Good Governance and Civil–Security Relations

A Comparative Study of Turkey and Egypt

Ahmed Abd Rabou

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000172935
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoría: Politica mediorientale

Developing the traditional civil-military relations approach to include security actors, the book compares the style of civil-security relations in both Egypt and Turkey. The volume comprehends the competition between civilian actors and military and security actors to impose control over the political regimes in transition and how this is related to the issue of good governance and democratization.

The Egyptian and Turkish cases are viably comparable in terms of the status of civil-security relations and level of civilian control, specifically considering the different outcomes of the latest military putsches in both country (2013 in Egypt and 2016 in Turkey), and the extended experiences of both countries with a strong military influence and presence in politics. The different responses of the Egyptian and Turkish publics to the coup attempts invite an interesting comparison, especially given that in both cases, the public was the decisive factor in the success or failure of the coup.

Focusing on civil-security relations within the broader context of good governance and democracy in Egypt and Turkey this book will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in political science, specifically comparative government studies and Middle East studies.

1 Theory of civil–security relations

Introduction

The concept of Civil–Military Relations (CMR) and that of civilian control have both received extensive scholarly attention over the years, while the concept of security sector reform has received far less attention due to its recent introduction into studies of democratization. In one of its widely embraced and most comprehensive definitions, CMR is defined as:

The web of relations between the military and the society within which it operates, and of which it is necessarily a part. Such relations encompass all aspects of the role of the military (as a professional, political, social and economic institution) in the entire gambit of national life … It involves issues of the attitude of the military toward the civilian society, the civilian society’s perception of, and attitudes to the military, and the role of the armed forces in relation to the state.

(Ebo, 2005, p. 2)

Based on this perception of CMR, scholars and practitioners use this term to describe the interactions among the state’s people, institutions, and military forces. Those interactions take different forms that extend over a continuum whose two ends, according to the dominant paradigm in literature, are civilian control and militarism. In this sense, civilian control represents the state of interactions in which civilians have the upper hand in controlling and deploying military forces, while the domain of military leaders is limited to ensuring their readiness and directing them in combat. In other words, and as Mackubin Owens (2012, p. 67) frames it, there should be two hands on the sword: the civil hand, which is the dominant hand of policy that determines when to draw the sword from the scabbard and guides it in its use; and the military’s hand that makes sure that the sword is always ready and wields it in combat (Brooks, Greenwood, Parker, & Wary, 1999).

On the other hand, militarism represents the case in which military values predominate, and the military devours a disproportionate share of the society’s resources and maintains the upper hand in dictating policy. It is the extreme form of military influence on a society. A considerable portion of CMR literature is devoted to prescriptions to avoid militarism and ensure civilian control. According to Naison Ngoma (2006, pp. 107−108), in order to avoid such militarism and to ensure democracy, militaries have to be held accountable to civil authorities, independent oversight agencies, and civil society; they also have to adhere to the rule of law, adopt transparent planning and budgeting processes, respect human rights and a culture of civility, be subject to political control over operations and expenditures, consult regularly with civil society, be professional; and finally support collaborative peace and security.

It is widely held that militarism can be avoided only by asserting civilian control over the military, and that democracy cannot prevail unless civilian control is institutionalized. Thus, it is perceived that civilian control is a prerequisite for democracy and that militarism is in one way or another contradictory to it. It is worth mentioning that, in the context of CMR, civilian control is not so much an endpoint as it as an ongoing process, because even in consolidated democracies rulers still have to focus on supervising their armed forces by defining their roles, missions, and budgets.

However, democratic civilian control doesn’t only imply the absence of armed rebellions but also military compliance with government authority. This only happens when civilian government officials, rather than military generals, maintain the authority to decide on the military’s missions, organization, and deployment. It also requires that officials have broad decision-making authority over state policy free from military interference. Therefore, scholars differentiate between civilian control and non-interference by the military, as the former is seen as being wider and more desirable for democratization. However, they disagree over how to reach this end.

Both Huntington and Janowitz introduced two divergent schools of thought. On one hand, Huntington advocated for an objective civilian control, in which the military’s professionalism is the barrier against any potential military intervention in politics. It is achieved when the political elites refrain from interfering in the military’s internal affairs. Therefore, the military becomes self-directed through strong norms of professionalism that include subordination toward the rightful state authority and an apolitical attitude toward the civilian government’s policies and activities. According to Huntington (1957), civilian control is best ensured by developing a distinct form of ‘military professionalism,’ that implies a specific expertise in the use of force, a primary responsibility within the state for military functions, and the existence of an independent bureaucratic military organization with its own internal hierarchy and rules of advancement. With this kind of professionalism, Huntington claims, the military would have no interest in intervening in politics and will willingly submit to the civilian authorities.

