Indeed a key part of the armed forces’ temporary claim to power
may well be that they claim to be (and may believe themselves to be)
‘non-political’ in the sense of both non-partisan and committed to the
national interest rather than those of any narrow sections of the
population. A claim is frequently made for greater efficiency and
incorruptibility for officers (as opposed to civilian politicians) as part
of a united, disciplined, educated and trained modern elite.
There is no doubt that many army officers do value strongly the
unity, probity and capacity for effective action of the officer corps. It
is therefore quite common for armies that have intervened in politics
to return to the barracks after a period in power when these values
come under stress. Under the pressure of being forced to make
governmental decisions, which will be interpreted as favouring
one section of the population or another, conflicts are frequently
generated within the military which are not necessarily evident
whilst the army is confined to a technical role. For instance, most
Latin American officers have been recruited from white, land-owning
groups, and governments dominated by them tend to be unsym-
pathetic both to rural Indian and urban slum-dwelling populations.
In Africa regional and tribal conflicts can come rapidly to the fore, as
was graphically illustrated from the moment the military intervened
in Nigerian politics. In the Nigerian Civil War (1966–1971) the
military intervened to stop ‘tribalism, nepotism and corruption’ on
the part of civilian democratic politicians only to preside over more
bloodshed and disunity than had ever previously been experienced.
Similarly there has been at least as massive an embezzlement of the
oil wealth of Nigeria by politicians in uniform as there was by their
predecessors and successors in civilian garb.
The mechanisms of military intervention vary greatly depending
upon time and place. In countries such as Turkey and Brazil the army
is often seen as having an important ‘guarantor’ role in relation to the
constitution. In the Turkish example this is as the inheritor of the
prestige of Ataturk (the founder of modern Turkish nationalism).
The army sees itself as entitled to intervene to preserve Ataturk’s
ideas of secular modern nationalism. In such cases the army may
exercise a veto on the participation of some groups in the govern-
ment, rather than play a direct role. The extreme form of military
intervention, in which the head of state and all cabinet posts are taken
by officers, the legislature is dismissed and the courts summarily
STATES 147