Review Article
The varieties of liberal militarism: A typology
Jean Joanaa,* and Frédéric Mérandb
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Centre d’Etudes Politiques de l’Europe Latine (CEPEL), Université de Montpellier, 39 rue de l'Université
34060 Montpellier CEDEX 2.
E-mail: [email protected]
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Centre d’études et de recherches internatlonales, Université de Montréal (CÉRIUM), CP 6128 succursale
Centre-Ville Montréal QC H3C 3J7 CANADA
[email protected]
*Corresponding author.
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A first draft of this note was presented to the ‘Varieties of Militarism’ panel organised by A. Stavrianakis
and B. Mabee during the European International Studies Association meeting, 5–8 June 2013, Tartu,
Estonia. The authors thank the participants to this workshop as well as French Politics’ editors for their
comments.
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Abstract The purpose of this article is to review and refine the notion of ‘liberal
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militarism’. It is based on the assumption that no society, even a democratic one, can do
without militarism as all of them consent to considerable budgetary efforts to provide for
their defence. But this consent and the ways in which it is expressed are prone to variations. More than an exceptional use of force at the international level, or an exaltation of
servicemen or of the military within society, the notion of liberal militarism denotes here
the social representations ascribed by the political and social actors to defence policy in
liberal democracies. Over the past 30 years, defence policy has seen a number of changes
towards economic and/or political-cultural liberalisation both in terms of their objectives
and in terms of their means. This twin liberalisation process, which took on different
forms according to the national cases considered, has given rise to different ‘varieties of
liberal militarism’.
French Politics (2014) 12, 177–191. doi:10.1057/fp.2014.11
Keywords: comparative politics; defence policy; militarism; liberal militarism; Western
Europe; United States
Introduction
The notion of ‘liberal militarism’ was coined to describe British liberal democracy’s
way of war in the nineteenth century. Edgerton (1991) argued that in the United
Kingdom, industrial power and sophisticated technology were used to offset the
absence of a mass army, similar to the ones found in the rest of Europe. Mann (1996)
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gave this notion a more political dimension to characterise the military posture of
West European democracies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which he
opposed to Germany’s, Spain’s or Austria–Hungary’s ‘authoritarian militarism’.
Bringing these two definitions together, another British sociologist Shaw (1991)
argued that liberal militarism was a central feature of post-Cold War ‘post-military
societies’. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the technological approach to warfare
developed in the United Kingdom and in the United States spread throughout the
European continent, where it had long been frowned upon for political reasons (Shaw,
2013, p. 26). Taking up Mann’s (1987) idea of ‘spectator sport militarism’, which
described the distant attitude of Western publics vis-à-vis the nuclear stalemate
between the East and the West, Shaw (2005) explains that this attitude produced a
new form of militarism that is unique to the West, one in which elites and citizens shift
the burdens of war onto others, often outside ‘national society’: professional soldiers,
enemy combatants or civilian populations that live on remote theatres of operation. (see
also Stavrianakis, Selby, 2013).
The aim of this research note is to show that the notion of liberal militarism is
useful to explain the content and structure of defence policy in Western democracies,
provided that a socio-cultural variable be brought in. Liberal militarism is not simply
caused by technology or the desire to shift the burdens of war, but also by the specific
meanings that political and social actors ascribe to defence policy in the West. These
social representations, as it were, are embedded in the process of state transformation
that has characterised the West since the 1980s. We define defence policy as the
principles and structures put in place by states to ensure the extraction, organisation
and use of military means. While liberal militarism pervades Western attitudes to
warfare, taking social representations seriously helps us explain the varieties of
liberal militarism that remain.
In the first part of the article, we will see that Western defence policies have
undergone significant changes over the past 30 years. These changes are associated to
an evolution in social representations of warfare. In the second part, we will show
that cognitive and symbolic evolutions in France, the United Kingdom, Belgium,
Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the United States, especially in regard to the
state, underpin different attitudes vis-à-vis defence policy, which we characterise as
varieties of liberal militarism. We conclude with a few remarks on the contribution of
liberal militarism to the study of comparative defence policy.
