War, Identity and the Liberal State

Everyday Experiences of the Geopolitical in the Armed Forces

Victoria Basham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415583411
• eBook ISBN: 9781135016814
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book critically examines the significance of gender, race and sexuality to wars waged by liberal states. Drawing on original field-research with British soldiers, it offers insights into how their everyday experiences are shaped by, and shape, a politics of gender, race and sexuality that not only underpins power relations in the military, but the geopolitics of wars waged by liberal states. Linking the politics of daily life to the international is an intervention into international relations (IR) and security studies because instead of overlooking the politics of the everyday, this book insists that it is vital to explore how geopolitical events and practices are co-constituted, reinforced and contested by it. By utilising insights from Michel Foucault, the book explores how shared and collectively mediated knowledge on gender, race and sexuality facilitates certain claims about the nature of governing in liberal states and about why and how such states wage war against 'illiberal' ones in pursuit of global peace and security. The book also develops post-structural work in international relations by urging scholars interested in the linguistic construction of geopolitics to consider the ways in which bodies, objects and architectures also reinforce particular ideas about war, identity and statehood.

1 Materialising identity and the British warfare state¹

British society must be defended

Our mission is to protect our country and provide the ultimate guarantee of its security and independence, as well as helping to project its values and interests abroad.

(The UK Defence Vision, MoD)²

When we sign on that dotted line to say we're joining the Air Force we know at some point in time we're going to go to war. We know that entails putting on a respirator, we know it entails somebody taking shots at us. We follow our orders as given to us by the government of the day. We're not being asked to have an opinion, if you want to have an opinion, stay a civvy.

(Mick, Black Officer, RAF)

The characteristic act of men at war is not dying, it is killing … Its peculiar importance derives from the fact that it is not murder, but sanctioned bloodletting, legislated for by the highest civil authorities and obtaining the consent of the vast majority of the population.

(Bourke, 1999:xiii)

Britain has always considered military deployments to be a legitimate and useful way to both protect and project the UK, its way of life, its independence, its values and its interests (Edmunds, 2006; Fey, 2012). As an imperial power, military force was essential to Britain's gaining and maintaining control of land, resources and people across the globe. Although since the end of the Second World War the UK, along with other liberal democratic nations, has been thought of as less militaristic, more welfare focused and so on (Edgerton, 2006), it has continued to wage war and more frequently than most other countries (Fey, 2012). As a member of the UN Security Council, of NATO, of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and a signatory to the European Union Common Security and Defence Policy, Britain's armed forces can be deployed alone or in coalitions, for war-fighting but also conflict prevention, “peacekeeping”, sanctions implementation and monitoring, and so on, though the use of the British Armed Forces remains at the sole discretion of the UK government. Britain also maintains a nuclear arsenal in the form of the Trident missile system, the renewal of which is estimated at a cost of £87 billion over the period 2007 to 2062. Military deployments and armaments are thus central to the British state's goals of defending the British population (life) and also society (way of life).

It necessarily follows that the British state must be prepared to send some of its citizens to war to protect others. This is why it trains, equips and deploys what the MoD describes as ‘battle-winning’ armed forces ‘with a war-fighting ethos and a willingness to adapt’.³ Many of the soldiers I met who comprise this combative, versatile and ultimately, victorious military, expressed views similar to that of Mick (above), that whilst they have personal and private opinions, beliefs and ideas about how “just” the wars they are sent to fight might be, they signed on the ‘dotted line’ and from then on they do what they are told by their political masters. However, as Joanna Bourke (1999) argues, wars are about killing; killing that has been sanctioned by states and populations. Though not many soldiers do kill, any of those who sign on the ‘dotted line’ could be asked to. To depoliticise this decision as “once you're in, you should have no say” is itself, therefore, an interesting opinion. The everyday lives of British soldiers are constituted, though not fully determined, in and through performances of what has come to be understood as “soldiering”. This idea of a depoliticised military is part of this; soldiering is a set of practices made intelligible by material-discursive intra-actions of war, identity and the British liberal state.

