Transnational Soldiers

Foreign Military Enlistment in the Modern Era

N. Arielli, B. Collins, N. Arielli, B. Collins

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781349340125, 9780230319684
• eBook ISBN: 9781137296634
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Warfare in the modern era has often been described in terms of national armies fighting national wars. This volume challenges the view by examining transnational aspects of military mobilization from the eighteenth century to the present. Truly global in scope, it offers an alternative way of reading the military history of the last 250 years.

1

Introduction: Transnational Military Service since the Eighteenth Century

Nir Arielli and Bruce Collins

The nature and implications of military service have been extensively debated in recent years. While since the end of the Cold War non-state conflicts have become more prominent, the period from the French revolutionary levée en masse in 1793 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 has often been depicted as one in which the mass, largely conscripted and nationally defined army provided the model for military mobilization. Indeed, until the 1990s, the history of military mobilization was traditionally treated in a fairly linear fashion. Professional and limited in size, the armies of the ancien régime were essentially drawn from the two opposite ends of the social scale and often incorporated mercenaries from foreign lands or relied on additional battalions hired from other states. Conversely, twentieth-century armies were large, mostly based on systematic conscription, and rooted in ideas of the national state, in whose service citizens were obliged, or at least encouraged, to fight. The exact starting point of the transition from the former to the latter is disputed. Let us first of all examine the evolution of mass recruitment from within the territories of states. Peter the Great introduced an early form of conscription in Russia in 1705.¹ There were also eighteenth-century attempts to widen military service in Prussia. These arose from a particular conjunction of factors. A small population and a financially poor state created difficulties for an ambitious monarchy, trying to expand its territories in a region without natural frontiers and exposed to greater powers. The only way for Prussia – and for other German states that followed suit – to compete militarily was to compel military service. Conscripts were cheaper and more readily available.

The traditional military history narrative, at least as far as Europe is concerned, sees the French Revolution as an important turning point in the ‘nationalization’ of military service.² The Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) stressed that the security of both citizens and their rights requires public military forces, established for the good of all rather than the personal advantage of the sovereign. The declaration also stipulated that a common contribution was essential for the maintenance of these public forces. Writing a few decades later, Clausewitz remarked that in 1793 war had ‘suddenly become an affair of the people’, all of whom regarded themselves as citizens of the state. Whereas in the past war had been a cabinet affair, now a whole nation with its ‘natural weight’ came into the scale.³ Citizens had a stake in the defence of their state with military service becoming a symbol of model citizenship. The first defenders of the revolution were volunteers, mostly of bourgeois background. When their number proved insufficient, the Republic attempted to call up the entire male population capable of bearing arms. As the social composition of the military changed, so did its image. The armed forces, composed as they were of sons, brothers and husbands, were – or were supposed to be – the subject of the population’s admiration rather than fear.⁴

The explosion of ideas from the 1790s and early 1800s has prompted Russell Weigley to see in the levée en masse ‘the first forging of the thunderbolt of a new kind of war – the total war of nations pitting against each other all their resources and passion’.⁵ Similarly, for David Bell, the Republic’s leaders fought ‘not simply to defeat France’s enemies but to destroy them and to absorb the broken pieces of their regimes into new configurations of power’. Additionally, war became a higher calling, for the extirpation of evil was a necessary preliminary to an age of international stability and peace.⁶ According to Geoffrey Best, Napoleon’s conquests inadvertently exported the notions of the nationalization of war and ‘the militarization of national feeling’ beyond the frontiers of France so that they ‘burst out all over Europe in the winter of 1812–13’.⁷

However, the move to mass conscription, the strict linkage between state, nation, citizen and soldier, and the insistence on the 1790s and 1800s as a revolutionary turning point in military affairs have been called into question. For example, Deborah Avant has argued that the shift to conscript armies and the accompanying cult of the citizen-soldier flowed essentially from specific political responses to military pressures. France in 1793 and Prussia after 1806 reacted to threatened or actual defeat by embracing conscription because their political leadership was in flux and their governments desperately sought military expedients which could not be found by adherence to the military status quo. Avant concluded that ‘Without the Prussian interpretation of the battles of Jena and Auerstadt as demonstrations of the superior fighting capability of citizens, the path toward small professional armies might not have been abandoned’. The success of French conscript armies in 1793–97 and of the Prussian levée en masse in 1813–14 vindicated the experiment and established a new military model.⁸ A different line of criticism has been offered by Arthur Waldron, who concluded a volume of essays on the subject by stressing that the idea of the levée was more powerful than the reality. Across a wide range of examples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the levée in reality was brief, partial and contested.⁹ Even during the wars of 1792–1815 the development of mass, national armies has been qualified by Ute Planert. Large armies were formed, but they were not necessarily in being for long periods. National feelings were aroused, but soldiers deserted in substantial numbers, even from the French armies. Conscription came into force, but exemptions from service were widely obtained.¹⁰

Recent research has, therefore, cast doubts about the linear development of conscription as a direct consequence of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. After 1815, as militarism became unpopular, Prussia alone among the European states retained universal military service without exemption or substitution. Instead, it was the international crises and short wars of the 1850s and 1860s that ushered in a new era of powerful states and more widespread conscription. However, even this shift was not universal. Britain did not turn to conscription until 1916 and even then only temporarily. In many countries beyond Europe and North America the ‘nationalization’ of military service and the creation of a heroic image of the citizen-soldier did not take place before the second half of the twentieth century. In China, for instance, the negative Confucian perception of soldiery persisted until, under Mao, the old proverb ‘Do not waste good iron for nails or good men for soldiers’ was replaced by a new heroic victor narrative.¹¹

