Coup d'état

A coup d'état (/ˌkuː deɪˈtɑː/  listen ; French: [ku deta], literally "blow of state"; plural: coups d'état, pronounced like the singular form), also known simply as a coup (/ˌkuː/), or an overthrow, is the sudden and illegal seizure of a state,^[1][2][3] usually instigated by a small group of the existing government establishment to depose the established regime and replace it with a new ruling body. A coup d'état is considered successful when the usurpers establish their dominance and legitimacy. If a coup fails, a civil war may ensue.

A coup d'état typically uses the extant government's power to assume political control of a country. In Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook, military historian Edward Luttwak states that a coup "consists of the infiltration of a small, but critical, segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder".^[4] The armed forces, whether military or paramilitary, can be a defining factor of a coup d'état.

Etymology

The phrase coup d'État (French pronunciation: ​[ku deta]) is French, literally meaning a "stroke of state" or "blow against the state". In French the word "État", denoting a sovereign political entity, is capitalized.^[5]

Although the coup d'état has featured in politics since antiquity, the phrase is of relatively recent coinage;^[6] the Oxford English Dictionary identifies it as a French expression meaning a "stroke of State". The phrase did not appear within an English text before the nineteenth century except when used in translation of a French source, there being no simple phrase in English to convey the contextualized idea of a "knockout blow to the existing administration within a state".

One early use within text translated from French was in 1785, in a printed translation of a letter from a French merchant, commenting on an arbitrary decree or "arrêt" issued by the French king, restricting the import of British wool.^[7] What may be its first published use within a text composed in English, is in an editor's note in the London Morning Chronicle, 7 January 1802, reporting the arrest by Napoleon in France, of Moreau, Berthier, Masséna, and Bernadotte:

There was a report in circulation yesterday of a sort of coup d'état having taken place in France, in consequence of some formidable conspiracy against the existing government.

In post-Revolutionary France, the phrase came to be used to describe the various murders by Napoleon's hated secret police, the Gens d'Armes d'Elite, who murdered the Duke of Enghien:

...the actors in torture, the distributors of the poisoning draughts, and the secret executioners of those unfortunate individuals or families, whom Bonaparte’s measures of safety require to remove. In what revolutionary tyrants call grand[s] coups d'état, as butchering, or poisoning, or drowning, en masse, they are exclusively employed.^[8]

Since an unsuccessful coup d'état in 1920 (the Kapp Putsch), the Swiss-German word Putsch (pronounced [pʊtʃ], coined for the Züriputsch of 1839), also denotes the same politico-military actions.

Usage of the phrase

Politically, a coup d'état is a usually violent method of political engineering, which affects who rules in the government, without radical changes in the form of the government, the political system. Tactically, a coup d'état involves control by an active minority of usurpers who block the remaining (non-participant) defenders of the state's possible defence of the attacked government, by capturing or expelling the politico-military leaders and seizing physical control of the country's key government offices, communications media, and infrastructure.

In looser usage, as in intelligence coup or boardroom coup, the term simply refers to gaining a sudden advantage on a rival.

Pronunciamiento

Pronunciamiento ("pronouncement") is a term of Spanish and Latin-American origin for a special type of coup d'état. The coup d'état (called golpe de Estado in Spanish) was more common in Spain and South America, while the pronunciamiento was more common in Central America. The pronunciamiento is the formal explanation for deposing the regnant government, justifying the installation of the new government that was effected with the golpe de Estado. In a coup it is the military, paramilitary, or opposing political faction that deposes the current government and assumes power, whereas in the pronunciamiento the military deposes the existing government and installs an (ostensibly) civilian government.^[9]

History

Variations of coups d'état have been among the most common forms of governmental transition, though they have declined worldwide; nowadays they are most common in Africa. Between 1952 and 2000, 33 countries experienced 85 such depositions, with West Africa having the most (42), largely against civil regimes. 27 were against military regimes and in 5 were the deposed incumbents killed.^[10]

Types

Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington identified three types of coup d'état, which correspond to the role the military plays in three different types of praetorian society".^[11] As society changes, so does the role of the military. In the world of oligarchy, the soldier is a radical; in the middle class he is a participant and arbiter; as the "mass society looms on the horizon he becomes the conservative guardian of the existing order".

