Civil-military Relations

Building Democracy And Regional Security In Latin America, Southern Asia, And Central Europe

David R Mares

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367315047
• eBook ISBN: 9780429981203
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses the normative and institutional aspects of the civil-military relationship to demonstrate that it is the politics of the relationship rather than its form that influences the likelihood of democracy and regional peace. It is useful for policymakers, academics, and general readers.

Chapter One
Civil-Military Relations, Democracy, and the Regional Neighborhood

David R. Mares

The end of the Cold War produced dramatic changes in both domestic and international politics. Democracy has blossomed, but the economic and political adjustments of the transition have led to severe internal tensions. The possibilities of a great-power war seem remote; regional-level armed confrontations continue unabated. At present the most severe conflicts are occurring largely in the Balkans and among the new states of the former Soviet Union. Elsewhere—Latin America, Southern Asia, and Central Europe—historical animosities, arms races, and domestic instabilities suggest that the future of regional interactions remains uncertain.

The authors of this volume contend that the dynamics of the domestic civil-military relationship determine the likelihood of conflict or cooperation at the regional level. In that arena, international and domestic challenges and opportunities shape a state’s foreign policy preferences. The economic and military interests of civilians and the military are key to determining the degree to which regional relations will be conflictive or cooperative. This chapter proposes a framework that postulates which civilian and military interests are most important in determining policy preferences. It demonstrates how these interests produce variation in the pattern of domestic civil-military relations, and it suggests hypotheses relating patterns of civil-military relations to the consolidation of democracy¹ and to cooperation in regional relations.² The framework uses insights from the study of grand strategy, historical sociology, interest group politics, and organizational theory. The grand-strategy perspective³ suggests the importance of distinguishing among (1) identification of threats (economic, political, and military at both domestic and international levels); (2) elaboration of strategies to counter the identified threats; and (3) implementation of doctrines for each strategy. Historical sociology focuses our attention on the domestic social and economic bases of government,⁴ whereas interest-group politics disaggregates these bases into more specific political actors.⁵ Organizational theory examines how the military’s degree of professionalism, need for autonomy and resources, as well as desire for growth, affect the perception of threat and the options for response.⁶

An important assumption made here is that overt military challenges to fundamental national security assets are unlikely to dominate regional relations. Authors in the realist school contend that territorial and resource disputes will continue into the future, but the authors in this volume maintain that those conflicts will play a secondary role to disputes related to the domestic political and organizational interests of civilian politicians and military officers.

We have also accepted the premise that the civil-military relationship and its potential implications for domestic and regional relations is best studied by undertaking theoretically informed, structured, and focused comparisons within and across regions. To accomplish this, we examine southern Asia (Thailand, Indonesia, India, and Pakistan) and Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, and Guatemala). These cases offer a range of potential causal variables identified in the social-science literature, such as region, type of government, military power, and culture. The addition of three Central European cases (Poland and the Czech and Slovak Republics) helps us evaluate whether unique regional factors are important determinants of behavior. Countries selected also have varied experiences with democratic institutions. India and Venezuela are long-standing democracies; Thailand, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile have recently redemocratized; and Indonesia and Guatemala are suffering a problematic transition toward democracy. The confluence of the end of the Cold War, global economic restructuring, and worldwide political liberalization has affected each country differently.

This introduction begins by developing a typology of civil-military relations and examining the determinants of where a relationship falls in the typology, using as variables political culture and constitutive rules of political interaction. Next I analyze the dynamics of the civil-military relationship by focusing on civilian and military interests as they relate to the potential sources of threat and possible policy responses. The chapter concludes with hypotheses on how civil-military relations influence the consolidation of democracy and produce cooperative or competitive regional relations.

