Which term refers to a military seizure of the government that makes way for military rule?

Personalism

Seizure of power for personal aggrandizement is one of the most common motives for a coup d'etat. One of the most notorious examples of a personalist regime is that of General Idi Amin, who seized power from the corrupt civilian regime of Milton Obote in Uganda in 1971. Some have suggested that Amin's motives in moving against Obote, while the latter was overseas, were essentially personal and stemmed from fears that Obote intended to dismiss Amin. Once in power, Amin sought to enhance personal loyalty by recruiting extensively from his own ethnic group and from the West Nile Province. During his 8 years in power, the hallmark of Amin's rule was personal and group self-interest, a reign of terror against much of the population including the expulsion of all Ugandan citizens of Asian origin and the devastation of the Ugandan economy. Other predatory military regimes in contemporary Africa have been those of General Mobutu of Zaire and Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the notorious self-styled King of the Central African Empire.

Corruption by personalized military governments in Latin America is also well documented. A succession of Venezuelan dictators in the 1930s through the 1950s absconded with hundreds of millions of dollars. Juan Peron of Argentina is alleged to have looted $700 million from his country. More recently, military dictators like Panama's General Manuel Noriega added profits from drug running to the more traditional robbery of the state.

The Crisis of European Science and the Life-World

The period between World War I and the seizure of power by National Socialism in Germany abounds with diagnoses of crises, from the foundational crises in most sciences (claimed for psychology, sociology, economics, etc., following the foundational crisis of classical mathematics so dramatically exposed by H. Weyl in the 1920s) to a general crisis of the times, of intellectual and moral orientation, and of European (‘rational’) culture generally.

Husserl gave much thought to this phenomenon and made out a growing loss of confidence in the sciences hitherto regarded as the firm foundation of Europe's rational culture. He analyzed this situation comprehensively in an article Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie published in 1936 in a new and little-known Serbian journal and later forming the first two parts of the monograph bearing the same title (Husserl, 1954). The sciences, it seemed to him, while ‘functioning’ as well as ever technically, had lost sight of their origin as well as of their aims, and thereby lost their former role and status as a guide and a standard of reliable knowledge and moral responsibility. Husserl hoped for a renewal by recognition of the fact that all scientific knowledge and activity is grounded in and grows out of everyday life. This is a realm usually not reflected upon but capable of thorough analysis as our ‘life-world,’ the domain not only of the physically ‘given,’ but primarily of our social life. Our immediate experience is not that of objects given to our consciousness, but that of situations in which we find ourselves with other people, in social groups and institutions, participating in common meaningful action, handling (linguistic and other) symbols, and approaching with understanding even “the great symbolic systems such as language, myth, religion, art, etc.; all of which are essential elements of the Lebenswelt and therewith of highest interest to the social sciences” (Schütz, 1959: p. 96). The phenomenological analysis of these largely ‘prepredicative’ constituents of the life-world was envisaged by Husserl in the Crisis treatise and begun in his late- and posthumously published work Erfahrung und Urteil (1939), where he has recourse to the life-world and to the primacy of praxis over mere contemplation. But in front of them, he places the ‘prepredicative’ evidence of perception and of judgment based on perception, and thereby once more a prelinguistic foundational domain. The new approach remained to be developed by others.

Conclusion

Studies in the social, natural, and medical sciences on traditional Asian medicines are still in their infancy. Landmark publications in the field of medical anthropology are Charles Leslie's (1976)Asian Medical Systems, which highlight how history, education, changing demographics, and political-economic systems – such as the rise of the bourgeoisie in India, and the seizure of power by the Communist Party in China – gave rise to professionalized forms of literate medical traditions. A decade later, Leslie and Young (1992) explored the same range of medical traditions with a focus on the particularities of their reasoning and on how they legitimated their claim to being scientific.

