Politiek en historie. Opstellen over Nederlandse politiek en vergelijkende politieke wetenschap

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II Vergelijkende politieke wetenschap

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The role of the military in the emerging countries^*

I Introduction

Within the past decade, the military have taken over power in a large number of the developing countries: in Egypt (1952), in Pakistan, Burma, Thailand, Iraq and the Sudan (1958), in Turkey (1960), in Korea (1961) and again in Burma in 1962. In other countries, too, the military have tended to play an increasingly important role, as in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and, less prominently as yet, in Jordan and Ethiopia. Military coups d'état are, of course, no new phenomenon. The Middle East has long seethed with military revolt. In Syria alone there have been no less than eight military revolutions since 1949. Even in Western Europe, military pressure changed a political regime in the annus mirabilis of 1958. Characteristically, an official army manual in one of the Latin American countries could unequivocally affirm: ‘the last step in a millitary career is the Presidency of the Republic.’¹ A striking characteristic, however, of many of the more recent military revolutions has been their identification with development and modernization. Many of them are no longer a mere incident in the power game of traditionalist élites.

Two questions therefore arise:

a. why is it that in so many countries the military have taken power under the banner of social and economic development, and
b. what are the prospects, what are the chances of success and failure, of military leadership in achieving development of the countries in which they have taken power?

* Public lecture at the Opening of the 1962 Postgraduate Course of Public Administration, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, on 11 January 1962. The then Rector, Professor Egbert de Vries, insisted on the use of the more neutral title Military Administration in the Developing Countries. Even so, the lecture attracted an unusually large attendance from the Corps Diplomatique in The Hague. Originally published as Volume 1, Series Minor, Publications of the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1962.

1 Quoted from George I. Blanksten, in Almond-Coleman, The Politics of the Developing Areas, 503. It is interesting to note that in Latin America, too, the number of military coups has increased substantially since about 1930. Out of twenty Latin American nations no more than six were ruled by military men in 1928, but thirteen in 1945. At the same time, the character of a number of military revolutions changed: typical ‘palace revolutions’ persisted, but many military revolutions were now also more than that. They were often carried out in close cooperation with and with the active support of new social strata. Cf. Lieuwen, Arms and Politics in Latin America, 12.2 ff.

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The subject of this paper is The Role of the Military in the Emerging Countries. By definition, I therefore exclude from consideration those developing countries which as yet have no autochtonous military apparatus worth speaking of, as is true of most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Nor shall I treat those instances where the military establishment is nothing but an appendage of a securely established upper class or traditionalist regime. Finally, I shall omit the more developed countries, even though the problem of civil-military relations is becoming of increasing concern to students of modern government. The relation of science to responsible government, the influence of military expenditures on the national economy, the increasing impact of defence considerations on the making of foreign policy, and the weighty national and international administrative problems which result from the powerful trend towards international decisionmaking - all those are substantial problems indeed. But they are little related to problems of national development which are the special concern of this lecture.²

2 This paper suffers from many unsubstantiated generalizations. For this reason, too, the experience of communist countries has been left out of consideration. The Russian revolution of 1917 would seem one of the rare cases in which a total breakdown in the organizational morale of the army allowed lower military ranks to play a vital role in a successful revolution. Normally, however, communist politicians have turned towards military activities (as in China, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and in post-revolutionary Russia) rather than military leaders towards communism. Mao Tse-tung's military successes seem to exercise a profound influence on the thought of both military and civilian revolutionaries. In either case, the effect of Mao's teachings has been to obliterate the borderline between military and civilian authority. This is, of course, true of guerilla and underground activity generally.

II The rise of the military as a modernizing force

Obviously, each military revolt has its special features. In some cases, the military have assumed power eagerly, as of right. In others, they have done so only after great hesitation. In certain instances, the initiative has come from the top, in others from relatively junior officers. Social-revolutionary desires have been more prominent in some military coups than in others. But even in those cases where power was taken by a few generals of the top echelons, and where, as yet, little practical reform has resulted, it would often be wrong to identify the military too easily with the more conservative, let alone reactionary elements of society.

