Political Theories for Students

tries, who had relied on the Soviet bloc for economic assistance and cooperation. Assistance ended and their former Soviet bloc aid donors began to compete with them for Western aid, private capital investment, and officially supported export guaranties.

Socialism in Australia and New Zealand

The British colonized Australia and New Zealand in a lengthy process that started in 1788 with a British convict settlement at what is now the city of Sydney. Overland exploration and further coastal settlements then produced seven colonies that became self– governing in the 1850s. In 1901 the six Australian colonies formed the Commonwealth of Australia and in 1907 New Zealand became an independent Dominion. At the beginning of the twentieth century these two countries were famous for the success of their socialist experiments.

Whereas the U.S. Constitution had been written at a time when liberalism was a dominant ideology among English–speaking intellectuals and politicians, Australia and New Zealand formed their political structures when socialism was a doctrine sweeping Britain.

The early years of Australia’s history comprised a parliamentary contest between the growing power of the Australian Labor Party (ALP) and the dominant social liberals led by Alfred Deakin (1856–1919). The result was an interventionist state, which regulated foreign trade through tariffs, set and enforced wage rates for workers, and controlled immigration. Later, the federal and state governments extended their ownership of businesses to encompass ports, banks, utilities, and shops. During the 1930s depression this was further developed into the state’s regulation of many agricultural products, including wheat and wool, by marketing boards.

Not surprisingly, the development of nearby New Zealand took a similar path. While the New Zealand Labour Party was only formed twenty–five years after the ALP in 1916, it arguably became even more dominant. In 1935 the First New Zealand Labour government was formed and, in addition to introducing similar regulatory agencies to Australia, developed what may have become the world’s first welfare state by 1949. Its measures included a complete free education system, universal health care, and pension provisions for the aged, unemployed, and infirm.

These socialist experiments were widely admired in Europe and attracted the attention and visits of socialist intellectuals, including Albert Metin, later French Minister for Labour who wrote the admiring

Socialism Without Doctrines, and the Fabian Social-

ist Webbs, who left behind The Webb’s Australian Diary. Needless to say, Lenin was scathing about the collaborationist nature of these socialist parties and quickly established opposing communist parties in the 1920s, which attracted only limited support. Visiting Americans, like author Mark Twain (1835–1910), were also less impressed by what they regarded as these excessively statist societies, as David Mosler and Bob Catley describe in America and Americans in Australia.

Australia and New Zealand were secure, social democratic societies for their White colonists, with extensive welfare systems and short hours of work. These conditions were underpinned by extremely democratic political systems, which were the first to give the vote to women. They were also rather intolerant of their indigenous communities, to whom socialist doctrines did not extend. In the mid–1970s both countries elected Labour governments, led by Gough Whitlam and Norman Kirk (1923–1974), who in many respects extended these Social Democratic regimes to include indigenous peoples.

The considerable affluence of these societies was underpinned by the efficient production of primary commodities—like wheat, wool, meat, and minerals— on territory newly discovered or conquered from indigenous peoples. During the 1960s and 1970s prosperity was maintained only with increasing difficulty, as the price of these commodities became less assured and markets more difficult to access. Both countries faced difficult economic problems in the 1980s, including stagflation and external trade deficits.

In the 1980s, both countries started to dismantle their statist and social democratic economic structures and joined the movement towards liberalization. In both cases, these reforms were undertaken by Labour governments. International trade was deregulated, economic regulatory agencies were dismantled, and many state–owned enterprises were privatized. Although the two countries often followed different polices, the pursuit of liberalizing reform was common to both. They continued to face difficulties in reorienting their economies to meet the challenges of the global economy of the twenty first century, but neither could be properly described any longer as socialist in structure.

The Neo Liberal Counter–Revolution, 1975–1991

In the mid–1970s the developed countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) underwent a severe economic dislocation. It was easily the worst since 1945. During the

deep recession of 1974–75 the social democracies of Western Europe, Japan, North America and Australasia experienced increased inflation, negative growth, a large jump in unemployment and, for most, a severe imbalance in their domestic fiscal and foreign trade accounts. This became known as the crisis of stagflation.

