Out of the Barracks: The Role of the Military in Democratic Revolutions

• Author: Marcos Degaut
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17708194
• Published date: 01 January 2019
• Date: 01 January 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Out of the Barracks:

The Role of the Military

in Democratic Revolutions

Marcos Degaut

1

Abstract

Why some democratic revolutions succeed while others fail? The scholarly com-

munity has sought to address this issue from various perspectives, from rational

choice approaches to collective action theories. Too little attention, however, has

been paid to analyzing the role of the military. By discussing the different types of

interactions played by the military in five cases of successful democratic revolu-

tions—the 1910 Portuguese Republican Revolution, the 1958 Venezuelan Revolu-

tion, the 1960 April Revolution in South Korea, the 1989 Velvet Revolution in

Czechoslovakia, and the 2000 Bulldozer Revolution in Yugoslavia—and three cases

of failed revolutions, the 1905 bourgeois-liberal revolution in Russia, the 1989

Tiananmen Square Protests in China, and the 2016 Turkey’s coup attempt, this study

finds out that the key factor in determining their outcome is the army’s response and

that the military backing is a necessary condition for a democratic revolution to

succeed.

Keywords

civil military relations, coups and conflicts, democracy, cohesion/disintegration

1

Department of Political Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Marcos Degaut, Department of Political Science, University of Central Florida, 4297 Andromeda Loop N.

Howard Phillips Hall, room 302, Orlando, FL 32816, USA.

Email: marcosdegaut@knights.ucf.edu

Armed Forces & Society

2019, Vol. 45(1) 78-100

ªThe Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0095327X17708194

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History has shown that there exist those eventful periods in which people living

under nondemocratic rules not only achieve to impose democratic reforms through

popular uprisings but also force regime change. These phenomena, usually known as

“democratic revolutions,” can be defined as “spontaneous popular uprisings—

peaceful, urban-based, and cross-class in compos ition—which topple unyielding

dictators and begin a transition process which leads to the consolidation of democ-

racy” (Thompson, 2004, p. 1), a definition certainly not consensual.

The events that took place across several republics of the former Soviet Union

and the Balkans during the early 2000s, known as the Color Revolutions, for exam-

ple, as heterogeneous as they are, can be seen as part of the latest stage of a wider

global historical process of rapid political changes, through revolutions, which have

somehow reshaped the world since the late 1980s. The unifying thread between

these movements is their rejection to authoritarianism and their wishes to democratic

reforms. In those cases, tr ansition from dictatorship t o democracy occurred not

through incremental steps, resulting from socioeconomic and political moderniza-

tion, but rather through politico-military efforts to depose an established order and

replace it with new ruling systems and institutions, contrary to the prescriptions of

theorists of political modernization, such as Karl Deutsch and Samuel Huntington.

In those instances, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest

against authoritarian regimes, seeking to remove them from power. This phenom-

enon has drawn the attention of the scholarly community, which has sought to

address the issue from various perspectives. A relatively large number of articles

and books have tried to explain why revolutions occur, why democracies emerge in

some places and dictatorship in others, why some countries succeeded and others

failed to establish, what can happen when the obstacles in the way of democratic

revolutions are removed, whether revolutions have actually brought sociopolitical

evolution, why these revolutions were nonviolent, what type of regimes a re more

susceptible to democratic revolutions, and many other subjects directly linked to

this event.

Goldstone (2000, p. 14), for example, claims that revolutions are caused by the

presence of three variables, popular mass mobilization potential, elite alienation and

divisions, and state resource failures. Gurr (1970) presents the concept of “relative

deprivation,” identifying it as a critical factor to unleash a revolution. Brinton (1965,

p. 18) compares revolution to a fever, that is, not necessarily a positive phenomenon,

but something to be avoided and healed, as “nobody wants to have a fever.” Its

positive aspect is that “for the organism that survives it [ ...] the revolution destroys

wicked people and harmful and useless institutions.” As “symptoms” of this fever,

Brinton cites economic issues, government mismanagement and inefficiency, and

political ambitions of the revolutionaries.

While arguing that revolutionary movements are not simply a reaction to eco-

nomic inequality or exploitation, but mostly to political oppression and violence,

Goodwin (2001, p. 4) distinguishes political from social revolutions, defining the

former as “instances in which a state or political regime is overthrown and thereby

Degaut 79