At least four circumstances have tended to propel the military into a progressive position in many of the developing countries.

1. The military have often been one of the earliest Westernized institutions in traditional societies. Traditionalist elites have thought it possible to borrow the ‘cutting edge’³ of Western civilization while continuing to isolate their societies as much as possible from Western influences in other respects. In doing so, they have contributed to making the army a potential revolutionary force par excellence. Many a ruling group has therefore been confronted and ousted by the antagonism of its own Young Turks.

2. In traditional societies a military career has often been a means of social advance for groups which otherwise occupied an inferior status. In many countries, the military have been recruited from relatively low orders of society. Hence, the army has become one of the few channels of upward mobil-

3 Rustow, The Army and the Founding of the Turkish Republic, 514.

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ity - for a rise through merit rather than social origin - in societies which have been marked by a very rigid stratification. To use a Western metaphor: army officers in the emerging states have often been Bonapartes rather than Prussian Junkers.⁴ This is also true in other ways. Absolutist rulers or colonial governments have often deliberately recruited their military forces from ethnic minority groups. They have presumably reasoned that this would make the army a more faithful, because more personal, instrument. But in seeking to isolate the military from the dominant ethnic groups, they may have ultimately pushed it into a more revolutionary position once nationhood became a more powerful symbol than personal allegiance to a ruling monarch or colonial power. Nationalism may be all the more passionate for being nourished by an urge to belong, and all the more dynamic for being somewhat synthetic.

3. It is mistaken to regard the military as a completely homogeneous force.

Armies, navies, and more recently, air forces of non-Western countries, have often had widely different philosophies, not unrelated to the Western traditions in which they were trained respectively. Whereas German, French and Italian missions have often trained the armies, the navies in most countries have been under the influence of British or American traditions. Generally, armies have been more politically minded than the other two services. Sometimes naval and air forces have even ended repressive army regimes.

But armies, too, are far from being monolithic entities. Typically, the initiative - or at least the momentum of a military revolt - has often come from certain special strata within the military profession. Have not many of them been ‘colonels' revolts’?

One reason for this is technical, following directly from certain basic organizational principles. ‘Colonels’, ‘Lieutenant Colonels’, and ‘Majors’ occupy a strategic position in any large organization. Their number is sufficiently small to allow them to communicate easily and secretly among themselves, while the number of levels between them and the ordinary ‘soldiers’ is not so large as to isolate them and prevent them from carrying the ‘soldiers’ with them.⁵ A military conspiracy can therefore be prepared more easily on the level of colonels and majors than that of either generals or privates. Generals are often much more implicated in the existing state of things, which frequently satisfies their ambitions. They are much more likely than younger officers to belong to a traditional elite. Soldiers and subaltern officers, on the other hand, lack the technical conditions for an armed uprising, except in conditions of total chaos and defeat.

But there are other, more telling, factors which account for the crucial place of younger officers in a number of recent military revolts. Many leading actors in these revolts have been staff officers rather than officers in ordinary commands. They have been trained as strategists, intelligence officers,

4 Cf. Rustow, in Almond-Coleman, 422.

5 See Deutsch, Cracks in the Monolith: Possiblities and Patterns of Disintegration in totalitarian Systems.

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engineers, or doctors. Within the army, they have therefore tended to form a special intelligentsia.⁶ They were generally trained in the 1930's and 1940's, when they rubbed shoulders with those who were then students, but who are now leading nationalist politicians. They themselves often participated in the military struggles for national independence, or in special guerilla activities. All this has made them ardent nationalists with a more diversified and direct political outlook and experience than fits the stereotype of military professionalism.

