after Khrushchev's 1956 "secret" speech denouncing Stalin ;
and changes in those communist regimes ultimately were conditioned
by a change in the Soviet leadership . That leadership, after considerable
delay, initiated a political response that aimed at reform . But, somewhat
as de Tocqueville wrote about the ancien regime, when reform finally
was seriously considered, the crisis became even more acute . The unintended
consequences of Gorbachev's actions did not lead to the survival
of a reformed system, but to the break-up and breakdown of the the Soviet
Union (Brown, 1996) . The regime collapse, while perhaps accelerated
by social and economic changes, ultimately was triggered by the
political decisions of the political leadership-a leadership that long
ago had lost faith in the totalitarian utopia and its ideologically defined
goals, lost the capacity to mobilize the masses, and lost the will to use
violence when challenged on the periphery of the system (Friedheim,
1993) . The loss of capacity to use force fits into a Paretian type of
analysis, and the loss of ideological faith at different levels can be analyzed
in terms of Weberian concepts of legitimacy.
In my work with Alfred Stepan (1996) on the transition from posttotalitarianism
to democracy (which did not include the failed democratizations),
we limited ourselves to distinguishing post-totalitarian regimes
from both authoritarian regimes and the previous totalitarian regime . We
did not enter into a detailed analysis of the change from totalitarianism
to post-totalitarianism, although we did point to different paths and degrees
of change in the different European communist countries . Certainly
much of the sociological literature on social changes in those countries,
the structure of the economy (as analyzed, for example, by Zaslavskaya's
[1984] Novosibirsk School), and the politico-administrative structures
Further Reflections
	
7
(like the work of Jerry Hough [1977]) would be relevant in this context.
A systematic comparative study of society, economy, and politics
in the post-totalitarian phase in different countries deserves top priority.
The study of the legacy of the earlier totalitarianism on that phase
and the continuing legacies from totalitarianism and post-totalitarianism
in the new and the failed democracies would be challenging .
The lesson to be learned from the study of the politics of posttotalitarianism
is, to quote Klaus Willer (1997) in his work on neototalitarianism
theory, "the stress it lays on domination and its specific irrationalities,
variables which were indeed neglected by mainstream
sociology and, after the Soviet breakdown, are ignored by liberalist optimism
of neoclassic reform programs ."
Was Fascist Italy Totalitarian?
I have been hesitant to characterize the Italian fascist regime as totalitarian,
even though the term was invented by opponents of the regime
to characterize it and assumed later by the fascists themselves (Petersen,
1996) . I wrote of "arrested totalitarianism" to indicate not only
the clearly totalitarian intention and conception of the fascists, but also
the limitations that Italian society and certain institutions-the monarchy,
the army, the church-imposed on its ambitions . Unlike Hannah
Arendt, I did not reach that position on the basis of the limited terror,
the smaller number of victims (particularly deaths after the takeover of
power, until the later years of the war), since I had not included terror
as a defining element of totalitarianism . However, more recent work by
Italian scholars on the ideological commitment, the workings of the
regime, the weakness of the institutions putting any limit on the party
hegemony, and the personal power and sacralization of Mussolini could
convince one of the more totalitarian character of the regime . Mussolini's
statement quoted on pages 166-167 of this book was perhaps
more an excuse for his failure than a description of the circumstances
under which his regime developed for many years .
As Emilio Gentile (1986) summarizes the position of the great
scholar de Felice :
Fascism was never completely totalitarian ; firstly, because it did not
adopt mass terror and the concentration camp system ; secondly, because
it did not impose the supremacy of the party on the State, but
brought about, instead, the "depoliticization" ^of the PNF (Partito
8
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
finally, because it never aimed "at a complete transition from the
State based on right to the police State." In short, the fascist political
system should be defined as an "imperfect totalitarianism ." (pp. 200-
201)
Gentile, however, writes :
There has been a fascist conception of totalitarianism, and this cannot
be overlooked. Once one attributes a "totalitarian tendency" to fascism,
which distinguishes it from traditional authoritarian regimes,
one then has to study how this tendency originated, how it was
formed in reality, and how it operated to modify reality, conditioning
the lives of millions of men and women in the process . The failure of
fascist totalitarianism is not a proof of its non-existence . The gap between
myth and achievement is not an argument against the importance
of myths in the politics of fascism and in its conception and
mode of organization of the masses . (p. 201)
He concludes:
Consequently, an exact classification within one or other category is
not possible . If authoritarian fascism characterized the construction
phase of the "regime," it was totalitarian fascism, developing in fascism's
second decade in power, which provided the dynamism and
the goal of "transforming the State." (p. 203)
Placing Other Nondemocratic Regimes
I never intended the Handbook essay to be an exhaustive comparative
analysis of all nondemocratic regimes, partly due to the lack of prior
monographic research and, in a few cases, difficulty in finding an adequate
conceptualization (for example, in the complex and fluid case of
Mexico). In the meantime, it has become easier to incorporate Japan
and Cuba in the discussion .
Japan
Japan, between the failure or breakdown of party democracy (Scalapino,
1953) and the postwar democratization under Allied supervision,
had not been included in the comparative study of nondemocratic
regimes. Much of the debate among scholars hinged on its characterization
as a fascist regime-military fascist, emperor fascist-from
Further Reflections
	
9
more or less Marxist perspectives . That approach fails since there was
no fascist movement, no fascist civilians taking power, and the reception
of only some parts of fascist ideology . The commitment to the imperial
legitimacy, including even the formal Meiji constitution among
other factors, limited the possible rise of true fascism . However, as
Kasta (1995, 1999) has pointed out, the global fascist Zeitgeist, while
not producing a fascist movement and party state in Japan, had considerable
impact on some of the policies of the military-bureaucratic-intellectual
elites who assumed power between 1937 and 1945 and on
some efforts at social mobilization . Kasta, describing this authoritarian,
Kakushin (i.e., renovationist) right, has noted its similarities with
authoritarian mobilizational policies on the right (and the left) in other
countries. Indeed, he argues for the characterization of certain authoritarian
military-bureaucratic regimes as Kakushin regimes. His review
of the literature on Japanese politics in the 1930s once more shows the
need to keep totalitarian and authoritarian regimes distinct, as well as
the importance of the fascist Zeitgeist (and models) without overextending
the term "fascist" to characterize a wide range of nondemocratic
and noncommunist regimes.
Cuba
Although the Handbook essay was written when the Castro regime had
consolidated its power, it did not include a reference to Cuba except in
a long footnote . I likely found the topic too close and too polemical at
the time. Most of the early studies of the revolution focused on its
utopian elements, its social achievements, and the hopes associated
with breaking free of dependency on the United States and pursuing
independent economic development and even industrialization . Later
the focus was on the hostility to U.S . imperialism. Even when some analysts
had already noted the frustration of hopes for democracy, the
positive social changes and popular support and mobilization were seen
to compensate. The massive outmigration (12 percent of the population,
mostly to the United States and Spain) limited the scale of repression,
although a recent summary shows the extent of state terror
and the similarity to the Soviet model in the patterns of repression, including
the harsh punishment of former revolutionaries turned dissidents
(Fontaine, 1997) . Almost no scholarly effort was made to place
the system in a comparative perspective . The hostility to the concept of
totalitarianism precluded its use, although in my view the basic elements
1 0
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
were there. I see the indisputable charismatic appeal of Castro and his
links with the Latin American tradition of caudillismo as no obstacle to
characterizing the institutionalization of the regime and its policies as
totalitarian. The question is to what extent the charisma and the nationalist
appeal are still the basis of what we might characterize as a
post-totalitarian regime .
Castro's political survival after the fall of the communist regimes
that had supported him has raised questions of whether, when, and how
a transition to democracy will take place in Cuba . The many papers on
the subject focus on the creation of capitalist enclaves, particularly in
tourism, the greater tolerance of private economic activity, the dollarization
of part of the economy, occasional tolerance of some dissidence,
the new modus vivendi with the Catholic Church after years of conflict,
and some speculations about the attitude of the armed forces . The analyses
and speculations turn on the nature of the post-totalitarian character
of the regime and the potential for transition (Mujal-León and Saavedra,
1977; Krdmer 1993, 1995 ; Centeno and Font, 1996) .
Cuba presents us therefore with an almost complete cycle, from the
revolutionary overthrow and abdication of a sultanistic dictator, to a provisional
government that some hoped would lead to democracy, to the
consolidation of a dictatorship that in the 1970s could fit perfectly into
the totalitarian type, to a process of transition to post-totalitarianism by
decay, societal conquest, and partial and reluctant liberalization (PerezStable,
1999) . Some of the best conceptual analyses deal with this last
phase, characterized as charismatic or caudillo post-totalitarianism .
While the earlier phases-the takeover by Castro, the failure of the
provisional government, and particularly the totalitarian phase-were
not placed in a comparative perspective, the opposite is happening with
the post-totalitarian phase .
Traditional Authority as Distinct from
Modern Authoritarian Regimes
Also in the category of "other nondemocratic regimes" are some of the
traditional monarchies . These include Saudi Arabia ; some like Kuwait
with oligarchic democratic institutions ; Morocco and Jordan, now perhaps
starting processes of democratization ; Nepal until the democratic
transition in 1990-1991 ; and Bhutan . Without analyzing the politics of
these countries, I want to note that the basis of legitimacy of the nondemocratic
rule is traditional (at least for parts of the population and
the elites), and that therefore these regimes should not be confused
with modern authoritarian regimes .
Further Reflections
	
