Democratic Consolidation and the Military: The East European Experience

Abstract

The literature on eastern Europe's postcommunist transition is already voluminous, but the role of the armed forces in democratization processes is one of the few areas that seems to have escaped the attention of political scientists and area specialists.' This omission is striking since the military is potentially one of the most consequential institutional actors in postauthoritarian transitions and the success or failure of these processes to a large extent hinges on its political behavior. Although the East European armies have seldom played a decisive political role in the post-World War II era certainly not one comparable to the military regimes of Latin America and Iberia they were one of the institutional defenders and beneficiaries of the Communist system. Thus, it is important to examine the behavior of these militaries during the 1989 transfers of power and in the consolidation phase thereafter. This essay surveys the evolution of civil-military relations in the East European states of the non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (for the purposes of this essay, defined as Bulgaria, the former Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania) during three stages of political transformation: the late Communist period (1980s), the transition from Communism (1989), and the period of consolidation (from 1990).2 I consider all of these cases but concentrate on Hungary and Romania because they appear to have had the most dissimilar patterns of civil-military relations in eastern Europe. Their experiences place them at the two opposing poles in the spectrum of civil-military relations. In most respects other East European states fall somewhere between them.