4. The recent military revolts should be explained above all in the light of assumed civilian failures. National independence, by itself, raised expectations which it would have been impossible to fulfil even under the most favourable conditions. Political leaders have been uncomfortably poised between the social forces of traditionalism and their desires for modernity. National unity, fleetingly achieved during the struggle for national independence, often gave way to a regime of competing groups which - in the absence of direct relations between the urban centres of government and the overwhelmingly rural areas - have often represented little but personal cliques.⁷ Internal unrest and external fears added to a feeling of insecurity. Is it surprising that the military intervened in this situation? Military men had the weapons. They prided themselves on their superior organization and incorruptibility. They regarded themselves as the guardians of the nation which, so young officers felt, might easily fall prey to imperialist designs (whether Western or Communist), if internal anarchy persisted. They considered their country's stagnation a major weakness in national defence and a serious blot on its international prestige. Absolutist government had after all been the rule rather than the exception in most countries under consideration. Small wonder therefore that many military leaders have echoed the words of Nasser: ‘If the army does not do this job, who will?’⁸ Where civilian government was strong and where it continued to carry the prestige of dynamic development as in India or Tunisia, the military have not so far challenged the political leadership. In a number of other instances, the military have intervened only incidentally, as a stabilizer to resolve civilian deadlock. But in others again, the military have taken over completely, feeling that they scored higher than the civilians on the scale of modernity which to the non-Western intelligentsia means, according to Edward Shils, above all to be ‘dynamic, concerned with the people, democratic and equalitarian, scientific, economically advanced, sovereign and influential’.⁹ Clemenceau spoke the famous words that war is too serious a business to leave to the generals. Military leaders in the emerging states have found little difficulty in inverting this. Like General de Gaulle, they have ‘come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians’.¹⁰

The question arises: How much better can the military do in achieving development?

6 There is a brilliant treatment of the attitude of the intelligentsia - both military and otherwise - in the developing areas, in: Benda, Non-Western Intelligentsias as Political Elites; and in: Edward Shils, The Intellectuals in the Political Development of the New States.

7 The best general recent analyses are: Pye, The Non-Western Political Process; and Shils, Political Development in the New States.

8 Rustow, 520.

9 Shils, Political Development in the New States, 265 ff.

10 De Gaulle to Attlee. Cf. Williams, A Prime Minister Remembers, 56.

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III Positive contributions by the military to development

The potential role of the military and of military administration in social and economic development is far from negligible.

Whatever the military's ulterior motives, many military undertakings have benefited social and economic life generally. When army engineers build roads for reasons of strategy or supply, these can also be used by civilians; this has far-reaching social and economic consequences as it increases social mobility, extends the division of labour and leads to a greater specialization of functions. Where military considerations dictate improved communications, these may also be available to civilian administration. If modern defence demands a technical basis of heavy industries, such industries can produce machinery and commercial means of transport, as easily as guns, tanks, or naval craft. The strategic location of military settlements may, unintentionally, help to develop neglected outlying areas. Hence, there is no hard and fast line which separates military production from civilian production. Substantial benefits may spill over from military expenditures into channels of general economic development.

The military are the repository of many skills, which is the more important as such skills are rarer in newly developing areas. Many officers have received and continue to receive extensive training, abroad or at home, under foreign military assistance agreements. A modern military establishment requires the support of an infinite number of skills. The Turkish army is not the only army requiring its own training centres in such diverse fields as electronics, shipbuilding, engineering, medicine, metereology, modern communication techniques, flying, and fire-fighting.¹¹ Such skills have a civilian just as much as a military importance, and many ex-graduates of special military colleges return to use their acquired skills in civilian employment.

The military play an important developmental role in yet another way. In countries that are often characterized by a very low degree of geographic mobility and a high degree of communal particularism, the army tends to be one of the most important agencies of socialization. It fashions raw recruits with a very limited outlook into national citizens. Numerous armies in developing countries run simple programmes in reading, writing, arithmetic, and even in ‘social studies’.¹² Army experience will generally widen the intellectual horizon of its soldiers. They develop a more dynamic view of human existence. In addition, they often learn specific skills such as the use and - a very important matter indeed - maintenance of machinery, which can be of considerable significance when they return to their villages. Conscription also has a multiplier effect. Ex-soldiers who return to their local communities may often act there as innovators. They may help to spread skills. They often increase the desire for self-education amongst their neighbours. Thus,

11 Lerner-Robinson, Swords and Ploughshares: The Turkish Army as a Modernizing Force, 32; Pye, Armies in the Process of Political Modernization, 85 ff.