11
There are those who call Latin American authoritarian regimes or
sultanistic regimes "traditional" ; some even do so in the cases of Franco's
Spain and Salazar's Portugal . This interpretation is fundamentally
flawed, however, since the basis of legitimacy in the regimes is not traditional
dynastic legitimacy .
Excursus on the
Scholarly Literature of Recent Decades
In the twenty-five years since publication of the Handbook of Political
Science, much has been learned about some of the nondemocratic
regimes around the world . It would be foolish to attempt to summarize
those developments here, since there are other works that accomplish
that task. For example, Volume 2 of the Traité de science politique,
edited by Madeleine Grawitz and Jean Leca (1985), includes excellent
essays by L. Ferry and E. Pisier-Kouchner, P. Ansert, K. D. Bracher, H.
Carrére d'Encausse, and J. L . Domenach on different totalitarianisms
and by G. Hermet on authoritarianism. The recent essay by Archie
Brown (1999) is an excellent source of work done in the United Kingdom.
It is impossible to refer in this limited space to the flood of books
and articles on Nazi rule that have appeared ; the anthology edited by
Karl Dietrich Bracher, Manfred Funke, and Hans-Adolf Jacobsen (1983)
offers an interesting selection and a selected systematic bibliography .
More recently, Eckhard Jesse (1996) has compiled an outstanding reader
that includes writings on totalitarianism from different perspectives .
With the exceptions I have already noted and a few others, the
work in the last twenty-five years has been mostly excellent historical
monographs and descriptive country studies . With the opening of the
Soviet archives, we can expect additional work along these lines . Such
work would allow us to understand better the different phases of Soviet
totalitarianism from its inception after the revolution to the Stalinist period,
the real meaning of Khrushchev's reforms (which can be seen either
as a process of liberalization or as an attempt to revitalize totalitarianism
without terror), the years of detotalitarianization (by default
more than by intent) under Brezhnev (Bialer, 1980), and the active reforms
by Gorbachev that led to the breakdown of the Soviet Union and
to democratization .
While Italian archives have been open for decades, political scientists
have not added much to our systematic knowledge of the nature
and transformation of Italian fascist rule, from a theoretical perspective,
1 2
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
that would allow us to understand better why totalitarianism was ultimately
arrested in Italy. We do have, however, the monumental historical
work of Renzo de Felice and the interesting writing of another historian,
Emilio Gentile, mainly on the ideological origins of the regime .
The Franco regime also has been the subject of excellent historical research
that illuminates some of the origins of its limited pluralism, as
well as excellent studies of the regime's elite . For Portugal, the work of
Antonio Costa Pinto places Salazar's regime in the broader context of
authoritarian European politics and the rise of fascism, focusing on
Portugal's small fascist party and its fate under authoritarian rule .
Manuel de Lucena (1976) has written an excellent study of Portuguese
corporatism . There is still much scholarly work to be done by historians
and social scientists on the nondemocratic regimes in Latin America,
beyond the recent focus on transitions to democracy .
There have been some valuable newer studies of authoritarian nonfascist
and even antifascist regimes : Ben-Ami (1983) on the Primo de
Rivera dictatorship in Spain ; Kluge (1984) on Austria ; Lucena (1976),
Wiarda (1977), Schmitter (1979), and Costa-Pinto (1995) on Portugal ;
Ozbudun (1995) on Turkey; Paxton (1972) on Vichy France ; Stepan on
Brazil (1973) and Peru (1978) ; Wynot (1974) on Poland ; Lieven (1973)
on the Baltic states ; Jowitt (1978) on Romania ; Liddle (1996) on Indonesia;
Winckler on China (1999) . The most important contribution to
the debate on the new authoritarianism in Latin America, largely generated
by O'Donnell's thesis of bureaucratic authoritarianism, is the
book edited by David Collier (1970), with contributions by, among others,
Albert Hirschman and Fernando Henrique Cardozo. The breakdown
of military regimes in South America and Greece has led to new
thinking about the military in authoritarian regimes . Alfred Stepan
(1988) formulated the distinction between regimes in which the "hierarchial"
military assumed power through its top leadership and those
where a "nonhierarchical" military (i.e., officers of lower rank) assumed
power, displacing their superiors, as happened in Greece . This
distinction became very important in the analysis of the role of the military
in the transition to democracy and particularly the problems of
democratic consolidation (Linz and Stepan, 1996) .
The various transitions-to democracy, to an uncertain future of
nonconsolidated democracy, or to failed democratization processes-together
with the end of hopes for the democratization of some authoritarian
regimes in the third world have created conditions for an objective,
intellectual analysis of regimes in comparative politics . For example, the
Further Reflections
	
13
three volumes of Democracy in Developing Countries on Africa (1988),
Asia (1989) and Latin America (1999), edited by Larry Diamond et al .,
cover developments in countries that have experienced both authoritarian
and democratic rule, by country experts .
Some Thoughts on the Origins of Totalitarianism
The reader of my work-and that of most of the contributors to the volumes
that Alfred Stepan and I edited on the breakdown of democracy-would
realize that we should not overestimate the capacity of
antidemocratic leaders and the success of antidemocratic mass movements,
but instead take into account the failures of democratic governments
and leaders, their inability to confront their opponents in defense
of liberal democracy, and, for some, their semiloyalty to democracy .4
From that perspective, the taking of power by Mussolini (Lyttelton,
1987) and Hitler was not inevitable, nor were the October Revolution
and Lenin's rise to power. Totalitarianism was not the inevitable outcome
of the European crisis created by World War I and even less the
outcome of the Great Depression . It was one of the possible fruits of
modernity ; but democracy was another. The victory of communism in
Russia and the communist threats in Europe met with different responses,
some democratic and some authoritarian, and not pace Nolte
(1987)-an inevitable struggle between fascism and communism.
A healthy corrective to any overdetermined view of the history of the
twentieth century is the reading of Henry A . Turner's (1989) counterfactual
history based on the assumption that Hitler died in a car accident in
the summer of 1930 . This thoughtful exercise makes excellent reading,
providing us with much food for thought. Had that death occurred in
1930, it would have prevented me from writing many of the pages of this
book. Still remaining, however, would be the question of the development
of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union and other communist countries.
And it would not have assured an earlier consolidation of democracy
in many European and Latin American countries and in Japan .
The Shortened Century of Totalitarianism
The history of the origins of the political disasters of the "short century"
should start with 1914, World War I and its aftermath . As Hobsbawm
14
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
(1994), Frangois Furet (1999), Ernst Nolte (1987), and Karl Bracher
(1984) emphasize, the old bourgeois order was shattered by the guns of
August. Without the war there would not have been the split of socialism
between Bolsheviks and Social Democrats, nor the rise of Italian
interventionist nationalism, Mussolini and fascism, the German radical
left, and the Nazi success in destroying Weimar democracy. Certainly,
the intellectual roots of the ideological response to the war and
its aftermath were there, as Bracher, Mosse, Gentile (1975), Sternhell
(1978), and Furet among others stress . The war generated among respectable
intellectuals, as Mommsen (1997-1998) has shown, a nationalist-chauvinist,
militarist reaction that may be difficult to understand
today . With the mass slaughter, its revolutionary aftermath, the
new nationalisms, and the displacement of millions from their homes,
the war desensitized people to the violence and horrors to come, a
point eloquently made by Hobsbawm.
That legacy became articulated and institutionalized in the great
antidemocratic movements and the regimes studied in this book . In the
common matrix of the war and its aftermath, the intellectual seeds of
revolutionary Marxism, irrationalist philosophy, social Darwinism, and
racism would bear new and poisoned fruit . (A more complete discussion
would include an analysis of those origins, but the works cited
should allow the reader to fill that gap .) The generational composition
of the founders and top elites of fascist and communist parties all over
the world, and certainly of the German Nazi and communist parties, reflects
the centrality of the experience of World War I, in contrast to the
older elites of the Christian Democrats and even more the socialist parties
(Linz, 1978, pp . 43-47, especially Table 1) .
Reading Furet and a number of other works of intellectual and cultural
history gives us considerable insight into why totalitarianism seduced
so many outstanding minds-though not always for long . There
is no fully equivalent work on the attraction of fascism, although there
is a useful review by Hamilton (1971) and the writings on Heidegger,
Carl Schmitt, and Gottfried Benn and on the fascist graduates of the
Ecole Normale Supérieure (Rubinstein, 1990) . Would those regimes
have had the same success without that appeal to intellectuals? Possibly
yes, considering their appeal to common men, the desire for security,
and above all the fear that their terrorism created . We should not
forget their ability to mobilize participation through the single party
and the administered mass organizations, nor the gratification derived
from, or dependent on, on that participation . Within the scope of my
Further Reflections
	