Let us turn now to cross-border mercenary service, which was unexceptionable before the late eighteenth century. Was the 1917 Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana of Madrid correct in stating that ‘Since the Napoleonic Wars, the use of mercenary troops seems to have disappeared for ever’?¹²

The shift from professional armies that relied heavily on mercenaries to national armies can partially be explained through changes in the political landscape and improvements in infrastructure. The golden age of mercenary mobilization in Europe coincided with a period when continental borders were ill-defined and persistently contested. Since so much fighting occurred in central Europe, the obvious place to recruit men was from among the numerous, mostly small and weak, Germanic states and in neighbouring areas. This system became unsustainable after 1815. There were far fewer states in central Europe, while Prussia had expanded its territory and population appreciably. Consequently, the transfer market in military service contracted with the disappearance of early modern recruitment loci. Apart from the increased ‘national’ self-consciousness of the governments of the principal states, transport links were faster and more plentiful, making it easier for continental European governments to raise troops from within their own territories and move them swiftly to their borderlands and the seats of war. Not only did Prussian territorial expansion and military wariness make it difficult for non-German powers to recruit within the reduced number of minor German states, but better roads and the spread of railways in continental Europe made it less important to do so.

Janice Thomson argues that states played a more purposive role in eliminating mercenarism. Governments wanted to avoid being unwittingly dragged into foreign conflicts. The U.S. Neutrality Act of 1794, emulated as it was by other countries, heralded a gradual change in international norms that made states responsible for the actions of their citizens, a process which led to the placing of restrictions on foreign enlistment and recruitment. By extending their right to control citizens’ actions not just within a country but also beyond their boundaries, states during the nineteenth century suppressed large-scale mercenary mobilization. Greater state authority and stronger links between citizen and state not only created the notion of the citizen-soldier but also destroyed the legality and credibility of the mercenary.¹³

However, ‘non-state’ mobilization did not disappear. A recent volume of essays has questioned the conventional assumption that violence in the modern era has been exercised primarily under ‘public’ control, emphasizing the persistence of ‘private’ expressions of violence by mercenaries, pirates and bandits. According to Tarak Barkawi, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not witness a ‘world of Weberian states’ with territorial monopolies on the legitimate use of force. During the Cold War, for instance, both the USA and the USSR advanced their interests by providing wide-ranging ‘advice and support’ for client armies and insurgents around the world. Thus, the ‘coercive power of states has international and transnational dimensions which call into question the adequacy of the idea of the territorial monopolies as a way of thinking about the global organization of force and state power’.¹⁴

The present volume goes a step further. One of its aims is to show that the break with the early modern past was not sharp and universal. The history of military mobilization does not fit neatly into national boxes, not even in the modern era. In fact, the movement from mixed eighteenth-century armies to national armies has often been described in historically inaccurate terms. Governments and military commanders were often forced to turn to transnational recruitment as a result of severe manpower shortages. Napoleon’s armies were far from homogeneous in composition. Half the army he led into Russia in 1812 consisted of Germans, Poles, Italians and many others. In the late 1810s and early 1820s thousands of Europeans fought in the armies of Simón Bolívar against the Spanish in the wars of national liberation in Latin America.¹⁵ Soldiers from non-combatant states took part in the Greek war against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, the internal struggles in the Iberian Peninsula in the 1830s and the war between Uruguay and the Argentine Confederation in the 1840s.¹⁶ Later, recruitment from among enemy prisoners of war, which the international conventions of The Hague (1907) and Geneva (1929) sought to abolish, was still practised extensively in both World Wars.¹⁷ During World War II, the Waffen-SS recruited men of German extraction from outside Germany, including Holland, Hungary and Romania, as well as non-Germans in the Baltic states, Albania, Yugoslavia and elsewhere.¹⁸ Exiled Polish pilots took part in the defence of Britain in 1940 and deserting Japanese soldiers and officers were recruited by the Vietminh to assist in the struggle against the French Expeditionary Corps from late 1945 until the early 1950s. As with many other foreign troops since the late eighteenth century, their military contribution was down-played in post-war national histories.¹⁹

The ambiguities around transnational recruitment and expanded state authority were particularly marked in the mobilization of colonial peoples. When European powers expanded overseas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they tended to use small armies of European soldiers. Indigenous peoples often joined invading armies as allies, to secure advantages in local power struggles, but they were rarely integrated into colonizing armies. Once non-settler colonies grew in geographical extent, it became increasingly difficult to protect and extend them by using only European troops. By the 1790s, the British East India Company operated three armies in India consisting principally of 80,000 locally recruited sepoys. By the mid-1820s those numbers had grown to 230,000 sepoys.²⁰ In their Caribbean island colonies, the British in the 1800s created West Indian regiments of slaves and ex-slaves to meet a regional manpower crisis; these men were less prone to tropical diseases, notably yellow fever and malaria, which speedily killed European troops in the Caribbean.²¹ Various kinds of indigenous recruitment flourished in the nineteenth century. It would be mistake...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Transnational Military Service since the Eighteenth Century
• Section I: Re-examining the Decline of Mercenary Armies, 1776–1815
• Section II: Colonial Military Mobilization
• Section III: After Empire: Flows of Military Talent
• Section IV: Ideology, Adventure, Coercion
• Further Reading
• Index