Iberian Military Politics

Controlling the Armed Forces during Dictatorship and Democratisation

José Javier Olivas Osuna

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781349459353
  9781137325372
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137325389
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By applying the nodality, authority, treasure and organisation public policy framework and neo-institutional theory to the dictatorship of Salazar and Franco respectively, this study explores the instruments that governments used to control the military and explains the divergent paths of civil-military relations in 20th Century Portugal and Spain.

Part 1

Ambitions and Choices

1

Civil-Military Relations and Policy Instruments

The civil-military relations of Portugal and Spain have taken different trajectories during the twentieth century, in particular during the periods of authoritarian rule of Salazar and Franco and the transitions to democracy that followed. In Portugal, the military, which had overthrown the First Republic in 1926 and peacefully handed power over to a civilian dictator, António Oliveira Salazar, became a threat to the regime and ended up causing the downfall of the authoritarian Estado Novo with the Carnations revolution of 1974. In Spain, the military, which had helped Francisco Franco defeat the Republic in 1939, remained loyal to the dictator’s principles and continued to pose a threat to democracy, culminating in the 23-F coup attempt on 23 February 1981.

This monograph analyses and compares the policy instruments that governments used to control the military throughout two stages of Portuguese and Spanish contemporary history: first, Salazar’s and Franco’s dictatorships and, second, the transitions during the early democratic periods (until 1986). It applies Christopher Hood’s (1983) ‘NATO’ (nodality, authority, treasure, and organisation) framework for the study of the tools of government in order to identify trajectories and establish comparisons across time and across countries. This book shows that there was no one single ‘Iberian’ government style or model of civil-military relations nor a constant country-specific style throughout the period analysed. Authoritarian as well as transitional governments adopted different military policies and combinations of control tools in Portugal and Spain. Only from 1982 onwards can a clear process of convergence be observed in both countries. Finally, this book draws on neo-institutional theory to interpret the evolution of tool choices and civil-military relations. It explains that macro-historical events, such as regime formation periods and wars, generated junctures and new trajectories in the control toolkit and that these trajectories were also shaped by institutional factors and the ideational environment.

This book combines extensive primary and secondary historical research with a political analytical framework. In addition to new facts, it provides – through the systematic application of the NATO framework – an innovative angle on preexisting empirical evidence and an alternative narrative about the evolution of civil-military relations in Portugal and Spain.

1.1 Why study civil-military relations?

The military is an essential instrument in the creation and maintenance of social communities and consequently in the building of nation-states (Finer 1975:84–103). However, history shows that militaries have also used their strength to influence, blackmail, displace, or even supplant governments (Finer 1988 [1962]:127). The interest in studying civil-military relations derived from the special institutional features of the armed forces and in the paradox that the organisation created to protect the polity is granted enough power to overthrow it (Feaver 1999:214).

Even in the twenty-first century, the tensions between the political and military spheres are more than evident in many contexts. The coups in the Central African Republic (2003), Fiji (2006), Guinea (2008), Mauritania (2008), Madagascar (2009), Honduras (2009), Niger (2010), Guinea-Bissau (2012), Egypt (2013), and Thailand (2014) are the latest evidence on how the military can successfully overturn the government of a country.¹ The problems experienced in countries currently trying to consolidate a democratic system, and in particular those belonging to the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, have brought concerns about civil-military relations back to the policy-making and research agendas. For instance, military intervention has been a crucial factor in overthrowing Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt, and Gaddafi in Libya. In Tunisia, the military that helped Ben Ali reach power via a coup in 1987 has exerted pressure on him to leave office (Brooks 2013). Once he had left the country, they judged and sentenced some of the leaders of the former regime and then retreated from the political arena during the transition process. Similarly, in Egypt, the military withdrew its support from the dictator provoking his downfall. However, in Egypt, the military has since actively intervened in the transition process. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces granted itself extensive political powers and was criticised for resisting the electoral results and trying to condition the transitional outcome (Frisch 2013). The civil-military relations remained so tense that one year after the first democratic elections, the military removed President Mohamed Morsi and suspended the new Constitution. In Libya, Islamist militias, NATO airstrikes, and military defectors were instrumental in the defeat of Gaddafi’s regime. Libya now faces the challenge of creating a unified national army to secure the government’s monopoly of violence in order to facilitate democratisation (Gaub 2013).

Since there has been a longstanding normative consensus on the necessity of military subordination, the central question is not whether the military should be controlled but how the military should be controlled. Historians, sociologists, and political scientists have studied the military, their relations with the political power and society at large, as well as the mechanisms or strategies to control them. These concerns that were already present in classical military studies² have been expanded by a substantial body of modern literature which emerged in the twentieth century. Four waves of literature on civil-military relations can be distinguished.³ The first wave appeared before the Second World War and supported the idea of demilitarisation.⁴ The second one emerged during the early Cold War period and discusses the need for a permanent army given the threat to liberty that such an arrangement could pose.⁵ The third wave that began in the 1960s may be divided into two streams: one favouring a sociological examination of the military,⁶ and another focusing on an institutionally oriented examination of civil-military relations in developing countries with a special focus on the problem of military coups.⁷ Finally, after the end of the Cold War, a new wave of civil-military literature has arisen focusing on the new challenges faced by democratic governments and following an approach closer to mainstream political science.⁸