15
early work it was not possible to convey sufficiently the importance of
that "democratic" participatory dimension .
Nolte (1987) has rightly stressed the importance of the fear of revolution
in Europe in generating reactionary sentiments . That fear was
stimulated by the unsuccessful but bloody revolutionary attempts and
the widespread revolutionary rhetoric in the socialist movement, by the
efforts of communist emissaries to kindle revolution, by the conflicts in
the new nations bordering on the Soviet Union, and by the militias and
army officers involved in repressing revolution, many of whom turned
against even the democratic governments that were successfully stopping
revolution .
Anticommunist, antirevolutionary sentiments were an essential
component of the antidemocratic wave in Europe (not always led by
the fascists) . Fascism and Nazism were the beneficiaries of that response
to communism, but anticommunism, in my view, was not the
only, and in many cases not the most important, ideological basis and
appeal of fascism . Nazism was not just anticommunism . Hitler's racism
may have been reinforced and legitimized by an emphasis on the Jewish
leadership of some of the revolutionary movements of the time, but
it had prewar and deeper intellectual and cultural roots . Fascism was a
more complex phenomenon and movement than anticommunism . As
any reader of the work of Gentile (1975) knows, Italian fascism's antiliberal,
antibourgeois, even anticlerical elements, as well as its overall
style, are not the reaction to communism or the result of "learning"
from the Soviet experience, as Nolte argues in his scholarly but onesided
analysis .
While anti-Semitism and the Holocaust occupy a central and
unique place in the analysis of Nazi ideology, it should be considered
as part of a broader racist ideology : "a full blown system of thought, an
ideology like Conservatism, Liberalism" (Mosse, 1985, p . ix) . That
racism was reflected in the mass murder of gypsies and in the sterilization
of the German children of black soldiers (World War I) . Such
social-Darwinist eugenic thinking was part of a larger body of scientific
thought, which had a broad appeal beyond Germany and counted
many followers in the democratic left . (We tend to forget the scientific
and pseudoscientific pedigree of racist thinking, of Gobineau, Vacher
de Laponge, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and the eugenic movement.)
Even when Nazism, as other fascist movements, was fundamentally nationalist
(and therefore "particularistic" rather than "universalistic," to
use Furet's terminology), its racism was in a sense "universalistic," ready
1 6
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
to sacrifice the nation and those citizens not identifying with the racistbiological
myths, and attempting to mobilize racists beyond its borders .
The racist-eugenic utopia was something quite different from nationalism
(Mosse, 1983) .
Liberal democrats, however, should not ignore the contribution of
the "civil war" atmosphere in the crisis of democracy that made possible
the fascist and particularly the Nazi appeal : there was an atmosphere
generated by the rhetoric of the class struggle, the futile violence
of German communist party (KPD) activists, the growth of the communist
parties, and the ambiguity toward liberal democracy of some
sectors of the socialist movement . Anticommunism could lead, and did
lead in a number of countries, to authoritarian regimes and to repression,
but not to a totalitarian system with its revolutionary efforts at social
transformation . Also, a number of democracies, some incorporating
the socialist parties into the government, were able to oppose both fascism
and communism . The totalitarian ambitions of fascists, the totalitarian
dimension of Italian fascism, cannot be understood as a reflection
of anticommunism. The radical and fully totalitarian rule of Hitler adds
Nazism's distinctive anti-Semitism and even more broadly conceived
racism to fascist ideological elements and the Italian model . Indeed,
Nazi racism went beyond the characteristic nationalism of fascist movements.
(In this context, it is significant that "neofascist" groups and
skinheads today do not connect that much with the fascist legacy, but instead
use Nazi symbolism in their violence against foreigners) .
The Totalitarian Temptation
Writing from the perspective of the year 2000, looking back at the
forms politics has taken in the twentieth century, what strikes me most,
besides the horrors and the inhumanity, is the enthusiasm, the hopes, the
commitment, and the idealism generated by communism and fascism,
including Nazism . The same has to some extent been true for anticommunism
and antifascism . In contrast, the much weaker appeal of democracy
in the first half of the twentieth century-in spite of its successesand
the measured hopes-and even disillusionment (desencanto, or
Entzauberung)-associated with it in the last quarter are striking . The
appeal of totalitarianism contrasts with the generally passive acceptance
of authoritarian regimes and the apathy, opportunism, and cynicism
in the response to sultanistic rule . The capacity for deception and
Further Reflections
	
17
temptation by totalitarianism is only equaled by its tragic legacy . Only
work focusing more than my own does on the ideological dimension of
totalitarianism, as seen sometimes in films, newsreels, and literature,
can capture the basis for the political institutions discussed .
National Cultures and Authoritarianism
An issue that I did not deal with sufficiently in the Handbook is the inclination
of some scholars to explain totalitarianism as the result of
unique historical legacies . During World War II this was a popular interpretation
of Nazism by politicians, historians, and psychologists focusing
on Germany's historical uniqueness, the Prussian legacy, Lutheran
political thought and ethics, a particular kind of national character,
etc. Richard Hamilton (1995) has articulated well some of the difficulties
with cultural arguments about the success of Nazism . I never sympathized
with such interpretations, and the development of German
democracy after the war only confirmed my skepticism . There were
similar approaches in attempting to explain Leninism and Stalinism
(Arnason, 1993) . More recently, the historian Richard Pipes (1984,
1990) has argued that an exploration of Soviet totalitarianism "must be
sought not in socialism but in the political culture which draws on socialist
ideas to justify totalitarian practices," as summarized by Klaus
Mdller (1997, p . 32) . Daniel Goldhagen's (1996) work on the roots of
Hitler's holocaust in German anti-Semitism, which created a great deal
of controversy (Schoeps 1996), is in the same tradition .
The emphasis on the Russian cultural matrix leads to a paradoxical
effort to stress a discontinuity between Leninism and Stalinism . The
argument is that many of Stalin's policies reflected a break with the
leftist ideological heritage and led to a rightist-nationalist regime that
reconstructed traditional authoritarian patterns and implemented repressive
ethnic policies . With that line of thinking, the concept of totalitarianism
can encompass both Nazism and Stalinism . The latter can
even be interpreted as a variant of fascism ; and in that way, the original
Marxist-Leninist ideology can be saved from responsibility for totalitarianism
. A new falsification of history, by ignoring the Leninist
roots of totalitarianism, would serve to cover the failure of the communist
utopia revealed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 .
Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations (1996) may encourage
a revival of such cultural explanations of nondemocratic rule . However,
18
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
considering the example of Confucianism, the democratic politics of
contemporary Taiwan and South Korea make such a culturalist perspective
questionable (Stepan, 2000)
. Obviously, I do not totally dismiss
such approaches-as long as they are not given a dominant place, and
cultures and religions are not considered homogeneous and unchange-
able
. But a cast-iron political culture interpretation in my view is un-
tenable
. Perhaps I am allergic to such interpretations because they recall
many writings on the incompatibility of Catholicism and democracy and
the inherent propensity for authoritarianism in toes
a
ish culture, ignoring
a wealth of other social, economic, and p
Mass Society and Totalitarianism
I have kept my distance from the mass-society perspective in explaining
totalitarianism, which probably is my main reason for not agreeing
with Hannah Arendt's analysis
. This reluctance is based on the facts
about the rise of Nazism in German society stressed by Rainer Lepsius
(1993) and Sheridan Allen (1984), among others, but also on the theoretical-empirical
critique of the concept by Theodor Geiger (1954) and
Salvador Giner (1976) and, going farther back, Simme
' analysis of
if not
the individualizing consequences of modernity
. Many,
the people who joined the Nazi movement were not lone individuals,
but did so as members of "civil society" groups taken over by Nazi activists
or went to Nazi rallies with friends .
The successes of totalitarian movements were not the result of
alienation generated by a "mass society," of the loneliness of individuals
in modern industrial or capitalist societies
. In fact, in some cases
those successes were facilitated by the integration of individuals into
close groups that rejected the larger more complex and open society
.
Some of those groups, like the Italian veterans (the
Arditi) and the German
Freikorps,
had been formed on the basis of close emotional relations
developed during World War I and the violent postwar years
. The
"mass society" approach to some extent reflects the search for an alternative
to the "class society" and class conflict view of disappointed
Marxists .
However, the mass-society perspective does help us to understand
the success of totalitarian rule once consolidated
. The destruction of
civilcivil b thy
the liberal state based on the rule of law t(the Rechtossmat)-the
Further Reflections
	