Defence Policy in Change
Sociology, history and political science highlight a number of transformations that
have affected the policy implemented by Western democracies to ensure the retrieval,
the organisation or the use of the state’s military means over the past 30 years. These
transformations have been described through three main perspectives. The first one
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insists on the civilianisation of military organisations. The second one relates to the
demilitarisation of the state. The third one addresses the marketization and privatisation of defence activities.
The civilianisation of military organisations
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Beginning in the 1960s, military sociologists drew attention to the civilianisation
process that had characterised military organisations since World War II, especially
in the United States. For these authors, civilianisation resulted in questioning the
specificities of the military institution, which conformed increasingly to values and to
norms in force within society as a whole.
The civilianisation of armed forces was first understood as a response to the
evolution of war and military activity. In particular, Janowitz (1971) stressed the
managerialisation process to which the US officer corps was subjected. He showed
that the growing complexity of military organisations had a major effect on the
officer corps and on the models of professional excellence around which it was built.
In addition to changes in recruitment practices, he described the growing prominence
of managers, characterised by their rational and scientific approach to war, to the
detriment of the heroic leader figure, whose courage, sense of honour and experience
of combat were at the core of the identity claimed by the profession. These
managerial officers progressively monopolised access to the summits of military
hierarchy as the leadership proved increasingly open to individuals whose career was
based on tasks that were hitherto considered as marginal within the armed forces. The
Cold War, by stressing the limits of the use of force, consolidated the civilianisation
process of officers, who were increasingly compelled to take into account the extramilitary consequences of their actions and to master the skills and know-how that
they shared with civilian technicians (Janowitz, 1971, p. 417).
Moskos (1977a, b) soon added that the functional civilianisation described by
Janowitz went hand in hand with a significant evolution in social representations of
the military. He saw in the termination of the draft by the United States, in 1973, the
manifestation of a growing trivialisation of the military. The reform revealed,
according to him, not only a transformation of the military institution but also of
American society as a whole. Whereas they had long understood their activity as a
unique one, founded upon specific representations and practices, soldiers began to
identify with an occupational or industrial model, conforming to the norms and to the
principles in force among civilians. Moskos saw this evolution in the revision of
servicemen’s modes of remuneration, in diminished legitimacy and in more concrete
aspects of their daily life, such as housing or married life. Finally, he projected that
reforms would lead to the growing recruitment of civilian technicians within the
armed forces, to accomplish tasks hitherto entrusted with servicemen and to union
membership in certain countries, following the Scandinavian model.
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This thesis of a civilianisation or of a trivialisation of military organisations was
quickly nuanced. Janowitz (1971, p. 31) himself argued that the basis of military
activity, which was to inflict death while accepting to risk one’s own life, meant that
it would always remain unique. The occupational/institutional model put forward by
Moskos was also criticised by scholars who explained that he described two age-old
dimensions of military activity, which could be found since the dawn of time with more
or less intensity according to the level of hierarchy or specialisation (Schweisguth et al,
1979; Boëne, 1987; Thomas, 1994). Nevertheless, the significant reforms undergone by
Western armed forces since the 1990s testify to the pressures they had to face along the
lines envisaged by Moskos. The end of conscription in a growing number of European
countries1 and the need to recruit staff on the labour market forced military
organisations to align their norms and their practices with those in force within the rest
of society (Boëne, 2003). In some cases, these evolutions led to review the objectives
allocated to staff management schemes, like occupational retraining assistance policies
(Genieys et al, 2000). The application of equal-opportunity and diversity-promotion
policies, for the benefit of sexual or ethnic minorities, also contributed to smoothing out
‘the right to difference’ long claimed by the armed forces (Kier, 1998; Dandeker, 2000;
Nuciari, 2003; Winslow et al, 2003). The end of the Cold War and the development of
new missions, calling less directly on the use of force, promoted the emergence in
certain cases of a new type of military organisation, described as ‘post-modern’
(Moskos et al, 2000). This type is characterised by a growing interpenetration between
military and civilian spheres; narrowing differences between the different services (air
force, land force, navy); the development of missions other than war (MOOTW), such
as peace-keeping or humanitarian action; multinational operations and internationalisation of the armed forces (Moskos et al, 2000, p. 2).