Breakthrough coups

In breakthrough coups, the soldier plays the role of "reformer", moving the society from "Oligarchical to Radical Praetorianism". "In oligarchical praetorianism the dominant social forces are landowners, the leading clergy, and the wielders of the sword". In "radical" society, the middle-class is an important social and political class. The shift toward "radical" society take the form of slow evolution, or a "breakthrough" to middle-class political participation may be led by civilian intelligentsia. A breakthrough to radical praetorianism (in which the military plays an important role among the middle class who govern) may occur when middle-class officers dislodge the civilian intelligentsia who led the breakthrough, or the military may take power directly from the absolute monarchy or the oligarchs in a military coup.

Examples include:

• Brazil 1889
• Thailand 1932
• Egypt 1952
• Syria 1949
• Iraq 1958
• Pakistan 1958
• Burma 1958
• Togo 1963
• Bolivia 1936
• Guatemala 1944
• El Salvador 1948
• Chile 1924
• Turkey 1980
• Egypt 2013

Arbiter coups

Arbiter coups: In this type of coup, society is in the stage of "radical praetorianism", meaning that the praetorian society is in the "middle stages in the expansion of political participation" - the middle-class (including the military) are actively involved in politics, but the masses are not regularly politically mobilized. This type of society often follows the breakthrough coup, which "clears the way for the entry of other middle-class elements into politics". In radical praetorian society, various middle-class groups may act against one another in riots or demonstrations, and the military will step in with a military coup to re-establish order and "halt the rabid mobilization of social forces into politics and into the streets…to defuse the explosive political situation".

Examples include:

• Peru 1962
• Haiti 1946
• Venezuela 1958
• Bolivia 1964
• Burma 1962

Veto coup d'état

Veto coup d'état: occurs when the army vetoes the people's mass participation and social mobilisation in governing themselves. "Military interventions of this "veto" variety thus directly reflect increasing lower-class political participation in politics". In "veto coups" the soldier plays the role of "guardian of the existing order". In such a case, the army confronts and suppresses large-scale, broad-based civil opposition.

Examples include:

• Argentina 1930
• Chile 1973
• Peru 1962
• Guatemala 1963
• Ecuador 1963
• Honduras 1963
• Turkey 1960
• Indonesia 1965
• Brazil 1964

Other types

Some later writers, such as Justin Ames, have described Huntington's framework as including three types: breakthrough, guardian, and veto (thus ignoring the Arbiter category and dividing the third category into two) and have ascribed patterns to those coups, such as that breakthrough coups are led by junior officers. However, some of the breakthrough coups described by Huntington were led by generals.

• In a bloodless coup d'état, the threat of violence suffices to depose the incumbent. In 1889, Brazil became a republic via bloodless coup; in 1999, Pervez Musharraf assumed power in Pakistan via a bloodless coup; and, in 2006, Sonthi Boonyaratglin assumed power in Thailand as the leader of the Council for Democratic Reform under Constitutional Monarchy.

The self-coup denotes an incumbent government – aided and abetted by the military – assuming extra-constitutional powers. A historical example is President, then Emperor, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. Modern examples include Alberto Fujimori, in Peru, who, although elected, temporarily suspended the legislature and the judiciary in 1992, becoming an authoritarian ruler, and King Gyanendra's assumption of "emergency powers" in Nepal. Another form of self-coup is when a government, having been defeated in an election, refuses to step down.

Populist leaders like Nicolás Maduro and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner make frequent mentions to "soft coups", a conspiracy theory that describes everything that damages the government's reputation in some way as part of a conspiracy. Usual targets of those accusations are the standard political opposition, the freedom of the press, the economic crises and the international criticism.

Coup-proofing

In what is referred to as "coup-proofing", regimes create structures that make it hard for any small group to seize power. These coup-proofing strategies may include the strategic placing of family, ethnic, and religious groups in the military; "creation of an armed force parallel to the regular military"; and "development of multiple internal security agencies with overlapping jurisdiction that constantly monitor one another".^[12] A 2012 study found that some coup-proofing strategies reduce the risk of coups occurring.^[13]

Resistance to coups d'état

Many coups d'état, even if initially successful in seizing centres of state power, are actively opposed by certain segments of society or by the international community, especially when the coup obtained power illegitimately. Opposition can take several forms, including an attempted counter-coup by sections of the armed forces, international isolation of the new regime, and military intervention.