The killing that is the characteristic act of war has for centuries been carried out almost exclusively by men. In the British context men continue to dominate the armed forces and defence and most of them are white and assumed to be heterosexual. In the processes of training, equipping and motivating soldiers to fight, and in mobilising civilians to support them, notions of identity, of what it means to be British, of what it means to be masculine, feminine, homosexual, heterosexual, an ethnic minority, a white Anglo-Saxon and so on, have become established as “fact”, privileging some ways of being over others. British society, its state, and its armed forces, have come to understand identity claims through distinct intra-actions of war, citizenship and subject-hood. Particular claims about which citizens should fight and die and for what ends materialise from these.

Each of these visions, of what armed forces and soldiers do, are reminders that there are things about warfare, identity and the British state that have come to be counted as worth remembering and often to the exclusion of others. They are the wider conditions of possibility in which my research participants made sense of and negotiated their lives and experiences, and recounted them to me. In the following chapters, I will focus in on their experiences as a way of thinking through how war and war preparedness is made possible by the everyday practices of soldiers; on how the ways in which identity is interpreted, negotiated, experienced and performed, animate and sustain war. In this chapter, however, I want to consider how their experiences can be located at a particular historical moment at which salient ideas about war, liberal democracy, gender, sexuality and race, have converged in exacting and interesting ways in the UK. In foregrounding what follows, I explore the significant relations of power that provide some insight into how we have come to “know” war in the British context; how who fights, for what, and for whom, has become ‘established as a fact’ (Mills, 2003:67; see also Foucault, 1977; Isin, 1997). I do not propose to provide a complete or linear history of the British state and its military but instead to explore how pertinent “myths” – claims which transform ‘history into nature’ (Barthes, 2000:129) – about what Britain and its armed forces are, and what they do, make war-waging and war preparedness conceivable.

Martin Shaw (1991) argues that British military practices are structured around a ‘national military myth’ that allows the state and its armed forces to control land, resources and people at home and across the globe because of its role in defending the UK from constant threats. This overarching myth materialises through a series of material-discursive claims including that of a British national identity built around a strong armed forces but that is only deployed when clearly justified; of a British national identity that prizes welfare more than warfare; and of a British national and military identity established around a healthy civil-military divide that ensures that the UK is more a welfare than a warfare state. It is through myths such as these that we have come to believe that ‘certain ways of acting’ and being are ‘the only possible or legitimate ordering of practices we can have’ (Falzon, 1998:50). It is by mapping out claims about identity, citizenship, war and war preparedness, and how these claims may have materialised, that we can begin to see an order at work; to discern how these material-discursive power relations discipline and shape the performed and lived realities of soldiers that are so necessary to making war.

Mind the gap

Most civilians don't understand, a lot of politicians don't understand, er, they certainly don't want to understand. And as the number of people in this country who have direct friends in the military reduce year on year on year, it's becoming a bigger challenge, to explain to people what we're about.

(Damien, White Senior Officer, Army)

As my account of my very first day of fieldwork suggests, initially at least, I knew very little about the British armed forces before it became the focus of my research. During fieldwork I was frequently told by soldiers that civilians, from Joe Public to journalists and politicians, simply do not understand what the military does; that direct experience of military service is the only way to understand it but that this is in decline; and, eventually, once I had visited more military bases and spoken to more and more military personnel, that I actually seemed to know what I was talking about and that I had ‘got all the jargon weighed up’ (Adam, White Senior NCO, RN). These comments were always somewhat backhanded compliments, though; my knowledge of military slang and acronyms was always merely “impressive for a civilian”. Rather reassuringly, I was never accepted as someone “of the military”, only ever someone “in” its spaces (Higate, 2003a).