These trends do not all tend towards a convergence of military organisations. First,
the literature emphasises the weight of political and cultural specificities, pertaining to
each country, which may postpone their advent (Williams, 2000). Also, the universality of these trends remains debatable. An analysis of the situation in some 40
European countries thus shows that the transformations at work do not systematically
tend towards post-modernisation of the armed forces (Forster, 2006). Differences
among military organisations as well as in their political and social environment
prevent us from concluding that a single model is in the making. The fact remains that
the civilianisation of military organisations is situated in historical and geographical
terms, meaning first and foremost Western Europe and North America.
The demilitarisation of the state
Another process that impacts on the transformation of defence policy concerns the
demilitarisation of the state. Historical sociology has emphasised the links existing
between war, state and nation building. But it has also shown that this process was
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ultimately indissociable from a marginalisation of military functions and, perhaps, a
demilitarisation of the state. A number of seminal contributions emphasise the impact
of this demilitarisation on defence policy.
Tilly (1975) famously analysed the critical role played by the preparation for and
the conduct of war in the emergence of European nation states. Beyond the
description of the war-making dynamics that contributed to the development of a
centralised political and administrative apparatus, the interest of his work lies in his
analysis of the relations between militarisation and the ‘civilianisation’ of nation
states (Tilly, 1990). In Coercion, Capital and European States, Tilly explains how
the military components of the state were gradually marginalised by the growth of a
civilian administration, representative institutions and redistributive policies. He
maintains that the very different international context with which states were
confronted during the twentieth century, in particular in the context of decolonisation, partially accounts for the particular forms of political and administrative
organisation they developed. Mann (1993a) argues for his part that the coming
together of economic, ideological, political and military networks under the umbrella
of the nation state around the end of the eighteenth century was relatively fortuitous.
The decline of foreign wars, the growth of civil rights and industrial capitalism elicited
new expectations among the population with respect to the state (Mann, 1993b, p. 11).
While insisting on the military origins of the state, historical sociology hence
adumbrates the existence of a threshold from which the latter has transcended these
origins to acquire a new legitimacy, based on its capabilities to run the economy or to
generate social policies (Porter, 1994; Fortmann, 2010).
Contemporary changes in defence policy partially confirm the marginalisation of
the military functions of the state. The emergence of a European security and defence
policy is a first illustration thereof. It builds on transnational relations among national
defence actors and contributes to a convergence of the policies they implement
(Irondelle, 2003). But European defence cooperation has been made possible by the
lesser importance granted to the military functions of the state. While diplomatic and
military elites support delegating traditional core nation-state activities to a
supranational body, they can do so precisely because these have lost their centrality
(Mérand, 2008, p. 150). For example, the convergence of European armed forces
towards a more concentrated and internationalised model, building on the projection
capabilities of numerically smaller and more professionalised forces, pushed aside
the draft system, and thus undermined the link between the nation and the army.
King (2011) has shown how the emphasis on the tactical and operational aspects of
the preparation and of the use of the forces enabled such an evolution. This
convergence is admittedly not totally perfect. It nevertheless concerns an increasingly
wide spectrum of countries. Such is the case especially of the Nordic countries,
traditionally characterised by a prominent role of the state and of the armed forces
within society. Østerud and Haaland Matlary (2007, p. 8) show that these countries’
defence policies have undergone a process of denationalisation since the end
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of the Cold War, which, spurred by privatisation and internationalisation. Even if
significant differences are still observable, as shown in some resistance to ending
the military draft in Germany, the common evolution of West European countries
certainly calls into question the role that had been traditionally devolved to the armed
forces.