More recently, two volumes have investigated these traditions from the vantage point of current globalization trends. Alter (2005) points to the need to transcend the focus on the geographically bound nation-state and its corresponding medicine and ask instead when, why, and how medicine can extend beyond the borders of its nationalistic legitimation. Hsu and Høg (2002) emphasize the need to pay more attention to patients and their agency in the context of studying traditional Asian medicines. Patients play an important role in the shaping of contemporary Asian medical treatments, especially their commodified versions that currently are competitive on the neoliberal health market. More needs to be done, particularly on Asian ritual healing and its interface with scholarly traditions and on the toxicology, ethnopharmacology, and ethnobiology of traditional Asian medicines to do justice to their material aspects.

2 Wars and Vietnamese Revolutionary Momentum

The major turning point was 1945, when French colonial power was humiliated by the Japanese supported coup of March 9, 1945, and when in the context of a power vacuum with the Japanese surrender to Allied forces in August 1945, the Communist-led Vietminh organized the seizure of power throughout the country. The last Vietnamese monarch abdicated under revolutionary pressure. Ho Chi Minh's Declaration of Independence from France in September 1945 evoked a powerful nationalist sentiment from all social strata, and garnered widespread support for the first independent government of Vietnam (Marr 1995, 537–9). In the Vietnamese Marxist orthodox discourse, this seizure of power has been referred to as the August Revolution (cach mang thang tam). It was a revolution only in the narrowest sense of the term, that means, as a seizure of administrative power and official marking of the end of the monarchical era. However, even the maintenance of this administrative power in a territorially unified Vietnam came under a serious challenge by France's desire to regain its influence and control of Vietnam and the complications of post-WWII international politics with the post-WWII rise of US power and the Cold War. France's attempt to regain control of Vietnam and its underestimation of the support for Vietnamese independence led to the Franco-Vietnamese war from 1946 to 1954. The US's greater concern with Europe and Soviet influence after WWII, in combination with the Chinese communists' control of mainland China in 1949, shifted US policy towards a support for France and away from Franklin Roosevelt's support for the aspiration for independence of colonized peoples in Asia and Africa. The violent Franco-Vietnamese war ended in 1954, after the Vietminh defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu in the northern highlands. Vietnam was temporarily divided into two parts at the 17th parallel, with the north under Communist control, and the south under American influence.

Ho Chi Minh's vision of a unified Vietnam was not achieved until 1975, after a long and violent war which, in the context of the Cold War, involved a massive US ground involvement in South Vietnam and US bombing of the north and parts of Laos and Cambodia. The Vietnamese Communist Party began lending support to the armed resistance against the US-allied government in Saigon in 1959, helped to establish the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam in 1960, and increased the flow of personnel and arms from the north to the south from 1960 onwards (Cao van Luong et al. 1995, pp. 285ff.). The United States responded by increasing military advisers in South Vietnam to 15,000 by 1963, bombing North Vietnam from 1964 onwards, and introducing ground combat troops to South Vietnam in 1965. At its peak, the US had half a million of combat troops in South Vietnam. In the context of the Cold War, North Vietnam in turn received significant military and economic aid from the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and Cuba. The intense warfare led to the migration of millions of peasants to urban areas in South Vietnam, seriously damaged the South Vietnamese economy, and increased the dependence of the US-supported government in South Vietnam on US aid.

In the US, the draft system and the protracted warfare in Vietnam, exposed daily in the mass media, intensified the antiwar movement, especially among the young. This contributed to the US policy of handling the war to South Vietnamese troops, and to the withdrawal of US ground troops and the end of bombing of North Vietnam by 1973 in the aftermath of the Paris Peace Agreement. South Vietnam enjoyed no peace, as the Paris Agreement was violated by both the Saigon-government troops on the one hand and the North Vietnamese troops and their southern allies on the other. The US-supported government in South Vietnam eventually collapsed in April 1975, under the attack of North Vietnamese troops and their southern allies.