For some scholars, Damien's concerns (above) about a lack of understanding between armed forces and society are symptomatic of a “civil-military gap” (inter alia Moskos, 1977; Dandeker, 2000a; Moskos et al., 2000; Feaver and Kohn, 2001; Strachan 2003). The idea of a civil-military gap or divide is closely associated with the military's ‘peculiar skill’ of managing and applying state-sanctioned violence (Huntington, 1957:11). Denying differences between civilian and military spheres, it is claimed, can facilitate ‘unanticipated militarism’ in society, or lead military personnel to question why they carry the burden of fighting and possibly dying when others do not (Janowitz, 1960:440). Accordingly, the key to balanced civil-military relations lies, for some scholars, in affording militaries just enough divergence from society to maintain a distinctive identity, whilst ensuring that they are responsive to societal change, in order to ensure that democratic control is maintained (Huntington, 1957; Army, 2000; Dandeker, 2000a, 2000b; RAF, 2003).

In the British context, some believe that the civil-military divide is wider than in other countries for particular historical and cultural reasons (inter alia Dandeker et al., 1998; Strachan, 2003; Wither, 2003). For example, historically, Britain has had relatively small standing armed forces and as such direct experience of military service has always been limited. Although Britain has a long history of impressments, stretching back to the Elizabethan era (Royal Naval Museum Library, 2001), The First World War marked the first time that the UK ever resorted to compulsory military service,⁴ and although by the end of the war in 1918 the British military comprised almost 4.6 million troops – and similarly in 1945, troop levels stood at just over 4.9 million – these figures are an anomaly (Rogers and Sedghi, 2012). With the end of conscription in 1962, the British forces reverted to the historical “norm” of being small, professional, volunteer, and largely regular in composition.

Recent direct experience of military service in Britain has actually been in decline since the 1950s,⁵ and there have been gaps between the overall trained strength and the operational requirements of the forces ever since. When conscription ended in 1962, the British military was 434,000 troops strong (Rogers and Sedghi, 2012), but by January 1963, 30 per cent of British Army infantry battalions already had a shortage of troops (Dietz and Stone, 1975). Such deficits cause those who are trained to be “overstretched”, because the fewer the number of trained troops available for active service, the more that those who are trained will be called upon. This overstretch has been further exacerbated over the past 40 years or so by the training requirements of increasingly complex weapons systems. As of 1 January 2012, regular members⁶ of the British military numbered 182,080. Only 173,020 of these troops were trained, and though militaries will always have personnel in training, this represented a 1.7 per cent deficit against its requirement (DASA, 2012a).⁷

Direct experience of military service has also fallen elsewhere. The overall strength of the Reserve Forces – comprising ex-service personnel who remain liable for mobilisation for a period after they have been discharged – has been steadily decreasing since 1992 (DASA 2012b).⁸ The Volunteer Reserves are in decline as well. Their current strength is 29,960⁹ (DASA, 2012b), whereas in 1980 it was 77,100; it saw reductions of almost 60 per cent between 1990 and 2011 alone (Berman and Rutherford, 2012).¹⁰ Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan (1976–79) was the last British Prime Minister to have served, and Britain has not had a Secretary of State for Defence with military experience since Tom King assumed the role under Prime Minister John Major during the 1990–91 Gulf War.¹¹ Whereas 12 of the 23 ministers that comprised Margaret Thatcher's Falklands War cabinet in 1982 had military experience,¹² not a single member of Tony Blair's cabinet during the years of 2001–05, when large numbers of British troops were sent to Afghanistan and Iraq, had any military service.

Enlisted British soldiers have also been less visible in everyday public spaces than in parts of Europe and the US, say. From the early 1970s right up until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, there was a ban on the wearing of British military uniforms in public in an effort to counter IRA threats. Institutions such as schools and universities have also periodically excluded the military from careers fairs and classrooms because of opposition to particular wars, or to the military's discriminatory practices, such as excluding sexual minorities from the forces until 2000. Mick, a Black officer in the RAF I interviewed when he was working in recruiting, told me: ‘People see us in uniform and they ask us, “Excuse me please mate, where is the nearest toilet?” People think we're toilet attendants, or we're car parking attendants.'