Demilitarisation appears less clearly in the case of the United States. First, the
twentieth century coincided with a significant militarisation of American society,
which can be seen since the 1930s in constant public references to war and its
requirements (Sharry, 1995). The anti-statism displayed by political elites and
American citizens has been analysed as one of the main safeguards against the
emergence of a ‘garrison state’ in the context of the Cold War, which would have led
to sacrifice economic and political freedoms on the altar of competition with the
Soviet Union (Freidberg, 2000). Second, the Vietnam war as well as wide-ranging
political and social changes since the 1960s have favoured the development of a new
form of militarism, in the light of which the quest for military power was construed as
an antidote to national decadence (Bacevich, 2005). For P. Feaver and R. Kohn
(2001), this quest is at the origin of the growing gap between civilians and
servicemen. The use of force remains a dividing issue in American politics, opposing
civilians and servicemen, but also political elites and citizens (Feaver and Gelpi,
2004, p. 5). In that context, the identification of a clear national interest remains
decisive for the electorate to support a military intervention.
The demilitarisation of the state hence appears as a second trend transforming
defence policy throughout the West. It derives from the declining centrality of war
and, consequently, of armed forces in state and society. In a comparative perspective,
this demilitarisation draws a line between the high-defence spending United States
and low-spending Western Europe – but also, within the latter, between countries in
which mass armies, conscription and the internationalisation of the military are
institutionalized to a lesser or greater degree.
The marketisation of defence
The third trend with which defence policy is confronted concerns the privatisation
of external security activities. This privatisation is partially the product of the
transformation of military organisations and of the military functions of the state
mentioned in the preceding section. But it has taken on a particular dimension with
the global diffusion of neo-liberalism and New Public Management.
The phenomenon is not entirely new. Moskos (1977a, p. 44) already identified it in
the 1970 report of the Gates Commission, which recommended terminating the
military draft in the United States. In his view, one of the consequences of the
civilianisation of the military would be increasing recourse to private contractors to
carry out missions hitherto entrusted with servicemen. But it is the boom of private
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military companies that revealed the magnitude of this phenomenon. The 1990s
indeed coincided with the development of a market of private armies, characterised
by the multiplication of multinational firms specialising in security and defence.
Singer (2003) highlighted the features distinguishing these organisations from
classical mercenarism. They are indeed collective structures, whose organisation
and hierarchy conform to the rules of corporate law in force in the countries where
they are established. Their objective is the search for profit rather than the satisfaction
of the individual interests of those involved on the field. Their agents are recruited
openly on the labour market. They offer their customers services well beyond simple
participation in combat operations. Finally, they have numerous contacts with
economic and financial partners, often as formal agreements, which according to
him testify to the considerable legitimacy they enjoy (Singer, 2003, pp. 44–48).
Even if the development of these private military companies calls into question the
monopoly of violence claimed by states, its political consequences on the control of
force ought to be nuanced. Avant (2001) draws attention to the limits of normative
judgment in this regard. She recommends distinguishing between three ways in
which nation states used to control force: functional, political and social (Avant,
2001, p. 5–7). The development of private military companies, she argues, affects the
(functional) capabilities of states to act forcibly, the (political) distribution of powers
between decision makers and agents, and (social) values recognised within societies
and the international community as a whole. But she cautions that the way in which
states buy the services of these private military companies or attempt to regulate their
activities also has an impact on these three types of control. At the end of the day,
while Avant argues that the ability of states to master this privatisation of force
depends on the political resources they can muster, she believes that the development
of the ‘market for force’ has reduced the odds of congruence among the three types of
control.