Vietnamese Marxists' seizure of political control in the north by 1954 and in the entire country by 1975 strengthened the foundation for the enactment of their socioeconomic vision. In North Vietnam, the socioeconomic revolution accelerated throughout the 1950s under the Communist vision of a collectivized economy where the state played the dominant role in the industrial and agricultural production process, as well as in the distribution of raw materials and finished products. By 1965, the northern economy was based mostly on the state and cooperative sectors, and sustained by aid from the socialist bloc, as North Vietnam became directly involved in the war against the US and the American-supported government in Saigon. The Communist party's economic vision was imposed on the south after 1975. The economic crisis in the late 1970s, fueled by the resistance of peasants in the southern Mekong Delta to collectivization and the disenchantment of northern cooperative farmers, led to a gradual shift towards a market economy. This process of economic reforms (doi moi) started in agriculture in 1981. The economic reform was reaffirmed at the 1986 Communist Party Congress, and implemented in the rest of the economy by 1989. Cultivators consequently have long-term leases on land, and regain control over production and distribution processes. Private enterprises have been allowed to reemerge in industries and commerce, and foreign direct investments since 1988 have helped to fuel a generally strong economic growth in the 1990s.

Wars and Vietnamese Revolutionary Momentum

The major turning point was 1945, when French colonial power was humiliated by the Japanese-supported coup of 9 March 1945, and when in the context of a power vacuum with the Japanese surrender to Allied forces in August 1945, the Communist-led Vietminh organized the seizure of power throughout the country. The last Vietnamese monarch abdicated under revolutionary pressure. Hồ Chí Minh’s Declaration of Independence from France in September 1945 evoked a powerful nationalist sentiment from all social strata, and garnered widespread support for the first independent government of Vietnam (Marr, 1995, 537–9). In the Vietnamese Marxist orthodox discourse, this seizure of power has been referred to as the August Revolution (cách mạng tháng tám). It was a revolution only in the narrowest sense of the term: a seizure of administrative power and an official marking of the end of the monarchical era. However, even the maintenance of this administrative power in a territorially unified Vietnam came under serious challenges by France’s desire to regain its influence and control of Vietnam, the complications of post-World War II international politics, and the postwar rise of U.S. power and the Cold War. France’s attempt to regain control of Vietnam and its underestimation of the support for Vietnamese independence led to the Franco-Vietnamese war from 1946 to 1954. The United States’ greater concern with Europe and Soviet influence after World War II, in combination with Chinese Communists taking control of mainland China in 1949, shifted U.S. policy toward a support for France and away from U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s support for the independence of colonized peoples in Asia and Africa. The violent Franco-Vietnamese war ended in 1954, after the Vietminh defeated the French at Điện Biên Phủ in the northern highlands. Vietnam was temporarily divided into two parts at the 17th parallel, with the north under Communist control and the south under American influence.

Hồ Chí Minh’s vision of a unified Vietnam was not achieved until 1975, after a long and violent war that, in the context of the Cold War, involved a massive U.S. ground involvement in South Vietnam and U.S. bombing of the north and parts of Laos and Cambodia. The Vietnamese Communist Party began lending support to the armed resistance against the U.S.-allied government in Saigon in 1959, helped to establish the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam in 1960, and increased the flow of personnel and arms from the north to the south from 1960 onward (Lượng et al., 1995, pp. 285ff.). The United States responded by increasing military advisers in South Vietnam to 15 000 by 1963, bombing North Vietnam from 1964 onward, and introducing ground combat troops to South Vietnam in 1965. At its peak, the United States had half a million combat troops in South Vietnam. In the context of the Cold War, North Vietnam in turn received significant military and economic aid from the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, and Cuba. The intense warfare led to the migration of millions of peasants to urban areas in South Vietnam, seriously damaged the South Vietnamese economy, and increased the dependence of the U.S.-supported South Vietnamese government on U.S. aid.

In the United States, the draft system and the protracted warfare in Vietnam, exposed daily in the mass media, intensified the antiwar movement, especially among the young. This contributed to the U.S. policy of handing the war to South Vietnamese troops, and to the withdrawal of U.S. ground troops and the end of bombing North Vietnam by 1973 in the aftermath of the Paris Peace Agreement. South Vietnam enjoyed no peace, as the Paris Agreement was violated by both the Saigon government’s troops, on the one hand, and the North Vietnamese troops and their southern allies, on the other. The U.S.-supported government in South Vietnam eventually collapsed in April 1975, under the attack of North Vietnamese troops and their southern allies.