19
penetration of society by mass organizations controlled by a single
party, and the fears generated by repression and terror certainly isolated
individuals and facilitated mass manipulation and mobilization .
Even such primary groups as the family and circles of friends were
threatened. The diary (1918-1921) of a young French intellectual,
Pierre Pascal, who joined the Bolsheviks in 1917, reveals how a contemporary,
engaged observer perceived the impact of totalitarianism on
society :
A unique and heady spectacle : the demolition of a society. This is the
very realization of the fourth psalm of the Sunday vespers, and the
Magnificat: the powerful cast from their throne and the poor man
lifted from his hovel . The masters of the house are confined to one
room, and each of the other rooms houses a family . There are no
more rich people : only poor and poorer. Knowledge no longer confers
either privilege or respect . The former worker promoted to director
gives- orders to the engineers . Salaries, high and low, are getting
closer to each other. The right to property is reduced to the rags on
one's back. Judges are no longer obliged to apply the law if their
sense of proletarian equity contradicts it . Marriage is merely registration
with the civil authorities, and notice of divorce can be served by
postcard. Children are instructed to keep an eye on their parents . Sentiments
of generosity have been chased out by the adversity of the
times: the family sits around counting mouthfuls of bread or grams of
sugar. Sweetness is now reputed to be a vice . Pity has been killed by
the omnipresence of death . Friendship subsists only as camaraderie .
(quoted in Furet, 1999, pp . 102-103)
The difficulties in re-creating civil society even in new post-totalitarian
democracies show the lasting impact of a "flattened social landscape"
(Marc Howard, 1999).
Totalitarianism and "Democracy"
The relation between democracy, as I have defined it, and totalitarianism
remained underdeveloped in the Handbook, but today it deserves
further thought. My earlier position was determined by the fact that
totalitarian rule had not ever been established by free choice in a
competitive electoral setting, contrary to the misinterpretation (if not
outright lie) that Hitler came to power as the result of a free election .
However, I have not thought enough about the possibility of the democratic
decision of a majority to do away with the freedoms that are the
20
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
essence of democratic government-a possibility that we should not
dismiss lightly . As de Tocqueville cautioned, democracy as a supreme
value, without giving equal or greater value to freedom, can be risky.
Certainly, the probability is that a functioning democratic system will
not lead to an unfree, nondemocratic political system, but we can not
exclude that frightful possibility. In our enthusiasm for the victory of
democracy, as Daniel Bell warned me, we should not forget that freedom
is as important as (if not more important than) democracy-that
is, government by those elected by the people . The liberal freedoms
certainly are important as an instrumental requirement for democratic
political processes, but above all they are valuable in themselves . We
should not forget that both fascism (especially Nazism) and communism
were profoundly antiliberal, but claimed to be "democratic" in a
way that authoritarian regimes did not .
The Centrality of Ideology
The reading of Franrois Furet's The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of
Communism in the Twentieth Century, with its focus on ideology (and
in passing, fascism) and the ideological manipulation of antifascism
and later, anti- anticommunism, is perhaps the best complement to the
political-science analysis in this book. Nolte in a sense does the same
with how anticommunist sentiments were used by fascism . Both extremist
ideologies sought to obscure the realities of their respective totalitarian
systems, gaining support from those who should have been
their enemies-liberal democrats, social democrats, Christians, nationalists,
and above all bourgeois and (although it might sound strange to
those weaned on the Marxist theories of fascism) capitalists-and who
were seen by both ideologies as enemies to be destroyed . This deliberately
created confusion led many to see the shortened twentieth century
as one of conflict between communism and fascism-as Nolte does
with great knowledge but also simplification-ignoring the roots of
fascist thought before the October Revolution and of Nazism in a tradition
of racist thinking, social Darwinism, pseudo-biological science,
and anti-Semitism.
The differing ideologies are, of course, one of the main distinctions
between communism and fascism . What are striking, however, are the
similarities in communism's and fascism's commitment to ideas, their
use of ideas to derive policies (sometimes very concrete measures,
Further Reflections
	
21
even in realms otherwise remote from politics such as art, music, scientific
debates), their fanatic effort to implement those policies, the
murderous consequences, and the extent to which large numbers of
cadres, party members, and citizens believed in them .
No one will question that the ideologically grounded and argued
debates among the contenders for Lenin's mantle up to the purges in
the 1930s were part of a gigantic and ultimately murderous power
struggle . But it would be a mistake to ignore the seriousness of the debates,
the intellectual articulation of the positions . That Stalin finally
became the despot he was and the only source of ideological formulations
could be seen as the deterioration of the ideological pillar of totalitarianism
and the strengthening of another (i.e., the concentrated
monopoly of power in the leader and his trusted lieutenants, who control
the apparatus of the one-party state and its organizations) .
It is the centrality of ideological belief that made so devastating to
the system Khrushchev's 1956 revelations, the loss of faith in the communist
utopia and its replacement with an emphasis by the leadership
on "really existing socialism," and the realization by common people
of the "living lie ." This in spite of the ritual reiteration and recitation of
ideology and the remaining loyalty of some cadres, activists, and fewer
and fewer intellectuals. The crisis of totalitarianism and the drift into
post-totalitarianism is largely, but not only, a crisis of the ideological
way of thinking . However, the "wooden language" of the regime had
become a mentality for the apparatchiks and even citizens, which survives
today in the new democracies .
I want to emphasize that ideology shaped the behavior and actions
of social groups and individuals operating from widely varying motives
. As Kershaw (1991, p. 74) put it, these actors "shaped the progressive
dynamic of Nazi rule by interpreting Hitler's presumed wishes
without any need for close central direction . At the same time, it allowed
the functional importance of Hitler's ideology to be seen less as
concrete aims to be implemented than as interpreted, utopian `directives
for action' integrating different forms of social motivation and
gradually coming into focus as realizable objectives without the necessity
of close steerage from the dictator himself ." This was probably
even more true for Stalin, as Bialer (1980) noted when writing about
"preemptive obedience ." In any case, the ideology, intentions, and actions
of the dictator, while far from unimportant, are insufficient to explain
the processes in totalitarian systems . They are admittedly more
important than I recognized in the Handbook-where I did not make
22
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
reference to the growing biographical literature on political leadersbut
certainly much less important than is claimed by those who want to
put all the weight on the leaders' personalities .
The real conflict was between freedom and liberal democracy on
one side and the two revolutionary totalitarianisms on the other, as
Raymond Aron and K . D. Bracher, among many others, emphasized .
The underlying perspective of my own work is part of that tradition,
except that I also include the noncommunist and nonfascist authoritarian
and sultanistic threats to freedom as part of the political and social
history of the twentieth century.
One of the shortcomings of the Handbook essay is that I did not,
because of space limitations, consider how nondemocratic political
regimes affected other spheres of society: religion, intellectual life, the
arts (Antonova and Merkert, 1995 ; Council of Europe, n.d.), the bureaucracy,
and the military, as well as the daily lives of ordinary citizens . My
lack of reference to "economic" society was more deliberate, since it
would have required a different expertise and probably another book .
Political Religion, Religion, and Regimes
If-the constant if-I had been writing a book rather than a contribution
to a Handbook, I would have devoted considerable attention to the
relation between political regimes and religion . I have done so in several
subsequent essays, mainly on the "nacional-catolicismo" in the
context of the Spanish authoritarian regime (Linz, 1992a, 1993, 1997a) .
While the literature to which I referred in the Handbook made use
of the concept of "political religion" or at least noted the pseudo-religious
element in totalitarian politics, I did not incorporate that concept
in my analysis . However, two volumes edited by Hans Maier and
Michael Schdfer (1997a) have reviewed classical writings on totalitarianism,
emphasizing this dimension and applying the approach to
concrete phenomena . My own contribution to those volumes (Linz,
1997) explores the whole range of relations between political regimes
and religion, covering aspects neglected or underdeveloped in the
Handbook.
Though I share some of the reservations expressed about the concept
of political religion, I probably would agree with several themes linked
to the debate on the subject to which Hans Maier (1996) has made an important
contribution. One is the fundamental hostility of totalitarian
regimes to existing organized religion : the effort to destroy it-as in the
Further Reflections
	
