20th-century models

Communism and fascism

In cold fact, the new Russian government was not quite as new as many of its admirers and enemies believed. Tyranny—the oppressive government of brute force—was as old as civilization itself. The first dictator in something like the modern sense—an absolute ruler owing little or nothing to tradition and in theory untrammeled by any institution or social group—was Julius Caesar, the great-uncle of the emperor Augustus. Caesar took the title of dictator from that of an emergency Roman office, and his assassination in 44 bce foreshadowed the fate of many of his later imitators. Napoleon was the first modern dictator, and he was copied in Latin America, where many a general seized power after the disintegration of the Spanish empire. During the mid-19th-century wars of Italian unification, Giuseppe Garibaldi, idolized as a heroic leader, was briefly recognized as the dictator of Sicily. Born in chaos, commonly sustained by violence, 20th-century dictatorship as a mode of government was always fundamentally unstable, however long it lasted; it was a distilled expression of that craving for order and hatred of perceived threats to order that had always been the justification for autocracy and monarchy. It enacted the belief that society was best governed by the discipline thought necessary in an army at war. Such, too, was the underlying principle of the Soviet Union, though it professed to be a democracy and to be guided by the most advanced and scientific social philosophy of its age.

Vladimir Ilich Lenin and his followers, the Bolsheviks (later known as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), won power in the turmoil of revolutionary Russia because they were abler and more unscrupulous than any other group. They retained and increased their power by force, but they argued that the theories of Karl Marx (1818–83), as developed by Lenin (see Leninism), were of universal, permanent, and all-sufficient validity, that the leadership of the Communist Party had a unique understanding of those theories and of the proper tactics for realizing them, and that therefore the party’s will could never legitimately be resisted. All institutions of the Soviet state were designed primarily to assure the untrammeled power of the party, and no methods were spurned—from mass starvation to the murder of artists—in furtherance of that aim. Even the economic and military achievements of the regime were secondary to that overall purpose; its most characteristic institutions, after the party, were the secret police and the forced labour camps.

The Soviet model found many imitators. Lenin’s strictly disciplined revolutionary party, the only morality of which was unswerving obedience to the leader, was a particularly attractive example to those intent on seizing power in a world made chaotic by World War I. Benito Mussolini of Italy, who won power in 1922, modeled his National Fascist Party on the Leninists, but he also exploited Italian traditions (including that of Garibaldi) in his portrayal of himself as a heroic leader. The ideology he manufactured to justify his regime, fascism, combined strident nationalism with unrelenting bellicosity. Adolf Hitler of Germany added a vicious anti-Semitism and a lust for mass murder to that brew. Mao Zedong in China combined Leninism with a hatred of all the foreign imperialists who had reduced China to nullity. In the Soviet Union itself Lenin’s successor and disciple, Joseph Stalin, outdid his master in building up his power by mass terror and party discipline (see Stalinism). Fascist practices were to some extent adopted by the government of Japan, the Nationalist victors in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and others. All in all, the post-World War I period was characterized by state criminality on an unprecedented scale. It unsurprisingly culminated in World War II, which was marked by even greater atrocities, of which Hitler’s murder of six million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust was the worst.

None of those tyrants can be said to have vindicated in practice their ostensible theories of government; fascism, in particular, was never more than an ideological sham, a facade behind which individuals competed shamelessly for power and wealth. Its only answer to the problems of peace was war. Terror and technology were all that kept their regimes afloat, yet in their time they undeniably had a certain prestige. Liberal democracy and liberal economics had apparently failed, suggesting to some minds that the future of government lay with totalitarianism. (George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-four [1949] depicts the dangers of that possibility.) Indeed, after his country’s victory in World War II Stalin was able to extend the Soviet model to 11 states in eastern and central Europe.

However, after Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet empire began to lurch from crisis to crisis, never resolving its basic dilemma; party dictatorship condemned the Soviet Union and its vassal states to permanent inefficiency and unrest, while reform would destroy the communist ascendancy. In 1985 a new generation came to power under Mikhail Gorbachev, who was willing to take enormous risks in order to revitalize the Soviet empire. Before long, though, the communist regimes in Europe disintegrated, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself dissolved. It suddenly became clear to most of the world that the Leninist experiment had failed as definitively as that of the fascists a generation earlier.

Liberal democracy

Meanwhile, liberal democracy had gotten its second wind. Although the democracies had failed to avert the World Wars and the Great Depression, they crushed the Axis powers in World War II and warded off the rivalry of communism in the Cold War that followed. Those achievements were undoubtedly in large part attributable to the colossal strength of the United States, but that strength itself was largely created by the American system of government, especially in the hands of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. American success scarcely faltered when Roosevelt suddenly died in 1945: by the end of the 20th century the country was generally looked on as the world’s only superpower. Yet the parallel success of many other democracies—and the fact that the American model could not really be exported, being closely adapted to specific American conditions—showed that there was more to the triumph of the West than Americanism.

The democratic system everywhere brought with it growing prosperity, the emancipation of women, recognition of the equal rights of law-abiding individuals and social groups (whatever their origins or beliefs), and a professed commitment to international cooperation; indeed, in the second half of the 20th century no Western democracy made war against any other. The turbulent processes of open debate and decision produced an economic order that was vastly more productive than communist command economies. This gave hope to Western democracies that the world’s largest democracy, India, would before long not only overcome its many intractable problems but also economically catch up with China, where the communists clung to power into the 21st century and made only incomplete adjustments to the social order.

However, the prosperity of Western democracies, as well as their free markets and free political institutions, was putting enormous strain on the rest of the world, since the West used up far more of the globe’s natural and human resources than the size of its population seemed to justify. Non-Western societies were also having to cope with the disproportionate effects of such problems as a rapidly growing population, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the worldwide environmental issues of ozone depletion and global warming. It was natural for some, or most, in every country threatened by the hurricane of change to cling, however futilely, to the shreds of tradition, or even to try to rebuild an order that had failed. So it was in much of the Islamic world, where a resurgence of religious fundamentalism led to campaigns for the establishment of Islamic republics, following the example of Iran and the short-lived Taliban regime of Afghanistan. But religious dictatorships did not seem likely to solve modern problems any better than the military or secular kind had done.