Vietnamese Marxists’ consolidation of political control (in the north by 1954 and in the entire country by 1975) strengthened the foundation for the enactment of their socioeconomic vision. In North Vietnam, the socioeconomic revolution accelerated throughout the 1950s under a Communist vision of a collectivized economy where the state played the dominant role in industrial and agricultural production, as well as in the distribution of raw materials and finished products. By 1965, the northern economy was based mostly on the state and cooperative sectors, and sustained by aid from the socialist bloc, as North Vietnam became directly involved in the war against the United States and the American-supported government in Saigon. The Communist party’s economic vision was imposed on the south after 1975. The economic crisis in the late 1970s, fueled by the resistance of peasants in the southern Mekong Delta to collectivization and the disenchantment of northern cooperative farmers, led to a gradual shift toward a market economy. This process of economic reforms (đổi mới) started in agriculture in 1981. The economic reform was reaffirmed at the 1986 Communist Party Congress, and implemented in the rest of the economy by 1989. Cultivators in the north consequently have had long-term leases on agricultural land since 1994, and they have regained control over production and distribution processes. In the southern third of the country, land has been under de facto private ownership again since 1988, although the principle of collective ownership is reaffirmed in Vietnam’s 1992 constitution (Article 17) and various land laws. Private industrial and commercial enterprises as well as large private plantations have been allowed to re-emerge.

Foreign direct investments since 1988 have helped to fuel generally strong economic growth, which averaged 7.3% annually in the 1990–2010 period. Vietnam has moved from being one of the poorest countries in the world in 1990 to joining the lower level of middle-income countries by 2008. Poverty has been greatly reduced. Although Vietnam is still a one-party state officially committed to socialism, socioeconomic inequality has sharply arisen.

Military Aggression and Racial Annihilation

Analogous to his domestic policy, Hitler dealt with foreign affairs by adapting a ‘trial and error’ method. Initially he pursued the path of a revision of the Versailles treaty, although being resolved from the start to establish a German hegemony over Europe beyond the territorial limitations of Versailles and to conquer ‘living space’ (Lebensraum) in Eastern Europe. His first step, however, involved breaking the diplomatic isolation of the German Reich, which had been increased by her retreat from the Geneva disarmament conference and the League of Nations in October 1933. By signing the German–Polish nonaggression treaty that ran counter to previous conservative foreign policy, and by concluding a naval agreement with Great Britain, Nazi foreign policy succeeded in undermining the Stresa Front. Despite conflicting interests with respect to Austria's independence, Mussolini entered the Axis alliance in 1936 and joined the Anti-Comintern Pact thereafter.

The domestic corollary of the transition to active foreign policy lay in stepping up the clandestine rearmament, which was already on the way before the seizure of power. Financial and economic policies both gave overall priority to rearmament, culminating in 1936, when the Four Year Plan required the German army to be capable of waging war within a period of 4–6 years. The remilitarization of the Rhineland as well as the introduction of conscription in 1935 was also accepted by the Western powers, despite the fact that they obviously violated the demilitarization provisions of Versailles. The Western powers still believed it was possible to reach an agreement with Hitler and tame his territorial ambitions, even after having acceded to the annexation of the Austrian Republic in March 1938. Not November 1937, but the spring of 1938 became the climacteric of the progress toward open aggression. Although Hitler had played a rather passive role in the Austrian crisis (which had been pushed ahead by Hermann Göring), he was resolved to settle the Sudeten conflict by military means, and his decision to take over the war ministry himself enabled him to act. Neville Chamberlain's decision to continue the policy of appeasement and Mussolini's mediation forced the dictator to reluctantly accept the provisions of the Munich conference in September 1938; however, any expectation that the cession of large parts of Czechoslovakia would curb Hitler's aggressive appetite proved to be utterly wrong – as was proved by the conquest of independent Czechoslovakia and the establishment of the Reich protectorate Bohemia–Moravia in March 1939.