There ensued a long intellectual debate about the causes of this problem. The OECD officials attributed the crisis to a series of singular events, which coincided and were unlikely to be repeated in that form. In some instances this was true, including the sharp rise in oil prices which the exporting states had been able to achieve by the coincidence of an Arab–Israeli War and a prolonged OECD dependence on that commodity. But there were also criticisms of the policy reactions of the OECD countries and indeed of their policy regime structures, which seemed for long unable to deal with the problems that had emerged. In particular, an old critique of Social Democracy emerged in a new guise.

Liberals had long held that the extension of the state into the economy and its resultant politicization would endanger the operation of economic calculation and damage the maintenance of economic prosperity. They had maintained this critique throughout the long post–war boom during which Social democracy had been extended in the manner previously indicated throughout much of the developed world. While growth was maintained, the liberal critique was broadly ignored. It then re–emerged as an explanation of the problem of stagflation and a policy recommendation for its resolution. Neo–liberalism revived in the Anglophone world and the U.S. economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman (1912–) became its most–celebrated advocate.

Friedman and the liberals argued that inflation was essentially the product of a rapid growth in the supply of money. Since money was a commodity, if it flooded the market its price would drop and all other prices, expressed in money terms, would rise. This had happened in the mid–1970s throughout the OECD. The solution was to arrest the growth of the money supply. Policy makers gradually took this on board into the 1980s and inflation receded. Corollaries of this policy, however, included stopping the growth of the state sector, abandoning budget deficits, deregulating domestic economies and foreign trade, and, later, privatizing SOEs. All these policies were adopted to varying degrees in the OECD states during the 1980s.

The result was winding back of the Social Democratic regimes. This was not undertaken at a similar pace or with the same intensity in each state. In the

English–speaking countries, the liberal reforms of Social Democracy went furthest. In Great Britain, where arguably the crisis of stagflation hit deepest, Margaret Thatcher was elected Conservative Prime Minister in 1979 and while in office during the next eleven years wound back the level of state regulation and subsidies, the size of the state–owned sector, the power of the labor unions, and the commitment to full employment. The next Labour government under Prime Minister Tony Blair, elected in 1997, did not overturn these basic reforms.

In less–populated English–speaking countries— Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand—simi- lar processes occurred. In each, SOEs were privatized, economies and markets deregulated, trade restrictions abolished, and the size of the state sector reduced. In general, this group of countries entered the twenty–first century with the smallest state sectors and the highest growth rates of the OECD countries. But they mostly retained a modest socialist structure, consistent with providing a social safety net for their citizens.

The developed countries of Western Europe were also influenced by these trends, but did not undertake the reforms nearly as far. They became known as the “Social Charter” capitalist counties who continued to subscribe to the European Union Charter on labor regulation and welfare provision. They retained large welfare systems, many SOEs, a state sector of up to half their economies, and extensive provisions and benefits to labor. Perhaps as a result, at the start of the twenty first century these countries had slower growth rates and higher unemployment levels than their An- glo–Saxon counterparts.

Collapse of the Soviet Union

As the heartland of Social Democracy was undergoing reform, so the countries of Communist socialism effectively collapsed. After the Second World War, Soviet–style communism had expanded into Eastern Europe and east Asia. Centered on the Soviet Union, it then created an alternative system of states based on the model created by Stalin in the 1930s. In the ensuing conflict with the West, known as the Cold War, its doctrines were then extended into many Third World countries, such that by the late 1970s it appeared a formidable social formation indeed. Nonetheless, within a decade it faced economic decline, geographic contraction, and finally, strategic defeat.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and its system took place in three phases. First, the client and allied regimes of the Soviet bloc were abandoned and their subsidies withdrawn in the late 1980s, thereby pre-

cipitating an economic crisis in many of them. Secondly, the Soviet garrisons and political guarantees to the puppet regimes of Eastern Europe were withdrawn in 1989, and all of the regimes of the “Peoples Democracies” collapsed almost immediately. Thirdly, the Soviet Union itself disintegrated into fifteen non–com- munist states in December, 1991.

The collapse of the Soviet Union was accelerated by the strategic confrontation and arms race opened by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, which the Soviet Union found itself unable to afford. But it could not compete because its economic and political structures were frozen in the socialist forms of the 1930s, implicitly created by nineteenth–century doctrines. The rigidity of the Soviet planning system made it unable to adapt to new technologies and processes. Its political dictatorship made it unable to change and provide the mechanisms for economic transformation. By the 1980s, Soviet communism was too conservative and rigid to survive. The liberal reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s were insufficient to save it, but enough to generate its demise.

