Armed Forces, Conflict, and Change in Africa

Henry S. Bienen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429718731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política africana

Nigeria has not evolved political formulas that explicitly allow religion or religious authorities to define legitimacy. There have, however, been struggles carried out in religious terms over constitutional mechanisms for adjudicating conflict. Religion also has been an element in the conflict between ethnic-language groups. Finally, religion provides a language, a set of values, and institutions through which groups struggle and over which groups contend, both within and between religious communities. It has been necessary for northern leaders to stress Islam in order to maintain northern unity. However, Islam itself has worked to intensify fissures opened up by social and economic change in Nigeria. Islam in Nigeria continues to be contentious in both domestic and foreign policy.

1
Armed Forces and National Modernization: Continuing the Debate

There is by now a large literature on the topic: "Armed Forces and National Modernization." Since the 1960s, to the rather general and speculative treatment of the subject has been added significant cross-national aggregate data studies that attempt to correlate military rule with various socioeconomic and political indicators.¹ There is also a growing number of in-depth case studies that explore the nature of military rule and the consequences of military rule. Although these case studies are uneven and still suffer from the difficulty of carrying out interviews with officers, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted men, not to say carrying out systematic surveys of armed forces personnel, many make important contributions to our knowledge of military regimes.² There have also been a number of recent attempts to make comparative studies of a limited number of military regimes in order to look at common themes and to try to isolate critical variables through the methodology of comparative case studies.³ In this last category it is welcome that serious attempts have been made to treat civil-military relations in communist systems in a comparative perspective, for although we have had available for some time studies of the military in individual communist systems, especially the Soviet Union and China,⁴ studies that compare communist systems with one another and/or with developing countries have been of more recent vintage.⁵ Finally, the 1970s continued to abound in works that attempted to provide analysis of military regimes in whole regions⁶ or that even more broadly examined the phenomena of military rule in historical and contemporary perspectives.⁷

Work carried out in the 1970s refined knowledge about civil-military relations and military intervention, rule, and extrication. The availability of specialized journals devoted to the study of armed forces, such as Armed Forces and Society and the Journal of Military and Political Sociology in the United States, gave further impetus to scholarly work.⁸ But it does not seem to me that the work of the mid-1970s and early 1980s alters general conclusions in the study of the military and modernization, although this work does point us in some new directions.

We had come to realize that defining modernization as a dependent variable remained highly contentious. Much of the literature has been addressed to asking: what are the impacts of the military as ruler or as important actor and interest group of national modernization. Various analysts defined modernization in their own fashion, some stressing quantifiable variables such as industrialization, GDP structure or rate of growth, ratios of animate to inanimate energy sources. Others stressed quantifiable variables pertaining to social structure-levels of literacy, urbanization, income distribution. Some observers who focused on economy and society chose to define modernization in terms of factors less easy to quantify or even be precise about, such as national independence, coherence of society, societal stability, or even decency and moral rectitude. Still others tended to stress individual characteristics of personality and behavior, such as autonomy, democratic traits, achievement versus ascriptive orientations.

Unless we have at least a common understanding of the dependent variable, modernization, it is rather difficult to ascertain what are the militaries' impacts. Indeed, it seems to me to make more sense to try to disaggregate or break up the idea of modernization and to look at the relationship of military rule or the size of armed force or the level of professionalization or any variable that pertains to the armed forces and to examine relationships to specific "modernization" outcomes that can be defined as precisely as possible rather than to deal with a grabbag idea of modernization. This point has the more force since although some components of what is commonly thought of as modernization are positively correlated with other components, life expectancy, high levels of literacy, levels of urbanization, rates of growth, and levels of industrialization do not neatly cohere or always even move together in the same direction.

Another reason for breaking up the concept of modernization into various components is that we should be concerned with the evolution of armed forces as this evolution is affected by modernization variables. Indeed, nineteenth and early to midtwentieth century writing on armed forces and society frequently treated modernization variables as the independent ones and looked for consequences for the structure and operation of armed forces. A good deal of writing on the relationship of the state and armed forces looked at the need to develop the state and to industrialize and modernize in order to have an armed forces that could defend the country. When we treat modernization as an independent variable, we should try to relate changes in society that we can describe as specifically possible to the specifics of the structure and functioning of military organizations.

If the highly aggregated concept of modernization has to some extent bedeviled analysis of armed forces and society, especially in developing countries, so too has the category of "the military" created problems for analysis. We can use this term as a kind of shorthand phrase. However, we know by now that there are many varieties of military regimes and that the mix of civilian-military authority varies within military regimes and within civilian ones, as well as between them. Indeed, the taxonomic dichotomy between military and civilian regimes will not stand. We know that there are political systems in which civilian supremacy is clear, where the military operates under civilians whose own power does not depend on the armed forces but where the armed forces have a great deal to say about domestic and foreign policy formulation and even implementation and where the military takes up important shares of the society's resources. Both the United States and the Soviet Union are examples. We know that there are societies in which the regime is a military regime in name but in which all government is highly limited in its scope and where central government does not much affect political life except in a capital city and a few towns. We know that there are civilian regimes that seem increasingly to depend on the military or part of it for their continuation in power, perhaps China during the Cultural Revolution. The alliance may be between the traditional elite and the army or, as in China, between the party and the army. The lines between the latter two may be very blurred, as, for example, when the army and the party were forged out of the same experience in China during the 1920s and the 1930s. There may be a narrow civilian leadership operating on top of a basically military regime. Or there may be a military regime of sorts operating on top of a civil service regime. This would describe many African countries. And within the latter type, there are many gradations and a good deal of flux in the determination of power between military, police, civil service, and civilian politicians.⁹

All this has been by way of saying what is obvious. Military-civilian relations range across a wide spectrum with regard to relative power positions. There is variability with regard to military functions in both military and civilian regimes conventionally denoted. The reasons for military intervention are various, and the military's performance in power is affected by the type of initial interventions, by the power of social groups to aid or impede the military, and by the military's own internal characteristics.

