Chapter Twenty-nine

The late 1970s

The Third Wave of Democracy

The downward trends were about to bounce back up. During the 1970s, the Mediterranean rim of Europe -- long a stronghold of authoritarianism -- finally rejoined the civilized world as Spain, Portugal and Greece all held their first free elections in quite a while. Another anomaly on the map of West Europe disappeared in 1971 when Switzerland became the last European nation to give women the vote at the national level.①

This was just the beginning. Democracy suddenly began spreading all over the world. In fact, by 1991 this uptick was so obvious that Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard called it Democracy’s Third Wave. According to him, the First Wave included the long struggle against the monarchies that crested in 1922. After that, the world turned toward fascism and war, and democracies fell quickly. The First Backwash hit rock bottom in 1942. Then democracy rallied after World War Two and staged a comeback. This Second Wave surged ahead until it fizzled out around 1962. After a decade of stagnation, democracy resurged, beginning with Portugal’s 1974 Carnation Revolution.

Portugal

As the last and most stubborn of the old-time colonial powers, Portugal was bogged down fighting bloody and exhausting wars against rebels in their African colonies. As these wars became increasingly unpopular among the troops, a clique of junior army officers (the Armed Forces Movement: MFA) conspired to put a stop to them. On 25 April 1974 they seized all the important government facilities and bloodlessly ousted the civilian dictator, replacing him with General António de Spínola, one of the wars’ most vocal critics.

The civilian dictatorship that had been run by leftover fascists was so widely hated that people immediately flooded into the streets to rejoice in its downfall. At that time of year, the flower stalls in the markets were filled with carnations, so the protesters plucked them up and wore them to celebrate. The popular outpouring accidentally made it impossible for the junta to consolidate dictatorial control themselves. Instead, the MFA was forced to compromise with upstart grassroots leaders. For the next year, Portugal was run by a kaleidoscopic array of committees representing whichever groups had enough followers to organize intimidating strikes, rallies and marches.

Labor unions quickly came to exert more power and pull Portugal leftward, so Spinola and other conservatives in the MFA tried another coup in March 1975. This failed and discredited the right wing of the junta. Spinola fled overseas. Leftists now ended up in complete control of the government and began nationalizing vital businesses such as banks and utilities. Workers took over shops and factories.  In the countryside, landless farm workers took over the large farms that employed them. It was beginning to look like an old-fashioned Communist revolution in the making.

Elections in April returned a wide spectrum of parties, none with enough power by itself to form a stable  government. The government remained officially under military rule, and power continued to pass through the hands of ad hoc committees and parliamentary coalitions.

Portugal’s overseas colonies were turned loose in the fall of 1975. Because the long anti-colonial wars had churned out veteran rebel armies with bitter, seething resentments, most of these new nations immediately collapsed into civil wars as factions fought for control and settled scores.  Back in the mother country, however, the main objective of the original military uprising was now accomplished, so conservatives in the military turned against the far left in Lisbon on November 25, arresting over 200 political organizers.  This neutralized the revolutionary leadership long enough for a centrist constitution to be drawn up and implemented in April 1976. By this time, most Portuguese preferred stability and began voting that way, winnowing the parties down to a more manageable handful.

Eastern Mediterranean

Ever since the 1967 coup, the Greek Colonels had arrested, beaten and tortured thousands of Greek dissidents. The people simmered with bad feelings; however, keeping the country on high alert year after year was just too exhausting, so the Greek junta eventually relaxed and loosened its hold on the country. They became more willing to let insults slide and to let complainers off with just a warning. This created an opportunity for the opposition to start quietly reorganizing. Of course, the Colonels continued to stamp out any dissent that threatened to get out of hand or spill into the streets, especially at the universities. In February 1973, the junta started rounding up and conscripting troublesome students into the army where they could be watched, controlled and disciplined full time. Students at the Athens Polytechnic School barricaded themselves in the university in protest. The police fought their way in and beat the students senseless.

In November 1973 another round of students barricaded themselves into the school and began broadcasting a call for revolution over a homemade radio station. A few days later on November 17, International Students Day, government tanks broke through the perimeter and rolled over the students’ defenses. The students still refused to surrender and they fought back as best they could. Two dozen students were killed and several hundred injured in the battle.

The unrest convinced military hardliners that relaxing the junta’s grip on the country had been a mistake, so they launched a coup of their own in November 24, purging the moderates and tightening their iron fist once again. And that was just the first item on their to-do list.

Not all Greeks lived in Greece. The island of Cyprus was inhabited by both Greeks and Turks in a rough ratio of 7:3. The British had set the island free in 1960 with a democratic constitution that required all government positions to be divided between Greeks and Turks by the same ratio as the population. The legislature had 35 Greeks and 15 Turks. The cabinet had 7 Greeks to 3 Turks. The president was Greek while the vice-president was Turkish. The native Cypriot armed forces were entirely Greek, although both Greece and Turkey stationed troops on the island to keep an eye on each other.