This marked the end of the long socialist experiment that had begun in 1917. The Soviet Union had effectively and/or ideologically underpinned the other variants of socialism, which had been created throughout the world in the period following the Revolution. The support that the Soviet state had provided—fi- nancially for communist parties, ideologically for philosophers, politically for activists, economically for state planners and SOE managers, and militarily for revolutionaries—disappeared. With it went one of the most significant props that the socialist movement had had since its modern incarnation two centuries earlier.

Certainly, socialist states continued to exist after 1991, but their utility as a model for continuing progress for the doctrine was greatly diminished by their character. The People’s Republic of China was a poor Third World country, although it demonstrated impressive rates of growth. But by 2001 it was clear that these had been achieved by abandoning socialist doctrines and adopting market mechanisms, deployed in the revealing phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

ANALYSIS AND CRITICAL RESPONSE

In theory, socialism is a political theory with the best of intentions—the elimination of private property and the sharing of economic resources. However, it has been difficult to maintain because it goes against

the concepts of freedom and individuality. Not many people want to be forced to move into farming villages or turn their crops over to the government instead of selling them on an open market. All forms of socialism run into problems when they are put into action. “The social democracy form of socialism is difficult to maintain because it runs head on into the political pressure of democracy—which replaces abstract issues of fairness with the practical calculations of in- terest–group politics—and the economic pressure of open markets,” wrote Victoria Postrel in a 1999 issue of Reason magazine. Moreover, socialism has a hard time shaking the negative associations brought on by the experiments in Soviet Russia and Third World countries. Too many versions of socialism take over areas of everyday life beyond economics.

The Problems With African and Arab

Socialism

Why did Julius Nyerere’s African Socialist policy of ujamaa fail in Tanzania? The problem essentially stemmed from the fact that Marxist doctrines assumed that socialism would be implemented in already developed societies. Many of the former colonies of the Third World were in fact very poor and often dominated by primary production with low levels of education and labor productivity. In these circumstances, socialist programs deriving from European circumstances had to try to produce a more egalitarian society and develop the economy at the same time. These were often difficult objectives to reconcile. Tanzania was and is one of the poorest countries in the world and faced this dilemma.

Nonetheless, in the 1960s and 1970s Tanzania gained much political respect, chiefly due to Nyerere’s political ideas. He was personally uncorrupted by fame or position and remained throughout his life self–effacing and unpretentious. Since Nyerere’s death in 1999 the positive aspects of ujamaa, particularly enhanced national unity, has received more credit, even from Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Nyerere’s successor who abandoned socialism and began liberalization in 1985. Tanzania is one of the very few African countries that has not experienced serious tribal conflict.

Of course, ujamaa was not the only form of socialism that ran into problems. Egypt was a prime example of an economy ruined largely by its own self–destructive Arab Socialist policies. In 1979, with the conclusion of the Israel–Egypt peace treaty, there were predictions and expectations of large–scale Middle East trade; multinational infrastructure projects; joint ventures involving Egyptian, Israeli, and Amer-

ican or European investors; technology transfers; and a reallocation of resources from the military to civilian pursuits. But for various reasons, many unrelated to the Camp David agreements, since the 1980s the Egyptian economy has stagnated and per capita income has declined.

The poor performance of the economy, especially in the first half of the 1990s, was particularly disconcerting, in view of the massive financial aid which Egypt received in those years. A major part of Egypt’s $50 billion debt was cancelled; interest rates were lowered and payments reduced on the remaining debt; and “Official Development Assistance” from various industrialized countries was raised from $1.8 billion in 1989—before the Gulf War—to $5.7 billion in 1990 and $10 billion in 1992. Egypt’s economic problems stem largely from the legacy of “Arab Socialism” instituted by President Nasser in the 1960s. The state–owned industries, especially in manufacturing, suffered from gross inefficiency, over–manning, and very low productivity and profitability.

The loss–making state–owned firms were a serious drain on the treasury. Nasser guaranteed jobs to all university graduates and demobilized soldiers in the civil service or in state–owned enterprises. This policy was continued by Sadat and by his successor Hosni Mubarak (1929–) during the 1980s. Subsidies were expanded under Sadat and maintained by Mubarak. Price controls, foreign exchange regulations (including multiple–exchange rates), wage policies, and other measures added more distortions to the economy. Egyptian corruption did not begin with Arab Socialism, but Nasser’s policies multiplied the opportunities and inducements. And the wide gap between the few rich and the many poor widened to dangerous dimensions, fuelled by widespread corruption.