12 Lerner-Robinson, 35.

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they can hulp to translate national planning intentions into local realities.

For all its ceremonial trappings, the military forms basically a fairly rational type of organization. Life in the military exposes officers and conscripts to new ways of discipline and co-operation which may revolutionize behaviour patterns on their return to civilian life. Expansion of the military establishment is conditional on people and money. It gives therefore a natural impetus to new ways of population registration and improved financial administration, through reforms in the taxation system, in methods of budgeting and accounting, in policing, etc. Military exertion may therefore be a powerful stimulus to administrative reform generally.

A final contribution, not by the military as such, but by military government, may be that it can - though it need not - increase the stability of government. If so, this may have a powerful effect on civilian morale. Energies may be diverted from emotional unrest into more productive channels. The confidence of private economic agents may return. Long-term investments, whether foreign or domestic, may increase. A more stable government might conceivably handle scarce resources more carefully, and priorities might be determined more objectively and on a longer view. This, in turn, may indirectly increase the effect of foreign aid and domestic savings. Might one not readily agree with the words of an American observer that civilian aid to a military government might well do more for development than military aid to weak civilian governments?¹³ If, indeed, military governments do seriously embark on development!

13 Pauker, Southeast Asia as a Problem Area in the Next Decade, 344.

IV Negative aspects of military administration

There are, however, a number of negative items which prominently figure on the balance-sheet of military administration.

The military mentality is not very conducive to easy relations between military administrators and civilian subjects. The very success of the military in the moulding of raw recruits causes them frequently to over-estimate the extent to which they could mould citizens and society. When frustrated in this they readily find fault with the people rather than with themselves. Instead of seeking the co-operation of the people, they instinctively resort to compulsion.¹⁴ If it is true, that community development is one of the most promising techniques in development, it is doubtful whether the military could operate it with more than limited success.

It is easy to exaggerate the real efficiency of the military. This is due to at least three circumstances:

1. not often are the military actually tested in the performance of their ultimate function, that of warfare;

14 Pye, Armies in the Process of Political Modernization, 88. A former civilian President of Colombia, Eduardo Cantos, wrote in 1956: ‘The military profession is poor schooling for learning the difficult art of government, for to govern well means to interpret, to reconcile, to respect the rights of all, to give freedom of expression to every opinion, to abide by the laws and never subordinate them to personal caprice, to have the courage to rectify mistakes, to ask for and listen to advice, to have patience, to realize that one owes one's power to the will of the people ... All this is difficult for the military to understand and accept, accustomed as they are to the blind obedience of their inferiors, the dry voices of command, and the narrow horizon of their profession, which rarely encompasses the element of humanism’, quoted from Lieuwen, 143.

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2. the military are allowed to work in an atmosphere of discipline and secrecy which prevents effective scrutiny and measurement of their actual behaviour; and

3. they perform a far narrower range of duties than does civilian administration.

When the military take over the reins of government, they inherit not only the trappings, but also the traps, of power. The relations between the new military leaders and the civilian bureaucracy are apt to create strains. The military have many skills which are of use to civilian life, but all these do not add up to the complex requirements of modern public administration. Both the range and the mass of bureaucratic duties make it impossible for the military to replace the civilian administration completely. The most they can do, therefore, is to insert military personnel into civilian offices, to supervise and control their performance. But this adds a new layer in government. It complicates the channels of communication. It may decrease the rapidity by which decisions can be taken on all but the highest level. Confusion may result.

Responsibilities may be evaded, and shifted to new - and usually higher - ranges of government. A surfeit of business at the top will be detrimental, again, to the despatch of day-to-day business and to the detached consideration of long-term policies. The leisurely staff planning of military days, in other words, will of necessity give way to short-cuts and hasty improvisations. Clamour for deconcentration and decentralization of authority will be of little avail, as long as effective power remains heavily concentrated in the hands of a military junta.