23
Soviet case-or at least to limit, control, or manipulate religious institutions.
This is compatible with pragmatic, cynical, or vague invocations of
defending religion, like the "positive Christianity" of the Nazi program
or Hitler's invocation of Vorsehung (providence). I also would agree that
the success of totalitarian movements was greater in secularized societies,
and that religious ties resulted in some capacity to resist . And I
would accept that, despite the secularization of the fascist regimes, some
of their leaders and especially some ideologists used a language and
symbolism derived from religious traditions, making them profane .
It is worth notice that a contemporary observer like Thomas Mann
perceived the common element of sacralization . Mann wrote in his
diary (October 1, 1933) :
The honor guard of the Storm Troops posted like statues in front of
the Feldherrenhalle is a direct and unabashed imitation of the guard
the Russians keep in front of Lenin's tomb . It is the "ideological"
arch-enemy they are imitating-as they do in their films-without reflecting,
perhaps without even being aware of what they are doing.
The similarity, in the style of our time, is far stronger than any rational
differences in "ideology." (quoted by Furet, 1999, p . 526)
Even in Italy, as Emilio Gentile (1996) and the more ethnographic
study by Mabel Berezin (1997) show, this process went far. Totalitarian
regimes tried to fill the emotional vacuum created by secularization
with political rituals and liturgies derived from or inspired by religion .
What is more difficult to ascertain is to what extent leaders, party organization
members, and ordinary citizens succumbed to those pseudoreligious
efforts to give meaning to their lives, and the extent to which
participation in those rituals evoked feelings comparable to those of religious
rituals. I am quite skeptical on the first point, except for the ideologists
themselves and some leaders ; but I would consider the second
quite relevant in understanding the hold of totalitarian movements and
regimes on some of their supporters.
Fascism and Totalitarianism
I subscribe to the idea of a generic fascism as a type of political movement,
ideology, and style, of which Nazism was a distinct (and even
somewhat aberrant) variant . This does not, however, lead me to equate
the Nazi and the Italian fascist regimes as a single type of totalitarianism.
Some scholars reject any encompassing conception of fascism,
1!n r
24
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
though they many emphasize the commonalities among fascist regimes .
Others reject the usefulness of any analysis that does not consider each
case as unique . Still others conflate ideology, movements, and regimes
under the category "fascism" (generally extending it to a wide range of
rightist-conservative-capitalist antidemocratic parties and regimes) . In
this regard, the Italian political theorist of the democratic left, Norberto
Bobbin, has formulated it well : "I agree with De Felice ; fascism is a historical
phenomenon ; we can compare it with Nazism in spite of all the
differences we know, but we can not attribute the characterization of
`fascism' to whatever authoritarian regime . There are dictatorships of a
military nature, which insofar as they are autocratic regimes are also
oppposed to democratic regimes, but they are not fascist" (1996,
p. 29) . Paradoxically, those who overextend the term "fascism" come to
a position not too different from Ernst Nolte's in Der europdische
BUrgerkrieg [The European Civil War], which treats the conflict between
communism and fascism as the key to European history .5 This position,
in contrast to the perspective maintained by Bracher (1976) and myself,
forgets that the great conflict in this century was between those two ideological
movements and modern liberal democracy based on the rule of
law. The recognition of that conflict has been the source of analyses by
Aron and Bracher, among many others . In the present book, another intellectual
source of the emphasis on the distinctiveness of totalitarianism
was my need to describe and understand the whole range of nondemocratic
and antiliberal regimes and the differences among them .
The reader of this book and of my essays on fascism will understand
that I find myself more in agreement with Frangois Furet in his
The Passing of an Illusion than I am with Nolte. The two Western totalitarianisms
had their own distinct origins and ideological bases, and
it would be a mistake to interpret fascism as a reaction to communism,
thereby ignoring its fundamental antiliberalism (as well as other "anti"
positions) and its distinctive appeal . In fact, there were fascists in
various countries who perceived an affinity with the communist revolution
in Russia in their common hatred of liberal, parliamentary,
bourgeois-plutocratic, and victorious democracies; for some, Stalinism
was a kindred Russian national revolution .
Human Rights, State Terror, and Mass Murder
A major breakthrough in recent years has been the greater focus on
human rights, on totalitarianism's terrible legacy of inhuman repression
Further Reflections
	
25
and on the new forms of authoritarian repression, state terror, and violence.
However, the rich scholarly literature and solid official reports
make little reference to any typology of regimes (Courtois et al ., 1998).
I have to confess that in an essay trying to link the typology of regimes
and the terrible manifestations of inhumanity by states in the twentieth
century I was, in many respects, inconclusive (Linz, 1992b). Totalitarianism
certainly explains some of the worst violations of human rights,
but totalitarian tendencies and regimes have not always led to the same
type of state terror and repression-and certainly other nondemocratic
regimes have contributed their share to the terrible legacies of the last
century. The systematic analysis of the most obvious data on the mass
murders, deaths, and jail sentences, the concentration camps, Gulags,
and political prisoners, should be complemented with a comparison of
the mechanisms of political and social control : the size of police
forces ; the recruitment, number, and activities of paid and "unofficial"
informers; the presence of party activists that might be informers and
the way they exercised pressures ; the "political tests" for employment,
travel, and educational opportunities . Even among communist countries
there seem to have been significant differences . The mechanisms
of control probably differentiated totalitarian regimes as much as the
more obvious horrors of repression .
Although politics and ideological justifications are at the core of
the explanation of the horrors of the twentieth century, microresearch
on victims and their persecutors in various countries has shown the use
by individuals of the machinery of repression for their personal goals,
vendettas, and settling of private accounts . The paradox of the "privatization"
of violence has been highlighted by Jan Gross (1988) and
documented in many studies (e.g., Kalyvas). However, it is the absence
of a liberal democratic Rechtsstaat that made this possible .
In this context, I want to mention Alexandra Barahona de Brito's
Human Rights and Democratization in Latin America (1997) and her
important observation on the South American military regimes :
Finally, the level of "totalitarian" penetration in these regimes was
not uniformly distributed . At one level, these regimes were typically
authoritarian given their rhetorical adherence to democratic legalistic
values, given their more porous quality, given the presence of limited
pluralism, and their daily political and diplomatic confrontation with
the values and rhetoric of the opposition and of the international community.
It was only sections of the military institution which developed
the totalitarian logic more fully in their implementation of repression.
One saw a repressive ideological dynamic or "pockets"
2 6
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
within the military which operated according to a totalitarian logic .
The "closer" to the repressive apparatus and the "further" from the
limited pluralism at the regime level, the more the totalitarian elements
of the ideology dominated and the more the totalitarian repressive
dynamic took hold .
These coexisting tendencies occasioned paradoxical results . On
the one hand, the totalitarian dynamic led the Armed Forces, so attached
to legal conventions, to violate their own laws ; on the other, it
led them to attempt to pass constitutions which aimed at "protecting
democracy." Thus, although the Uruguayan military tortured almost
one-third of their population, they forced President Bordaberry to resign
for his desire to destroy the traditional parties by abolishing
them. In Chile, one could be abducted by an illegal and official nonexistent
Comando Conjunto, but one's criminal abductors took the
trouble to fill out forms with the relevant information .
The more the totalitarian ideology penetrated the Armed Forces,
the worse the repression . Thus, the differences in repressive methods
were partly shaped by the intensity and extension of the penetration
of the totalitarian ideology within the Armed Forces . This is particularly
clear when one compares Uruguay and Chile with Argentina. It
is widely accepted that the penetration of this ideology in Argentina
was the greatest of the three countries . Here, the total institutionalization
of repression within the structures of the Armed Forces, together
with the intensity of this ideological outlook, made repression
the worst in the Southern Cone, as the military became more of a totalitarian
institution or organization than it did in any other case .
This again shows how actual regimes combine elements in "mixed
forms" that would fit more into one or another of the ideal types developed
in the Handbook essay. In this case, regimes that in their dominant
characteristics would be considered "authoritarian" had a totalitarian
conception of repression. The same would be true of the strong
sultanistic tendencies in Ceau~escu's Romania and in North Korea,
which we would otherwise define as totalitarian, and of the sultanistic
component in Suharto's rule in Indonesia .
Opposition and Resistance
One gap-among many-in my work is the neglect of the unsuccessful,
but not nonexistent, dangerous and heroic resistance against totalitarianism.
Over the years, an extensive scholarly historical literature on the
resistance-Widerstand-against Hitler's rule has been published . Some
interesting conceptual distinctions have been made between passive
withdrawal, the assertion of autonomy by institutions and individuals,
activities planning for a different future, and conspiratorial activities
toward the overthrow of the regime (Hoffmann, 1979; Schmddeke and
Steinbach, 1985). There also is an extensive literature on dissidents,
particularly intellectuals and artists, in post-totalitarian regimes. In an
essay on "Opposition In and Under an Authoritarian Regime : The Case
of Spain" (Linz, 1973), I analyzed the different types of semi-opposition,
alegal (tolerated) opposition, and illegal (persecuted) opposition in
authoritarian regimes . Richard Lówenthal (1983) distinguishes among
political opposition, societal refusal, and ideological dissent . Broszat
(1987) has developed an interesting contrast between Widerstand and
Resistenz.
The need for Soviet military intervention in Budapest in 1956 and
Prague in 1978 to support and reequilibrate totalitarian rule after the
death of Stalin is evidence of the limits or failure of totalitarian control
(Ekiert 1996). The different forms of dissidence, opposition, and resistance
deserve more attention . The demobilization of opposition and
reequilibration of those regimes, however, represent the start of post-
totalitarianism.
A question that might have been pursued further and explored
more systematically in the Handbook essay is at what point, when,
how, and by whom the establishment of totalitarian rule could have
been prevented, arrested, or overthrown . Such a counterfactual analysis
could help us to understand better the conditions and circumstances
that made totalitarian control of society possible .
Totalitarianism and Daily Life
Since publication of the Handbook, a new perspective has led to much
solid empirical research by historians, particularly on Nazi Germany,
focused on a wide range of aspects of the daily lives of individuals .
Working conditions, local community life, the letters of soldiers from
the front, etc ., are increasingly documented by what is called Alltagsgeschichte
(Peukert, 1984, 1987) . That literature in part has been used
against the totalitarianism approach, arguing for the limits of Hitler's
power and highlighting peoples' ways of evading the politicization of
everyday life, but arguing also for individuals' spontaneous and unthinking
assent to and participation in the policies of the regime against
"racially inferior" people, Jews, and foreign workers .
Further Reflections
	