Since 1991 Egypt has made some important monetary and fiscal changes in addition to alterations in its foreign exchange controls but it has been reluctant to embark on a large–scale privatization program to get rid of the bloated and very costly public sector enterprises. Politically powerful interests who benefit from “milking” the public sector oppose privatization plans. The public sector workers and managers fear that privatization would be followed by massive dismissals. As a result, about two–thirds of industrial production, together with oil extraction and refining remains in the public sector. Egyptian efforts to liberalize the economy have been very limited.

There was a similar problem in the Soviet Union, as well in other socialist countries. In the early twenty–first century, China faces the daunting prospect of either privatizing its SOEs, with the re-

sulting labor shedding and fear of political destabilization, or having the rest of the economy carry a socialist and inefficient millstone around its neck. Another problem is the massive public payroll common to socialist economies, involving literally millions of employees with little or nothing to do. Egypt has four million public servants comprising 23 percent of the labor force and another eight percent employed by public sector enterprises. In the public sector it is virtually impossible to sack anybody and labor laws also make it very difficult to dismiss private sector employees. This results in low productivity, financial losses, and depressed incomes. In the years since the conclusion of the peace agreements between Israel and Egypt in 1979, economic progress has been slight. Egypt is a modernized and more populous, but stagnant, Pharaonic state.

Socialism in the Third World has proven to be a difficult project. The Again, Marxist–Socialist doctrine assumed that capitalism would develop a country before socialism took it over, and socialists found their own doctrines only partly useful for providing a model for rapid development in undeveloped Third World countries. Indigenous socialism fell back on public ownership and collectivized land, which often impeded economic growth. The state forms which Third World socialists utilized, were almost uniformly dictatorial. By the twenty first century socialist regimes in the Third World were commonly reverting to the market as a means of escaping the problems their doctrines had devised. A similar pattern was evident in the more developed societies.

The Future: Socialism under

Globalization

At the end of the Cold War in 1991 the doctrines of socialism faced considerable problems. The Soviet bloc had disintegrated because of its own failures to produce a viable alternative structure to democratic liberal capitalism. In the social democracies of Europe and elsewhere they had been exposed to a vigorous attack by the revival of the liberal critique. The remaining communist states were adopting liberal oriented reforms. In the Third World privatization and de–regulation was replacing statist, socialist development models almost everywhere. It seemed that the high tide of socialism had passed.

This process was accompanied by the evolution of a substantial international economy in a process often referred to as “globalization.” The global economy was the manifestation of international market transactions increasingly overtaking those that had been nation based. A growing section of national economies

become locked into a global trading structure rather than being confined to their own domestic market. States found that a growing proportion of their economies were devoted to foreign trade; that more of their capital markets were derived from foreign investors; that more of their own investments went into other economies; that more of their commodities were international brand name products; and that a growing proportion of their labor forces were internationally mobile.

This was a process that derived form three sources. First, the U.S. had been a determined sponsor of an international regime designed to produce a free market in capital, products, and culture for most of the twentieth century and after 1991 pursued it energetically as the only remaining superpower. Next, technological change increasingly permitted the global organization of production, distribution and exchange. This was evident in cheaper transport systems, including bulk carriers, containerization, and wide–bod- ied jetliners; in better data transmission, which created a global finance market; and in enhanced communications involving the fax, mobile phones, and the Internet. And finally, the only alternative economic system collapsed with the Soviet Union and its major successor state, the Russian Federation, became an advocate of liberal capitalism, not social democracy.

By 2001 these processes were creating a global economy. The institutional agencies of globalization, particularly the U.S. Treasury, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the IMF, promoted a state regime policy structure which was known as the “Washington Consensus.” As David Mosler and Bob Catley describe in Global America, this involved free trade, deregulation, privatization of government assets, free movement for capital and investment, and, by the late 1990s, transparent representative government. This program contrasted sharply with the doctrines of socialism which—whatever its claims to in- ternationalism—had evolved as an intellectual guideline for state policy makers.