The development of private military companies sheds light on the particular
situation with which a number of Anglo-Saxon countries are confronted, Great
Britain and the United States at the forefront. The importance taken by outsourcing
within Western armed forces, in logistics or support tasks, reveals the sway of
market-oriented logics. To be sure, their international diffusion is explained by a kind
of institutional isomorphism, but it is also limited by varying national norms about
state power (Petersohn, 2011). The growing share held by private contractors fits into
a novel conception of defence policy, associated with the diffusion of New Public
Management within European and North American governments since the 1970s
(Jobert, 1994; Pollit and Bouckaert, 2000). The end of conscription went hand in
hand with a reform of management practices among defence staffs (Genieys et al,
2000; Joana, 2004). In the case of France, these evolutions were accompanied by a
rethinking of policy categories (Joana, 2002). Privatisation also affected armaments
policy. It led to the promotion of a ‘commercial approach’ in military procurement,
which threatened the future of a number of international cooperation programmes – the
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European transportation aircraft A400M for instance – during the 1980s–1990s
(Joana and Smith, 2006). Some scholars, however, question the consequences of
these liberal-inspired reforms on the policies effectively implemented. In Germany,
in France and in the United Kingdom, for example, they seem to have been
accompanied by the development of a ‘liberal’ industrial policy that pursues the
same objectives as before through different means of state intervention (Hoeffler,
2011).
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This literature review allows us to take stock of the changes that have affected defence
policy in Western countries over the past 30 years. Military sociology focuses on the
civilianisation of military organisations and the redefinition of their activities,
structures and recruitment practices. Historical sociology emphasises the marginalisation of the military functions of the state and the impact this process has had on
social representations of defence policy. Political economy, for its part, uncover
marketization and privatisation dynamics in the defence sector, which derive from the
global diffusion of neo-liberal arguments. While these changes suggest that a common
dynamic is at play in Western countries, it is important to note, as we do in the next
section, that they have not affected all defence policies with the same magnitude.
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Economic and Political-Cultural Liberalisation
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The civilianisation of military organisations, the demilitarisation of the state and the
privatisation of defence bear witness to an evolution of social representations of
defence policy in Western democracies. We suggest analysing this evolution by
reference to two liberalisation processes, the first economic and the second politicocultural. This twin liberalisation process, which affects Western countries unevenly,
explains the coexistence of three different types of liberal militarism.
Political economists have described the economic liberalisation wave that
submerged developed countries after the 1970s. Hall (1986) put forward different
political and social mechanisms that presided over the replacement of a Keynesian
paradigm with a monetarist paradigm in Great Britain during the 1980s. Jobert
(1994), for his part, stressed the magnitude of the changes introduced by the diffusion
of neo-liberal arguments among European governments and their effects on policy
implementation. Streeck and Thelen (2005) defined the expansion of market relations
inside and beyond the boundaries of national political systems as the main cause of
institutional change within developed economies during the 1980s–1990s.
As we have seen, defence policy was not immune to economic liberalisation. The
professionalisation of armed forces and the abandonment of the military draft play a
part in that process, as suggested by Moskos. The rationalisation of defence
management, increasingly frequent recourse to outsourcing and to private military
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companies in the case of the Anglo-Saxon countries, the reform of military
procurement and the introduction of a commercial approach in military project
management provide tangible illustrations. The transformation of defence policy
nevertheless appears to be also dependent on liberalisation dynamics of a politicalcultural nature, by which we mean the declining significance of armed forces, and of
defence policy, within society and the state. The marginalisation of the military
functions of the state, the calling into question of the uniqueness of military activity,
the increasing pressures facing the armed forces to comply with the norms and the
rules in force in their surrounding society, in terms of integration of the minorities or
of alignment on the rules of the common law, go along these lines.
Even though both these dynamics are partially congruent and may in some
instances blend with each other, these are nevertheless two distinct processes, which
may at times enter in conflict with each other. In that sense, it is justified to consider
economic and political-cultural liberalisation as the main features of the transformation of defence policy in Western countries over the past 30 years. Combining and
comparing these two dynamics allow us to identify three ideal types of liberal
militarism, between which defence policy should evolve.
Westphalian or ‘professional’ militarism (Model 1) is the starting point of most
Western defence policies (see Figure 1). Pointing to a weakly liberalised defence
policy, it is part and parcel of the monopoly of legitimate violence around which the
nation state was built during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is also
characterised by the strong functional autonomy of the armed forces with respect to
their political and social environment (Huntington, 1957). In a historical perspective,
this type of militarism characterises defence policy in liberal democracies as well as
Figure 1: Varieties of liberal militarism since the end of the Cold War.