The term the military must also be subjected to qualifications because of the variety of internal characteristics that distinguish particular armed forces. Indeed, as empirical work is carried out on armed forces organizations, we have demystified the term the military by subjecting militaries to the same concern for finding internal factions, ethnic splits, generation gaps, functionally based divisions, and hierarchically based conflicts that has characterized the study of parties and civil services. And we have tried to understand how differences in levels of professionalization and corporatism relate to armed forces' propensities to intervene, affect the way they rule, and affect their extrication from direct rule.

However, making the argument that both the terms modernization and the military need to be handled with care does not release one from looking at relationships between them. I shall characterize very briefly the debates that have taken place on the military and modernization issue and bring us up to date before pushing forward on my own.

The arguments about the military as a modernizing force in developing countries prove the adage that if one waits long enough in social science research and writing, the circle comes full again and again. In the United States, at least, scholars expressed in the 1950s views of militaries derived largely from an understanding of Latin America and of the Balkans, which stated that armed forces were the repositories of authoritarian if not reactionary values and were administratively incompetent organizations. Many maintained these views, but by the 1960s a significant number of analysts were more and more describing militaries as dynamic and were giving to them the task of modernizing transitional societies. Indeed, armed forces often were seen as the only bulwark against instability and the only institution that could compete with communist parties, especially in Asia.¹⁰ A number of arguments were put forward as to why militaries were modernizers. They were said to be the most well-organized institution in society; they were said to be rationally and technologically oriented; that is, for those who accepted a distinction between modernity and tradition based on achievement/ascription, universalistic/particularist, and industrial/nonindustrial dichotomies, militaries were the most modernized forces in relatively nonmodern societies. Militaries were said to be socialized to the norms of modernity and to be development oriented. For those who were worried that high rates of political participation would overwhelm weak institutions, armed forces were frequently seen as rulers who could stabilize by choking off excess political participation. Armed forces were also seen as having individuals who were better educated, more technically skilled, and possessing more expertise and organizational abilities than other institutions in developing societies. As problem solvers, they were said to be more willing to cut the Gordian knots and to impose difficult solutions, by force if need be. It was further argued by some that the armed forces stood above ethnicity; their self-description of being identified with the nation as a whole rather than any particular segment of it was accepted.

As more empirical work was done, a revisionist literature on the military as modernizer took hold. First, doubt was cast on the actual orientations of many armed forces toward development and growth. Military interventions were explained in terms of the personal idiosyncracies of leaders and in terms of internal factionalism that led segments of the military to try to seize the state in order to wield its apparatus against other segments of the military and/or to allow groups of armed men to further their personal welfare. The amount of expertise and technical ability inside armed forces was seen as variable and not necessarily more pronounced than within civilian bureaucracies, business groups, and academic institutions. The armed forces were noted to require civilian input for their rule both for technical needs and for representative functions that the military was reluctant, unwilling, or unable to perform. Even when the military had skills, it was argued that these skills were not always transferable for the requisites of rule. Indeed, the military was frequently seen to block the free use of skills, entrepreneurship, and rational problem solving.

Analysts were not arguing that the failures of military regimes in developing countries were unique but that there were many failures and that these often could be traced to the corporate needs of armed forces. These needs could be seen both in reasons for armed forces' intervention and in the ways that they performed as decision makers, political bargainers, and administrators.

These arguments, as digested and presented in synoptic form above, remain highly general. In truth, analysts more and more came to relate the characteristics of armed forces to broader variables extant in the societies in which militaries lived. They also came to focus on the particular histories of armed forces and societies. They looked to see the interactions of variables that pertained to the internal characteristics of armed forces—their size, structure, levels of professionalization— with broader, societal wide factors such as levels and the rate of growth, public versus private sector share of GDP, class formation, ethnicity. The aim was to see how change in one set of factors might affect alterations in others.

Also, work on armed forces in society in the 1970s was not immune from growing social science concern for bringing to bear international factors to explain national developments. These factors included concern with the armed forces's ideological stances,¹¹ the impact of military assistance on levels of professionalization;¹² diffusion effects of defense spending by one state on its neighbors.¹³ Those who were positive about the military as modernizers stressed that armed forces were the most international of actors. Officers were part of an international community much more than the working class or even members of communist or socialist parties. They went to one another's schools, exchanged doctrines through publications and direct presentations, were linked to one another through military assistance programs and weapons procurements. Those who argued from a "dependista" or dependency point of view debunked the nationalistic character of armed forces, maintaining that they were conservative forces because they refused to break their ties to Western capitalism and they were unwilling to dismantle a structure of state capitalism. Some who argued that militaries in developing countries were tied into the web of dependency relations could be construed to understand this as a modernizing phenomenon since, they insisted, from the standpoint of Western-based multinational corporations and of ruling classes "at the center" and their local counterparts, military regimes often provide the most efficient route to rapid industrialization."¹⁴ This argument relied on resurrecting the idea that the military is industry oriented and a stabilizing force in politics and it can guaran...