27
2 8
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
In my view, these important contributions do not call into question
the distinctive characteristic of a totalitarian regime (in contrast to
other types of nondemocratic rule), nor the shaping of. society, behavior
patterns, and values by the system . They only question a simplistic
view of totalitarianism that extrapolates from an ideal type a society totally
penetrated and shaped by those in power . The essay by Henry A .
Turner (1999), based on the diary of Victor Klemperer (1995), shows
well how ordinary citizens expressed their discomfort with the
regime-specifically its persecution of Jews-in little ways, as well as
the fear surrounding those actions . It also puts a limit to the view that
coercion and state terror (always latently present) were always overt
and omnipresent. Certainly, people in their everyday lives-unless they
were part of a targeted group (or an object of the hostility, for whatever
reason, of those with access to power)-did not think of how their society
was being ruled, just as people in a democratic free society do not
see their daily lives shaped by the values of a free society . In a nondemocratic
and particularly in a stable totalitarian society, many ordinary
people are not necessarily aware of their lack of freedom ; for
them, that is the way life is . However, simultaneously and for a wide
range of reasons (including personal benefits), many people are actively
committed to building and sustaining such a society . After the
fall of the system, they will claim (and even believe) they were just
"ordinary" people ruled by an indeterminate and remote "them ."
The Intellectual and Political History
of the Totalitarianism Debates
I believe that some of the most important contributions in the last few
years to our understanding of totalitarianism have come from writings
on the intellectual history of the concept and from the debates that work
has generated . A book could and should be written on the intellectual
and ideological history of these writings and debates. The works edited
by Alfons SSllner (1997) and Hans Maier (1997) provide many of the
needed elements. Moreover, we have the surveys by Wipperman (1997)
and Gleason (1995) . Gleason's book, while its title (Totalitarianism)
suggests an updating of work on totalitarian regimes, really responds to
its subtitle, The Inner History of the Cold War-that is, to the use of,
and the political polemics surrounding, the term. The collection of essays
edited by Evelyne Pisier-Kouchner (1983) provides us with a
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29
review of the analyses of Trotsky, Kautsky, Althusser, Castoriades, and
Besangon, among others .
But a truly comprehensive book would have to discuss not only works
by social scientists, but also literary writing ranging from Koestler's Darkness
at Noon, Silone's School for Dictators, and Orwell's 1984 to Solzhenitsyin's
The Gulag Archipelago. There is also an extremely rich body of
autobiographical writings, mainly by former communists, that includes efforts
at intellectual conceptualization and analysis . There are a few
works-significantly few-by former fascists or fascist dissidents . The
ideological, pseudo-scholarly efforts of intellectuals who identified with
totalitarian regimes (and their contortions to hold their places in and under
such regimes)-Carl Schmitt, Rudolf Huber, and the numerous Italian fascist
jurists come to mind-would deserve to be included . Frangois Furet,
in The Passing of an Illusion, offers many insights into the delusions of
such intellectuals. The pages (116-124) he devotes to Gyorgy Lukács convey
well that overriding ideological commitment of a brilliant thinker :
Lukács "never missed a chance to align himself with what was going on in
the Bolshevik party," and he was so captive of the idea of the Soviet Union
that it annulled his knowledge of its history .
An interesting chapter in the study of totalitarianism-one without
any parallel in the case of authoritarian regimes-is the fascination with
communism (including Stalinism and Stalin as a leader) (Marcou, 1982)
and fascism, and even Nazism, of so many distinguished intellectuals,
writers, and artists living in free societies . That response provides us
with many insights into the nature of totalitarianism and its appeal .
Last, but not least, there are foreign "political pilgrims" (Hollander
1981) impressed by the positive aspects of such regimes . The Handbook
essay makes little or no reference to them .
The outside responses to the Soviet and the Nazi totalitarianisms
were shaped by those regimes' respective use of antifascism and anticommunism
to cover up their distinctive characteristics, and at one
point or another to gain the sympathy or tolerance of liberal democrats
who otherwise would have been hostile to them . At the time of the
Cold War, "anti-anticommunism" served the same purpose . Each of
those "ideological" myths had a kernel of truth, but obscured the true
nature of the two totalitarianisms . Since my student days in Spain, I
have been familiar with Koestler, Monnerot, Merleau-Ponty, and Carl
Schmitt. That intellectual baggage shaped my thinking, although it
might not be reflected in the footnotes limited to the more scholarly
literature.
3 0
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
Types of Regime and the Transition to Democracy
I have found the clear distinctions among modern forms of politicsdemocracy,
totalitarianism, post-totalitarianism (as a distinctive type of
nondemocratic rule), authoritarian regimes in all their varieties, and sultanistic
regimes or regimes with strong sultanistic tendencies-to be extremely
fruitful in understanding the patterns of transition to democracy
as well as, or even more, some of the problems of democratic consolidation.
In this regard, I refer the reader to my collaboration with Alfred
Stepan on Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation . 6
The type of regime that we (Linz and Stepan, 1996) briefly delineate
and use in our analysis of European postcommunist transitions to democracy
is explicitly linked to the analysis of totalitarianism in the present
book. It shares the general approach of focusing on the political-the
structure and use of power-rather than the social, economic, or even
cultural factors, though the latter three of course should not be neglected .
It does not explain the change in and from totalitarianism in terms of the
emergence of new social strata like managerial elites and technicians, or
the spread of education, or social mobility, or the functional requirements
for economic efficiency . Those changes certainly took place, but
they did not directly change the political system . In my view, it was the
cadre's loss of ideological commitment, which set in after de-Stalinization,
that was decisive. The decay, the ossification and ritualization of an ideology
that could not serve as a mobilizing utopia, in the end meant that the
cadres, particularly at the middle and lower levels, did not feel legitimized
to use the intact and large coercive apparatus in a crisis situation. Negotiation
with demonstrators and meetings (some public) of regimee leaders
and the oppositon were the consequence . The nomenklatura-hierarchical,
bureaucratized, aging, sometimes corrupt, recruited to the end using political
criteria-was in general unable to formulate innovative responses
to the problems confronting the society. However, in the end, one of its
members, Gorbachev, would start perestroika and glasnost to reform and
shake up the system, abandon the outer empire, and allow electoral mobilization
in nationalist peripheries, with the consequences we all know .
It was clear that there was no plan to return to totalitarianism ; but neither
was there the intention to make a transition to Western-type democracy
(Di Palma, 1995). It was a new dynamic setting and conflicts within the
elite that accelerated the process of breakdown and transition to democracy
or pseudodemocratic politics .
My and Stepan's thinking on post-totalitarianism should not be understood
as a theory of neototalitarianism . We incorporated into our
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31
analysis not so much the social and economic changes before and after
Gorbachev as the political changes that contributed to the breakdown
of the Soviet-type regimes, particularly the political crisis in the relation
of the rulers with the society and within the ruling elite . An analysis
of the post-totalitarian phase-in its variations over time and across
countries-is in our view particularly useful to understanding the difficulties
post-totalitarian new democracies confront in the transition
phase and especially during consolidation . It is unfortunate that we
could not devote even more attention to the distinctive characteristics
of post-totalitarianism . We believe that the development of societieseconomies,
intellectual life, religion, civil society-in new democracies
with a post-totalitarian past, in contrast to those with an authoritarian
past, proves the relevance of totalitarianism as a distinctive form
of domination. It also should caution against cultural-civilizational interpretations
of Russian history and of the history of some Eastern European
countries.
In Eastern Europe, the different types of post-totalitarian regimes,
as we analyze in some detail in Problems of Democratic Transition and
Consolidation, underwent processes of liberalization (initiated by members
of the elite) or confronted a more or less significant and mobilized
civil society that had submitted before to the lies of the regime, whether
passively or coerced. The regime elite in some cases tried to save as
much as it could by substituting one leader for another, by negotiation,
and ultimately by giving up power peacefully, having lost faith in its
right to rule and its capacity to mobilize the party and its organizations .
The course of totalitarianism had gone full circle from the initial
ideological-utopian impulse to the loss of ideological legitimacy . In the
absence of free democratic electoral legitimation, what basis was there
left on which to demand obedience? (The case of East Germany was
even more dramatic : if it was not to be a socialist state, why should it
exist at all?) Everything that had made totalitarianism so powerful and
frightening had decayed, eroded, disintegrated ; but its legacy has been
a flattened society, which finds it difficult to articulate itself in the
framework of democratic political institutions and a market economy .
The Primacy of Politics
In the nineteenth century there was an uneasy equilibrium between the
primacy of economic and political change . The bourgeoisie was making
an economic revolution-industrial, agrarian, and service-and
32
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
demanding political change . At the same time, as Schumpeter noted,
that revolution was in a sense protected by the political legitimacy of
the preindustrial political structures . The constitutional monarchies
were a result of the compromise between the ascendant bourgeoisie
and the traditional structures .
The shortened twentieth century (1914-1989) was dominated by
politique d'abord-to use the term coined by Charles Maurras-of
Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism with the terrible and destructive consequences
we know, and even democracy and its Keynesian policies
after World War 11 . It was a time in which everything became politicized
and all hopes were centered on political action .
Now, at the turn of the century, the indisputable success of the capitalist
market economy-under whatever regime-has opened the door
to a neolíberal economic view of politics that ignores the importance of
institutions and political legitimacy .
The primacy of politics led to power as an end in itself, its maximization
in the society and among nations, military expenditure rather
than consumption . The absolute primacy of the economy, property, and
market can lead to private consumption, but the neglect of collective
goods. There is a need for a balance between politics and economy,
made possible (but not assured) by democracy.
From the "Age of Totalitarianism"
to the "Age of Democracy"?
As we move away in time from the concrete institutional, social experience
of totalitarianism-and as the concept is being less questionedattention
turns to a more philosophical perspective . What does it all
mean? How much did it define a historical period, between World War
I and 1989? What does it tell us about human nature, modernity, and
our values? These are great and difficult questions .
It is logical that, after 1989 and the end of the Soviet Union, a
broader-although still European-approach would become central in
the intellectual debate . This is an approach that goes far beyond the
"political science" perspective found in the Handbook essay, but it is
highly relevant to it . From different perspectives and implicit value
judgments, the works of Bracher, Furet, Nolte, and Hobsbawm are relevant
to the debate on totalitarianism, the usefulness of the concept,
and the differences as well as the similarities of totalitarian systems .
Further Reflections
	
