Wednesday, 10 June 2015

THE JANOWIZT AND HUNTINGTON THEORIES OF MILITARY INTERVENTION IN POLITICS



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

No comments:

Post a Comment