Then, difficulties are likely to arise from increasing disenchantment with the new rulers. As the reputation of the military leadership fades, criticism from the people, from ousted political leaders, or from sections of the military themselves can be expected to increase. Perhaps new military coups will follow. Military traditions, anyhow, make military leaders prone to a desire to stifle criticism. New control organs may be established within the army, the civil service, or the nation at large. This adds yet another tier to the machinery of government, complicated as it already is by the side-by-side operation of civilian and military administrators. And - perhaps even worse - a silencing of free criticism tends to deprive a government of one of the most basic requirements of all successful public administration: truly accurate information about the actual functioning and effect of its own policies.

Government means constant choice. No amount of appeal to ‘the national interest’ will by itself solve basic problems of modern government. To evade this dilemma, military leaders may well resort to ostentatious acts and works, which are not so much dictated by development priorities as by a desire to feed national pride. Military leaders have a natural inclination to

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think well of the interests of the military, which is likely to augment unproductive military expenditures. They may resort to striking action in the field of international politics, to offset disappointments at home. This increases the outlay on foreign embassies which are becoming a major drain on the skilled manpower and the scarce foreign currencies of many of today's new nations. South American military leaders are not the only leaders to have brought their countries in a short time to financial ruin: a careful husbanding of available resources is not a quality in which the military excels.¹⁵

But the most basic question of military government is that of its own legitimation. Two choices seem to be open to military leaders in the wake of a successful coup. They can try to continue to govern as the military or they can try to civilianize themselves.

A continuation of military government complicates both the working of civilian government and of the military itself. As Kemal Atatürk argued in 1909, a dozen years before he seized power: a confusion of military and civilian responsibilities tends to make for both a weak army and weak civilian government.¹⁶ Military government introduces the discord of public life into the bosom of the military itself. The military have therefore often recoiled from a permanent assumption of civilian duties. They either have hesitated to take power, or they have clung to it without conviction. And at times they have deliberately divested themselves of all civilian responsibilities in order to preserve their own unity and purity. Significantly, Atatürk resigned all military duties after he had come to power. He had himself photographed, not in the splendour of military uniform, but in white tie and tails. His example is now being repeated by Ayoub Khan of Pakistan, Gursel of Turkey, and Nasser of Egypt, amongst others.

But then, if a one-time military leader turns in fact into a civilian, one can no longer speak of military government. The ex-general or former colonel becomes as much a political leader as any national leader ever was. His former military experience may help him to retain the allegiance of the military more readily than purely civilian leaders can. But this is no blank cheque. If the new leader does not perform to the satisfaction of the decisive strata of the military, a new military coup might easily follow. One may even witness the spectacle that a one-time military leader moves to become an outright antagonist of the professional military. He may seek to build up a mass-movement of his own so that he need no longer exclusively rely on military support. For security reasons, he may even seek to establish a private army, thus provoking the regular military forces in their own professional atmosphere.

In other words, assumed civilian failure may readily invite military intervention. Military government, however, can only endure if its leaders prove more adapt at politics than do the regular politicians.

15 Lieuwen, 146 ff., gives some data on the outright predatory activities of certain military dictators in Latin America, some of whom started as radicals of a sort. To quote from 149: ‘In the five years period from 1954 to 1959 Latin America's fleeing military dictators carried out of their countries hundreds of millions of dollars. Indications are that Péron escaped with as much as $700 million, Pérez Jiménez with more than $ 250 million, Batista with $ 50 million in 1944 and $ 200 million in 1959, and Rojas Pinilla, Paul Magloire, and Arbenz with smaller, yet sizeable fortunes. Meanwhile, those still in power were providing for their retirement. General Trujillo, in the neighboring Dominican Republic, had over the years perfected his systematic graft until his annual income was estimated in the neighborhood of $ 30 million. In similar fashion, corrupt use of political power has made the Somoza family of Nicaragua one of the richest in Central America. But thievery by the heads of state was only part of the story. Under the Perón regime, favored generals like Humberto Sosa Molina and Franklin Lucero became multimillionaires. Colonel Pulido Barreto, Pérez Jiménez' ordinance chief, amassed millions from parking meter collections and transportation concessions.’

16 Rustow, The Army and the Founding of the Turkish Republic, 545 ff; Lerner-Robinson, 19ff.