Foreign Fighters and Multinational Armies

From Civil Conflicts to Coalition Wars, 1848-2015

Steven O'Connor, Guillaume Piketty, Steven O’Connor, Guillaume Piketty, Steven O'Connor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032233819
• eBook ISBN: 9781000588170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book showcases new historical research on foreign soldiers, including an overview of the early modern period and numerous case studies which cover the last 175 years and stretch over 5 continents.

The last two decades have seen the term 'foreign fighter' enter our everyday vocabulary. The insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Syrian Civil War and the rise and fall of the Islamic State group have sparked public interest in the phenomenon of people choosing to leave their own country and fight in a foreign conflict. Foreign fighters, their origins, motives, activities and potential danger to their home countries have become subjects of debate, attracting contributions from politicians, military personnel, the media, political scientists, legal scholars but to a much lesser extent from historians. The ten essayss in this volume showcase new historical research on foreign military labour.

The aim of the volume is to better understand the experiences and challenges faced by both the foreigners and the host country, particularly its armed forces, and to highlight the significance of these trends to the contemporary debate on foreign fighters.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal European Review of History.

Part I The impact of foreign soldiers and foreign fighters over the Longue Durée

Foreign military labour in Europe’s transition to modernity

Peter H. Wilson

Abstract

Foreign soldiers were a major element in virtually all European armies between the early sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. The extent and duration of their use clearly indicates they were far more than a temporary expedient adopted solely until states acquired the capacity to organize forces from their own inhabitants. Rather than being a hindrance to state formation, they were integral to that process. Likewise, the formation of European states and an international system based on indivisible sovereignty was not purely competitive: it also entailed cooperation. The transfer of foreign military labour is an important example of this and is central to what can be labelled the European Fiscal-Military System, which assisted the emergence of a sovereign state order and was dismantled as that order consolidated in the later nineteenth century. Wilson’s article articulates ‘foreign soldiers’ as an alternative to the problematic term ‘mercenaries’, and examines their motives, explaining how and why foreign soldiers were recruited by early modern European states.as well as assessing the scale of their employment. The article concludes that the de-legitimation of foreign military labour was connected to fashioning the modern ideals of the citizen-in-arms as part of a more general process of nationalizing war-making.

Foreign soldiers were a structural feature of early modern European warfare and essential to both the growing scale of conflict, as well as to the establishment of permanent state-controlled armed forces. Their significance has been obscured by their general characterization as ‘mercenaries’ in contemporary polemic and later scholarship. Mercenaries have generally been regarded as unwelcome expedients, used by states that either lacked the capacity to organize forces from their own inhabitants, or were ruled by authoritarian elites who preferred foreigners who would not sympathize with domestic opponents.¹ Their widespread use thus becomes a stage in what is generally narrated as the progressive modernization of states and armed forces towards the so-called Westphalian model of the sovereign national state possessing a monopoly on legitimate violence. The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars are widely hailed as the decisive breakthrough to modernity, in which ‘every citizen must be a soldier, and every soldier a citizen’, leading to mass armies and ‘total war’.²

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.Org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

Not only is this narrative a teleology, but it assumes that each successive stage is inherently superior (including in destructive potential) to those that preceded it. Political development is treated as a struggle to nationalize force by monopolizing inhabitants’ military labour, both to employ it in the ‘national interest’, and to control ‘extra-territorial violence’ by preventing people from engaging in wars elsewhere, at least without permission. This idealized Westphalian model of the modern sovereign state was enshrined in international law, notably through The Hague and Geneva conventions of 1907 and 1949. The rapid proliferation of private military and security companies (PMSCs) since the 1990s is widely characterized as the ‘return of the mercenary’, and a sign that the modern international order is under threat and may even be declining.³

Certainly, there are clear signs that security is increasingly no longer provided by governments but instead delivered on their behalf by private companies.⁴ During the 1991 Gulf War, the US employed 5000 contractors, with the ratio to combat troops being 1:55. By 2010, over 250,000 contractors were working for US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ratio had shifted to 1:1. UK spending on contractors doubled across 2001–3 to reach £2bn annually, and has grown substantially since then. After its acquisition of ArmorGroup, the UK-based firm G4S became the world’s largest PMSC and second-largest employer, with 657,000 personnel in 125 countries and an annual turnover of £7.52bn in 2011.⁵ Services range well beyond equipment maintenance, logistics and conventional security, and include intelligence, cyber warfare and the provision of combat forces on land, air and sea.⁶

