Civil-Military Relations in a Neo-Kantian World, 1886-1992

Armed Forces & Society

Volumn 30, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 227-254

  Choi, Seung Whan ^a   James, Patrick ^b  

^a CARLETON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

^b UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 2942679466     PISSN: 0095327X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0095327X0403000205     Document Type: Article

References (94)

1. As will become apparent, MIDs are the near-standard choice of data on interstate conflict within the field of international relations. An MID is defined as “a set of interactions between or among states involving threats to use military force, displays of military force, or actual uses of military force” (Charles S. Gochman and Zeev Maoz, “Military Interstate Disputes, 1816–1976: Procedures, Patterns, and Insights,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 28, 4 (1984): 587).
2. The rapidly evolving program of research brings with it similar shifts in identity. The “democratic” peace initially emphasized the apparent absence of warfare among such regimes (Michael W. Doyle, “Liberalism and World Politics,” American Political Science Review 80, 4 (1986): 1151–1169)
3. while the “liberal” peace emerged as research findings associated economic interdependence and democracy with pacific interstate relations (John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, “The Classical Liberals were Right: Democracy, Interdependence, and Conflict, 1950–1985,” International Studies Quarterly 41, 2 (1997): 267–294).
4. The neo-Kantian or “triangular” peace, which stands as the most recent variant in the series, links democracy, interdependence, and international organizations with peace (Bruce Russett and John R. Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001).
5. See Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)
6. John R. Oneal and Bruce Russett, “The Kantian Peace: The Pacific Benefits of Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885–1992,” World Politics 52, 1 (1999): 1–37
7. Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace
8. Brandon C. Prins, “Democratic Politics and Dispute Challenges: Examining the Effects of Regime Type on Conflict Reciprocation, 1816–1992,” paper prepared for delivery at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 2002.
9. It also should be noted that, as Diamond points out, civilian supremacy in civil-military relations is one of the most important attributes of democracy; see Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy Toward Consolidation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999): 11. So it is necessary to delve into civil-military relations in the context of the democratic peace as well as the discipline of international relations.
10. Although there exist more sophisticated and complex definitions for civil-military relations, we employ the degree of influence for reasons of parsimony. For a more compelling treatment of concept formation, see Glen Segell, “The Nation-State, Nationalism, and Civil-Military Relations Theory,” in Constantine P. Danopoulos, Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi and Amir Bar-Or, eds. Civil-Military Relations, Nation Building, and National Identity and Security: Comparative Perspectives (forthcoming).
11. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret.
12. It should be noted that several studies of American foreign policy suggest the opposite direction for this linkage, i.e., civilian hawks and military doves. Good examples in that domain are as follows: Richard K. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977)
13. Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, “Civilian Hawks and Military Doves: The Civil-Military Gap and the Use of Force, 1816–1992,” paper presented to the Triangle Institute for Security Studies Conference on the Gap between the Military and Civilian Society (1999)
14. and Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Civilian-Military Relations and the Use of Force (forthcoming). While these works address American foreign policy alone, our paper, in a sense, attempts to broaden the temporal and spatial domain of those studies by including all states.
15. See Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1957)
16. Samuel E. Finer, ed., The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1976)
17. Morris Janowitz, ed. Civil-Military Relations: Regional Perspectives (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1981).
18. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
19. For a compelling interpretation of Clinton's actions in that period, see Ryan C. Hendrickson, “Clinton's Military Strikes in 1998: Diversionary Uses of Force?” Armed Forces & Society 28, 2 (2002): 309–332
20. an excellent review of civil-military relations appears in Peter D. Feaver, “Civil-Military Relations,” in Annual Review of Political Science, ed. Nelson W. Polsby, 2 (1999): 211–241.
21. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises, vii.
22. See Roger W. Benjamin and Lewis J. Edinger, “Conditions for Military Control over Foreign Policy Decisions in Major States: A Historical Exploration,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 15, 1 (1971): 5–31
23. David E. Albright, “Comparative Conceptualization of Civil-Military Relations,” World Politics 32, 4 (1980): 553–576