However, the notion of a civil-military gap should be approached with caution. Although it might be the case that members of the general public, politicians, journalists, rookie researchers, and so on, do not fully understand military culture, practices and experiences, war and war preparedness saturate British institutions, culture and society. Like most states, Britain makes continual preparations to be able to wage war. These include the training and arming of those who enlist in the armed forces, but also the maintenance of a defence sector, encouraging public support for military deployments and spending, for example. Whether in everyday social practices, institutional arrangements, or Britain's geopolitical activities, war and war preparedness form a significant part of economic, social, cultural and political life in the UK. The pervasiveness of British militaria in everyday sites and spaces ought to prompt us to be mindful that the notion of a civil-military gap may more readily conceal rather than illuminate power relations of war and war preparedness in British society.

Support the troops

British civilians have always played important roles in supporting their troops, including through their labour and their taxes. Although, as noted, conscription is an anomaly of sorts in the British context, and the Military Service Act of 1916 was the first time that compulsory conscription was introduced in modern history, it still took place on a mass scale during the First and Second World Wars, and national service was a feature of my grandfather's life and the men of his generation. Both men and women were deployed to fight wars “over there” or to keep the “home-front” war ready. From the spring of 1941, every woman in Britain aged 18–60 had to be registered with the British state. Their family occupations were recorded, they were interviewed, and they were required to choose a job on the home-front. The 1941 National Service Act (No. 2) meant that by December that year the conscription of women was a legal requirement. Initially, only single women aged 20–30 were called up, but by the middle of 1943 almost 90 per cent of single women and 80 per cent of married women were employed in the “war effort” (Harris, 2011). These were the experiences of the British men and women that I grew up with, who lived in the sheltered housing scheme my mother managed from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. These experiences were tangible, real and present to me, not distant and far removed as common tales of the British civil-military divide suggest.

These experiences also complicate the neat picture of an “all-volunteer force” in other ways. The “Dunkirk spirit” is still to this day evoked by British politicians when seeking to stir up “patriotism” but the actual experiences of British citizens in the World Wars was more mixed than crass caricatures of liberated women working in munitions factories and valiant “tommies” suggest. The much celebrated work of women in munitions factories cost the British state much less than the men who staffed them because women's labour was considered temporary (Smith, 1996). Both men and women working in this war industry worked long shifts, and injuries through accidents and poisoning were common. Moreover, during the First World War around 16,000 British men became conscientious objectors. In the Second World War there were around 61,000 men and women who conscientiously objected.¹³ Only a fraction of these conscientious objectors were exempted from war completely; most had to serve the war effort in non-combatant roles or face courts martial. Few records of conscientious objectors survive in the National Archives, especially after 1921, because the Ministry of Health decided in that year that all papers relating to individual cases should be destroyed.¹⁴ Thus some of the more complex history of the World Wars has been erased literally and figuratively from British cultural and institutional memory.

Today's MoD, which is a fusion of five previous departments of state who once did what the MoD does now,¹⁵ has always relied on non-military personnel to free up soldiers for active duty. In the mid-1970s, civilian staff amounted to the equivalent of around 88 per cent of the total number of military personnel, compared to just 34 per cent in the US Forces in 1970 (Dietz and Stone, 1975). Although modern figures are much lower, as of 1 April 2011 there were 83,100 MoD civilian personnel, the equivalent of around 45 per cent of the number of regulars in the British military (DASA, 2012a). The MoD aims to cut its civilian workforce to 53,000 by 2020 as part of a wider programme of cuts, but this will come with cuts to the military too. Defence cuts also mean that the British military will be increasingly reliant on reservists in the future, including volunteer reservists who whilst enlisted remain in civilian jobs and spaces most of the time. The future reliance on reserves is especially relevant to the Army. In July 2011, the Secretar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Interventions
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary of military terminology and acronyms
• Basic rank structure of the British Armed Forces
• Introduction: The geopolitics of the everyday in the British Armed Forces
• 1 Materialising identity and the British warfare state
• 2 Intimacies of war and gender: the politics of women's bodies in war
• 3 Forbidden intimacies: rethinking military masculinities through heteronormativity and desire
• 4 Imperial encounters and the structural privileging of whiteness
• Concluding thoughts – the march of progress?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index