Jean Blondel

Presidential Republics in Africa from Independence to the Second Decade of the Twenty-first Century

While the duration of the presidential republic has been markedly shorter in Africa than in the United States and in Latin America, there has none the less been a ‘history’ of independent Africa in the context of that model of government. Given that two-thirds of African countries in existence at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century became independent in the 1950s or the 1960s, one can assume that enough political practices developed gradually during the half century of the existence of these countries to justify the view that these, as well as possibly at least some of those which were set up later, especially in the 1970s, came to have a history of their own. What seems realistic is to suggest that African independent countries are intermediate between Latin American countries, which had a long and diverse history, and the countries issued from the Soviet Union, where, by and large, the generation of those who created these polities was still closely involved in running them at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The countries which emerged from the ex-Soviet Union do not ‘have’ a history: their history is in the making.

Introduction: The Need to Study the ‘Presidential Republic’ as a General Phenomenon of Contemporary Government

This book is about a variety of national arrangements and practices, whose common characteristics are to constitute ‘presidential republics’ and which as such have become the main form of government in the contemporary world. It is more realistic to refer to ‘presidential republics’ than to ‘presidential systems’ as what characterises these regimes is, on the one hand, the major importance given to the presidency in a formal document of the State, typically a constitution, and, on the other hand, the key part openly played by the president above all other players in national decision-making, indeed whether that constitutional document is closely applied, ill-applied or scarcely applied.

Has There Been ‘Progress’ in the Characteristic Life of Presidential Republics?

The first of the two questions which have to be answered about the past and present of presidential republics is whether there has been ‘progress’ in terms of the fundamental characteristics displayed by these republics, the ‘progress’ which is being referred to in this context being concerned with the very existence of these countries as presidential republics. This kind of ‘progress’ is therefore not merely whether a given presidential republic succeeds in achieving social or economic development more rapidly at some point in time than at another; nor is it even whether certain political characteristics of these regimes are better implemented at some moments of their history than at others. It is about the truly ‘life and death’ question as to whether these countries are or are not presidential republics at certain points in their history, that is to say whether they happen to be, at particular moments, ruled by usurpers.

How Did Presidential Republics Emerge in Spanish America during the Prolonged and Harsh Independence Process (1810–26)

The Latin American independence process began in 1810, but this was merely the initial part of very difficult and often harsh developments, both in terms of the build-up of the new nations and of the determination of the future political institutions of these new nations, including whether they would become presidential republics; indeed, perhaps only since the beginning of the twenty-first century have presidential republics been fully established in Latin America, although some difficulties still occasionally occurred. The contrast is sharp with the orderly development of the presidential republic in the thirteen North American colonies a third of a century before Latin American countries began their independence process: this was so despite the new American republic having had to face two wars with Britain and after its first constitution, the Articles of Confederation , had proved ill-adapted and was replaced within ten years by a federal presidential compact. There was unity of purpose and widely accepted leadership in the United States, while these characteristics were almost entirely absent in the Latin American case, and, to be precise, specifically in the Spanish American case, at least as long as Brazil remained a monarchy, indeed an ‘empire’, from its independence from Portugal in 1822–1889. Why, then, was there such a contrast? Specifically, how far can the characteristics of the independence process be held responsible for at least some of the major problems which Spanish America had to face afterwards?

The Lack of Success of the Model of the Presidential Republic in Asia and Europe

Somewhat over half the population of the world of seven billion (as of 2010) lives in Asia (56 per cent) and about eight per cent live in Europe: but only eighteen per cent of the presidential republics come from that Euro-Asian ‘landmass’: this is so if we do not take into account the Euro-Asian ‘island’ constituted by those eleven republics which were the object of the previous chapter, an ‘island’ which, from what can be described as ‘old Russia’, extended south of the Caucasus and east to Central Asia. This is indeed why, in the previous chapter, a strong emphasis was placed on the remarkable character of the move from communism to the presidential republic which occurred in the eleven countries concerned but also on the apparent enduring effect of the long domination of the communist single-party system over the political ‘culture’ of the citizens. Yet these eleven presidential republics constitute merely an ‘island’ within Europe and the huge Asian mass; these republics may be large in area, but while they included twelve per cent of all the presidential republics in existence in 2010, their proportion of the world population was under five per cent.