24. Graham T. Allison, Albert Carnesale, and Joseph S. Nye Jr., Hawks, Doves, and Owls: An Agenda for Avoiding Nuclear War (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1985)
25. Guy D. Whitten and Henry S. Bienen, “Political Violence and Time in Power,” Armed Forces & Society 23, 2 (1996): 209–234
26. Feaver, “Civil-Military Relations”
27. Julian Schofield, “Militarized Decision-Making for War in Pakistan: 1947–1971,” Armed Forces & Society 27, 1 (2000): 131–148.
28. Colin S. Gray, “Hawks and Doves: Values and Policy,” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 3, 1 (1975): 86.
29. Harold D. Lasswell, “The Garrison State,” American Journal of Sociology 46, 4 (1941): 455–468.
30. Allison, Carnesale, and Nye, Hawks, Doves, and Owls.
31. Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Security 9, 1 (1984): 58–107
32. Jack Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984,” International Security 9, 1 (1984): 108–146.
33. Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations,” 140.
34. David Laurent Rousseau, Domestic Political Institutions and the Evolution of International Conflict (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1996), 69.
35. James A. Donovan, Militarism, U.S.A. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968): 100.
36. It should be noted that some studies suggest the opposite, namely, that the U.S. military was deeply ambivalent about the Vietnam War, preferring instead to prepare to fight a conventional war in Europe against the Warsaw Pact. See Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises, 22–30
37. Bob Buzzanco, “The American Military's Rationale against the Vietnam War,” Political Science Quarterly 101, 4 (1986): 559–576.
38. The second and third emphases are ours. Graham T. Allison, “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” American Political Science Review 63, 3 (1969): 714.
39. Amos Perlmutter, “The Military and Politics in Modern Times: A Decade Later,” Journal of Strategic Studies 9 (1986): 5–15
40. Feaver and Gelpi, “Civilian Hawks”
41. Schofield, “Militarized Decision-Making”
42. Feaver and Gelpi, Civilian-Military Relations.
43. For example, Huntington, The Soldier and the State; Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises; and Janowitz, Civil-Military Relations.
44. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: 70.
45. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises.
46. Stanislav Andreski, Wars, Revolutions, Dictatorships: Studies of Historical and Contemporary Problems from a Comparative Viewpoint (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1992): 103.
47. Feaver and Gelpi, “Civilian Hawks”
48. Feaver and Gelpi, Civilian-Military Relations.
49. See Charles Lane, “A Soldier's Story: National Insecurity,” The New Republic 213, 16 (October 16, 1995): 20–21
50. Lawrence J. Korb, “The Use of Force,” Brookings Review 15, 2 (1997): 24–25
51. and Kenneth J. Campbell, “Once Burned, Twice Cautious: Explaining the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine,” Armed Forces & Society 24, 3 (1998): 357–374.
52. Patrick M. Morgan, “Disarmament,” in The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, ed. Joel Krieger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 246.
53. Michael Brecher, “Crisis Escalation: Model and Findings,” International Political Science Review 17, 2 (1996): 220.
54. Daniel S. Geller, Domestic Factors in Foreign Policy: A Cross-National Statistical Analysis (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Books, Inc., 1985): xviii.
55. Seung-Whan Choi and Patrick James, “‘Quandrangulating’ the Peace: Civil-Military Dynamics, Political Communications and Militarized Interstate Disputes,” unpublished manuscript, 2002
56. Seung-Whan Choi, Civil-Military Dynamics, Democratic Peace, and International Conflict, 1886–1992: A Look Beyond the Triangular Peace (PhD dissertation, University of Missouri, 2002).
57. For example, Diamond, Developing Democracy.
58. Sam C. Sarkesian, “Civil-Military Relations in a Liberal Society: The United States in a New Security Era,” paper presented at the OSU Mershon Center Conference on Civil-Military Relations, Columbus, Ohio, 4–6 December 1992.
59. Michael C. Desch, Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999): 3.
60. Kim Quaile Hill, “Domestic Politics, International Linkages, and Military Expenditures,” Studies in Comparative International Development 13, 1 (1978): 38–59
61. Gary Zuk and William R. Thompson, “The Post-Coup Military Spending Question: A Pooled Cross-Sectional Time Series Analysis,” American Political Science Review 76, 1 (1982): 60–74
62. William A. Niskanen, “The Peculiar Economics of Bureaucracy,” American Economic Review 58, 2 (1968): 293–305.
63. Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, “Measuring Military Allocations: A Comparison of Different Approaches,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 30, 3 (1986): 554.
64. Dixon standardized this operationalization by calling it the “weak link” approach when applied to democraticness in a dyad. The likelihood of an international dispute within a dyad should be a function primarily of the degree of constraint experienced by the less constrained state (i.e., the smaller value) in each dyad, that is, the less democratic of the two. In the present context, the lower value of military expenditure by percentage in a dyad establishes the “lowest common denominator.” See William J. Dixon, “Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict,” American Political Science Review 88, 1 (1994): 14–32.