At the dawn of the twenty–first century, it appears that socialism is an idea whose time has come and gone. However, many writers remind us that history comes and goes in cycles, and it was not even a century ago that philosophers and world leaders spoke of the coming death of capitalism. “The thesis that the end of socialism does not have a historical basis,” states James Petras in a 1992 issue of Canadian Dimension. “At best, it is a reflection on a moment of retreat and reversals.” And yet, it remains to be seen if and how socialism can adapt and survive into its

third century as a serious competitor to other political ideas and social formations.

TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY

•How do Marxism and Fabian socialism compare?

•Why and how did the doctrines of socialism became popular in Australia but not in the United States?

•Is socialism is an appropriate doctrine for Third World countries? Why or why not?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sources

Berki, R.N. Socialism,. Needham, Massachusetts: Prentice Hall, 1995.

Catley, Bob. Globalising Australian Capitalism, Cambridge

University Press, 1996.

Mosler, David, and Bob Catley. Global America: Imposing Liberalism on a Recalcitrant World, Praeger, 2000.

Petras, James. “A Leftist Resurgence” in Canadian Dimension, March 1992 (vol. 26, no. 2). Canadian Dimension Publication, Ltd., 1992.

Postrel, Virginia. “After Socialism” in Reason, November 1999 (vol. 31, issue 6). Reason Foundation, 1999.

Further Readings

Hayek, F.A. The Road to Serfdom, 1944. A critical evaluation of the application of socialist doctrines to prosperous capitalist economies by one of the leading critics of socialist thought.

Lipset, Seymour Martin and Gary Marks. It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, W.W. Norton & Co., 2001. An explanation of why socialism as an ideology and a movement has been weaker in the United States than arguably any other developed country.

Morris, William. Why I Am a Socialist, 1884. Morris was the precursor of the Fabian Socialists in Britain, and this is one of the most forceful statements of a committed Democratic Socialist.

Sassoon, Donald. One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, New Press, 1998. A clear account of the recent history of socialist movements in Western Europe.

SEE ALSO

Communism, Marxism, Utopianism

OVERVIEW

Political systems are often categorized according to the degree of freedom they afford their citizens or according to their degree of their responsiveness to citizen input. Democracies allow the most input; totalitarian systems stand at the extreme opposite end of the continuum. They offer the least amount of freedom and pay the least amount of attention to the voice of the people. In fact, as the name implies, totalitarian governments try to control the totality of human experience. A true totalitarian ruler attempts to take charge not only of the public life of the people, but also their personal and emotional lives. Until the advent of modern forms of travel, communication, and coercion, it would have been impossible to contemplate the total control of anything but a very small group of people. But, with mass media, electronic surveillance equipment, and prisons and torture facilities boasting the efficiency of advanced industrial operations, totalitarianism seemed within the grasp of leaders such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—men with a limitless desire for control. Totalitarianism is a form of government that emerged only in the twentieth century. So rapid was its rise, that by 1940, many people in Europe and America feared that totalitarianism might be able to overwhelm democratic peoples and governments. That fear proved to be unjustified because, by the end of the twentieth century, no country in the world practiced a full–blown totalitarian form of governance.

Totalitarianism

WHO CONTROLS GOVERNMENT? Dictator

HOW IS GOVERNMENT PUT INTO POWER? Overthrow or

Revolution

WHAT ROLES DO THE PEOPLE HAVE? Devote life to

dictator and the state

WHO CONTROLS PRODUCTION OF GOODS? The state

WHO CONTROLS DISTRIBUTION OF GOODS? The state

MAJOR FIGURES Friedrich Nietzsche; Adolf Hitler

HISTORICAL EXAMPLE OF GOVERNMENT Egypt,

1952–present

CHRONOLOGY

c. 2600–2200 B.C.: Egyptian Old Kingdom is ruled by pharaohs.

c. 1700 B.C.: Hammurabi rules.

c. 1028 B.C.: The Chou Dynasty controls northern China.

1507–1547: Henry VIII of England reigns as king of England.

1740–86: Frederick II, also known as Frederick the Great, rules as king of Prussia.

1821: Frederick Hegel writes The Philosophy of Right.

1883: Friedrich Nietzsche writes Thus Spake Zarathustra.

1939: Getulio Vargas is placed in power by the Brazilian military.

1948: The Purified Nationalist Party wins the parliamentary elections in South Africa.

1952: Gamal Nasser takes power in Egypt through a coup.

1979: The Ayatollah Khomeini establishes an Islamic theocracy in Iran.

