INTRODUCTION
Military interventions in politics
are very common both in democratic or totalitarian regimes. Although the
involvement of the military in determining who gets what, when, and how is too
apparent, the issue has not been studied well enough. Students of politics and
public administration, up to now, focused generally on individual cases or with
regional perspectives while studying military interventions.
The main role of the military as a
bureaucratic organization is to defend the country against external threats.
The military bureaucracies are expected to carry out defense policies
formulated by legislative and executive branches. However, in developing
countries, the military has had some other functions like contributing to
development and protecting the regime from internal and external sources, etc.
The distinctive characteristic of military bureaucracy from civilian
bureaucracy with more hierarchic, authoritative, and a legitimate source of
coercion make it easy for them to influence political institutions.
Some authors argue that the military is a major
institutional interest group in the industrial world deserving of particular
attention, especially in third world countries. What does the military do as an
interest group? In this context, we will be looking at the Janowizt and
Huntington theory of military intervention in politics and also why the
military has intervene in politics especially in the developing countries such
as Africa, Asia and Latin America.
CONCEPTUAL CLARIFICATION
Military intervention: The deliberate act of a nation or a
group of nations to introduce its military forces into the course of an
existing controversy.
Military
interventions in the form of a coup or military regimes are the most extreme
forms of the military having an impact on the policy process. We can define a
coup as an irregular transfer of the state's chief executive by the regular
armed forces or internal security forces through the use or threat of the use
of force (Jenkins and Kposowa, 1992). By means of military interventions, the
military wants to control the policy process largely. Hence, the military uses
either legislative or executive power or in some cases judiciary power. With
military interventions, the military not only changes the executive or
legislative powers of government but also tries to exert strict control over
other interest groups or society.
THE JANOWIZT AND HUNTINGTON THEORIES
OF MILITARY INTERVENTION IN POLITICS
Political development explains military interventions,
although related but distinct from social and economic development in a certain
extent, can be grouped under the heading of political development. Strong
civilian governmental and political institutions, democratic values, and so
forth can be indicators of political development level.
The
modernization process created upward social mobilization, but in some countries
political development has lagged behind creating a participation crisis that
encourages military interventions. The political development arguments attempt
to underline the issue weak political institutions and a participation overload
(Jenkins and Kposowa, 1992). Huntington’s (1977) theory of political
development and decay stresses the importance of institutionalization of
political organizations and procedures. Political decay, of which a significant
symptom of military intervention, arises out of an imbalance between social
mobilization and political institutionalization. In the case of social
mobilization, if there are weak political institutions that regulate
participation, it will be unable to respond to these demands, and regulate
social conflict, thereby succumbing to military interventions and related
instabilities.
In his seminal 1957 book on
civil-military relations, The Soldier
and the State, Samuel P.
Huntington described the differences between the two worlds as a
contrast between the attitudes and values held by military personnel, mostly
conservative, and those held by civilians, mostly liberal. Each
world consisted of a separate institution with its own operative rules and
norms. The military's function was furthermore inherently different from that
of the civilian world. Given a more conservative military world which was
illiberal in many aspects, it was necessary to find a method of ensuring that
the liberal civilian world would be able to maintain its dominance over the
military world. Huntington's answer to this problem was "military
professionalism."
Huntington focused his study on
the officer corps. He first defined a profession and explained that enlisted
personnel, while certainly part of the military world, are not, strictly
speaking, professionals. He relegated them to the role of tradesmen or skilled
craftsmen, necessary but not professionals in his definition of the term. It
was professional military officers, not the enlisted technicians of the trade
of violence, or even the part-time or amateur reserve officers extant in the
mid-1950s (as opposed to the near "part time 'regular' " status
characterizing reserve officers with extensive active duty experience,
professional military education, and active combat experience in the post-Gulf War
period), who would be the key to controlling the military world.
Professionalizing the military,
or at least the officer corps, which is the decision-making authority within
the military world, emphasizes the useful aspects of that institution such as
discipline, structure, order, and self-sacrifice. It also isolates the corps in
a specialized arena in which the military professionals would be recognized as
experts in the use of force. As recognized experts not subject to the
interference of the civilian world, the military's officer corps would
willingly submit itself to civil authority. In Huntington's words, such an
arrangement maintained a "focus on a politically neutral, autonomous, and
professional officer corps.
In order for the civilian
authority to maintain control, it needed to have a way to direct the military
without unduly infringing on the prerogatives of the military world and thus
provoking a backlash. Civilian leadership would decide the objective of any
military action but then leave it to the military world to decide upon the best
way of achieving the objective. The problem facing civilian authority, then, is
in deciding on the ideal amount of control. Too much control over the military
could result in a force too weak to defend the nation, resulting in failure on
the battlefield. Too little control would create the possibility of a coup,
i.e., failure of the government.
