When Clausewitz suggested that war was a political instrument, he was addressing the theory of strategy, not the practice of civil-military relations. And yet his dictum's resonance has been particularly powerful in late 20th-century liberal democracies, in part at least because for them it reflects norms of government in peace as well as in war. Serving soldiers should not be involved in active party politics, and armed forces should be subordinated to civil control.
The theoretical underpinnings of these assumptions were established in the 1960s, and were a product of two phenomena. First, the institutionalization of the Cold War required the world's premier liberal democracy, the United States, to sustain a large army in peacetime. Concerns that its existence could unbalance the workings of the constitution were reinforced by the second consideration, the frequency of military coups, especially in Latin America and Africa. Explanations that rested on the comparative political and economic immaturity of some of the affected states were not sufficiently reassuring. The army was frequently the best organized, the best educated, and technologically the most sophisticated component of a newly independent African state. It therefore had a greater capability for intervention than did an army in a European state, where other government agencies probably had the edge in every respect save that of the monopoly of arms. But means had proved to be only one element in determining an army's behaviour; intention and opportunity proved as important. In the 1960s the recent histories of many developed countries suggested that military intervention in politics was not the prerogative of the Third World.
At the beginning of the decade, French generals plotted an anti-Gaullist coup. France's history gave the republic good grounds for fear. A general, Napoleon Bonaparte, had used the army to subvert the French Revolution and seize power in 1799; the army had supported revolution in 1830 and suppressed it in 1848; and its equivocation towards the Third Republic, whether motivated (as it claimed) by legitimate professional concerns or inspired by clericalism and royalism (as the left asserted), culminated in the Dreyfus affair. Dreyfus, a Jewish captain, was wrongly convicted of treason in 1894. The army's reluctance to revisit the verdict rested in part on anti-Semitism and in part on its determination to sustain its inner unity against the fissiparous tendencies of individualism. Professionalism had rendered it a state within a state.
Continuities, however, were less important in determining the French army's politics in the early 1960s than the withdrawal from Indochina and then Algeria (see Algerian independence war). The relevance of this for the theorists was twofold. First, other armies were similarly being asked to hold colonies and then give them up. Secondly, in countering insurgencies, armies were meeting ideas with ideas. By engaging in ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns, they were using weapons that were more political than military, and they were developing techniques applicable at home as well as abroad. By 1968 the temptation to intervene seemed almost overwhelming. The student demonstrations in Paris and Berlin, the anti-Vietnam protests in the USA, and the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland all challenged the established domestic order. The very threats which the armies of the West had confronted in the colonies seemed to be re-emerging in their parent states.
The fears were exaggerated. The army seized power in Greece in 1967, and in Portugal in 1974. Both interventions were comparatively short-lived; and Britain escaped entirely. By 1990 the end of the Cold War confirmed liberalism's security. Nonetheless the subsequent restructuring of armed forces was debated in terms which often owed more to the issues of political subordination than military effectiveness. Conscription might be the legacy of the mass army designed for major European war but it ensured that the army reflected the society from which it was drawn, and so guaranteed its political compliance. The professional army was in danger of separating itself from society, of developing its own mores and thus its own politics.
This was not how Samuel P. Huntington had seen professionalism in his primer on civil-military relations, The Soldier and the State, published in 1957. A true professional would accept it as his duty to obey orders despite the fact that they were politically uncongenial. If an order was illegal, the soldier should have recourse to the judiciary, and if it was militarily unwise the fault was the politician's. What Huntington's argument failed to take on board, as Morris Janowitz recognized in The Professional Soldier (1960), was the careerism which professionalism generated. Long-service regulars were committed to the prestige and promotion of their own calling, and this could involve lobbying for a larger defence budget or for a new equipment programme.
Both Huntington and Janowitz looked at armies in intrinsic terms; it was a British scholar, S. E. Finer, who looked at them from the outside in, and did so in terms which were less concerned with the American experience and more driven by establishing a theory of universal application. As a result, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics (1962) achieved a level of abstraction sufficient to ensure it a continuing validity. Finer described four ascending levels of intervention: influence, blackmail, displacement, and supplantment. He thus accepted Janowitz's argument that professionalism can promote politicization: all armies, at the very least, seek to influence their governments, and on occasion blackmail them too. Whether they remove them in favour of another government depends less on their own political inclinations than on the legitimacy of the existing government and its constitution. A coup, or supplantment, is thus only the most extreme in a range of options. Amos Perlmutter's The Military and Politics in Modern Times (1977) rests on Finer's emphasis on the primacy of the political order, since Perlmutter explicitly states that ‘the military cannot take a neutral political stance’.