Civil-Military Relations: A Framework for Analysis

The determinants of the civil-military relationship are found in both the political culture of a society and the constitutive rules that arise out of the struggles among its principal political forces to create a governmental structure. Political culture influences but does not determine the construction of the civil-military relationship. Constitutive rules not only affect the role that the military plays in national politics but also influence the mechanisms of control that will permit the dominant coalition to delegate tasks to its subordinate partner.

Political Culture

Political culture comprises “a people’s predominant beliefs, attitudes, values, ideals, sentiments, and evaluations about the political system of its country, and the role of the self in that system.”⁷ Political culture is the product of inherited ideas and historical experience, but at any particular moment, it acts as a causal factor.⁸ Political culture changes very slowly, generally only when there has been a fundamental failure in the old pattern. Some countries studied in this book have experienced such dramatic events—Venezuela in the late 1950s, Argentina in the early 1980s, Central Europe in 1989—so we should see important changes in their political cultures at these moments.

Although political culture consists of cognitive, affective, and evaluative components,⁹ only the first is relevant to our purpose. To identify the “proper” relationship between state and society and to examine the use of state power to confront threats, a focus on beliefs, values, and ideals is sufficient. The affective and evaluative aspects of political culture build on the cognitive and are secondary in identifying threats to the political system.

The cases discussed here present four ideal-type political cultures: liberal, corporatist, militarist, and patrimonialist (see Table 1.1). A liberal political culture is individualist. Society exists for the benefit of its members. The state is subordinated to society. The government exists to defend the individual and not the reverse. Sovereignty rests in the people. There is no “state” but only a “government,” which guides a bureaucratic apparatus, and that government expresses the will of the dominant social forces through the mechanism of free elections that effectively represent the people. The military is part of the governmental apparatus, and as such, it is subordinated to the will of the people via the civilian government.¹⁰

In an organic-corporatist political culture, people speak of the nation in anthropomorphic terms. The nation defines the context in which society exists.¹¹ Sovereignty is inherent in the “state.” Citizens are an agglomeration of groups and not of individuals; individuals define themselves and act in accordance with the group to which they belong. Because the nation is the “parent” of the citizen, each corporatist group has a responsibility for the nation’s defense, but each group expects to be nurtured in return. The military establishment is understood to be the people in arms and therefore has a special responsibility to defend the state. In corporatist states, military participation in politics is facilitated by constitutional clauses that permit fairly easy declarations of states of emergency.¹²

In a militarist political culture, the armed forces are seen as the vanguard in a process of national modernization. The state is organic: It either grows or it dies. Individualism represents a threat to the nation because it subordinates the national good to personal good. In an anarchic world, the military is the repository

Table 1.1 Models of State-Society Relations and the Role of the Military in Each

of the national vision, and there are historical moments in which it has the moral obligation to assume leadership. The organizational and professional qualities of the military are favorably contrasted with those of politicians and leaders of principal social organizations, who are viewed as entrenched political and economic forces that defend their own interests and thus impede development.¹³ The national defense depends on military capacity, and this justifies disproportionate expenditures on technological and industrial innovations.

A neopatrimonial political culture is hierarchical and looks to the personal leader for its cues. The political community is thus defined largely by reach of the ruler’s authority. The people are politically quiescent because they do not believe that they are legitimate actors in the political struggle for influence. Yet the leader’s decisions are not made in a vacuum. The ruler’s power depends upon his ability to secure the support of a “winning coalition” among the political elite. The elite recognize the legitimacy of the ruler and compete among themselves for his favor. The bargain involves an exchange of tribute and loyalty from the elite in return for benefits generated by the power of the government (e.g., office holding and largesse). In this type of political culture, the military is perceived as one more group of elites who wish to gain favor with the leader and whom the leader wishes to include in his coalition.¹⁴

Societies may be dominated by one political culture, as is the case with liberal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• 1 Civil-Military Relations, Democracy, and the Regional Neighborhood
• Part One Conceptions of Civil-Military Relations and Democracy
• Part Two Civilian-Dominated Relationships
• Part Three Civil-Military Partnerships
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index