Armies and Insurgencies in the Arab Spring

Holger Albrecht, Aurel Croissant, Fred H. Lawson, Holger Albrecht, Aurel Croissant, Fred H. Lawson

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780812293241
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Process
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Following the popular uprisings that swept across the Arab world beginning in 2010, armed forces remained pivotal actors in politics throughout the region. As demonstrators started to challenge entrenched autocratic rulers in Tunis, Cairo, Sana'a, and Manama, the militaries stormed back into the limelight and largely determined whether any given ruler survived the protests. In Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, senior officers pulled away from their presidents, while in Algeria, Bahrain, and Syria, they did not. More important, military officers took command in shaping the new order and conflict trajectories throughout that region. Armies and Insurgencies in the Arab Spring explores the central problems surrounding the role of armed forces in the contemporary Arab world. How and why do military apparatuses actively intervene in politics? What explains the fact that in some countries, military officers and rank-and-file take steps to defend an incumbent, while in others they defect and refrain from suppressing popular protest? What are the institutional legacies of the military's engagement during, and in the immediate aftermath of, mass uprisings?Focusing on these questions, editors Holger Albrecht, Aurel Croissant, and Fred H. Lawson have organized Armies and Insurgencies in the Arab Spring into three sections. The first employs case studies to make comparisons within and between regions; the second examines military engagements in the Arab uprisings in Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria; and the third looks at political developments following the cresting of the protest wave in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and the Gulf. The collection promotes better understanding not only of the particular history of military engagement in the Arab Spring but also of significant aspects of the transformation of political-military relations in other regions of the contemporary world. Contributors: Holger Albrecht, Risa A. Brooks, Cherine Chams El-Dine, Virginie Collombier, Aurel Croissant, Philippe Droz-Vincent, Kevin Koehler, Fred H. Lawson, Shana Marshall, Dorothy Ohl, David Pion-Berlin, Tobias Selge, Robert Springborg.

PART I

Military Politics and Regime Dynamics

CHAPTER 1

Military Relations in Comparative Perspective

David Pion-Berlin

As a thoroughly captivated international audience watched hundreds of thousands of Egyptians pouring into Tahrir Square in January and February 2011 demanding the ouster of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak, the event was also significant for those outside the spotlight: soldiers. While some tanks were visible, parked along the edges of the square, not a single shot was fired by the Egyptian armed forces in order to put an end to the uprising. Egypt was not unique. In Tunisia, soldiers also refused to rescue President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s regime in the face of massive civilian protests. And the Arab Spring itself is not the exception. Militaries from Asia, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union (FSU) republics, and Latin America have remained garrisoned (or quartered, confined to their barracks) or sidelined, refusing to follow presidential orders to suppress civilian uprisings. This was evident during the People Power Revolution in the Philippines in 1986, the Indonesian uprising that toppled longtime military president General Suharto (1998), the “Color Revolutions” in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and the constitutional crises witnessed in several countries of Latin America during the same period.

These forms of military disobedience are not common, but neither are they unique to a specific region, regime, or political culture. They occur most frequently during moments of upheaval, when civilian opposition forces decide that merely changing government policy is not enough, that what is required is a change in government—and at times the regime itself. Civilian opponents have taken to the streets in largely nonviolent acts of protest. If these uprisings reach a critical mass—when so many have joined that the movement seems irreversible and its political force unstoppable—they have the potential to bring down heads of state, governments, and regimes. While the principal protagonists in this drama are the civilian protesters themselves, the security agencies of state—and particularly the armed forces—play a critical role.

Unfortunately, the military has often escaped the notice of scholars who study social movements and political protests.¹ Movement attributes and state-centered political opportunity structures are the twin preoccupations in this literature. Scholars repeatedly fail to acknowledge that the military itself affords protest movements a huge opportunity, both by allowing demonstrations to unfold and by pulling the rug out from under detested political leaders. In every case where a president (and his government) has fallen from power as a consequence of a civilian uprising, the armed forces had refused his pleas for assistance by remaining quartered or on the sidelines. In each instance, police forces were overwhelmed and overrun by the sheer size and persistence of the demonstrations. They retreated, compelling presidents to call on their armed forces to quell the uprising, only to find them unwilling to do so. Military insubordination has helped to bring down authoritarian, hybrid, and democratic leaders and has done so in countries both with and without traditions of military intervention. Conversely, presidents have frequently survived the ordeal when armies chose to defend them.² The parallels are striking, despite the fact that these events occurred in such vastly different corners of the globe.

Why would these armies choose to defy civilian orders to repress and instead remain quartered? Rather than search for region-specific or country-specific explanations, study should search for clues inside the military institution itself, examining motivations stemming from its strategic calculations and professional interests. Certainly, militaries differ by size, resources, political clout, doctrines, and customary roles. However, they all share some core attributes that could serve as a starting point for analysis. The military is goal oriented, weighing the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action in order to maximize its well-being. In the midst of crisis, it makes on-the-spot decisions based on calculations about the president’s chances for survival versus the demonstrators’ determination to bring him down. It wants to bet on the winning side to secure its own position in the future.

