Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T08:23:27.922Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Soldiers in Mufti: The Impact of Military Rule Upon Economic and Social Change in the Non-Western States1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Eric A. Nordlinger
Eric A. Nordlinger*
Affiliation:
Brandeis University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When military officers are either sitting in the governmental saddle or have one foot securely in the stirrup, is it likely that such military controlled governments will pursue policies of socio-economic change and reform? What are the officer-politicians' motivations in reacting to the possibilities of such modernizing changes? Under what conditions are their motivations likely to vary? This essay attempts to answer these questions with regard to the contemporary non-western states. And in making the attempt, I believe that the analysis falls squarely within the purview of certain recent changes that are taking place in the study of comparative politics. These changes may be most broadly depicted as a movement away from that aspect of behavioralism that has focused exclusively upon “inputs,” and away from that dimension of “scientism” that has focused upon abstract concepts at the expense of empirical analysis. The change can also be described (in an overly facile manner) as a movement toward the politics in political science and the government in comparative politics.

As is evidenced in LaPalombara's call for “parsimony” in the selection of problems, we should choose problems for analysis that are blatantly political and of obvious contemporary relevance. In approximately half of the contemporary non-western states military officers either occupy the topmost seats of government themselves or they have a marked influence upon the civilian incumbents. And when this fact is placed alongside the potential of most contemporary governments to influence the pace and direction of social and economic change, this essay's central concern fulfills LaPalombara's criterion.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 64 , Issue 4 , December 1970 , pp. 1131 - 1148
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1970

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

The research and writing of this article was generously supported by the Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, and the National Science Foundation (grant number 01–GS–2098). For their much appreciated suggestions and criticisms I am indebted to Amos Perlmutter, Gary Orran, John D. Powell, Donald Hindley, George A. Kelly, and James F. Guyot.

References

2 LaPalombara, Joseph, “Macrotheories and Microapplications in Comparative Politics: A Widening Chasm,” Comparative Politics, 1 (10 1968), 52–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pennock, J. Roland, “Political Development, Political Systems, and Political Goods,” 18 World Politics (04 1966), 415–434 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Almond, Gabriel A., “A Development Approach to Political Systems,” 7 World Politics (01 1965), 183–214 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, 1968)Google Scholar; Macridis, Roy C., “Comparative Politics and the Study of Government,” Comparative Politics, 1 (10 1968) 79–90 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Pye, Lucian W., “Armies in the Process of Political Modernization,” in Johnson, John J. (ed.), The Role of the Military in Underdeveloped Countries (Princeton, 1962), p. 78 Google Scholar; also see pp. 80–82.

4 Halpern, Manfred, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton, 1963), p. 258 Google Scholar. Similarly, see Berger, Morroe, The Arab World Today (New York, 1962), pp. 389–390 Google Scholar, and Vatikiotis, P. J., The Egyptian Army in Politics (Bloomington, 1961), esp. pp. 211, 233 Google Scholar.

5 Johnson, John J., The Military and Society in Latin America (Stanford, 1964), p. 237 Google Scholar.

6 Edward A. Shils, “The Military in the Political Development of the New States,” in Johnson (ed.), op. cit., p. 17. But cf. p. 31 for the soldiers' distrust of anti-traditional modernizers.

7 Johnson, op. cit., pp. 152, 250. Also see McAlister, Lyle N., “The Military,” in Johnson, John J. (ed.), Continuity and Change in Latin America (Stanford, 1964), pp. 145–160 Google Scholar.

8 Pauker, Guy J., “Southeast Asia as a Problem Area in the Next Decade,” World Politics, 11 (04 1959), pp. 339–340 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Halpern, Manfred, “Middle Eastern Armies and the New Middle Class,” in Johnson, (ed.), The Role of the Military …, p. 295 Google Scholar.

10 Halpern, Manfred, Social Change …, pp. 52–54, 253, 258 and passim Google Scholar. See the criticisms levelled at Halpern's thesis in Perlmutter, Amos, “Egypt and the Myth of the New Middle Class: A Comparative Analysis,” 10 Comparative Studies, in Society and History (10 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The ensuing debate between Perlmutter and Halpern is found in ibid., 11 (January 1969) and 12 (January 1970).

11 Although he is only referring to Latin America, Schmitter's comments are even more applicable to those continents in which military intervention is not quite the hallmark it has become in Latin America. Studies of military intervention in Latin America have “surprisingly … focused exclusively on (its) causes … and have neglected almost entirely (its) consequences. They leave us with the generals (or colonels as the case may be) battering down the gates to the presidential palace … and tell us very little about what these triumphant groups do with their newly acquired power.” The officer-politicians become the “objects rather than the subjects of analysis.” The literature abounds with speculations and scattered observations regarding the consequences of military intervention, but they “are rarely accompanied by evidence.” Relying upon cross-national and longitudinal aggregate data, Schmitter systematically analyzes the impact of Latin America's officer-politicians upon governmental outputs and economic outcomes, although he does not attempt to explain the officers' political behavior. For the most part his findings dovetail with the aggregate analysis reported below. Schmitter, Philippe C., “Military Intervention, Political Competitiveness and Public Policy in Latin America: 1950–1967,” mimeographed, 1970, Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, pp. 1, 7 Google Scholar.