The remilitarization of the Rhineland as well as the introduction of conscription obviously contradicted with the demilitarization provisions of the Versailles peace treaty, but the Western powers did not intervene, still believing that is was possible to reach an agreement with Hitler and to accept his assurance that after the unification of Austria with the Reich there would not be any further territorial demands by Germany. The opposite was true. While Hitler had played a rather passive role with respect to the Austrian crisis, which had been pushed ahead by Hermann Göring, he now was resolved to settle the Sudeten conflict by military means. After the Blomberg crisis Hitler took over the war ministry by himself was resolved to go to war this respect to Czechoslovakia. Neville Chamberlain's intention to avoid a military conflict for the time being as well as Benito Mussolini's intervention that had been endorsed by Göring compelled him to accept the provisions of the Munich conference in September 1938. The expectation that the cession of large territories of Czechoslovakia might curb Hitler's aggressive appetite proved to be utterly wrong and did not prevent the destruction of independent Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and the establishment of the Reich protectorate Bohemia–Moravia.

Introduction

Small group research is a field of empirical research that observes the behavior of groups – and of individuals in groups. These can be natural groups observed in their natural habitat – at the workplace, in the neighborhood, etc. – or ‘artificial’ groups convened in the laboratory, where for the most part, the group members do not know each other. The field was established in the first decades of the twentieth century, and from the very beginning it attracted researchers from both social psychology and sociology. Its establishment was accompanied with high hopes in the field's impact. It appeared that small group research would be able to develop into a specialty that could span these academic disciplines and guide the further development of both.

The nature of the task at hand requires some deliberate restrictions. Historically, small group research is of Northern American origin. This article is concerned mostly with the history of its early development in Northern America and does not discuss the international diffusion of ideas. For many European countries, however, it holds true that small group research was introduced by two cohorts of scientists. The first cohort consisted of people who emigrated in the course of World War II or earlier due to the Nazi seizure of power and returned to their home countries. The second cohort comprises younger researchers who received postgraduate training in the United States during the 1950s. A second restriction is that conceptual or theoretical differences between approaches must be painted with a big brush. The multitude of different conceptualizations of core notions, like, e.g., the group, and the intricacies that this multitude causes for the theoretical discussion must be neglected (but see Mills, 1967, pp. 10–23, for a thoughtful discussion of various mental models).

A recurrent narrative in the historiography of small group research is that after a first bloom in the 1950s, the field receded into the background. Within the disciplines contributing to it, groups conspicuously – and to most commentators spuriously – moved out of focus. Prior to that, however, small group research was a major player and also a signpost, providing orientation on both intellectual, methodological, and organizational issues to many other lines of research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (SBS). An important year in the establishment of the field was 1954, when – after a series of influential monographs (especially Bales, 1950; Homans, 1950) and articles emanating from the work at a handful of research centers in the United States – special issues of the American Sociological Review (ASR 19 (6), December 1954) and Sociometry (17 (2), May 1954) were dedicated to small group research. The latter included an extensive bibliography compiled by Fred L. Strodtbeck and A. Paul Hare (1954), prepared with support by the Ford Foundation's Behavioral Science Division. It documented an increase in magnitude of items on small groups from 0.5 items published per year in the 1890–99 period to 152.5 items in the 1950–53 period. However, these collaborative efforts to create a field that transcends and unifies the various local traditions of small group research, however, were without success; in the 1970s, small group research appeared to be a ‘light that failed’ (Mullins, 1973, p. 105).

This article is structured as follows: after some remarks on theoretical and methodological sources, three traditions of small group research are introduced and their specificities discussed. The adjacent section reports a variety of arguments put forth in the literature to explain the field's loss of influence after 1970. Further, some contemporary attempts to reestablish small group research as a viable field of research are presented. The concluding remarks attempt an outlook on the future of the field.