65. It should be noted that students of arms races “assume that military spending is an important measure of a nation's future military capabilities and therefore also intentions and commitment” (Thomas Hartley and Bruce Russett, “Public Opinion and the Common Defense: Who Governs Military Spending in the United States,” American Political Science Review 86, 4 (1992): 909). It also is assumed that, in a situation of conflict, civilians will support military spending to defend the state and its people. Our two-step method does not distinguish different roles and responsibility between civilian and military leaders, and we leave more refinement of the measurement issue to the reader for future study.
66. D. Scott Bennett and Allan Stam, “EUGene: A Conceptual Manual,” International Interactions 26, 2 (2000): 179–204. The webpage address is http://www.eugenesoftware.org/.
67. Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism: Civilian and Military (New York: The Free Press, 1959)
68. Donovan, Militarism; Mark Souva and Brandon C. Prins, “International Trade and Militarized Dispute Initiation, Reciprocation, and Revision, 1950–1992,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Chicago, IL, 2001.
69. Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1986).
70. Several controversies exist: Elizabeth Kier's recent work, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine Between the Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), discusses the tactical limits of a drafted army in England and France
71. discusses the tactical limits of a drafted army in England and France; and Anderson and Honegger's edited volume, The Military Draft: Selected Readings on Conscription (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1982), provides an excellent collection of the pros and cons.
72. Thomas W. Ross, “Raising an Army: A Positive Theory of Military Recruitment,” Journal of Law and Economics 37, 1 (1994): 109–131.
73. Simon Duindam, Military Conscription: An Economic Analysis of the Labour Component in the Armed Forces (Heidelberg: Physica Verlag, 1999): 119.
74. Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace, 19.
75. Gary M. Anderson, Dennis Halcoussis, and Robert D. Tollison, “Drafting the Competition: Labor Unions and Military Conscription,” Defence and Peace Economics 7, 3 (1996): 189–202.
76. Michael D. White, “Conscription and the Size of Armed Forces,” Social Science Quarterly 70, 3 (1989): 780.
77. Seung-Whan Choi and Patrick James, “No Professional Soldiers, No Militarized Interstate Disputes?: A New Question for Neo-Kantianism,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 47, 6 (2003): 796–816.
78. The following sources have been used for either cross-checking or complementing military manpower data with respect to reliability and validity: International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance 1970–1971 through 2000/01 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970–1971 through 2000/01)
79. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, World Armaments and Disarmament: SIPRI Yearbook 1985 (London and Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1985).
80. Zeev Maoz, Dyadic Militarized Interstate Disputes (DYMID1.1) Dataset–Version 1.1. Dyadic MID Codebook (1999): 1–9, downloaded from ftp://spirit.tau.ac.il/zeevmaoz/dyadmid.html. It should be noted that the level of hostility is originally based on MIDs data assembled from the Correlates of War project
81. see Gochman and Maoz, “Military Interstate Disputes”).
82. The GEE is one of the most commonly employed statistical methods among students of international conflict, crisis and war. Stata Statistical Software (version 7.0) is used for empirical tests. Our model is corrected for the first-autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity. The Wald test statistic of 471.37 is statistically significant at the 0.001 level. For explanation of GEE in practice, see Christopher J.W. Zorn, “Generalized Estimating Equation Models for Correlated Data: A Review with Applications,” American Journal of Political Science 45, 2 (2001): 470–490.
83. Oneal and Russett, “The Kantian Peace.”
84. See Gochman and Maoz, “Military Interstate Disputes”
85. and Oneal and Russett, “The Kantian Peace,” 10.
86. According to Oneal and Russett, after testing both MID involvement and initiation, they find that both dependent variable measurements have “produced nearly identical results.” Oneal and Russett report only the MID involvement results in their article. See Oneal and Russett, “The Kantian Peace,” 23.
87. See Table 1 in Oneal and Russett, “The Kantian Peace,” 22.
88. Nathaniel Beck, Jonathan Katz, and Richard Tucker, “Taking Time Seriously: Time-Series-Cross-Section Analysis with a Binary Dependent Variable,” American Journal of Political Science 42, 4 (1998): 1260–1288.
89. Oneal and Russett, “The Classical Liberals.”
90. Erik Gartzke, “Kant We All Just Get Along? Opportunity, Willingness, and the Origins of the Democratic Peace,” American Journal of Political Science 42, 1 (1998): 1–27
91. Patrick James, Eric Solberg, and Murray Wolfson, “An Identified Systemic Model of the Democracy-Peace Nexus,” Defence and Peace Economics 10, 1 (1999): 1–37.
92. Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace.
93. Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises, vii.
94. Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis, first paperback/CDROM ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000).