Yet the military is not a disinterested bystander wagering on one side or the other. It is a formidable actor whose decisions alter the course of events that unfold in crisis. Those decisions are also guided by core institutional interests that predate the crisis period. The military’s view of the regime will be shaded by its treatment at the hands of political elites in the past. Staying garrisoned can be a means of registering displeasure over resources denied to it. Its view of the demonstrating public will be molded by its connectedness to them and whether coming to their defense is vital to its own professional reputation or whether attachments to the regime override sensitivities to public attitudes. Furthermore, militaries are comprised of individual soldiers who have career aspirations themselves. Officers want to avoid behaviors that could harm their careers by subjecting them to investigation or prosecution.

A brief review of regionally based scholarship suggests no convincing explanations for military defiance of orders to suppress mass civilian uprisings. To the contrary, widely accepted interpretations of civil-military relations in the former Soviet bloc, the Middle East, and Latin America raise more questions instead of providing answers. That leads us to consider a more comparative approach, one that is centered on the military institution itself. By identifying motivational interests shared by all militaries, we can then assess to what extent military decisions to either obey or disobey orders to repress in each of the countries derive from a common set of concerns. Those concerns are twofold. The first refers to making strategic decisions in the midst of crisis that will allow the military to emerge relatively unscathed. The second amounts to institutional motivators for behavior that predate the crisis and revolve around core institutional needs that include organizational survival, protection of material well-being, and enhancement of reputations and avoidance of risks to career advancement. If these motivators can be identified in each of the cases under review, we will have a basis for making more general observations about military dissent that cut across countries and regions. This means that in contrast to the approach chosen by Croissant and Selge in their contribution to this volume, this chapter excludes so-called coup-proofing strategies employed by governments in order to protect their rule against the threat of a military coup d’état.

Regional Realities and Unexpected Military Defiance

The common complaint about comparing cross regionally is that contexts are so unique that they must shape political outcomes in ways that are not comparable or that merely accentuate the differences. If, in fact, comparisons between for example Latin America and the Middle East only result in affirmations about how results differ greatly due to contextual contrasts, then what is the added value of the exercise?

It would be tempting to fall back on idiosyncratic accounts that hinge on the peculiarities of each context to derive a “Middle Eastern” or “Latin American” or “East European” explanation for each set of cases here and settle with that. For example, one could easily see that the Middle East and the FSU, in contrast to Latin America, are two regions practically devoid of a democratic past. Strong traditions of autocratic, sultanistic, and monarchical rule in the Middle East and a long history of Soviet party-styled domination in the FSU followed by electoral authoritarian regimes in the postcommunist era might suggest that the dynamic between the regime, the military, and the protesters would be sizably different from that in Latin America.³We might hypothesize that political leaders in the first two regions would have an easier time demanding compliance from their armed forces because of traditions of obedience to authoritarian leaders (more so in the FSU, less so in parts of the Middle East). Second, since authoritarian regimes are less accountable to the public, they should be able to resort to coercion against civilian protesters more easily than democratic regimes. Without established democratic cultures, laws, and norms in the Middle East and the FSU, we would expect there to be fewer restraints on the use of force against unarmed protesters, and military repression should be a first resort. Generally speaking, authoritarian regimes are less restrained in their ability to use force, and when force is unleashed on unarmed protesters, as it was against the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in 2013, the scale of repression can easily surpass what is observable in democratic countries. This depends, however, on those autocratic regimes having the full cooperation of their armed forces—something that cannot be taken for granted.

The fact is that regional differences pose comparable puzzles more than they expose suitable explanations. Military dissent does not make sense if we consider some of the regional and country-specific traits we know to be true. East European and FSU republics had long legacies of military compliance with the power holder. Scholars concur that the communist parties held enormous power over their militaries, even as they disagreed about how that influence was to be wielded.⁴ A particularly persuasive theory centers on organizational culture perspectives, suggesting that military allegiances to the Communist Party had become deeply ingrained and that those allegiances would be transferred to the new political authorities in the postcommunist era. This is because of a deeply embedded belief that it is not for soldiers to question the commands of legitimate governments—regardless of their ideology or the nature of the party in power.⁵

Whether forced on them or ingrained in their beliefs, soldiers grew accustomed to falling in line with the political authorities over the course of several decades. All of these explanations predict—albeit for different reasons—the military compliance with civilian rule in the postcommunist era in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the FSU states. Ukraine, as a former Soviet state, certainly inherited the traditions of unflinching military subordination to civilian control. An absence of any real military autonomy meant that even after the transition to postcommunist rule, this military did not have the requisite authority to challenge the policies it disagreed with and tended to transfer allegiance to the new rulers. In turn, that mentality should have inhibited the military from defying orders to repress during the Orange Revolution in 2004. The same could be said for the Georgian Rose Revolution the year before and the Serbian Bulldozer Revolution of 2000. But defiance is exactly what these militaries practiced, as they allowed mass protests to triumph against sitting presidents. Why?