33
Were I to write a much longer essay, I would enter into those debates
and highlight my agreements (considerable with Furet) and disagreements
(more with Nolte and less so with Hobsbawm) . In view of the
horrors of Auschwitz and also the Gulag, the questions first raised by
Hannah Arendt appear as more central than ever in a comparative study
of regimes. The monstrosity of inhuman rule, in a historical-moral perspective,
was the central fact of the twentieth century . Unfortunately,
the ultimate crisis of the totalitarian ideologies, movements, and regimes
may not be the end of that tragic story.
In the Handbook essay I certainly was wrong in my pessimism
about the possibility of peaceful, orderly, even formally constitutional
transition from nondemocratic regimes to democracy . At the time I was
writing, in 1974, there had been only the Turkish transition after World
War II and the Colombian power-sharing agreement (concordancia),
and no ane could foresee the pattern of transition initiated in 1976 in
Spain that would be followed by so many countries in later years .
The twentieth century was the age of totalitarianism, true ; but it
also was the age of democracy, the consolidation and expansion of political-and
to some extent, social-democracy. It was the age of
decolonization and the end of colonial imperialism, the age of the
emergence of new independent states, some democratic, most nondemocratic.
The century will be remembered for the inhumanity of
man toward fellow human beings, but also for the universal declaration
and assertion of human rights . (The first characteristic sadly does not
seem to be a monopoly of totalitarianism .) No better evidence for the
gigantic historical change in the last twenty-five years can be found
than the fact that in mid-1974, according to Larry Diamond (1999),
there were only 39 democracies in the world-that is, only 27 percent of
the existing independent states-and by the beginning of 1998 the
number of electoral democracies (in which governmental offices are
filled through competitive multiparty elections that place incumbents at
real risk of defeat) had increased to 117, or 61 percent of the by then
larger number of independent states .
However, our joy at the progress of the last quarter-century must be
tempered by the fact that of these 117 formal democracies, only 81 (69 .2
percent) could be characterized by Diamond, using the Freedom House
ratings, as "free ." In a significant number of countries, for example 93 in
1993, the freedom scores were declining (compared to improving scores
in 18 countries). If I were to write a book on comparative democracies,
it would have to include a section on failed transitions to democracy,
34
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
defective or pseudodemocracies, which I would rather characterize as
"electoral authoritarian" regimes-mostly ethnocratic, often plebiscitarian-where
a democratic fagade covers authoritarian rule, often with
sultanistic components.
When I was writing in 1974, there were many "democracies" with
adjectives such as "organic," "people's," "tutelary," "basic"-and it was
the nondemocratic regimes, their ideologists and partisans, who were
using those terms to describe themselves ; many of those regimes are
analyzed in this book . In the middle 1970s and through the 1980s, a
clear consensus seemed to emerge about which governments deserved
to be called democratic . In the 1990s, confusion again set in-but this
time caused by the very scholars committed to democracy, a result of
their desire to see democracy progress and their hopes for democratic
developments below the state level . New adjectival democracies are labeled
"pseudo," "semi," "illiberal (electoral)," or "delegative"-but
these terms are in fact being used to describe nondemocratic regimes
(or in a few cases, low-quality democratic governments) (Merkel,
1999; Collier and Levitsky, 1997; Collier and Adcock, 1999). The fact
that these nondemocratic regimes do not fit into the basic types of nondemocratic
polities leads to such conceptualizations ; I myself surely
have fallen into this trap . Thus, I would urge the search for conceptual
clarity. We might positively value some aspects, by no means all, of
these new regimes, but we should be clear that they are not democracies
(even using minimum standards) . To avoid confusion, I propose
the addition of adjectives to "authoritarianism" rather than to "democracy"
: for example, electoral authoritarianism, multiparty authoritarianism,
center authoritarianism with subnational democracy . These are
only suggestions, and I have yet to work out more precise concepts and
to define the dimensions needed to clarify this growing number of
regimes .
A somewhat different question is the quality of political democracy.
We see governments resulting from free and fair elections and attempting
to rule according to a constitution, committed to the rule of
law, and respecting human rights . We might not have doubts about the
democratic convictions of their leaders, but they may govern with a
state apparatus that does not respond to their demands . We see countries
where those who hold power at the local level behave as if immune
to the laws of the state (in several federal states) ; countries where
the police and the military in charge of maintaining law and order are
unresponsive to liberal values (and where their reorganization and
Further Reflections
	
35
retraining cannot be achieved easily) ; countries where terrorists and insurgents
contribute systematically to a spiral of violence and counterviolence
(even though their demands could instead be expressed peacefully
and there are democratic institutions in place to respond to them),
preventing citizens from exercising their democratic rights. The quality
of democracy depends on the quality of the state-bureaucracy, judiciary,
police, military-and of all major social forces and actors, something
that a democratic government cannot assure in the short run . In
addition, democratic institutions and civil rights cannot always lure
disloyal and violent oppositions into the arena of peaceful democratic
politics .
Any analysis of the quality of democracy in "third wave" democracies
(Huntington, 1994) has to take into account that totalitarian systems
did not create only political institutions (and in the communist
systems, a command socialist economy), but also shaped the entire social
life and culture . It is that legacy-difficult to define, conceptualize,
or describe-that cannot be ignored . The former Soviet Union is different
in this respect from Eastern Europe and even the Baltic republics,
since at least one or two generations of Soviet citizens were
socialized in that totalitarian and post-totalitarian society. Fortunately,
Nazi totalitarianism, lasting less than a generation, could not have the
same impact.
The Future of Nondemocratic and Illiberal Rule
A question that the reader might pose, and to which I am very hesitant .
to reply decisively, is : "What is the future of nondemocratic politics at
the turn of the millennium?" I can not avoid stressing that we should
not be overly optimistic. There have been a significant number of failed
transitions to democracy . There is still a lot of uncertainty about the development
of Cuba and some of the postcommunist Southeast Asian
countries, as well as North Korea, where totalitarianism seems to combine
with sultanistic elements . The strong sultanistic components of
Suharto's authoritarian regime leave a difficult legacy for the transition
to democracy in Indonesia. And although China is undergoing some
significant processes of liberalization, in my view it is still a posttotalitarian
communist regime ; contrary to the hopes of many of my
colleagues, the emergence of capitalism does not yet assure a transition
to democracy .
36
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
What probably has changed is that, with one exception, there are
no nondemocratic regimes that appeal to intellectuals as there were for
those born in the first part of the twentieth century . The one exception
is Islamic fundamentalism, which found a first state-institutional embodiment
in the Islamic Republic of Iran .
It is difficult to fit the Iranian regime into the existing typology, as
it combines the ideological bent of totalitarianism with the limited pluralism
of authoritarianism and holds regular elections in which candidates
advocate differing policies and incumbents are often defeated
(Chehabi, 1998) . In the early 1980s, Iran's Islamic regime held great
attraction for Muslim activists worldwide : it seemed to combine popular
participation with a commitment to cultural authenticity, the rule of
the shari'a, and opposition to Western imperialism . But the inability of
the regime to deliver on its promises of a better life for its citizens has
led to widespread disenchantment within the country, while the inconclusive
ending of the war against Iraq and the growing Shiite sectarianism
in Iran's foreign policy have dampened enthusiasm for the Iranian
model elsewhere in the Muslim world (Roy, 1994) .
The failure of the Iranian model of nondemocratic rule to maintain
its appeal among Muslims does not mean that other forms of Islamic
nondemocratic rule cannot attract adherents . Afghanistan's Taliban, for
example, seems to exert an ideological influence that can be detected in
such places as the Caucasus . Moreover, the end of ideology, or better,
the crisis of ideology, has not, outside of Western Europe, meant the
end of the ideological appeal of nationalism, which has led to new
forms of ethnocracy, sometimes dressed in democratic form . It is difficult
to say whether new forms of nondemocratic rule have emerged,
except perhaps for plebiscitarian, pseudodemocratic, ethnocratic authoritarianism
with significant sultanistic strains, particularly in the periphery
of the former Soviet Union . We cannot exclude the authoritarian
tendencies in some Latin American presidential democracies with
strong populist traditions, such as Peru under Fujimori and Venezuela
under Chavez. In other parts of the world, the real question is the consolidation
and stability of the state under whatever political regime,
preventing what could be called chaocracy-the rule of chaos, the
mob, mercenaries, militias-without a central authority with the monopoly
of violence .
Class and ideological conflict were the main causes of authoritarianism
and totalitarianism in the past . The crisis of ideology-the defeat
of fascism and the disintegration of communist rule in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe-and the economic revolution in many parts
Further Reflections
	
