State Practices, International Norms, and the Decline of Mercenarism

Abstract

This article describes the evolution of state control over military manpower through an examination of three centuries of mercenarism. It documents the decline of several eighteenth-century forms of mercenarism and presents a critique of the conventional explanations for that decline. I argue that an institutional analysis provides a much richer understanding of how and why state control has varied. I present an empirical analysis of the institutional basis of mercenarism and construct an alternative explanation for its decline. My argument is that mercenarism's decline resulted from the institutionalization of a new international norm of state control over nonstate violence in the international system. The norm reflected a new set of state practices developed by leading states in the context of the French Revolutionary War. In the course of the nineteenth century, these practices were universalized in the state system, setting a new standard for competent statesmanship. State armies of the 1980s are citizen-armies. Nearly 90 percent of the world's armies recruit exclusively within their home states' territories, and the employment of foreigners in regular standing armies is an anomaly. Two hundred years ago this pattern was quite the reverse. 1 A peacetime army with a large contingent of foreigners was the norm and a pure citizen-army was an anomaly. In a state system characterized by enormous differences in size, population, strategic location, wealth, political regime-type, and development, it is striking that only a handful of armies employ foreigners. Among those that do are rich and poor, large and small, socialist and authoritarian and democratic, Eastern and Western, Northern and Southern. The theoretical implications of the decline in mercenarism are the subject of this article. Mercenarism, as I use the term, refers to the practices of recruiting for and enlisting in the service of a foreign army.2 In analytic terms, the I Because I am interested in the modern state system as it evolved and developed in Europe, the following analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century mercenarism focuses primarily on that region.