The Middle East featured what Eva Bellin (2004) described as robust authoritarian regimes. While other regions were experiencing democratic transitions, or at the very least departures from authoritarian rule, the Middle East seemed relatively immune to such changes—that is, up until the Arab Spring. Scholarship suggested that militaries would choose to defend autocratic regimes against civilian uprisings where they are organized along patrimonial lines. This refers to a military in which career advances are dictated by cronyism rather than merit and where ascriptive ties to regime leaders, based on ethnic, religious, tribal, or familial bonds, are powerful enough to override other imperatives, including defense of the nation and its people (Barany 2011; Bellin 2012; Lutterbeck 2013). Regime survival is of critical importance for the armed forces, not only because soldiers have strong ties to political leaders but because of the material benefits that have accrued to them and the sizable material loss should the regime fall into the wrong hands. Others allege that the armed forces conspire with political officeholders to design systems that are stable and have the veneer of democratic pluralism but are deeply authoritarian. Militaries dominate these systems without governing on a day-to-day basis (Cook 2007). Others contend that the military has been politically marginalized from the centers of governance but cooperate with the regime nonetheless so long as its economic interests are protected.⁶

These views about military support for entrenched authoritarianism are long held, and the surprise with which the Arab Spring struck Middle East scholars as well as many other scholars working on other parts of the world is proof enough that durable autocratic rule was the conventional wisdom. Why, then, did militaries refuse to come to the aid of besieged autocratic leaders in Tunisia and Egypt? Why, in particular, would the Egyptian military abandon Mubarak if it had been the beneficiary of an extensive and elaborate system of patronage and profit-making schemes? The members of the military became huge landowners, had overseen state-owned holding companies, and had won controlling shares in public-private ventures, benefits that expanded greatly under Mubarak (1981–2011) (Harb 2003). They should have been content, willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with their president until the bitter end.⁷ Why didn’t they?

Latin America did have a long history of military praetorianism beginning in the 1930s. The coup d’état was a familiar political event in that region, and few elected governments could serve out their full terms over the course of decades, having fallen prey to military intervention (Lowenthal and Fitch 1986; Loveman 1999). Armies were motivated to unseat political leaders by security concerns, ideologies, class alliances, and professional norms. By contrast, it was uncommon for the military to sit out political conflicts between civilian protesters and regimes by remaining confined to the barracks. Having become political, officers were much more prone to enter the fray either by arbitrating disputes or putting an end to them entirely by seizing power and silencing all those parties and organizations responsible for the conflicts.

However, with the end of the Cold War, the defeat of revolutionary insurgents, and the transitions to democratic rule in the last three decades, the political landscape there has changed dramatically. Significant gains have been made both in progress toward democratic consolidation and civilian control after decades of praetorian intervention. The United States has withdrawn its support for dictatorship, and regional organizations are committed to democratic endurance. Militaries do wield some political influence but mostly within official corridors (Pion-Berlin 1997). Latin American armies have harnessed their energies on behalf of their governments’ domestic and foreign policy objectives: to aid in disaster relief and development projects at home and to join international peacekeeping operations abroad. One country that stands out in particular for having subordinated its armed forces to civilian control is Argentina. Why, then, did its military refuse the urgent pleas of the president in December 2001 to put down a civilian uprising and instead sat on the sidelines and watched as mass demonstrations brought down their commander in chief?

The Case for Cross-Regional, Cross-National Study

Neither the regional authoritarian legacies nor prior military support for regimes or former levels of civilian control will sufficiently account for military dissent from orders to repress in these regions. In fact, the Middle East and FSU countries could be considered least likely cases for military dissent, given how powerful the conditions there were to favor military subordination to or cooperation with incumbent leaders. Naturally, there are other effects that could be considered, and this brief treatment of regime characteristics cannot and should not discount the regional influence. But it does force us to search for other causes that may or may not be entirely unique to one region or another.

It is my view that an analysis focusing only on Middle Eastern, Latin American, or FSU explanations for military dissent is less than desirable. In the end, these accounts may be suitable for one or more locales but will not travel to other regions. As a result, we will never get to a more general account for military dissent that can cross over national and regional boundaries. A better approach is to begin with the military institution and the common core military attributes found nearly everywhere. There is a basic set of concerns shared by all militaries. If we take these into consideration, they give us a single menu of appropriate, comparable motivators from which we can choose. By establishing a baseline with which to evaluate military motives, one can analyze actual military conduct within and across these regions with core attributes in mind. Finally, we may gain some leverage in understanding why some armies supported their presidents while others refused to.

While institutional concerns should remain relatively constant, specific cost-benefit calculations and resulting courses of action will vary because military core interests are affected differently. Another way of putting it is that the dimensions are the same, but the values they take on differ. The advantage of pursuing the research this way is that we can tie all the cases together in a comparable framework. We ask the same set of questions of each, based on the same set of variables. The answers we get will differ, but they will fall out in predictable patterns. This approach makes the assumption that cross-national and cross-regional comparisons are doable, because militaries share common internal structures, institutional interests, and values. This does not mean, however, that militaries are identical; they a...