Civil-Military Relations in Post-Communist Europe

Reviewing the Transition

Timothy Edmunds,Andrew Cottey,Anthony Forster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317970422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Fifteen years after the fall of communism, we are able to appraise the results of the multi-faceted postcommunist transition in Central and Eastern Europe with authority. This volume specifically addresses the fascinating area of Civil-Military relations throughout this transitional period.

The countries of the region inherited a onerous legacy in this area: their armed forces were part of the communist party-state system and most were oriented towards Cold War missions; they were large in size and supported by high levels of defence spending; and they were based on universal male conscription. Central and eastern European states have thus faced a three fold civil-military reform challenge: establishing democratic and civilian control over their armed forces; implementing organisational reform to meet the security and foreign policy demands of the new era; and redefining military bases for legitimacy in society.

This volume assesses the experiences of Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia-Montenegro, Ukraine and Russia in these areas. Collectively these countries illustrate the way in which the interaction of broadly similar postcommunist challenges and distinct national contexts have combined to produce a wide variety of different patterns of civil-military relations.

This book was previously published as a special issue of European Security.

Civi–Military Relations in Postcommunist Europe: Assessing the Transition¹

ANDREW COTTEY,* TIMOTHY EDMUNDS** & ANTHONY FORSTER**

*Department of Government, University College Cork, Cork, Republic of Ireland, **Department of Politics, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

Fifteen years after the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War provides sufficient time to make an assessment of the multi-faceted postcommunist transition in Central and Eastern Europe. This special issue of European Security attempts such an assessment in the area of civil–military relations. When communism collapsed in 1989–91 the countries of Central and Eastern Europe inherited a very particular legacy in relation to armed forces, defence policy and civil–military relations: the armed forces were part of the communist party-state system; they were oriented, except in the cases of Yugoslavia, Albania and arguably Romania, towards the Cold War mission of conflict with the West; they were large in size and supported by high levels of defence spending; and they were based on universal male conscription, which gave them a broad social presence and perhaps made them a unifying social force. Anyone who travelled in communist Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union from the late 1940s to the late 1980s witnessed highly militarised societies, with uniformed soldiers a universal presence.

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe therefore faced broadly similar challenges: reforming the communist party-state system of civi–military relations and replacing it with, hopefully, democratic models of civi–military relations; reducing the size of the armed forces and defence spending and reorienting the military towards new post-Cold War missions; and building new bases of military–society relations. Drawing on the broader civi–military relations literature this special issue assesses the transition in civi–military relations, focusing on these three areas: democracy and the military; defence reform and professionalisation; and the military and society. The articles in this volume examine the postcommunist civi–military transition in eight different countries: Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Romania, Croatia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRS)/Serbia–Montenegro,² Ukraine and Russia. Collectively these countries illustrate the way in which the interaction of broadly similar postcommunist challenges and distinct national contexts (in terms of size, historical legacies, geo-strategic location, political and economic transitions, involvement in violent conflict and integration with NATO and the European Union) have combined to produce a variety of different patterns of civi–military relations. This introduction draws overall conclusions on the transition in civi–military relations in postcommunist Europe. It suggests that the relative, although never absolute, homogeneity of civi–military relations in communist Europe is being replaced by greater diversity: those countries in the process of joining NATO and the EU are developing patterns of civi–military relations similar to those in the long-established democracies of Western Europe and North America; civi–military relations in the former Yugoslavia republics, especially Serbia–Montenegro, have been deeply scarred by the wars of the 1990s and thus face particular problems relating to armed forces roles in those wars, including issues of responsibility for war crimes; Russia, Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics appear to be moving towards situations where civi–military relations are one part of semi- or ‘soft’ authoritarian regimes, while economic problems have resulted in a more general degrading—de-professionalisation—of the military.