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in authoritarian regimes. Conscription, for example, does not distinguish France from
Germany (Hippler, 2007). Furthermore, this Westphalian model remained dominant
in most Western democracies up to the turn of the 1970s. From the viewpoint of
the military, Westphalian militarism rests on the mass army model: compelling,
highly prioritised, conscription-based and reflecting the social structures of the state
(especially with regards to male dominance and that of the dominant ethnic groups or
social classes) (Von Bredow, 1998). A Westphalian defence policy’s priorities are
the monopoly of violence and territorial defence: the defence sector is sheltered from
democratic procedures; armed forces obtain a considerable portion of the national
budget; and defence policy is aligned with national interests (Mann, 1986, p. 450).
Finally, a Westphalian defence policy escapes the ‘logic’ of the market: the military
must be self-sufficient; the state plans, generates and consumes its own resources;
recruitment is based on constraint, patriotism or the selection of elites and leads to
‘long careers’; and procurement is planned from above (Muller, 1989). While it was
taken up by authoritarian regimes, this model was, in the first half of the twentieth
century, especially attractive to liberal democracies because it seemed in sync with
the modern nation state and the ideal of the ‘citizen in uniform’. Having pioneered
most if not all of these constitutive elements (state and nation building, levée en
masse and so on), France is in some regards the Western country that has remained
closest to the Westphalian model.
The two other types of liberal militarism correspond to defence policies that have
been exposed to either (or both) of the liberalisation processes aforementioned since
the early 1980s. Functional militarism (Model 2) is characterised by a high degree of
economic liberalisation and a low degree of politico-cultural liberalisation. Defence
policy is subject to economic rationality, but without any particular normative
pressure regarding societal values. The functional requirement may apply to the military
budget or the principles that are implemented to secure the retrieval, the organisation
or the use of military resources. While most Western countries have shrunk their
military budgets and introduced a market logic in their procurement policy since the
end of the Cold War, certain countries have gone further than others in specific
respects: for example, the United Kingdom with regards to outsourcing or the
Netherlands with regards to off-the-shelf procurement. This kind of liberalisation has
had a major impact on personnel management (Irondelle and Foucault, 2013). The
consequences on armaments regulation, however, are more difficult to discern: while
the privatisation of former state-owned firms has certainly occurred, the degree of
state leadership remains strong even in the United Kingdom (Hoeffler, 2013).
Conversely, moral militarism (Model 3) is characterised by a high degree of
politico-cultural liberalisation and a low degree of economic liberalisation, the focus
being on the compliance of defence policy with societal principles and values. The
retrieval, the organisation and the use of the state’s military means are politicised in
ways that may sometimes go against the implementation of functional solutions. Not
surprisingly, moral militarism has gone furthest in Scandinavian countries with
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regards to labour relations. Norway’s decision in 2013 to extend conscription to
women is a clear illustration, even though the incorporation of women and
ethnic minorities may also respond to functional needs (Bertossi and Withol de
Wenden, 2007). In continental countries such as Belgium and Germany, international
legitimacy and humanitarian law are given greater importance than diversity.
These countries give a high premium to multinationalism in planning and using their
military tool. In the United States, finally, the transformation of civic engagement
since the Vietnam War has contributed to the development of a ‘new American way
of war’ that simply cannot be explained by its operational success (Cusumano and
Vennesson, 2013).
We should not expect to find a defence policy that is perfectly in line with any of
these three ideal types. They nevertheless enable us to think through the trajectories
followed by Western defence policies over the past 30 years. First of all by
emphasising their different initial situations. While the Westphalian model constitutes a starting point common to all of them, significant nuances appear. The United
States and the United Kingdom have been traditionally reluctant towards the
military draft, even permanent armies (Wood, 2007; Mabee, 2011, 2013). They thus
combined elements of Westphalian militarism and functional militarism before the
beginning of contemporary liberalisation. Germany, Belgium and Scandinavian
countries also fell under the Westphalian model, but with early manifestations of
moral militarism. The introduction of trade unions inside the armed forces (Caforio,
2003), restrictions on the use of force beyond self-defence and constraints on the
autonomy of the armed forces (in the case of Germany since 1945) bear witness to
the specificities of national situations even before the 1980s.