Before the rise of totalitarianism in the 1920s and 1930s, even the most powerful and oppressive governments would have been classified as authoritarian rather than totalitarian. Authoritarian governments acted in arbitrary and autocratic ways, but they did not attempt to exert control over every facet of people’s lives. In the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s, a number of authoritarian regimes in Europe were headed by monarchs claiming absolute authority. Generally, however, they did not pretend to exercise absolute power or control. Almost to the end of the twentieth century, many Latin American regimes were headed by military leaders who ruled in a highly authoritarian manner. But, they did not try to intervene in the daily lives of citizens with the same degree of intensity characteristic of totalitarian governments. In Asia, for thousands of years, powerful monarchs and military rulers demanded compliance from their people. Like many other authoritarian leaders throughout history, they re-

quired absolute obedience from the people and they exercised the absolute power of life or death over their subjects. But, until the emergence of Maoism in China, they demanded compliance only in a limited portion of their subjects’ lives and they used the sword only against people who posed a direct threat to their sovereignty or wealth.

At the beginning of the twenty–first century, most authoritarian governments were concentrated in the Middle East and Asia where monarchies and strong men or strong women continued to hold sway. In many of these authoritarian systems, for example Iraq, powerful leaders hoped to increase the wealth and military power of their countries without having to cope with the turmoil they believed accompanies political openness. To a large extent, those leaders cared little about the private sentiments of the people, as long as the people did not publicly oppose the policies of government.

HISTORY

The Ancient World

The ancient world was marked by a number of very large–scale states that exercised unchallenged control over some aspects of their peoples’ lives. In ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, powerful dynasties were able to use their power to mobilize vast numbers of people to participate in extensive public works schemes. Complex irrigation systems, enormous monuments, and large–scale agricultural operations were some of the projects that provided the economic and political foundations for these ancient empires. The social and psychological distance between the leaders and the common people was so great that the rulers could claim near divine power and stature. The authoritarian nature of these rulers’ governments enabled them to provide their subjects with a level of security and economic well being otherwise unattainable at the time. Peoples of the ancient world could not increase their productive capacity through highly advanced technologies and machines that came only with the modern industrial revolution. But, the coordination they achieved by offering obedience to a despotic ruler allowed them to focus their energies in ways that resulted in astonishing material and social achievements.

The ancient despotic regimes were limited to regions where people were forced to settle in close proximity and where they had little chance to live elsewhere. For example, in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, people had to remain close to the

major rivers in order to farm. This reality made it easier for rulers to exert tighter control over their subjects. What sets the ancient despotic regimes apart from modern totalitarian systems is the fact that the ancient governments never sought to mobilize the people politically. Ordinary people were expected to be nonpolitical and uninvolved in the ceremonies and rituals of the capital and the court. Common people were required to work for the state, not to identify with or have affection for the regime.

Although Ancient Greece witnessed the rise of democracy in Athens, many city states, and even Athens at times, were ruled by authoritarian regimes. Sometimes the regimes were headed by tyrants, leaders who had seized power and who had the power of life and death over their subjects. In Sparta, the entire citizen population between the age of twenty and thirty was mobilized into military groups called “phalanxes.” The demands of these groups controlled an individual’s entire life. The men lived in barracks, took common meals, and were forbidden to marry. Many Greeks admired the strength and discipline of Sparta that enabled its people to defend themselves effectively and to exert their control over neighboring regions.

Ancient Rome functioned as a republic for more than 400 years before the republican form of government gave way to an autocratic imperial structure. The transformation came in response to internal tensions and external challenges. As the Roman city–state expanded to dominate all of what is now Italy and then extend its control over the entire Mediterranean region, ambitious generals wielded increased power. Competing with the Senate, a body composed of hereditary aristocrats, the generals based their authority on an appeal to the masses. Although the Republic would not have measured up to the standards of modern democracies, Rome moved even more decisively to authoritarian rule with the establishment of the Empire under Augustus, who ruled from 27 B.C. until his death in 14 A.D. But, even under the emperors, Rome functioned as an authoritarian not as a totalitarian system. In large part, that was true because the Roman Empire regarded itself as a society governed by laws that protected the rights of the citizens. Furthermore, at least some of the emperors believed strongly in the need to submit themselves to the rules of virtue and morality. No matter how powerful their office, such men regarded themselves as servants and protectors of the people.