Despite the interesting lessons that all of these works have provided, the underlying concerns and debates in the civil-military relations literature have not evolved greatly. As Forster (2006:11) argues, the literature on civil-military relations has been excessively self-referential and backward looking which has resulted in the slow evolution of the discussion and approaches to the field.⁹ The traditional sociological debates in civil-military relations centred around the concept of professionalisation, the political or apolitical ethos of the military, the need for insulation or integration, and the military’s autonomy remain well entrenched in the literature.¹⁰ These debates, after having dominated the field for several decades, seem to have reached a dead end and have exhausted their capacities of theory generation (Feaver 1999:213). The lack of consensus has hindered cumulative progress. There is enough empirical evidence to challenge the best known theories in the field and more fine-grained analyses and theories are required (Staniland 2008:329)

1.2 Why a ‘tool’ or ‘policy instrument’ approach on civil–military relations?

This book marks a clear departure from the discussions that have dominated the literature and further connects the study of civil-military relations to public policy analysis. Rather than developing a general explanation of military control,¹¹ it focuses on the ‘tools of control’ or ‘policy instruments’ that governments choose. The goal is to contribute to a more fine-grained analysis and nuanced understanding of this complex phenomenon of military control.¹²

This monograph assumes that governments are concerned about military subordination but does not focus on measuring the degree of control over the military.¹³ Instead, it seeks a better understanding about what is actually done to control the military and why. In particular, it explores what instruments were used by the governments to achive military subordination and why they were chosen. This exploration entails moving the focal point back along the causal chain aiming to provide some less divisive common ground of knowledge and a more stable basis for further academic attempts to assess the degree of civilian control and its implications.

Most definitions of the policy instruments and the tools of government stress their role as a means of social control that governments have at their disposal.¹⁴ For instance, Salamon calls them ‘techniques of social intervention’ (1981:256). For Vedung they are ‘techniques by which governmental authorities ... wield their power in attempting to ensure support and effect social change’ (1998:50). Landry and Varone define tools as a ‘means of intervention by which governments attempt to induce individuals and groups to make decisions and take actions compatible with public policies’ (2005:107–8). According to Lascoumes and Le Galès, a policy instrument ‘constitutes a condensed form of knowledge about social control and ways of exercising it’ (2007:3). In sum, policy instruments are the manifestation of the government’s power and consequently, its instrument choices reflect different government strategies or styles. Since an understanding of governments and the way they exercise their power is important for civil-military relations, taking a closer look at the tools that the government employ seems a logical endeavour.¹⁵

The tools can also be considered the building blocks of policies (Linder and Peters 1989:42; Salamon 2002:20). The deconstruction of multifaceted entities, such as policy programmes, into their basic components, tools, allows making sense of the growing complexity involved in modern government action.¹⁶ In this case, the deconstruction of the governments’ strategies to control the military into different and ‘smaller’ instruments helps to identify trends, to establish comparisons, and to trace policy change (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2007:18). Therefore, the dissection of complex military policies into a set of basic policy instruments paves the way for further cumulative research.

Focusing on the the tools used rather than on decision-making processes or on the evaluation of outcomes, reduces subjectivity and simplifies the analysis. Focusing on ‘what government does’ rather than on ‘how it is decided’ or ‘what are its ultimate goals’ diminishes the room for speculation and misunderstandings in the analysis of civil-military relations.¹⁷

Besides, it is interesting to observe the contribution of this book against the backdrop of the still not very well-developed literature on policy instruments.¹⁸ So far, policy instruments have not been sufficiently studied (Vedung 1998:50) nor considered central in political science (Lascoumes and Le Galès 2007:1). Some recent works indicate a revival of the scholarly interest in policy instruments.¹⁹ Despite this revitalisation, empirical studies are still scarce and their comparability is limited in the literature about policy instruments (Landry and Varone 2005:108). Too much attention continues to be devoted to single instrument studies, ignoring that the action of the government in practice always involves a mixture of the whole range of types of tools available (Hood 1983:154; Ringeling 2005:192; Howlett 2005:33). Moreover, the existing literature has failed to address the interplay of explanations based on historical legacies and contextual factors in policy choices. On the whole the policy instrument literature remains somewhat idiosyncratic and fragmented.

This book fills some of these gaps. It provides new empirical evidence drawn from comparative cases showing that governments generally employ combinations of several different types of tools.²⁰ In this endeavour, Hood’s (1983) ‘NATO scheme’ for the study of the tools of government is adapted and used as a framework to deconstruct and compare military policies. NATO is an acronym that refers to the four basic resources that governments possess (nodality, authority, treasure, and organisation) and from which policy instruments draw their power. The analysis in this book shows that Hood’s NATO framewok has the capacity to become a standard framework for future comparative studies in the field of civil-military relations and beyond. Moreover this book explores historical and contextual explanations for tool choice.

In sum, a policy instrument approach to the study of civil-military relations is justified by a series of theoretical considerations and the opportunity to contribute to a developing body of literature. First, policy instruments are manifestations of the government’s power and their stance on social control, which makes them relevant objects of study. Second, the dissection of policies into their basic components, that is, policy instruments, facilitates and strengthens the analysis because it helps make sense of the growing complexity in policy issues by identifying trends, tracing policy change, and establishing comparisons. Thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part 1  Ambitions and Choices
• Part 2  Portugal
• Part 3  Spain
• Part 4  Comparisons and Explanations
• Notes
• References
• Index