Undemocratic regimes

Undemocratic forms of rule, or regimes, are authoritarian or autocratic. Hardline regimes refuse to allow any change in the political system. Hardliners are members of such regimes who are particularly resistant to change.

A country may be ruled by:

a totalitarian regime controlling all aspects of life and not allowing any opposition;

one-party rule, allowing only the political party in power to operate;

a military junta: a group of army officers;

dictatorship: rule by a small group of people, or by one person alone, a dictator.

A dictator, or someone else with autocratic powers and methods, may be referred to in the media as a strongman.

The initial liberal reaction to the break-up of former Communist regimes was to cheer the emergence of national identity. This enthusiasm soon gave way to ambivalence. The removal of an authoritarian regime was one thing; the removal of all central authority was another.

… the intransigence of the hard-line regime in Pyongyang, where President Kim II Sung has been president since 1948.

No event could possibly highlight the fundamental difference between democratic and autocratic government so vividly as her departure, by due democratic process, at this time.

For 70 years, a totalitarian regime forced people to work and distributed the products of their labour through a highly centralized government bureaucracy.

Although Cameroon’s constitution provides for a multi-party system, the country has been a de facto one-party state since 1966.

Some elected leaders of Latin America would be happy to offer an example of a military junta reaching a bad end.

But their meeting in 1940, at Hendaye, on the French-Spanish border, was not a success. France kept Hitler waiting: not all dictators make the trains run on time.

Referring to Mr. Mugabe’s plan for a one-party state, the paper says they may be Africa’s way forward, but they are often one-way routes to dictatorship.

… Enva Hodja, the Albanian strongman who ruled the country with an iron hand, using Stalin as his role model.

Task 8. A return to dictatorship?

Read this extract from The Times and answer the questions.

BIANCA EYES THE NICARAGUAN PRESIDENCY After Bianca Jagger’s divorce in 1979, she returned to Nicaragua within days of the Sandinistas taking power and celebrated the end of Somoza’s hated dictatorship and what promised to be a revolution bringing equality for all. ‘But the Sandinistas betrayed their ideals. They became corrupted by power,’ she said. ‘They ran the country on the basis of extended patronage so that it was unprepared for democracy when it finally came.’ But Jagger reserves her most bitter scorn for the country’s present government. ‘Violeta Chamorro was voted into power as something of a Virgin Mary figure. But she has ceded power to her son-in-law, Antonio Lacayo, who now runs the country as an autocracy.’ Leaders of 12 of the 14 parties in Chamorro’s coalition have accused her government of forgiving a ‘new dictatorship’ in Nicaragua. Critics claim that Chamorro is being manipulated by the Sandinistas, who still form the largest party and control the army, police, trade unions, banking system and businesses nationalised during their decade in power. An American aid package of $ 116 million has been blocked in protest at Sandinista control of the security forces and failure to investigate a post-election free-for-all in which Sandinistas helped themselves to houses, guns and government property before ceding limited power to Chamorro. Peasants who fought on different sides in the civil war have been uniting in protest at the government’s failure to abide by peace accords reached in1990. ‘The clock is being turned back at a tremendous pace in Nicaragua,’ says Jagger. ‘There is a desperate need for some new political answers before it is too late.’

Questions:

1. If something promises to be something, does it necessarily happen?

2. If people betray their ideals, do they remain faithful to them?

3. If you have scorn for someone, you have con_ _ _ _ _for them and you desp_ _ _ them.

4. If you cede power to someone, do you hand over power to them?

5. If you forge something new, do you destroy it?

6. If you are manipulated by someone, are you free to act as you wish?

7. If people fail to do something, do they do it?

8. Are people and events under control in a free-for-all?

9. If you abide by an accord or an agreement, do you break it?

10. If you turn back the clock, you go back to a situation that existed previously, in this case, according to Bianca Jagger, dic_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _. This is happening at a tremendous pace, or very f _ _ _.