On the other hand, Janowitz recommended a subjective civilian control, in which military intervention is avoided by ensuring that the armed forces share common values and objectives with the political elites. This is often achieved by politicizing the officer corps. Acknowledging the fundamental difference between the military and civilian spheres, with the former based on hierarchy, order, and strict discipline, whereas the latter is disorderly and values individual freedoms, Janowitz advocates the convergence of the military and civilian realms in order to achieve civilian control over the military. As indicated by Janowitz, encouraging mutual exchange and regular interaction between civilian and military domains is the best way to ensure civilian control, because it would guarantee that the values and expectations of the general public remain present within the military establishment. Hence, Janowitz supports general conscription, which he sees as a key instrument for ensuring the envisaged convergence. In his view, conscription would prompt civilianization of the military and thus prevent undue military interference in politics (Lutterbeck, 2011).

The third concept in the field of civil–military relations that received far less attention is the concept of ‘Security Sector Reform’ (SSR). It has come to increasing prominence only since the late 1990s and it implies reforming security institutions to enhance their functions in a way that is consistent with democratic norms and principles of good governance (Edmunds, 2013). Therefore, security sector reform is perceived as a precondition for consolidating democracy because in many transition contexts security agencies have played an important role in hindering transition and restoring authoritarianism.

As is the case in CMR, the concept of SSR is concerned with the role of the police and intelligence agencies in politics and society and their relations with civilians, and in its most authoritative and widely used definition, SSR is perceived as:

a term used to describe the transformation of the security system—which includes all the actors, their roles, responsibilities and actions—working together to manage and operate the system in a manner that is more consistent with democratic norms and sound principles of good governance, and this contributes to a well-functioning security framework.

(OECD/DAC, 2007, p. 20)

Civil–military relations: state of the art

The natural orientation of the militaries of newly independent states in the post-colonial era toward maintaining internal order rather than external defense resonated in their primary focus on internal politics, which resulted in a surge of military interventions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. These interventions were in direct contradiction with the democratic values and institutions of the West and therefore, in an attempt to slow down this trend, considerable scholarly attention was devoted to explaining why and how military coups occurred. (May, Lawson, & Selochan, 2004).

As a consequence, early scholarship in CMR sought to explain the motives of coup leaders, the structure of the military, and the socio-economic, political, and external conditions that facilitated and encouraged coups. The dominant trend in the literature argued that the underdevelopment of civil-political institutions was the major predisposing and facilitating factor for military coups. Other scholars identified the military’s corporate interests as the dominant factor behind military interventions (e.g., Janowitz, 1964; First, 1970; Nordlinger, 1977; Horowitz, 1980). Others sought an explanation in the coup leaders’ personal ambitions, while some perceived the military as a mere extension of the larger civil society, with the same qualities of class, regional, and ethnic divisions that make internal friction more likely and might end up with the military siding with particular political players at particular times.

It is widely held that such explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, since personal, organizational, and societal factors are interconnected. In this context, a growing number of case studies provided support for all of these explanations, claiming that while most military interventions had several common denominators, the explanation of individual cases required an understanding of their particular historical and social conditions.

With the spread of military regimes in the second half of the twentieth century, scholars started to study the specific qualities of such regimes. For example, in the 1970s and early 1980s, some scholars (Nordlinger, 1970, 1977; Schmitter, 1971; Hoadley, 1975; McKinlay and Cohan, 1975; McKinlay and Cohan, 1976) studied the economic performance of military regimes and concluded that mostly they did not form a unique regime type. In addition, Heeger (1977, p. 274) suggested that for Africa and Asia during 1965–1975 ‘most military regimes hindered the development of their countries.’ More recently, Seitz (1991, p. 7) studied around 40 sub-Saharan African states and concluded that there was ‘no significant discernible pattern separating the economic performance of military and civilian regimes.’

On the level of political performance, Nordlinger (1977) measured political performance by four indicators (i.e., legitimization, no coercive rule, minimization of violence, and responsiveness to popular wishes), and concluded that the performance of military governments ‘is significantly and almost consistently poorer than that of civilian governments’ (p. 197). More recently, and based on the data supplied by Freedom House, Finer (1991) noted that 94% of military governments were considered as authoritarian and lacking basic civil freedoms, compared to 60% of 73 civilian regimes.

A third trend in the civil military literature conducted deep analysis of the economic and political performance of different military regimes, aiming at identifying the characteristics that distinguish such regimes from their civilian counterparts in other countries. Though different scholars that took it upon themselves to do this task differed on how to categorize different military interventions, they eventually came to agree on the lack of a clear dividing line between military and civilian regimes (e.g., Heeger, 1977; Finer, 1982; Bebler, 1990).

