The Crisis of the Dictatorships. Nicos Poulantzas

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 upheaval in the balance of forces in the world, i.e. to prevent these changes from escaping the controlled readjustment of this balance.

      As far as the attitude of the USSR and the Soviet-bloc countries towards the dictatorial regimes in Portugal, Spain and Greece is concerned, this has certainly been critical and negative, but this does not mean that the Soviet Union and its allies adopted, as states, a policy that effectively challenged these regimes. (This indeed is the least that one can say.) From Greece, where trade and diplomatic exchange with the Soviet bloc experienced a new upswing under the colonels’ junta, through to Spain where a major development in economic relations is now under way, the score is clear enough.

      All this, however, simply concerns the first aspect of the relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, and is sufficiently well-known not to need any emphasis here. The second aspect is far more important – this equilibrium in the balance of forces is a dynamic one, and highly unstable, as it in no way excludes considerable contradictions between the United States and the USSR. In point of fact, there is a permanent readjustment of this balance by way of the policy failures produced by these contradictions. The important factor in this respect is the direct presence of the USSR in the last few years, by way of the Israel-Arab conflict, as a power of the first order in a region that was previously a reserved domain of the United States. The Soviet presence in the Mediterranean is a constituent element of the new readjustment in the balance of forces, and it has major effects for the countries in this region. While provoking attempts by the United States to reinforce control of the NATO countries, it also makes massive and open American intervention in this region far more risky than this was previously, and this can undoubtedly have in Spain, as it already has had in Greece, highly positive effects on the circumstances in which the dictatorships are overthrown. We may say that the popular masses of these countries have been able to take advantage, or will be able to do so, of the contradictions between the United States and the Soviet Union, even though their path lies along a razor’s edge, on account of the intensified efforts at control on the part of the United States. This situation could be seen at work in Greece in the Cyprus conflict, with the spectacular about-turns of the United States due among other things to the firm though cautious attitude of the Soviet Union, an attitude which made a massive American intervention in favour of the military junta altogether too risky.

       III

       The Dominant Classes

      The fundamental question regarding the