37
of the world have reduced those bases of authoritarian responses . However,
the salience of nationalism is likely to create, in many multinational
states, conflicts leading to authoritarian rule and repression, as is
the case when dominant nation-builders try to integrate ethnic and cultural
minorities into a nation-state (ethnocratic polities) and when different
minorities claim the right of national self-determination and secession.
Overpopulation and inequalities in development produce
massive migrations that threaten the sense of national identity and economic
interests, leading to discrimination and the repression of outsiders.
I therefore see in nationalism in its different manifestations one
of the main sources of authoritarianism in the future. What is not clear
is what institutional forms these authoritarian responses will take .
In a paradoxical way, political and cultural nationalism is a not unlikely
response to economic globalization, to the expansion of a worldwide
market economy and certain cultural patterns of the consumer society
associated with it . While that economic transformation may be
necessary, even inevitable, and probably to a large extent (although not
for everybody) beneficial, I am not so optimistic about its positive effects
in the political realm . Will economic globalization assure the expansion
and consolidation of liberal political democracy? I sometimes
feel that we might fall into the trap of a "white Marxism"-a belief that
a free-enterprise, liberal economic infrastructure assures the development
of a liberal political democracy .
The use of violence-power "out of the barrel of the gun"-in the
twentieth century created a political order based on an existential and
deadly friend-foe distinction . At the turn of the century, that distinction
is still there, in a sense privatized in the hands of independent
entrepreneurs of violence who mix personal ambitions, greed, ethnic
hatred, and religious fanaticism . Typically, these mobilizers of violence
are unable to create political order in a larger political realm, but they
are able to resist any effort to subdue them . The result is chaocracy, enclaves
of unlimited power without legitimating (true or false) myths .
The situations in Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda, the rule
of the Tamil Tigers in northern Sri Lanka, to some extent the Taliban in
Afghanistan, the guerrillas in Colombia, the KLA in Kosovo (barely
checked by NATO and the UN) all approach this model. We are not
dealing with states, regimes, political systems, but with something new
that certainly has little to do with the types of politics analyzed in this
volume.
My present intellectual interests are focused on the comparative
study of political democracies in all their varieties, particularly their
3 8
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
institutional forms : presidential and parliamentary, unitary and federal,
and specifically the relationship of federalism, democracy, and nation .
I hope, perhaps believe, that the totalitarian illusion-temptation-will
not be repeated . But who is to tell whether-after the failures of real
democracies, the existence of many "bad" democracies, the unsolvable
problems in many societies-in a few decades the dream of a homogeneous,
egalitarian, conflictless (by eliminating the sources of conflict)
polity will be resurrected . The power of the idea of the nation in the
context of a world that is globalized economically, and to some extent
culturally and politically, could serve as the basis for a new mobilizing
effort by a demagogic leadership-a leadership propelled by resentment
and cloaked in a response to the injustice in the world .
As I read the Handbook essay today, I confess that I probably erred
in being pessimistic about the possibility of nonviolent transitions to
(liberal) democracy and about the spread of democracy around the
globe. I would not like to underestimate again the potential for change
toward freedom and democracy. However, the title of Democracy's Victory
and Crisis (Hadenius, 1997) reflects my own feelings . The growing
literature on "defective democracies" (Merkel, 1999) (almost all of
them nondemocratic regimes with an electoral fagade), delegative
democracy, the disillusionment with democracy, and a renewed debate
about the quality of democracy (which tends to disregard the enormous
gains in freedom and human dignity thanks to even far from perfect
democracies) should make us wonder about the "victory" of democracy.
Fortunately for all of us, there is (with the exception noted above) for
now no alternative form for organizing political life that is attractive to
intellectuals, students, young people-no alternative that is firing their
imaginations . Perhaps we have learned the insight of Hálderlin (1970,
p . 607, my translation) :
You accord the state far too much power. It must not demand what it
cannot extort. But what love gives, and spirit, cannot be extorted . Let
the state leave that alone, or we will take its laws and whip them to
the pillory! By Heaven! he knows not what his sin is who would
make the state a school of morals . The state has always been made a
hell by man's wanting to make it his heaven .
Notes
1. The reader should keep in mind that the chapters that follow were written
at the request of the editors of the Handbook of Political Science, Fred
Further Reflections
	
39
Greenstein and Nelson Polsby . The material therefore is centered on the political
dimension of regimes and hence makes only limited reference to such issues
as social structure, economic development, economic institutions-capitalist
or socialist-and religious traditions . I initially was given only a few
pages in the Handbook, but I bargained constantly to expand the essay . My argument
was that in the other contributions to the six volumes there was almost
no reference-and even less, an extended discussion-of any aspects of nondemocratic
regimes. The chapters on executives and legislatures, on parties,
etc ., were focused exclusively on liberal democracies-at a time when the majority
of the world's population was living under nondemocratic rule .
2. 1 have written an essay (in Sdllner, 1997) on how I came to formulate
the distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. I note there how
the term totalitarianism was used in the 1930s in Spain (applied to both communism
and fascism by a leftist bourgeois politician) and how Francesc
Cambó, a Catalanist politician, formulated a distinction in his wartime diary
(published many years later) between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes .
3 . Manuel Azaňa, the leader of the bourgeois left and president of the Republic,
wrote in 1937 (in the middle of the Civil War):
When one speaks of fascism in Spain, my opinion was this : There are
or may be as many fascists as one may wish . But a fascist regime,
there will be none. If the movement of force against the Republic
were victorious, we would fall into a military and ecclesiastical dictatorship
of the traditional type. For many "watchwords" translated
and many labels they might use . Swords, chasubles, military parades
and homages to the Virgen del Pilar. On that side the country does not
produce anything else .
Azaňa was right, although fascism contributed to the distinctive and, in a way,
the modern character of the authoritarian regime . The regime was a failed and
largely defeated totalitarian attempt.
4. There has been an extensive literature on the conditions for and the
breakdown of democracies, which I cannot review within the scope of this
piece. Dirk Berg-Schlosser and Giséle De Meur (1994) offer an original systematic
comparison of different theories, including my own work . A major
contribution is Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D .
Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (1992).
5. Incidentally, the conflict between fascists (and other authoritarians) and
communists (and other revolutionary groups), particularly their militias, could
be considered part of a civil war, but not so the extermination of entire social or
ethnic groups. A civil war is a violent conflict between two or more groups that
are part of the same social or political body . The total exclusion of groups of
people as "insects" or a "disease," and their physical destruction, goes beyond
civil war. Civil war implies groups fighting, with one perhaps winning, but not
a conflict with a defenseless group that has no chance to offer resistance .
6. There is the ever growing literature on the transitions from nondemocratic
regimes to democracy (or sometimes failed transitions), including
O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead (1986), Di Palma (1990), Przeworski
(1991), Higley and Gunther (1992), Huntington (1994), von Beyme (1994),
40
	
Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes
Offe (1994, 1997), Shain and Linz (1995), Linz and Stepan (1996), Bratton
and van de Walle (1997), Diamond (1999), Merkel and Puhle (1999), and
Merkel (1999).
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Guerra. Mexico: Oasis. P. 813 .
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