The
other principal thread within the civil-military theoretical debate was that
generated in 1960 by Morris
Janowitz in The Professional Soldier.
Janowitz agreed with Huntington that separate military and civilian worlds
existed, but differed from his predecessor regarding the ideal solution for
preventing danger to liberal democracy. Since the military world as he saw it
was fundamentally conservative, it would resist change and not adapt as rapidly
as the more open and unstructured civilian society to changes in the world.
Thus, according to Janowitz, the military would benefit from exactly what
Huntington argued against – outside intervention.
Janowitz
introduced a theory of convergence, arguing that the military, despite the
extremely slow pace of change, was in fact changing even without external
pressure. Convergence theory postulated either a civilianization of the
military or a militarization of society. However, despite this convergence,
Janowitz insisted that the military world would retain certain essential
differences from the civilian and that it would remain recognizably military in
nature.
Janowitz
agreed with Huntington that, because of the fundamental differences between the
civilian and military worlds, clashes would develop which would diminish the
goal of civilian control of the military. His answer was to ensure that
convergence occurred, thus ensuring that the military world would be imbued
with the norms and expectations of the society that created it. He encouraged
use of conscription, which would bring a wide variety of individuals into the
military. He also encouraged the use of more Reserve
Officer Training Corps
(ROTC) programs at colleges and universities to ensure that the military academies did not have a monopoly on the type
of officer, particularly the senior general officer and flag officer leadership positions, in the military services. He
specifically encouraged the development of ROTC programs in the more elite
universities, so that the broader influences of society would be represented by
the officer corps. The more such societal influences present within the
military culture, the smaller the attitudinal differences between the two
worlds and the greater the chance of civilians maintaining control over the
military. Janowitz, like Huntington, believed that the civilian and military
worlds were different from one another; while Huntington developed a theory to
control the difference, Janowitz developed a theory to diminish the difference.
In
response to Huntington's position on the functional imperative, Janowitz
concluded that in the new nuclear age, the United States was going to have to
be able to deliver both strategic deterrence and an ability to participate in
limited wars. Such a regime, new in American history, was going to require a
new military self-conception, the constabulary concept: "The military
establishment becomes a constabulary force when it is continuously prepared to
act, committed to the minimum use of force, and seeks viable international
relations, rather than victory. Under this new concept of the military
establishment, distinctions between war and peace are more difficult to draw.
The military, instead of viewing itself as a fire company to be called out in
emergency, would then be required to imagine itself in the role of a police
force, albeit on the international level rather than domestically. The role of
the civilian elite would be to interact closely with the military elite so as
to ensure a new and higher standard of professional military education, one
that would ensure that military professionals were more closely attuned to the
ideals and norms of civilian society.
EXAMPLE OF HUNTINGTON’S THEORY OF MILITARY INTERVENTION
The political power of the
military has developed and matured since Huntington published’. The Soldiers
and The State’ in 1957. During the post-world war and Korea War periods inter
service rivalry was so intense that military leaders often exhausted their
political energy in turf and budget battles with each other, resulting in
enhanced civilian control.
Huntington sounded a cautionary
not as he regarded this contentious environment, suggesting that should the
services unite their efforts, inter service peace would probably have contain
costs in decease the civil military harmony.
The
focus of Huntington's study is the officer corps and the rise of
professionalism. Although he does not develop it in such explicit terms, the
civil-military problematique is central to his theory. He recognizes that there
is a tension between the desire for civilian control and the need for military
security. Indeed, his critique of certain forms of civilian control is based on
his claim that they sacrifice protection against external enemies in order to
minimize the power of the military and thus make civilian control more certain.
In classical understandings,
particularly as grounded in Samuel Huntington's theory of objective civilian
control of the military, civil-military relations are portrayed as separate
civilian and military spheres under the assumption that the civilian
politicians were the masters of the military, while the military maintains its
professionalism (Huntington, 1957). The problem that is embedded here as
posited by Huntington is that of the ability of the military to act
professionally in its traditional functions to defend the state and yet to not
be able to threaten the state while being subservient to civil authority. This
system achieves its objectives by maximizing the professionalism of the officer
corps within a clearly defined civil and military leadership. This is the basic
principle that underpinned democratic control of the armed forces, as being
reinforced in previously authoritarian states and former socialist countries
since the early 1990s.