This body of thought is Anglo-American, the fruit of liberal democracies on the one hand and of the modern nation state on the other. It therefore presupposes that the need to reflect on and manage civil-military relations is a consequence of functional specialization, the product of standing armies and the democratization of politics. There could be no institutionalized tension between the military and the political for Frederick ‘the Great’ or Napoleon as they embodied supreme control in both. But such an interpretation merely serves to highlight the limitations of political science for the historian. Both Frederick ‘the Great’ and Napoleon enjoyed more absolute powers than their predecessors. In the seventeenth century, and before, power resided in the military, but the state did not have the monopoly of armed force. The crown relied on the nobility to bring men. If the monarch endeavoured to raise taxes in order to ensure his independent ability to raise forces, as Charles I did in Britain, then he ran the risk of clashing with the nobility and gentry. Not only in the subsequent British civil wars but also in the Fronde in France, the crown's struggle to centralize administration and to assert its authority over the entrenched local powers of the aristocracy pivoted on the control of armed force. So fragmented were the components of the Holy Roman Empire during the Thirty Years War that power resided with the commander of the troops rather than with imperial authority. Wallenstein raised his own taxes, conducted his own diplomacy, and even extracted an oath of personal loyalty from his officers.
The depredations inflicted on society by uncontrolled armies in the seventeenth century, and the alternative, the authoritarianism of military government (England, for example, was administered at the local level by major-generals in 1655), were not unfamiliar to the scholars of the Enlightenment. They knew that the ability of the generals to subvert their governments by dint of their conquests and their control of armies had wracked the Roman republic with civil war and culminated in the triumph of Julius Caesar. Caesar's imperial successors had, however, not escaped the same vulnerabilities. Their answer, the creation of the Praetorian Guard as a form of protection against an internal coup, rendered them in turn dependent on the guard's loyalty. Both ‘Caesarism’ and ‘praetorianism’, like ‘Bonapartism’, have entered the vocabulary of civil-military relations.
The combination of civil war in the first half of the 17th century and of humanist scholarship in the second made the control and use of armed force a pressing problem for political thought. In 1688 James II was ousted from the British throne in favour of William III, not least because a large element in the army, led by John Churchill (see Marlborough), changed sides. The subsequent settlement met the soldiers' needs insofar as it authorized the existence of a standing army, but it did so on the sufferance of parliament. The effect was to divide the control of the army between two authorities, the crown and parliament. Effectively, the ability of any component in this triumvirate to operate independently was thwarted. Although the so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1689 became the building block for subsequent liberal thinking on the army's constitutional status, in reality the patterns of control were slow to emerge. Throughout the 18th century, and indeed well into the twentieth, there was no bar on serving officers sitting in the House of Commons, and many did so. Moreover, the civilianization of the ministerial control of the army in Britain did not become a fixed principle until after the Napoleonic wars. However, by the 19th century it had become an axiom of British government that the army was kept in its proper place by the division of military from civilian authority: the former was pre-eminent on the battlefield, the latter in the debating chamber. Crucially, however, the Secretary of State for War was simultaneously a civilian, a Member of Parliament, and a minister of the crown.
Although this solution satisfied the constitutionalists, it made less strategic sense in the volatile areas of the empire or in time of war. Then command needed to be united, not divided. Moreover, the defence of late Victorian Britain was not restricted to the War Office and the Admiralty, but was also within the remit of the foreign office, the India office, the colonial office, and the home office. In 1904 Britain created the Committee of Imperial Defence. A subcommittee of the cabinet, it lacked executive powers, but it brought into one forum all those ministers concerned with defence, and included soldiers and sailors. Effectively, it recognized both the truth of Clausewitz's dictum and its limitations. War did indeed have to be set in a political context, but the formulation of strategy was not a purely political activity: it had to be grounded in military reality. Thus the British model developed in the 20th century on two lines. First, the principle of civilian supremacy was rarely challenged, the most significant exception being the so-called Curragh ‘mutiny’ of March 1914. Secondly, the business of defence embraced the integration of professional and civilian. On the outbreak of WW I the Committee of Imperial Defence went into abeyance, and the formulation of strategy became a matter for the cabinet as a whole. But by 1916 the War Cabinet, a small group of ministers supplemented by professional advisers, became the engine of strategy, and a model for subsequent thought.
The casualty of this form of civilianization was democracy. Wide-ranging debates on the army, which had characterized not only the 19th-century House of Commons but also the French National Assembly, became subsumed by internal discussion in ministry councils. Generals who spoke out publicly were seen to be motivated by ‘Caesarism’ or ‘praetorianism’ rather than by the needs of national security. When the British director of military operations, Frederick Maurice, wrote to the press in 1918 to complain about Lloyd George's presentation of the army's manpower position and its effect on the western front, he had no option but to resign. Charles de Gaulle, in advocating tanks and professionalism rather than conscription in the 1930s, became a demon of the left not a potential saviour of France. The danger that confronted liberalism was that the scope for public and parliamentary debate was limited by ignorance, and that forceful professional critics became typecast as political mavericks.
Britain and the United States were able to embrace liberalism because of their geographical advantages. In neither case was the army central to national survival, and in both cases it found employment on the periphery (in the case of the American West) or overseas. The liberal model of civil-military relations, however, could not take root so easily when the army played a central role not only in the formation of the nation state but also in its defence against predatory neighbours.
