WHAT?

THE START OF THE THIRD WAVE

THE THIRD WAVE OF DEMOCRATIZATION in the modern world began, implausibly and unwittingly, at twenty-five minutes after midnight, Thursday, April 25, 1974, in Lisbon, Portugal, when a radio station played the song "Grandola Vila Morena." That broadcast was the go-ahead signal for the military units in and around Lisbon to carry out the plans for a coup d'etat that had been carefully drawn up by the young officers leading the Movimento das Forcas Armadas (MFA). The coup was carried out efficiently and successfully, with only minor resistance from the security police. Military units occupied key ministries, broadcasting stations, the post office, airports, and telephone exchanges. By late morning, crowds were flooding the streets, cheering the soldiers, and placing carnations in the barrels of their rifles. By late afternoon the deposed dictator, Marcello Caetano, had surrendered to the new military leaders of Portugal. The next day he flew into exile. So died the dictatorship that had been born in a similar military coup in 1926 and led for over thirty-five years by an austere civilian, António Salazar, working in close collaboration with Portugal's soldiers.

The April 25 coup was an implausible beginning of a worldwide movement to democracy because coups d'etat more frequently overthrow democratic regimes than introduce them. It was an unwitting beginning because the installation of democracy, much less the triggering of a global democratic movement, was far from the minds of leaders of the coup. The death of the dictatorship did not ensure the birth of democracy. It did, however, unleash a huge array of popular, social, and political forces that had been effectively suppressed during the dictatorship. For eighteen months after the April coup, Portugal was in turmoil. The MFA officers split into competing conservative, moderate, and Marxist factions. The political parties covered an equally wide spectrum, from the hard-line Communist party on the left to fascist groups on the right. Six provisional governments succeeded each other, each exercising less authority than its predecessor. Coups and countercoups were attempted. Workers and peasants struck, demonstrated, and seized factories, farms, and media. Moderate parties won the national elections on the anniversary of the coup in 1975, but by the fall of that year civil war appeared possible between the conservative north and the radical south.

The revolutionary upheaval in Portugal seemed, in many respects, to be a replay of 1917 Russia, with Caetano as Nicholas II, the April coup as the February Revolution, the dominant groups in the MFA as the Bolsheviks, similar widespread economic turmoil and popular upheaval, and even the equivalent of the Kornilov conspiracy in General Spinola's unsuccessful right-wing coup attempt in March 1975. The resemblance was not lost on acute observers. In September 1974 Mário Soares, foreign minister of the provisional government and leader of the Portuguese Socialist party, met with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Washington. Kissinger berated Soares and other moderates for not acting more decisively to head off a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship.

"You are a Kerensky.... I believe your sincerity, but you are naive," Kissinger told Soares.

"I certainly don't want to be a Kerensky," replied Soares.

"Neither did Kerensky," shot back Kissinger.

Portugal, however, turned out to be different from Russia. The Kerenskys won; democracy triumphed. Soares went on to become prime minister and later president. And the Lenin of the Portuguese revolution, the person who at the crucial moment deployed disciplined force to produce the political result he desired, was a taciturn prodemocracy colonel named António Ramalho Eanes who on November 25, 1975, crushed the radical leftist elements in the armed forces and ensured the future of democracy in Portugal.

The movement toward democracy in Portugal in 1974 and 1975 was dramatic but not unique. Less obvious democratic stirrings were occurring elsewhere. In 1973 in Brazil leaders of the outgoing government of Gen. Emílio Médici developed plans for political distensão or "decompression" and in 1974 Gen. Ernesto Geisel committed his new government to starting the process of political opening. In Spain Prime Minister Carlos Arias cautiously moved the Franco dictatorship in a liberalizing direction while the country awaited the death of the dictator. In Greece tensions were building up in the colonels' regime that led to its downfall in mid-1974 and, later that year, to the first democratically elected government in the new wave of transitions. During the following fifteen years this democratic wave became global in scope; about thirty countries shifted from authoritarianism to democracy, and at least a score of other countries were affected by the democratic wave.

THE MEANING OF DEMOCRACY

The transitions to democracy between 1974 and 1990 are the subject of this book. The first step in dealing with this subject is to clarify the meaning of democracy and democratization as they are used in this book.

The concept of democracy as a form of government goes back to the Greek philosophers. Its modern usage, however, dates from the revolutionary upheavals in Western society at the end of the eighteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century three general approaches emerged in the debates over the meaning of democracy. As a form of government, democracy has been defined in terms of sources of authority for government, purposes served by government, and procedures for constituting government.

Serious problems of ambiguity and imprecision arise when democracy is defined in terms of either source of authority or purposes, and a procedural definition is used in this study. In other governmental systems people become leaders by reason of birth, lot, wealth, violence, cooptation, learning, appointment, or examination. The central procedure of democracy is the selection of leaders through competitive elections by the people they govern. The most important modern formulation of this concept of democracy was by Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. In his pathbreaking study, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, Schumpeter spelled out the deficiencies of what he termed the "classical theory of democracy," which defined democracy in terms of "the will of the people" (source) and "the common good" (purpose). Effectively demolishing these approaches to the subject, Schumpeter advanced what he labeled "another theory of democracy." The "democratic method," he said, "is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote."

For some while after World War II a debate went on between those determined, in the classical vein, to define democracy by source or purpose, and the growing number of theorists adhering to a procedural concept of democracy in the Schumpeterian mode. By the 1970s the debate was...