The Middle Ages

In the Middle Ages, many European rulers thought of themselves as following in the footsteps of the great leaders of Rome. Virtue and law were now

Frederick the Great of Prussia (Corbis-Bettmann)

defined by the church rather than by an appeal to ancient traditions or Roman gods. But the concept of ruling according to higher principles remained an important theoretical concept. While the claim to rule on behalf of natural law or divine ordination imposed moral restrictions on political behavior, medieval leaders made no concession to the voice of the people.

By the fifteenth century, a shift in rhetoric and practice took place. Starting with the Renaissance, princes and even churchmen in Italy regarded themselves as unchecked by morality, rules, or the people when it came to political behavior. The only limits on a prince was competition from other ambitious leaders or the threat of revolt from an oppressed citizenry. Morality was no longer an important constraint regulating political conduct.

After about 1500, early European nation states increasingly were ruled by powerful autocratic leaders who attempted to impose linguistic, religious, and political uniformity over divided societies. Assertive monarchs such as Henry VIII of England, his daughter Elizabeth I, and Louis XIV of France; divine right kings such as James I and Charles I of England; and enlightened despots such as Catherine the Great of Russia and Frederick II of Prussia struggled to build the foundations of strong states. While their sometimes ruthless tactics resembled those of Renaissance rulers, their goals were the creation and protection of

nations or empires, not just self promotion and personal power.

The Eighteenth and Ninteenth Centuries

Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia from 1740 to 1786, is one example of these autocratic rulers. Frederick focused much of his energies on developing Prussia as a strong military state with a highly professional bureaucracy. The military and the bureaucracy served as two of the most important sources of his extensive authoritarian power. A man of the Enlightenment, Frederick attempted to rule according to the highest principles of reason. To some extent, he embodied the principles of Aristotle’s ideal monarchy, where one individual ruled for the good of the whole. Although Frederick did not consult citizen voices, he tried to rule in a way that would benefit the people. Some of the benevolent and progressive measures he introduced in Prussia were the abolishment of using torture on criminals, strict prohibitions against bribing judges, the establishment of state–supported elementary schools, and the promotion of religious tolerance. On his own vast personal estates, which he owned as a feudal lord, he did away with capital punishment, reduced the amount of time peasants had to spend working for him instead of for themselves, and introduced scientific farming and forestry practices that increased production. In the nineteenth century, Otto von Bismarck, the autocratic German Chancellor continued in the tradition of Frederick. During his tenure in office from 1871 until 1890, Bismarck introduced many progressive social programs while working tirelessly to unify Germany and strengthen his country’s military power.

The Modern World

In the twentieth century, a new kind of autocracy emerged. Using the tools of modern transportation, communication, surveillance, and psychology, men such as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao were able to control millions of peoples’ lives in ways that would have been unthinkable or impossible in previous centuries. The political innovations of these men introduced a new type of governing that was given the label “totalitarian.” Vicious, aggressive, and ideological, totalitarianism created its own morality. Mobilizing their citizens through propaganda and thought control, totalitarian leaders appeared to be intent on dominating other parts of the world as well as reshaping their own countries. In every case, totalitarian leaders were aggressively anti–democratic and anti–religious. They allowed no space for individual thought or criticism. Consequently, they allowed no room for an appeal either to individual liberties or to supernatural truth.

By the end of World War II, totalitarianism had collapsed in Germany and Italy. With the death of Stalin in 1953, totalitarianism in the form of Stalinism began to give way to authoritarianism in the Soviet Union as well. A similar pattern obtained in China after the death of Mao in 1976. In the Soviet Union, especially by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, even authoritarianism came to be regarded as increasingly dysfunctional. At the beginning of the twenty–first century, authoritarian systems persisted in the Middle East; some parts of Asia such as China, Malaysia, and Vietnam; and Cuba. But, authoritarianism was increasingly under a shadow. South Africa, a racially divided nation governed in accordance with the principles of apartheid, voluntarily shifted to complete democracy in 1994. Even Iran, a nation run as a theocracy (where God is the ultimate ruler) was shifting to a pattern of incorporating popular opinion into government policy.