During the 1980s and early 1990s, with democratization sweeping over parts of Latin America, Asia, Africa, central and Eastern Europe, this type of literature converged with the ongoing literature on regime change (May et al., 2004). The fact that many of these transitioning states had politicized and militarized police and security forces led to an increasing embrace of the wider concept of the ‘security sector’ – rather than the more restrictive defense or military sector (Edmunds, 2003, 2007).

Although the importance of the security sector to wider process of political and economic transformation has long been asserted, the field of civil–military relations has always been concerned solely with armed forces and their relationship with governance, focusing primarily on the question of civilian control over the military. There has been a similar, though less extensive, literature on the role of police and intelligence agencies in politics and society. Yet, it was not until 1999 that ‘security sector reform’ began to emerge as a distinct policy agenda, where it was first used by the UK’s Department for International Development in the late 1990s (UK-DFID, 1999 Ball, 2010).

Ever since, different political and geographical contexts, especially transitioning ones, witnessed various SSR activities encouraged by aid policies of developed countries which perceived the politicization, corruption, and ineffectiveness of security actors as a major impediment to economic and political transformation.

After reviewing different developments in the field of CMR, it is worth mentioning that the development of this discipline as a field of study was driven by a fear for the West’s democratic norms and institutions that were diminished and challenged by the ever-increasing military interventions in various regions of the world during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Consequently, this was reflected in the framework of the literature’s dominant paradigm that based itself upon the successful separation of civil and military institutions as the best option for countering any potential military interventions in any nation’s domestic politics, regardless of its specific political, economic, social, and cultural structures.

Even though this dominant paradigm proceeded unchallenged for quite a long time, some scholars proposed challenging perspectives to the separation paradigm. At the forefront of those critiques comes the concordance theory that distinguishes itself by focusing on each nation’s cultural and historical experiences and how these have affected both its military and political institutions. It is widely held that the concordance theory represents the only viable challenger to the dominant separation paradigm, therefore in the next section the premises of both theories will be presented and discussed as the major theoretical contributions in the field, in an attempt to devise an applicable theory that embraces the wider concept of security sector, rather than military or defense sector, since both Egypt and Turkey have had actively politicized security and intelligence agencies.

Theories of civil–military relations

The two major theories in the field of CMR, that is, separation and concordance theories, differed on three grounds: (1) their analysis for various domestic military interventions, their motives and performance; (2) their recommendations for countering potential interventions; and (3) their ideological basis and limitations.

The major hypothesis and proposition of the separation theory was a separation of military and civilian institutions, while concordance theory postulates that the military, the political elites, and the citizenry somehow formulate a cooperative relationship that does not necessarily involve separation. The latter developed as a critique for separation theory’s two major shortcomings: (1) its ideological bias (i.e., its inapplicability on many non-Western nations since it is derived mainly from the American experience); and (2) its negligence of each nation’s specific cultural and historical conditions due to its institutional emphasis that pays no attention to history and culture.

A third theory, proposed by Aurel Croissant and David Kuehn (2010), tried to build upon both separation and concordance theories to provide a new framework of analysis for CMR that starts from a dichotomous perspective and at the same time pays considerable attention to the effect of multiple situational and structural factors, other than the military and civilian spheres, including, but not limited to, public support, an active civil society, and external actors. Thus, they neither overlooked the citizenry in their analysis nor gave it too much weight.

First: separation theory

Separation between civil and military institutions represented the centerpiece of CMR literature on both developed as well as underdeveloped countries. Most scholars in the field recommended physical and ideological separation between the country’s military and its political institutions (Schiff, 1995). The key hypothesis in most scholarly contributions was that the professional military will have no reason to intervene in civilian politics and institutions, should it be detached from politics and specific political causes. Such separation does not happen off-hand; on the contrary, it requires a distinct set of civilian institutions that can maintain political control over the armed forces. Despite the merit of this way of thinking and its success in the West it provides no viable solution for the status of those countries that lack the existence of ‘civil’ institutions in the first place.

Perceived as the cornerstone of the separation theory, military professionalism implies that the professional army should be prepared to advise civilians and defend the nation from foreign threats without getting involved in political decision-making unless asked to. For example, Trinkunas (1999) suggests that in order for the political elites of any country to establish civilian control of the armed forces, they should make sure that the ultimate jurisdiction over military activities rests with government officials not military Generals, and that confining soldiers to tasks linked to their primary function, that is, preparing for war, will maximize such control. Civilian leaders need to gain enough leverage over the armed forces to get them to accept oversight, and only then will civilian control emerge. That’...