The Military and its Civilian Environment: Reflections on a Theory of Civil-Military Relations

Abstract

The study of what has come to be termed civil-military relations has received renewed interest within the last decade and, in my view, it is safe to assume that it is going to attract even more attention in the years to come. This situation may justify talking of nothing less than the renaissance of the study of civil-military relations. The reason for this renaissance seems to be that, in recent years, civil-military relations across the globe have entered a turbulent era, one that challenges – albeit with considerable variation – the established patterns of civil-military relations of the past. In particular, “[t]his renaissance in what some academics once considered a settled issue may be attributed to the emergence of post-cold war democracies in Eastern and Central Europe; to a (mostly) American quest to spread democratic norms throughout the world; to continued problems of imposing civil control over the military in many states, especially those where internal conflict seems endemic; and to a recent, but brief, interlude of American self-doubt about the effectiveness of civil control in the United States.”2 Don Snider and Miranda Carlton-Carew add to these elements some others, such as the changes in the international system caused by the end of East-West conflict, the rapid downsizing of the armed forces that followed, and the increasing use of the military for operations other than war.3 These factors will be dealt with in this article, but prior to this, the talk of the renaissance of the study of civil-military relations leaves the reader with some obvious questions to be answered: What is actually meant by the term “civil-military relations”? To what does the term “established patterns” refer? In which direction are civil-military relations moving? Last but not least, underlying all these other issues is the question of whether there is an explanatory model or even a theory of civil-military relations that is capable of capturing all this. What follows is an attempt to respond to these questions.