This bipolar ethnicity caused nothing but trouble. Early in Cyprus’ nationhood, all the Turks in government (legislators, civil servants, everyone) stomped out in protest over something the Greeks did. For the next few years, Cyprus had only half a government while ethnic violence disrupted society. Talks to restore amity began in 1967, and the elections of 1968 calmed the country down for the next few years.

Greek Cypriots generally wanted the island to be part of Greece -- Turkish Cypriots not so much -- but then democracy collapsed in Athens, and neither ethnicity wanted to follow the tyrant colonels down their dark and dangerous path; however, being rock solid Greek patriots, the Colonels would not let Cyprus escape so easily. They arranged a coup d’état in July 1974 in Nicosia, the Cypriot capital, to pave the way for annexing the island into Greece. Greece sent troops to back it up. Turkey however would have none of this and invaded Cyprus to restore the balance. Having two NATO allies openly fighting each other led to an awkward frenzy of diplomacy in the West.

As the war stalemated with the island split down the middle, the regime in Athens lost credibility at home. They also lost the support from NATO which had propped up their regime all these years. The weakened junta in Athens was forced to call old politicians back from retirement to stabilize the government. Constantine Karamanlis, prime minister of Greece from 1955 to 1963, was put back in charge of a transitional government. Free elections in November restored democracy. When Greek voters were asked whether to bring back the monarchy, most decided that the king hadn’t done enough to stop the coup to justify restoring the throne. Since then, Greece has remained a steady, but sometimes chaotic, democratic republic.

Cyprus still remains split into Greek and Turkish halves today. Only Turkey recognizes the split as official and permanent. The rest of the world considers the island of Cyprus to be one nation indivisible. Official or not, the split is stable. The ethnicities have moved around to match the split and they both have left the other side alone. The governments are about as democratic as possible under the circumstances. The Greek side claims the whole island, while the Turkish half claims to be independent.

Turkey in those days was oscillating between military and civilian rule. In the early Seventies, Turkey was democratic but slipping into chaos with riots and terrorism. American servicemen were kidnapped. Schools ceased to function. Leftist college professors were blown up by bombs slipped into their homes.

To restore order, in 1971, the Turkish army launched a half-hearted coup against the civilian government.  Turks call it the Coup by Memorandum because the generals seized control by sending a memo to the presidential palace instead of tanks. Their heart just didn’t seem to be in it, and they returned control to parliament within a couple of years. This next stretch of democracy lasted from 1973 to 1979.

Spain

After winning the Spanish Civil War and decimating the country’s left wing, Generalissimo Francisco Franco froze Spain in the 1930s and nothing changed for thirty-some years. Finally, as he tottered toward the end of his life, he made arrangements for the succession. He decided to bring the monarchy back to Spain, but he bypassed Juan, the exiled heir to the Spanish throne, as being too liberal. Instead, he settled on Juan Carlos, grandson of King Alfonso XIII, to be his successor. By now, Franco was being clobbered with one illness after another until he finally slipped into a long lingering coma in October 1975. After a few weeks unconscious, with daily reports on his unchanging condition that became silly with monotony. Franco died on November 20, 1975 and went immediately to Hell where he remains to this day.

After taking the throne of Spain, King Juan Carlos picked Adolpho Suárez, chief executive of the only legal political party, Franco’s National Movement, to form a government in 1976. Everyone expected Spain to continue stagnating in the Fascist era, but Suarez was more of a lawyer and a technocrat than an ideologue. He had kept himself on the everyday administrative side of Franco’s government - not the whisking-away-dissidents-in-the-dead-of-night side - so he had less baggage left over from the dictatorship. Suarez issued a new constitution which followed a properly democratic blueprint. Rival parties were legalized.

The 1977 general election was won by the Union of the Democratic Center, a center-right coalition that included several candidates who had served in the Franco administration but had mostly kept away from the worst of the Fascist regime.

Other countries also inched their way towards freedom in the late Seventies. In 1978, the Dominican Republic bowed to pressure from the US and held free elections.  The military dictator of Nigeria, General Murtala Mohammed, was assassinated during a failed coup in 1976. His successor General Olusegun Obasanjo then transitioned to civilian rule in 1979. In 1975, the relatively moderate General Francisco Morales Bermúdez came to lead Peru’s ruling junta. Bermudez eased the country back to civilian rule with a new constitution in 1979; the 1980 election returned Peru’s former president Fernando Belaúnde to power.

-- Matthew White

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① As Europe’s oldest democracy, Switzerland is idiosyncratic. It settled into its own way of doing things long before there were neighboring democracies to learn from. For example, the federal government is minimalist. It has no single head of state. It leaves most policy decisions either to the citizenry as a whole via referenda, or to the individual cantons. Swiss political parties seem to exist as a mere formality, and positions in the national government are allocated to parties according to the so-called "magic formula", a negotiated ratio that often doesn’t change for generations, rather than winner-take-all competitive elections.

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Ⓐ Sami M. Moubayed, Steel & Silk: Men and Women who Shaped Syria 1900-2000 (Cune Press, 2006) pp.308-314

Ⓑ David Schafer, “Triumph and Catastrophe”, The Humanist, Nov/Dec. 2002.