Stalin and Marxism–Leninism

The events of the Russian Revolutions of February and October 1917 are very well known. In 1918, the name Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) was adopted at Lenin's initiative. It later became the CPSU, which in 1919 reinforced the organizational principle of democratic centralism by setting up a Politburo with its own Secretariat above the Central Committee of the Party. The state was administered in parallel fashion through a Council of People's Commissars appointed by the CPSU from among its own membership. In practice, the CPSU Secretariat controlled the appointment of Party officials to key appointments throughout the state apparatus, which put Stalin, as the General Secretary, in an exceptionally powerful position. The tolerance of debate and dissent within the Communist Party eroded rapidly, especially in the circumstances of the Civil War in Russia. The mutiny of sailors at Kronstadt was crushed in 1921 and at the 10th Communist Party Congress in the same year, factions such as the Workers' Opposition were banned. The treatment of the cultural heresy of the Proletcult has already been noted. By 1922, all other political parties had been banned.

Lenin had developed the vanguard party and led its seizure of power in Russia, an undeveloped and culturally backward country, with the aim of imposing the conditions for socialism. He saw the revolutionary potential of the Russian peasants and attempted to unite them with the proletarian socialist revolution. As we have noted, this strategy was criticized by such as Rosa Luxemburg and Georgi V. Plekhanov (1856–1918), who regarded themselves as orthodox Marxists. They believed that the conditions for socialism required certain necessary stages of economic development and could not be imposed as Lenin believed. In practice, the contradictions of Lenin's policy resulted in the long-term maintenance of a one-party dictatorship that came under the control of the ruthless political organizer Joseph V. Stalin (1879–1953). In his massive book Leninism (1940a), Stalin describes the basic ideology and program, which he described formally as Marxism–Leninism, to be followed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under his direction.

In the pamphlet Foundations of Leninism (1940b), Stalin claimed that Lenin, although the follower of Marx and Engels, unlike them “… pursued his activities in the period of developed imperialism … when the proletarian revolution had already triumphed in one country, had smashed bourgeois democracy and had ushered in the era of proletarian democracy, the era of the Soviets” (Stalin, 1940b: 10). The basics of Marxism–Leninism were in place by the time of Lenin's death in 1924. The ‘toiling masses,’ proletarians and peasants, were to be united in a revolutionary political consciousness developed through the leadership of a communist party of militant intellectuals recruited for their political discipline, knowledge, and capacity for socialist theory. The revolution was to be accomplished in two stages. First, a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ managed by the élite ‘vanguard’ communist party, would suppress counterrevolution, and ensure that natural economic resources and the means of production and distribution were in common ownership. Finally, communism would be achieved in a classless society in which Party and State would have ‘withered away.’

How this would be achieved in practice remained inchoate and there continued criticism and dissension both from foreign communists and within the CPSU. Rosa Luxemburg has been mentioned, but she was murdered by reactionaries in 1919. Karl Korsch, another prominent German communist, and Georgy Lukács, a leading member of the Hungarian Communist Party, set out their concerns in exceptional theoretical works that attempted to recover the original dialectical and Hegelian philosophical basis of Marxism. Korsch's Marxism and Philosophy was published in 1923 and Lukács' Marxism and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist dialectics, which also contained an essay on ‘The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg,’ in 1922. They aroused savage criticism from the Communist International or Comintern (see below) and in practice proved to be of little political importance, although reappearing as inspirations for the New Left in the 1960s. Korsch, a persistent critic of the Soviet Union and the Comintern under Stalin, was expelled from the German Communist Party in April 1926 and in 1936 went to the United States, where he died in 1961. Lukács, on the other hand, recanted his heresy and remained a functionary of the Comintern and a lifelong Marxist–Leninist. It should be mentioned that the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, particularly his concept of hegemony, is often linked with Korsch and the early Lukács, and again was later an inspiration for the New Left. But Gramsci was in practice a convinced Marxist–Leninist charged by the Comintern with the task of Bolshevizing the Communist Party of Italy (PCI). Moreover, he was imprisoned in Italy from 1926 until shortly before his death in 1937. His work on culture, hegemony, and politics found in The Prison Notebooks (1971), although now very influential, only came into prominence some years after World War II.