The Crisis of the Dictatorships. Nicos Poulantzas

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СКАЧАТЬ apparatus continued to maintain certain ‘reserved domains’;

      (iv) Karamanlis solution;

      (v) Kanellopoulos, a figure of the liberal right, far more open to the resistance organizations than Karamanlis;

      (vi) solution of a transitional government under the aegis of the centre, with a vaguely right social-democratic character of the present German type; etc.

      Analogous scenarios could be drawn up as far as Portugal is concerned, from support for the hard core of the dictatorship, through Caetano-ism with a liberal facade, through to and including a certain form of Spinola-ism or centrist government (viz. the ambiguity of American policy even after the fall of Spinola). In Spain, too, the different options could be listed.

      It is true, certainly, that not all these solutions are supported by the United States with the same intensity, neither with the same constancy or by the same means; the United States attitude, confronted by a number of possible solutions that are ‘acceptable’, ranges from various degrees of support to the more or less passive acceptance of solutions that it considers the lesser evil – up to the point of a certain break. But this in itself shows how simplistic it is to view every change in the dependent countries that does not pass this breaking-point as due or at least corresponding to a conscious and unambiguous act of will on the part of the United States. To say that in Greece, for example, the Karamanlis solution corresponds to American ‘intentions’ is at the same time both true and false, in so far as this solution is for the United States simply one card among others, both ahead and behind certain others in its order of preference.

      This polyvalent tactic of the United States is analogous to the similar tactic of the bourgeoisie in general as regards the forms of its political domination over the popular masses (the extreme case of a social-democratic government, for example, being pursued or at least tolerated by the bourgeoisies according to circumstances), and has both its advantages and its disadvantages. On the one hand, it enables the United States to perpetuate its domination under various forms that are adaptable to the concrete circumstances. On the other hand, forced as it is to multiply its tactics, and given the major weight of the internal factors in each country and above all that of the struggles of the popular masses, the risks of a skid, or total loss of control of a solution originally judged acceptable or even desirable, are many times greater. It frequently happens, then, in the present phase of a rise in popular struggles on a global scale, that the United States loses control of certain cards, to a lesser or greater extent. This is what particularly matters to us here, for the United States’ loss of control is evident in the case of Portugal, and a certain skid has also taken place with Karamanlis over the Cyprus question.

      A second element pertaining to the global strategy of the United States is also involved here. This concerns the extension of the spectrum of solutions judged acceptable or tolerable in this or that country, in a certain region of the world – particularly in Europe. As far as a particular country is concerned, this depends on the opportunities available to the United States for recapturing other countries in the same zone. This is particularly apparent in the case of Cyprus; after the failure of the Greek card (the colonels) to effect a partition of the island that would integrate it into NATO, the Americans played the Turkish card, successfully this time, in so far as the partition of the island, the chief goal sought, seems now to be a fait accompli. As far as the question of NATO and American bases in the Mediterranean is concerned, the degree of escalation of United States policy against regimes liable to challenge its imperial prerogatives depends on the possibilities it has of shifting its bases to neighbouring countries. This explains, among other things, the fact that subsequent to the events in Portugal and Greece, and while those in Spain were still only predictable, the focus of American strategy in the Mediterranean shifted to Italy – not that this in any way means the United States has given up hope as far as Portugal and Greece are concerned.

      2. This plurality of American tactics is not just the product of a conscious decision on their part; it is also related to the contradictions of American capital itself. Under-estimating the internal contradictions of the enemy, in fact, is just another way of over-estimating his strength. Internationalized American capital and the big American multinationals have major contradictions with those fractions of American capital whose base of accumulation and expansion is chiefly within the United States; there is thus a constant oscillation of American policy between an aggressive expansionism, which ultimately carries the day, and a permanent tendency towards a form of isolationism. There is also a further contradiction which does not completely coincide with the former, that between big monopoly capital and non-monopoly capital, which is still significant in the United States; this is expressed, among other things, in the particular way in which the American anti-trust laws operate, these having made difficulties only recently for multinational firms such as ITT and ATT, with a bad reputation. Given the specific form of the American political regime, these internal contradictions come to be translated into important contradictions within the state apparatuses. The peculiarity of the American state is that its ‘external fascism’, i.e. a foreign policy that generally does not hesitate to have recourse to the worst types of genocide, is embodied by institutions which, while far from representing an ideal case of bourgeois democracy (one need only recall the situation of social and national minorities in the USA), still permit an organic representation of the various fractions of capital within the state apparatuses and the branches of the repressive apparatus. A regime of this kind, even though based on a real union sacrée of the great majority of the nation on major political objectives (and a lot could be said about this), is necessarily accompanied by constant and open contradictions within the state apparatuses.

      These contradictions are precisely expressed in the divergent tactics simultaneously pursued by the different American state apparatuses involved in foreign policy. The CIA, the Pentagon and military apparatus, and the State Department often adopt different tactics, as do the Administration and executive branch as a whole as opposed to Congress; this is quite apparent in the cases of Greece, Portugal and Spain. What is more, these tactics are often pursued in parallel, giving rise to parallel networks that take no notice of each other and even combat one another. The case of the CIA and the Pentagon literally short-circuiting the State Department over the Cyprus question, or more recently in Portugal, provides a typical example of these practices. These contradictions also have their own specific effects, which accentuate the risk of skids; they are not just due to the deliberate multiplication of the tactics adopted in a particular case, but also to the parallel and divergent tactics resulting from the specific contradictions within the United States itself. Nothing would be more wrong, then, than to view the United States and its foreign policy as a monolithic bloc without its own internal fissures.

      All these points finally lead to the same conclusions: not only do factors internal to the different countries in the United States’ sphere of influence play the principal role in various conjunctures, but the very interventions of United States foreign policy leave these countries a certain margin of maneouvre, on account of the polyvalent tactics pursued and the contradictions crystallized in them, which relate in the last analysis to the internal contradictions of the enemy.

      This margin of manoeuvre is extended today by the contradictory relations in Europe, and particularly in the Mediterranean region, between East and West – the Soviet Union and the United States – which raises the subsidiary question of the role of the USSR in the changes of regime in the countries with which we are concerned.

      In this case, too, we have to take account of a dual tendency.

      In the first place, there is the understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union on maintaining the global balance of forces between them, as far as the spheres of influence of each of these two superpowers are concerned. Although this in no way means a status quo that is fixed in every detail as far as the internal situation in each country of the respective spheres of influence is concerned, it does mean that the two superpowers do everything in their power (which is far from being absolute) to prevent changes in one country from provoking a long-term СКАЧАТЬ