In the eighteenth century the Prussian state was, in many respects, embodied in the army. Moreover, in 1864-71, the army was the instrument of German unification, and by 1914 the army was the nation's principal bulwark against France to the west and Russia to the east. Military values permeated society, but their political implications were held in check by the authority of the monarch. The army's dilemmas arose when the monarch was weak. Its reaction to the crown's subservience to the French after Jena and to its surrender to the Berlin revolutionaries in 1848 was to distinguish between the monarchy as an institution, to which its loyalty was unconditional, and its loyalty to the king as an individual, which was not. In 1870-1, when Moltke ‘the Elder’ as chief of the general staff clashed with Bismarck over the conduct of the war with France, he was kept in check by Wilhelm I. But in 1914-18, his grandson, Wilhelm II, lacked the authority or the stamina to coordinate civil and military in this way. Until 1916 Falkenhayn remained CGS against the wishes of the chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, because he continued to enjoy the support of the kaiser, but when he lost that support he was replaced by Hindenburg. With a succession of weak chancellors, the German high command extended its authority into the war aims, economics, politics, and labour relations of Germany. Its authority rested on a form of populism that subverted not only the civilian government but also the kaiser himself. Wilhelm II abdicated in November 1918 not because of the revolution but because the army told him to do so.
Hans von Seeckt, the army's professional head between 1920 and 1927, stressed that its loyalty was to the state and not to any political party. But such a doctrine, although outwardly conforming to Huntington's model, contained a double danger in the circumstances of Weimar Germany. First of all, it left the definition of the state to the army itself—to the point where indeed it could become the embodiment of the state. Secondly, democratic party politics required the army to give its loyalty to the elected government of the day, regardless of its policies. At best Seeckt rendered the army politically naïve. At worst, it was bound to be attracted by a government that promised to revoke the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty and to undertake Germany's rearmament. In WW II the Wehrmacht became the willing executor of Hitler's strategy. In careerist terms, the war gave the army's generals the victories that had eluded their predecessors 30 years previously. More significantly, in ideological terms, the army identified wholeheartedly with the war against Bolshevism on the eastern front, and was deeply implicated in the atrocities to which the front's barbarization gave rise. The German army of 1871 to 1945 enjoyed a reputation for professional excellence in the operational and tactical sense. But the political context into which this was set was paradoxical. In terms of global strategy, Germany proved unable to relate war to politics, to set objectives consonant with its means. And in terms of Huntington's definition of professionalism, it proved sadly deficient. Its high command became the tool of Nazism; it did not even have the excuse of a Seecktian detachment.
What the Wehrmacht shows is that totalitarian regimes have devised methods of subordinating their armies that are every bit as effective as those of liberal governments, and that their claims to represent strong government and to ready the nation for war can facilitate the process. The French armies of the 1790s became the tools of the revolution at both top and bottom. Commissaires aux armées accompanied generals into the field and removed those whose policies were suspect: 67 were executed in 1794 alone. In the ranks, songs, pamphlets, and public addresses became the vehicles of ideology. Broadly speaking the Soviet Union did the same. In time of war the political imperatives of the commissar might become subordinated to the professional needs of the field commander, but the concession was only temporary. Stalin's sensitivity to the power of the army was amply manifested in his purge of the officer corps in 1937-8, and even his most successful field commanders, such as Zhukov, were regularly put in their place rather than given the opportunity to convert military triumph into political authority. When the Cold War ended, the defence ministers of the former Warsaw Pact countries were staffed by soldiers rather than civilians, but this implied subordination not independence: the vast majority of officers were party members. In their subsequent efforts to liberalize and democratize their civil-military relations, the states of eastern central Europe looked to the West German idea of innere Führung, which attempted to counter the legacy of its own army's past by stressing the individual rights of soldiers and the civic education of the armed forces.
One component in ensuring the army's compliance and subordination has been its need for prestige. Every British campaign of colonial withdrawal ended in political defeat, in that Britain acknowledged the colony's right to independence, but nominal victory. Neither the American army in Vietnam nor the Soviet army in Afghanistan had the same good fortune. The effects on the civil-military relations of both countries were deleterious. In the United States, the army used the memory of Vietnam to drive up its demand for resources, and to undermine the wishes of its political masters and so dictate the manner of its own employment. In Russia, the army remained loyal to the government throughout the 1990s, but it became alienated from its parent society despite—or even because of—conscription. Defeat in Chechnya and moral defeat in the Cold War robbed it of the status it enjoyed under communism. For the other armies of NATO and the UN Security Council, the peacekeeping and peace-enforcement missions which dominated their operational activities in the 1990s honed political skills to the detriment of military. Moreover they have done so outside the aegis of national structures. At one level the end of the Cold War marked the triumph of a liberal consensus, but at another it imposed fresh strains on the civil-military aspects of that inheritance.
— Hew Strachan