Accountable to shareholders, not voters, PMSCs are widely criticized within the media and scholarly literature as ‘foreign’ elements within national states threatening the ‘democratic bargain’ of citizenship in return for military service.⁷ It is thus timely to re-examine the place of foreign soldiers in the development of centralized states in Europe across the early modern/modern divide. In doing so, this article will articulate ‘foreign soldiers’ as an alternative to the problematic term ‘mercenaries’, before briefly examining their motives and how these might help inform debates on what today are called ‘foreign fighters’. It will explain how and why foreign soldiers were recruited by early modern European states and assess the scale of their employment. The article then concentrates on how the de-legitimation of foreign military labour was connected to fashioning the modern ideals of the citizen-in-arms and how this belonged to a more general process of nationalizing war-making.

Foreign soldiers in Europe’s Fiscal-Military System

What follows constitutes initial findings from a wider project on how European states raised war-making resources from beyond their own populations and frontiers, and what influence this had on the processes of both state-formation and the development of an international order resting on sovereign national states. It examines the element of cooperation in what is otherwise regarded as an inherently competitive, Darwinian struggle for the survival of the fittest. Thus, the project aims to complement and extend the existing analytical models of the Fiscal-Military State and the Contractor State. The former emphasizes institution-building and revenue raising as each state supposedly strove for autarky through institution-building to maximize resource-extraction.⁸ The latter stresses the continued significance of the ‘private’, in the form of contractors and military entrepreneurs, amidst the development of the ‘public’ (i.e. the early modern state) and examines this primarily through expenditure.⁹

While both approaches provide valuable insights into the relationship between war finance and state development, they generally overlook that inter-state competition was only possible through cooperation with allies, neutrals and even enemies, since states rarely obtained all they needed from their own populations, while governments were usually unable to prevent their own subjects from aiding other powers. Mutuality extended to how states were legitimated, since it was not enough for a state to assert itself militarily; it also had to be recognized as a ‘state’ by its neighbours, some of whom might be long-standing enemies. The emergence of diplomatic conventions and international law were only two aspects of this process. Europe contained many semi-sovereign entities, like the German and Italian principalities and city-states, which not only struggled to preserve or enhance their autonomy, but also provided war-making resources to other, larger states. A host of non-state actors, like merchants, entrepreneurs and bankers, were also involved in supplying war-making resources. These partnerships became sufficiently dense and extensive as to constitute what can properly be called a ‘Fiscal-Military System’ in the accepted definition of a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole. Transfers within the system were handled by intermediaries often based in cities which were not necessarily political capitals, but which functioned as ‘hubs’, or nodal points. The system evolved in parallel with state sovereignty from the 1530s, maturing around 1700 before being progressively dismantled as national states were consolidated between about 1790 and 1870. War-making became fully nationalized, and the last elements of ‘private’ or semi-private extra-territorial violence were almost eliminated. That age is now gone or at least fading rapidly as we enter a postmodern, post-sovereign world order.¹⁰

A taxonomy of foreign military labour

This article focuses on foreign military personnel, who were the most obvious and politically significant aspect of the Fiscal-Military System, alongside the other five primary forms of war-making resources: expertise; information and intelligence; finance and credit; war materials; and the provision of services such as the use of port facilities or transit rights.¹¹ Analysis of foreign soldiers has been clouded by their categorization as ‘mercenaries’. Virtually all definitions share three characteristics.¹² First, mercenaries are allegedly a transhistorical phenomenon which has ‘existed since time immemorial’ and thus a fact of nature, seemingly everywhere and beyond interpretation.¹³ This is reflected through historical surveys charting the use of mercenaries since the ancient world, as well as frequent, if also highly problematic comparisons with prostitution.¹⁴ The second characteristic is that mercenaries are ‘foreign’ in the sense of being non-citizens and non-nationals who have no (legitimate) stake in the conflicts they are involved in. Thirdly, their motivation is invariably characterized as self-interest, especially pecuniary in the popular euphemisms ‘guns for hire’ or ‘soldiers of fortune’.

Clearly, the standard definition has been fashioned through moral critiques and political discourse.¹⁵ This is not to say that it might not still carry analytical weight in some contexts, but for pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Foreign fighters and multinational armies: from civil conflicts to coalition wars, 1848–2015
• Part I The impact of foreign soldiers and foreign fighters over the Longue Dur–e
• Part II The motivations and experiences of foreign fighters
• Part III The nature of coalition warfare during the Second World War
• Index