Democracy and the Military

Military intervention in domestic politics, and the degree of political independence and influence of the military, are generally seen as one of the key problems, often the central challenge, of civi–military relations. Much of the academic civi–military relations literature is thus devoted to exploring the circumstances that give rise to and the factors that explain military intervention in politics. Much attention is also paid to exploring circumstances and factors that facilitate civilian political control of the military and the establishment of democratic civi–military relations.³ The communist system as it developed in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union resulted in the emergence of a very particular relationship between the military and politics. The military was generally under the strict political, but of course not democratic, control of the civilian communist leadership and had quite limited room for independent political action. At the same time, the military was politicised in the sense that it was one of the vehicle's for society-wide inculcation of communist values. In most cases it was intertwined with the communist party through the establishment of party cells and the oversight of party education officers throughout the armed forces. Finally, although the military's political independence was limited, the military high command retained substantial control over defence policy, military strategy and force structure.⁴ As communism crumbled in the late 1980s and early 1990s this civi–military context raised major questions about the role of the military. To what extent was the military loyal to communism and to what extent would it, either independently or at the behest of or in conjunction with civilian communist leaders, act to defend the old regime? Once the communist regimes fell, the question shifted: to what extent would the armed forces support or resist a transition to democratic civilian political control and the broader de-communisation of the military?

Prior to and during the 1989 revolutions in Eastern Europe there were fears that the military might intervene forcefully to defend the communist regimes. In the event this did not happen, suggesting that, despite forty years of communist penetration, military loyalty to communism in the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact states was probably skin deep. Lech Walesa, former leader of Poland's anti-communist Solidarity movement and the country's first postcommunist President, argued that the Polish military was like a radish, red (communist) on the outside but white (national) on the inside.⁵ As the articles on Poland, Hungary and Romania in this volume indicate the relative ease with which these countries have consolidated democratic civilian control of their armed forces, and the absence of significant opposition to this process from the military itself, reinforces the argument that military loyalty to communism was always skin deep in these states. The situation in the Soviet Union and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) was different. In the Soviet Union elements of the military high command were wary of the reforms introduced by President Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s and played a central role in the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev—indicating the greater loyalty of at least some parts of the Soviet military to communism compared to their Eastern European counterparts. Russian President Boris Yeltsin's success in opposing the coup and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union, however, suggested that the military was both divided and ill prepared to actually implement a coup.

In the SFRJ the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) became closely intertwined with the politics and wars that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s. The JNA was one of the key national institutions that had helped to hold the ethnically fragmented SFRJ and its own institutional identity was closely linked to that of the Federal state. This placed it in natural opposition to the secessionist claims of Slovenia and Croatia and ultimately led to its cooption by the Milosevic regime and its Serbian nationalist project. The JNA became an increasingly Serbian institution, eventually becoming the army of the successor FRY (as the Yugoslav Army or VJ) and now today's Serbia–Montenegro (as the Armed Forces of Serbia–Montenegro or VSCG). The military always retained a strong tradition of professionalism and corporate self-governance, which made it resistant to the more aggressive politicisation attempts of the Milosevic regime. Nevertheless, by the end of the 1990s, its leadership had been filled with Milosevic cronies and as an institution it was inextricably linked to the regime's nationalist project and wars. A decade later the challenges of civi–military relations in Serbia–Montenegro are part of the larger challenge of dismantling that nationalist project and the other pathologies, especially corruption and political cynicism, that it imposed on the country. More widely the future of civi–military relations in the country will be closely connected to the future viability of the state union itself, uncertainty over which has stalled defence reform and intensified domestic political divisions. As Alex Bellamy and Timothy Edmunds discuss in this volume, nationalism and war resulted in similar attempts by the Tuctman regime to politicise the Croatian armed forces and tie them to the Croatian nationalist project. Zagreb's road away from these problems is proving easier than Belgrade's however. This is because, in contrast to Serbia–Montenegro, the Croatian state represents a finished political project. The period since 2000 has also seen the emergence of an increasingly strong domestic political consensus on the direction of the country's foreign and defence policy which has allowed Croatia to press ahead with it civi–military reform process.