Still, these ideal types allow us to think more clearly about the directions that
Western defence policies are taking. Without a doubt, all Western countries are
moving away from Westphalian militarism – but not all at the same speed and in the
same direction. British and US defence policies have pioneered economic liberalisation, but been affected unevenly by the dynamics of political-cultural liberalisation, the United Kingdom having liberalised the furthest, especially with regards to
the sexual orientation of service members (Kier, 1998). For a number of countries in
continental Europe, economic liberalisation has materialised through quite distinct
solutions, from a more systematic recourse to private service providers in the
Netherlands to defence internationalisation with a view to saving money, as in
Belgium. The varying commitment of these two countries to the development of
NATO cooperation or, in the case of Belgium, the European security and defence
policy, also appears as substantively distinct manifestations of moral militarism.
These two different ways of departing from the Wesphalian model cannot be
explained by technology or democratic pressures to shift the burden outside the
national society. Much as Westphalian militarism was couched in a specific
configuration of the nation state in the nineteenth century, functional militarism
has flourished in countries where the neo-liberal agenda has shaped social
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representations of the state since the 1980s. Similarly, moral militarism dovetails
nicely with egalitarian welfare states that are reluctant to use the language of national
interest. The legacy of the state, but also the transformations that Western states have
gone through since the 1980s, provide direction to the general trend away from
Westphalian militarism.
Conclusion
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We have observed over the past 30 years a deep transformation of defence policy in
Western democracies. These changes bear witness to an evolution of the social
representations held by political and social actors about these policies. They mainly
refer to a liberalisation process, that is sometimes economic, sometimes politicocultural and sometimes both. The manner in which both these processes work
together in different countries enables us to distinguish varieties of the militarism,
which we designate as ‘functional’, ‘moral’ and ‘Westphalian’ militarism, the latter
being a residue from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that has not entirely lost
its relevance, even in the West.
These three ideal types only sketch out the political and social transformations that
have affected the defence policy of Western countries over the past 30 years.
Systematic comparative research would be necessary to assess their relevance. Still,
they allow us to raise interesting questions. First, regarding the differences that can
still be observed despite the similar evolution of these defence policies away from
the model of Westphalian militarism: talking about common evolutions in this
respect does not exclude the persistence of strong disparities between the
founding principles and the concrete content of such policies. Second, regarding
the way in which changes in the different dimensions (procurement, personnel,
legitimation, objectives and so on) of defence policy are articulated: since
liberalisation cannot be expected to affect these dimensions in precisely the same
manner, the interplay of changes at the national level deserves to be studied more
thoroughly. Finally, as regards the political consequences of these changes: we
may, for example, wonder about whether any of this has had an impact on
the actors who are associated with formulating defence policy. This implies
querying the extent to which economic liberalisation influences the autonomy
of the military and the bargaining power of the industry versus civilian elites, or
the extent to which politico-cultural liberalisation empowers political actors and
public opinion versus the bureaucracy.
These observations lead to a number of general remarks on the contemporary
development of defence policy. The first concerns the role of technology. As we have
seen, the fact that all Western armed forces now conform to the post-military society
model put forward by Shaw does not prevent the coexistence of different ways of
extracting, organising and using military resources. Social representations of defence
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policy continue to differ quite strikingly. It is therefore quite likely that the
uniformising trend attributed to technology must be relativised. Our second point
concerns the possible convergence of defence policies. While they are all subject
to a twin process of liberalisation, defence policies may actually go in opposite
directions depending on whether economic liberalisation or politico-cultural
liberalisation prevails. The only element in common among Western democratic
defence policies seems to be their moving away from the Westphalian model they are
started from.
Note
C
O
1 The list of European countries that have abandoned the military draft since 1990 is as follows: Germany,
Belgium, Bulgaria, Bosnia-Herzegovinia, Spain, France, Latvia, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Poland,
Portugal, Czech Republic, Romania and Slovenia (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2011).
R
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