In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Beau Mullen about his article “Democratic and Republican Coups,” from Telos 189 (Winter 2019). An excerpt of the article appears below. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 189 in our online store.
Democratic and Republican Coups
Beau Mullen
This paper focuses on the coup d’état and the possibility that it may function as a check both on the majoritarian impulse in a democratic society and on an executive who transgresses political norms and slides into authoritarianism. I plan to address whether or not such actions and measures should be seen as appropriate when democratically elected regimes engage in abusive constitutionalism, which is defined by David Landau as an incumbents’ constitutional change to entrench their power, modify the constitutional structure to their advantage, and thus undermine the nation’s democracy.
I am particularly interested in the embrace of unconstitutional means of regime change by citizenry faced with extreme circumstances or the perception thereof, especially when the executive is a political strongman. The piece will rely heavily on Ozan Varol’s scholarship on the subject of democratic coups d’état and, to a lesser degree, the reporting of such events in Turkey, Honduras, and Egypt.
In his preface to the 2016 revised edition to his work Coup d’état: A Practical Handbook, Edward Luttwak admits that he failed to mention corruption as a motive for many coups d’état. He writes, “With corruption . . . those who seize power can enrich themselves enormously, sometimes by simply taking what they want from the country’s national bank . . . or, more discreetly, by taking their cut on all state purchases, by exacting bribes from all who need anything from the government, by securing loans from state banks that are never repaid, or by setting up family members as business agents—indeed there are myriad ways of converting state power into self-enrichment.” Luttwak’s cynical view of the motivation of coup plotters, as driven primarily by personal gain even when acting against a fundamentally corrupt regime, is a reflection of the commonly held view on the subject. Coups have occurred primarily in unstable (Luttwak often uses the term “backward”) nations and are more often than not self-serving power grabs on the part of high-ranking military officials who wish to exert control over the government in order to maximize political or economic rewards for themselves by unseating the sitting government, be it a democratically elected official or an authoritarian kleptocracy.
In his 2012 article “The Democratic Coup d’état,” Ozan Varol challenges this traditional view of the subject. Varol posits the idea that while they are certainly a facially anti-democratic phenomenon, some coups, certainly not all, act to promote or establish democratic regimes. These types of coups are an expression of the popular will and occur in nations that are ruled by authoritarian, totalitarian, or otherwise illegitimate regimes. In Varol’s “democratic coups,” the military topples the despot and rules only on a temporary, interim basis while allowing for free and fair elections to be held. Varol explicitly states that for a coup to be considered a democratic coup, it must be staged against an authoritarian or totalitarian regime. He writes:
A coup staged against a non-authoritarian or non-totalitarian government therefore does not constitute a democratic coup under this framework. Many coups have been perpetrated with the ostensible purpose of toppling what military leaders view as corrupt, inefficient, or shortsighted politicians. Those coups fall outside the democratic coup framework because the people may depose such politicians by voting them out of office, without the need to resort to military intervention.
While this distinction certainly makes perfect sense, it makes one wonder about yet another type of coup, one that is staged against a democratically elected government that has abandoned constitutional norms and that is carried out by a military that seeks to return the nation to these norms. In particular, when faced with a regime enjoying a majoritarian mandate and engaging in abusive constitutionalism, responses previously found in comparative constitutional designs, specifically militant democracy (such the German tradition of party banning) and tiered constitutional amendment thresholds, are largely ineffective.
A coup against such an elected government—a “republican coup,” if you will—would of course be by its very nature anti-democratic. The republican coup would also fail to be legitimate in the traditional sense, at least certainly at its outset, as it does not flow down from established authority but instead usurps authority. Rather, its legitimacy, if it was found to have any at all, would stem from a popular recognition that it was in the “spirit of the law” and was staged to preserve republican values against a democratically elected regime that has, for whatever reason, be it corruption or incompetence, violated constitutional norms or placed the nation in peril. This type of action on the part of the military would most likely only be seen as legitimate, similar to Varol’s democratic coups, in nations where the military is not only highly esteemed but also central to the national culture and experience, such as in nations that have a long-standing tradition of universal conscription. Such a coup could simultaneously counteract a majoritarian impulse and be in response to popular opposition.
This type of coup transcends the legal order as the military steps into the role of the sovereign (all the while maintaining adherence to the original principles of the state). The military is essentially deciding on the exception and acting in the place of and subverting the role of the sovereign as viewed by Carl Schmitt. As Schmitt states early in Political Theology, “He [the sovereign] decides whether there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it. Although he stands outside the normally valid legal system, he nevertheless belongs to it, for it is he who must decide whether the constitution must be suspended in its entirety.” In a republican coup, we would see the military deciding on the exception and removing the elected head of state unconstitutionally, paradoxically to ensure compliance with constitutional norms.
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