The Quick Move towards the Presidential Republic in Eleven of the Very Different Countries of the Ex-Soviet Union

Probably the views which accounted for the choice of the presidential republic were never as varied, contrasted even, as when 11 of the 15 ‘units’ which formerly composed the Soviet Union decided to opt for that form of government on or soon after becoming ‘independent’ in the early 1990s . The fact that the move was unanimous among these 11 countries strongly suggests that the presidential republic had become the arrangement par excellence across a wide spectrum of key political decision-makers of the late twentieth century world; the matter was analysed in an article of mine published in the Japanese Journal of Political Science in 2012. 1 Communism had once been ‘the wave of the future’: it then spectacularly failed, at any rate in Europe, indeed elsewhere as well, given what its political arrangements really were. The presidential republic thus came to fill what had become an empty space. The ‘model’ of the presidential republic did more, however: it positively proposed a formula which, on the one hand, established a fundamental relationship between the top of the political pyramid and the people, but which, on the other hand, accommodated very different approaches to the nature of what that relationship could be in practice.

Presidential Republics alongside Monarchies and between Parliamentary Republics and Regimes of ‘Usurpers’

Presidential republics may be a majority of political systems in the twenty-first century, they are none the less faced with a substantial number of other republics as well as with a substantial number of monarchies. Monarchies constituted nearly half the 56 countries of the world before 1914 (45 per cent): in 2013 there were still 37 monarchies (20.5 per cent of the total), despite the fact that presidential republics had made some gains among older monarchies in Asia (Turkey, Nepal) and in Africa (Egypt, Ethiopia). Meanwhile, in 2013 there were 49 republics which were not presidential: the large majority of these (36) were ‘parliamentary’ in character, but the other 13 divided into four groups. Three countries were highly decentralised, that is to say were even more ‘parliamentary’ than were the ‘classical’ parliamentary republics: these three were, above all, Switzerland, and, in a less convincing manner, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Micronesia. Four countries were ‘communist’, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba. A further four were ‘unclas-sifiable’, Libya, Nepal, Somalia and South Sudan, as the nature of their regime was, in 2013, impossible to determine. Two countries remained, and only two countries, in a fourth category, that of the polities ruled by ‘usurpers’: these were Fiji and Myanmar, which were controlled by the members of the military who had come to power by means of a coup.

Presidential Republics Are Not Inherently Unfit to Govern

It is rather surprising that there should not have been a systematic attempt by political scientists, at any rate for many decades, to account for the fact that, while the presidential republic flourished during over two centuries in the United States, even if with some problems, no European country should have successfully adopted that model in the course of several decades following American independence: as a matter of fact, the only occasion in which such an attempt was made was in France in 1848; but, in 1852, the president who had been elected by universal suffrage, the nephew of Napoleon, usurped his powers, dismissed the constitution and set up an ‘empire’. Perhaps not surprisingly, American-type presidentialism was regarded for a century, at any rate in France, as leading directly to dictatorship. Meanwhile, in Latin America, where the presidential model had been widely adopted, the results were at best unconvincing. Yet, if the presidential republic was good for America, why could such a model of government be ineffective or even ‘dangerous’ elsewhere?

Is ‘Civilian Republican Leadership’ a Realistic Proposition, Especially in New Countries?

It has been argued consistently in this volume that the key ‘presidential’ characteristic of presidential republics made these regimes particularly suited for ‘new countries’, but on the understanding that the satisfactory functioning of these republics also depends on what might be described loosely as a ‘good relationship’ being established between people and president. That requirement is particularly important in the ‘new countries’ throughout the period, which may be long, during which institutions are gradually built, the president being likely to be the only ‘fixture’, so to speak, on the basis of which these institutions are likely to be able to acquire, to use Huntington’s expression, ‘value and stability’ (1968, 12).

Latin American Presidential Republics from about 1830 to the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

In September 1973, the notion that Chile was different from the other Latin American states was brutally shattered by the violent and ruthless takeover of the presidency by General Pinochet, a takeover which led to the death of President Allende, perhaps a suicide, perhaps an assassination: these actions resulted in the establishment of a military form of government which was to last seventeen years in a country which had been said to be immune from such takeovers and which, since the middle of the 1830s, had indeed been regarded as having avoided military coups. There was even a view that, because of a constitution which a very influential minister, Portales, had brought about in 1833, Chile had been able to avoid any kind of illegal governmental ‘replacement’, by the military or any other body. Some aspects of an episode which occurred in the middle of the 1920s had perhaps already indicated that total immunity from such a type of intervention was somewhat unrealistic.