Iran Iran is illustrative of two important types of contemporary authoritarianism, one the more conventional modernizing authoritarianism, the other an authoritarianism guided by a fundamentalist ideology. The latter form has seemed especially threatening to people in the west. From 1941 until 1979, Iran was governed by an autocratic monarchy under Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi. Accepting military and economic aid from the United States, the Shah set about to modernize his nation. A key part of his policy was limiting the influence of the imams, Muslim clerics who had great authority over the lives and thoughts of the people. Although Iran witnessed rapid economic growth that dramatically transformed the cities and greatly strengthened the country’s infrastructure, not everyone benefited from the changes. Small shopkeepers, small farmers, and ordinary workers sometimes found life to be more difficult. Furthermore, the westernization that accompanied the economic changes was not welcomed by the conservative and largely Shiiti Muslim population. Iranians who were troubled by what was happening in their country often blamed the United States for America was the Shah’s main supporter. However, because Iran operated as an authoritarian regime, the voices of citizen disapproval had no constructive outlet.

The Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an exiled radical Islamic cleric, took advantage of the growing discontentment to incite a revolution that succeeded in overthrowing the Shah in 1979. Now, Iran was governed by a new type of authoritarianism, a theocracy. Religious leaders, who interpreted God’s will as revealed in the Koran, came to play a major role in politics. Mullahs (clerics) sat as powerful members of parliament. A

Council of Guardians, Iran’s supreme court, was a body of clerics who used the Koran, not the constitution, as the ultimate authority. Around the country, the Islamic Republican Party, the official party of the revolution, depended on clerics a party agents. At the top of the entire system, the Ayatollah Khomeini had the final word. And his word was based upon his concept of what God told him to say or do. Consequently, the Ayatollah’s pronouncements could not be challenged.

The highly authoritarian nature of the Islamic Republic was evident in its internal and external policies. Internally, the Ayatollah’s government moved harshly against dissidents. Intellectuals, people associated with the Shah’s government, opposition politicians, and military leaders were arrested, imprisoned, and executed. People feared speaking against the regime and people feared conducting their private lives in ways that contradicted the mullahs’ strict interpretation of Islamic law. Women, especially, were objects of religious supervision and control. Externally, Iran pursued an aggressive and militant policy. The United States, as the former backer of the Shah, was regarded as an especially “evil” state and labeled the “Great Satan” by the Ayatollah. In November of 1979, Iranian radicals stormed the American Embassy and took 52 people hostage. These people were held until January of 1981. Saudi Arabia, a conservative and, in the Ayatollah’s view, apostate state, was also a target of Iranian anger. In 1987, the Ayatollah called for the overthrow of the Saudi government. Iran also conducted a protracted and bitter war with its neighbor Iraq. Although Iraq began the conflict—hoping to grab a piece of Iranian territory during the turmoil of the revolu- tion—Iran regarded the conflict as a jihad or holy war.

As is characteristic of all fervent ideological or theological revolutions, the people and the country of Iran could not sustain the political intensity for long. Isolated internationally, suffering from economic decline internally, and facing increasing grumbling from moderate Iranians who wanted a more open political system, Iran’s government moved back to the center. The first shift was from a rigid theocratic authoritarianism to a more pragmatic authoritarianism that relaxed the enforcement of religious laws and allowed for more openness of expression. This happened almost immediately after the death of the elderly Ayatollah in 1989. By the year 2000, Iran had installed a decidedly more moderate government that came to power as a result of relatively free and fair elections. While the majority of Iranians likely were content to be governed according to the principles of Islamic law, they desired more flexibility in how those laws were interpreted and they wanted more room to offer input to the government.

Ayatollah Khomeini, raising his hand to a crowd of supporters.

As the twenty–first century got under way, people in the West feared a dangerous conflict with an irrational Middle Eastern world filled with radical Islamic fundamentalists. A common concern was that these fundamentalists would set up governments filled with fanatics guided by a very narrow and xenophobic understanding of the Koran. The example of Iran suggests that enthusiasm for theocracy lasts about one generation. In the end, more pragmatic concerns push a nation to a more moderate, less authoritarian, and less aggressive form of government.

THEORY IN DEPTH

Terms such as authoritarianism and totalitarianism have been the subject of intense debates among many political scientists. Two sets of questions dominate this discussion. One revolves around the issue of definitions. What exactly is an authoritarian regime? What exactly is a totalitarian system? How are they the same and how do they differ? Is totalitarianism merely an extreme manifestation of authoritarianism or is it a fundamentally new and different phenomenon? Because definitions in a dictionary, encyclopedia, or text book are just reflections of the way both ordinary people and scholars use words, there is no