Civilian control in the
objective sense, as postulated by Samuel Huntington, is: “that distribution of
political power between military and civilian groups which is most conducive to
the emergence of professional attitudes and behaviour among the officer corps.
That this theory developed in response to the new circumstances of the Cold War
is questionable when it comes to its applicability to weak democracies. Since
its presumption is based on a clearly: “delineated military spheres defined by
war fighting that is independent of the social and political spheres” (Burk J,
2002), it neglects the problem of sustaining democratic values and practices
while focusing on the matter of protecting democracy (Matei, F 2008).
Therefore, there are reasons to doubt whether Huntington's theory may well be
applied to the contemporary situation in Nigeria, where democratic
consolidation is determined by the extent to which the military and political
interests in the polity broker a common ground.
EXAMPLE OF JANOWITZ’S THEORY OF MILITARY
INTERVENTION
The issue as
Janowitz saw it was: “how to preserve the ideal of the citizen-soldier in an
era when the changing nature of war no longer required mass participation in
military service but did require the state to maintain a large standing force
of professional soldiers”(Burk J, 2002). The tradition inspired by Janowitz
provides an important counterweight to Huntington, but on a critical question
of how civilian institutions control military institutions on a day-to-day
basis, the Janowitzian school does not represent a significant alternative.
Although Janowitzian theory underscores the value of civic virtue by bolstering
civic participation through the citizen-soldier's role, it lacks the framework
to analyse conditional and/or exigential factors as embedded in Nigeria
civil-military relations. For example, the military's pre-existing prerogatives
create a situation of retired military officers’ dominance of Nigerian
political terrain which has largely undermined the growth of strong democratic
institutions and ideals, having a direct impact on the nature of civil-military
relations in the polity. Furthermore, Janowitzian theory asserts that
democratic values and practices ought to be sustained by cultivating the
citizen-soldier ideal, which is not possible in Nigeria where the society is
seemingly fractionalized along primordial lines, posing a threat to national
unity. An attempt to practice this 'citizen-soldier' ideal in Nigeria will only
make the country's fragile unity more threatened and will intensify the
proliferations of ethnic militia which is already bedevilling the country.
THEIR MAJOR VIEWS
ON MILITARY INTERVENTION IN POLITICS
For
Huntington, the tension between soldier and statesman is rooted in the essence
of professionalism. Offering a now-classic description of the military mind --
conservative, realistic, and pessimistic about human nature -- he prescribes
"objective control" as the optimum form of civil-military relations.
This form of civilian control achieves its objectives by maximizing the
professionalism of the officer corps to include its autonomy within a clearly
defined military sphere. Janowitz, the founder of American military sociology,
takes a different tack, arguing that officership has undergone a fundamental
transition to what he calls a "constabulary" model, that is to say,
increasing resemblance to police forces, which organize and apply violence in
tightly controlled and limited circumstances and retain close links with the
society they protect. Two brilliant works that disagree but encompass the most
penetrating assessment of the military profession in a turbulent age.
CONCLUSION
Democratic regimes in new states
are fragile in developing countries, whether they were established at the dawn
of independence by agreement with a collapsing imperial power or after a period
of domestic authoritarianism under military domination. The governance based on
these narrow minded representative institutions is unlikely to function
normally. These regimes cannot cope with crises effectively: a group of
military officers supported by civil servants and by deeply disaffected popular
forces often respond to a crisis by seizing democratic representative power.
The institutional design of these weak democracies correlates with the success
of military coups. Almost all of developing countries experienced at least one
catastrophic breakdown such as, suspension of the constitutions, the abolition
of legislature, and rule by appointed officials, and led by military officers
directly. The rule by military officers continues for a short period of time
but, its impact continues and brings uncertainty to the expectations of people
in the long range.
REFERENCES
Burk,
James. (1991) "Introduction: A Pragmatic Sociology," in On Social
Organization and Social Control by Morris Janowitz. University of Chicago
Press.
Janowitz,
Morris. (1960).The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political
Portrait. The Free Press: New York.
Putnam,
Robert D. (1967). Toward Explaining Military Intervention in Latin-American
Politics. World politics. 20:1 (pp.83-110).
Jenkins, J.C. & Kposowa, A.S.
(1992). "The Political Origins of African Military Coups",International
Studies Quarterly, 36, (271-292).
Michael C. Desch. 2001. Civilian Control of
the Military: The Changing Security Environment. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Hagopian,
F. (1993). Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America. Johns
Hopkins University Press 1993.
Huntington
Samuel P. (1977). Political Order in Changing Societies. 13th
Edition. London: Yale University Press