Following the collapse of communism, the new democratic regimes in Central and Eastern Europe faced the challenge of establishing democratic civilian political control of the military and reforming the institutions for the management of the armed forces. As the papers by Paul Latawski, Pal Dunay, Larry Watts and Jan Trapans in this volume illustrate, this challenge proved easier than might have been expected. A core group of Central and Eastern European states—Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovenia—have all made substantial progress in entrenching democratic civilian control of the military. In all these states major reforms were undertaken in the early and mid-1990s. New constitutions establishing the principle of democratically controlled militaries were put in place, new chains of command were instituted to operationalise this principle, and the military were depoliticised as the old link between the armed forces and the communist party was broken. Although there were often disputes over the details of such reforms and the old guard in the senior military leadership sometimes obstructed their implementation, there was almost no serious opposition to the principle of civilian democratic control of the military. Where minor crises did occur, moreover, they usually involved disputes between civilian politicians (for example, between Presidents and government ministers) over should control the military, rather than the potentially more serious problem of the military asserting its own right to have a say in politics. There is a strong case that in the sphere of civi–military relations, as more generally, this group of Central and Eastern European states have now reached the stage of democratic consolidation: the principle of democratic civilian control of the military is deeply entrenched and not seriously challenged; institutions have been put in place to put this principle into practice and these institutions function reasonably effectively; and although politics in these countries is sometimes messy and chaotic, serious threats to democracy from the civi–military sphere appear unlikely.

The consolidation of democratic civi–military relations in Central and Eastern Europe also raises interesting questions about how far there are different models of democratic civi–military relations in the region. It is striking that all these countries have adopted models of democratic civi–military relations in which the military is implicitly an institution separate from the rest of society and democracy is exercised in essence through the control of the military by the democratically elected President, government and parliament. This contrasts with the post-1945 Federal Republic of Germany's model, and also the longer-standing Swiss model, of a closely integrated military and society, in which the active participation of civilians in the armed forces through conscription is a central element of ensuring the democratic character of the military.

While the Central and Eastern European states moved down the road towards democratic consolidation in the 1990s, Russia, Ukraine and the other former Soviet republics have faced more difficult political transitions, especially from a democratic perspective. In some cases—as in Belarus and the Central Asian states—communist authoritarianism has been replaced by an old-new brand of postcommunist authoritarianism, with former republican communist party chiefs establishing themselves as national leaders and much of the old communist era political infrastructure remaining in place. In Russia and Ukraine, a more complex situation has emerged with elected Presidents and parliaments in place, a variety of political forces operating but political power increasingly concentrated in the hands of the President and their supporters and weak counterbalancing institutions. Critics thus warn that Vladimir Putin's Russia and Leonid Kuchma's Ukraine have become, or risk becoming, semi- or ‘soft’ authoritarian states in which the concentration of power in the hands of the President and their circle fundamentally undermines democracy. In this context, the military and other security forces such as the interior ministry and intelligence services are some of the key instruments of presidential power.

While much of the academic literature on civi–military relations focuses on the issue of military intervention in domestic politics, one of the main challenges facing the countries of postcommunist Europe has been the related but distinct problem of establishing effective control over defence policy. As we noted above, one feature of communist civi–military relations was the relatively high degree of autonomy given to the military in relation to defence policy. As a consequence, when communism collapsed almost no structures existed for civilian democratic control of defence policy. The new governments in Central and Eastern Europe faced a daunting array of challenges in this area: appointing civilian defence ministers and civilian staff to previously military dominated defence ministries; separating military general staffs from defence ministries and subordinating the former to the latter; putting in place institutions for the management of defence policy, budgets and procurement; and establishing parliamentary committees and procedures for the oversight of defence policy. These issues can be viewed as a set of second generation challenges following on from the basic first generation challenge of ensuring that the military does not intervene in domestic politics.⁶ For much of postcommunist Europe these second generation problems have proved far more challenging than the first generation ones and have comprised the real agenda for civi–military relations since the early 1990s.

As the articles on Poland, Hungary Romania and Latvia in this volume show, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe spent much of the 1990s introducing a series of reforms designed to address these second generation problems.⁷ These reforms proved problematic for two reasons: they involved complex institutional and technical issues, but they also threatened the previous power of the military to shape defence policy and were therefore quite often resisted by senior officers. Despite this, the core group of Central and Eastern European states identified above made substantial progress in implementing such reforms in the 1990s and now mostly have reasonably functioning systems for democratic civilian control of defence policy. Similar patterns have been visible in Croatia from 2000 onwards. This is not to say that these countries do not face problems in these areas. There continue to be problems of mismatches between declared defence policy goals and the resources available to meet these goals, inadequate transparency in relation to defence budgets and procurement and periodic scandals of issues such as procurement and corruption. The lon...