8 Military Intervention in Politics
Introduction
Direct military intervention in the politics of Third World countries has been
a depressingly regular occurrence since the high-water mark of post-war
independence. Between 1960 and 1980 three-quarters of Latin American
states experienced coups, as did half of the Third World Asian states
and over half of the African states (Clapham, 1985, p. 137; see also Woddis,
1977, pp. 7–10). The 1980s saw the trend continue strongly. Not a
year passed without there being a coupor an attempted coupin some part of
the Third World (World Bank, 1991, p. 128). Despite the wave of democra-
tization in the 1990s there have been coupsor attempted coupsin Chad
(1990), Togo (1991), Peru, Sierra Leone, Venezuela and Haiti (1992),
Guatemala and Nigeria (1993), Gambia (1994), Pakistan (1999) and
Venezuela (2001).
In the independence era expectations were very different (Wells, 1974;
Charlton, 1981). Military intervention in politics, including the coup d’état,
was nothing new in historical terms, but that it should became such a remark-
ably common occurrence in Third World states surprised and dismayed
many national politicians and outside observers, including Western social
scientists who had shared the view that the military was unlikely to be
a threat to civilian regimes. In the late 1950s and early 1960s many social
scientists were fairly confident that though the military might be a problem
in Latin America conditions were so different in other regions of the
world, including Africa, that it was unlikely to be so there. It was widely
believed that there was little chance in the newly independent states of the
world that the military would play other than a constitutional role in politics.
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