Sometimes opposition takes the form of civil resistance, in which the coup is met with mass demonstrations from the population generally, and disobedience among civil servants and members of the armed forces. Cases in which civil resistance played a significant part in defeating armed coups d'état include: the Kornilov Putsch in Russia in August 1917; the Kapp Putsch in Berlin in March 1920; and the Generals' Revolt in Algiers in April 1961.^[14] The coup in the Soviet Union on 19–21 August 1991 is another case in which civil resistance was part of an effective opposition to a coup: Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, stood on top of a tank in the centre of Moscow and urged people to refuse cooperation with the coup.

Governments following military coups

After the coup d'état, the military faces the matter of what type of government to establish. In Latin America, it was common for the post-coup government to be led by a junta, a committee of the chiefs of staff of the armed forces. A common form of African post-coup government is the revolutionary assembly, a quasi-legislative body elected by the army. In Pakistan, the military leader typically assumes the title of chief martial law administrator.

According to Huntington, most leaders of a coup d'état act under the concept of right orders: they believe that the best resolution of the country's problems is merely to issue correct orders. This view of government underestimates the difficulty of implementing government policy, and the degree of political resistance to certain correct orders. It presupposes that everyone who matters in the country shares a single, common interest, and that the only question is how to pursue that single, common interest.

Current leaders who assumed power via coups d'état

Title	Name	Assumed power	Replaced	Country	Coup d'état
Sultan	Qaboos bin Said al Said[15]1	000000001970-07-23-000023 July 1970	Said bin Taimur	Oman	1970 Omani coup d'état
President	Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo	000000001979-08-03-00003 August 1979	Francisco Macías Nguema	Equatorial Guinea	1979 Equatoguinean coup d'état
President	Yoweri Museveni	000000001986-01-29-000029 January 1986	Tito Okello	Uganda	Ugandan Bush War
President	Omar al-Bashir	000000001989-06-30-000030 June 1989	Sadiq al-Mahdi	Sudan	1989 Sudanese coup d'état
President	Idriss Déby	000000001990-12-02-00002 December 1990	Hissène Habré	Chad	1990 Chadian revolution
President	Isaias Afwerki	000000001991-04-27-000027 April 19912	Mengistu Haile Mariam	Eritrea	Eritrean War for Independence
President	Yahya Jammeh[16]3	000000001994-07-22-000022 July 1994	Dawda Jawara	The Gambia	1994 Gambian coup d'état
Prime Minister	Hun Sen	000000001997-08-01-0000August 1997	Norodom Ranariddh	Cambodia	1997 Cambodian coup d'état
President	Denis Sassou Nguesso	000000001997-10-25-000025 October 1997	Pascal Lissouba	Republic of the Congo	Republic of the Congo Civil War
Prime Minister	Frank Bainimarama	000000002006-12-05-00005 December 2006	Laisenia Qarase	Fiji	2006 Fijian coup d'état
President	Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz4	000000002008-08-06-00006 August 2008	Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi	Mauritania	2008 Mauritanian coup d'état
Prime Minister	Prayuth Chan-ocha	000000002014-05-22-000022 May 2014	Niwatthamrong Boonsongpaisan5	Thailand	2014 Thai coup d'état
President of the Revolutionary Committee	Mohammed Ali al-Houthi	000000002015-02-06-00006 February 2015	Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi6	Yemen	2014–15 Yemeni coup d'état

¹Monarch who overthrew his father in a bloodless palace coup.
²As head of Provisional Government of Eritrea, which declared independence 24 May 1993.
³Subsequently confirmed in office by an apparently free and fair election.
⁴Subsequently confirmed by a narrow margin in the 2009 Mauritanian presidential election, which was deemed "satisfactory" by international observers.
⁵Acting Prime Minister at that time.
⁶Hadi resigned on 22 January 2015.

Other uses of the term

The coup d'état was commonly used in Australia to describe the events of Thursday morning on June 24, 2010, when the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was ousted and replaced by his deputy, Ms Julia Gillard.^[17][18]

The term has also been used in a corporate context more specifically as boardroom coup. CEOs that have been sacked by behind-the-scenes maneuvering include Robert Stempel of General Motors (1992)^[19][20] and John Akers of IBM (1993).^[21][22]

Steve Jobs attempted management coups twice at Apple, Inc.; first in 1985 when he unsuccessfully tried to oust John Sculley and then again in 1997, which successfully forced Gil Amelio to resign.^[23][24]

South Korean recording artist G-Dragon also published an album with this title, Coup d'Etat (G-Dragon album) complete with a title track of the same name.

See also

References

Bibliography

External links

• The dictionary definition of coup d'état at Wiktionary
• Media related to Coups d'état at Wikimedia Commons