classes of the pre-industrial era. Putnam tested this hypothesis with data
from Latin America and found that economic development was correlated
with social mobility and moderately positively correlated with military
intervention. However, the development of a middle-class produced obsta-
cles to military intervention.
An alternative interpretation of the significance of class development is to
see it as a source of fragility in civilian institutions. The key development is
not that there is a new middle class, but that there can be conflict between fac-
tions within the middle class particularly under conditions of dependency and
underdevelopment. Such conflict has often preceded the coupsthat have been
staged in the Third World. The very category of a ‘guardian’coupreflects
awareness of this possibility. This may be accounted for by the centrality of
political power to the needs and interests of the middle class in less developed
societies, when capital comes largely from state sources. If sections of the
middle class feel disadvantaged by the operation of the political system, they
may support its overthrow by a military that is allied to their interests.
If the political consensus and ideological foundation of the system are
weak, as was often the case in the immediate post-independence period,
when the remnants of pre-capitalist social relations such as forms of feudal-
ism remained in rural areas, support for modern, democratic, civilian insti-
tutions can be fragile. The rules of politics are not firmly established in such
a context. If one middle-class faction attempts to secure a permanent
monopoly of power and therefore of the limited resources available for the
generation of wealth, there is a strong temptation for other factions to resort
to extra-constitutional means to gain power. This is the classic Bonapartist
scenario where the pure form of bourgeois rule through liberal democratic
institutions is impossible to sustain during crisis, and where other classes
become increasingly difficult to manage and incorporate into the social
order, again because of a weak ideological base.
The ‘crisis of hegemony’ in post-colonial societies to which a form of
Bonapartism responds includes conflicts between tribes and regions as well
as interests founded on pre-capitalist, capitalist and comprador class struc-
tures. Military intervention often represents a way of managing such con-
flict rather than a way of profoundly changing the power structure of
society. In many instances coupsjust ‘speed the circulation of élites and the
realignment of factions of the ruling classes more often than they bring
about fundamental change in the organization of state power and its alloca-
tion between (rather than within) social classes’ (Luckham, 1991, p. 368).
However, Latin American experience suggests a number of reasons why
the middle class might not feel that its interests are best served by military
182 Understanding Third World Politics