12 Morris Janowitz also suggests that the officers' technical education and their opposition to religiously defined traditions inclines them to act as modernizers. However, he does not argue that these predispositions are sufficiently pervasive and powerful to overcome other factors, which would allow him to say that soldiers in mufti generally act as modernizers. See The Military in the Political Development of New Nations (Chicago, 1964), pp. 28, 44, 67 Google Scholar.

13 Daalder, Hans, The Role of the Military in the Emerging Countries (The Hague, 1962), pp. 18–20 Google Scholar. For similar claims, including socialization into national as opposed to parochial attitudes, see Janowitz, op. cit., pp. 81–82; Bell, M. J. V., “The Military in the New States of Africa,” in Van Doorn, Jacques (ed.), Armed Forces and Society (The Hague, 1968), pp. 263–264 Google Scholar; Lyle N. McAlister, op. cit., pp. 136–144; Johnson, op. cit., p. 258.

14 Rustow, Dankwart A., A World of Nations: Problems of Political Modernization (Washington, D.C., 1967), pp. 16–17 Google Scholar.

15 Hurewitz, J. C., Middle East Politics: The Military Dimension (New York, 1969), p. 117 Google Scholar.

16 Finer, S. E., The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics (New York, 1962), p. 47 and passim Google Scholar.

17 Lieuwen, Edwin, Arms and Politics in Latin America (New York, 1961), pp. 147–148 Google Scholar.

18 Schmitter, op. cit., p. 25. In terms of defense expenditures as a percentage of GNP (1960), the ordering is somewhat reversed, with the “intermittent” regimes averaging 2.7 per cent, and only 2.1 per cent of GNP being spent in military-dominated regimes. (The figure is 1.2 per cent where the military are completely out of politics.) Schmitter accounts for this pattern by noting that the civilian elites attempted to buy off the military as they moved in and out of politics, (p. 51)

19 Adelman, Irma and Morris, Cynthia, Society, Politics and Economic Development (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 74–76 Google Scholar. See below, p. 1138 for an explication of this three-fold division.

20 Russett, Bruce M., et al., World Handbook of Political Social Indicators (New Haven, 1964), pp. 79–80 Google Scholar.

21 Lieuwen, Edwin, Generals vs. Presidents: Neo-Militarism in Latin America (New York, 1964), pp. 42–43 Google Scholar.

22 Ibid., pp. 60–61.

23 Ibid., 86–91; Taylor, Philip B. Jr., The Venezuelan Golpe de Estado of 1958: The Fall of Marcos Perez Jimenez (Washington, D.C., 1968), pp. 48–52, 67–71 Google Scholar.

24 For the persuasive argument that “The postwar dogma, so widespread among the less developed countries, that modern economic growth is dependent wholly on industrialization has done much harm,” see Schultz, Theodore, Economic Growth and Agriculture (New York, 1968), p. 21 and passim Google Scholar, where it is also suggested that the agricultural sector of most non-Western countries might contribute most to economic growth.

25 Lieuwen, Arms and Politics …, op. cit., pp. 146–47. Also see Sohn, Jae Souk, “Political Dominance and Political Failure: The Role of the Military in the Republic of Korea,” in Bienen, Henry (ed.), The Military Intervenes (New York, 1968), pp. 114–116 Google Scholar.

26 Johnson, op. cit., p. 147.

27 M. D. Feld, “Professionalism, Nationalism, and the Alienation of the Military.” in Doom (ed.), op. cit., p. 68.

28 Aristide R. Zolberg, “Military Intervention in the New States of Tropical Africa,” in Bienen (ed.), op. cit., p. 87. Zolberg goes on to say that the military rulers “think much like their predecessors in the one-party states.” However, the impression that I derive from his essay, combined with some knowledge of African single-party states, is that the military do place greater emphasis upon governmental suppression of actual and potential conflict groups.

29 Ibid., pp. 89–90.

30 Wood, David, The Armed Forces of African States, Adelphi Paper no. 27 (London, 1966)Google Scholar; Martel, André, “Les Armées africaines,” in Hamon, Leo (ed.), Le Role Extra-Militaire de L'Armee dans le Tiers Monde (Paris, 1966)Google Scholar.

31 Adelman and Morris, op. cit., pp. 74–76, where the classification of the 74 countries can be found.

32 Ibid., pp. 84–129 and passim; also see pp. 14–15 for the assignment of numerical scores.

33 Ibid., pp. 78–81. While economic planning might be thought to discriminate against military regimes, Janowitz (op. cit., pp. 64–65) and others have emphasized the officers' statist predispositions.

34 Further confirmation of the absence of any positive relationship between the military's political strength and economic change is evidenced in the following three operations. (1) As an additional test for the reliability of the mean correlation of .04, I correlated a single indicator of economic modernization (which was constructed by calculating the mean score for each country on the seven economic indicators) with the military variable. The result was a correlation of .08, which hardly differs from the .04 mean correlation in Table 1. (2) To test for the possible effects of curvilinear patterns and extreme scores, each of the seven indicators was separately cross-tabulated with the military variable. There were no significant deviations from statistical independence, except for a weak positive relationship between the military variable and change in industrialization (gamma = + .38) and leadership commitment to economic development (gamma = − .28)—which is what we would expect given the .29 and − .22 correlations ia Table 1. (3) On the possibility that Adelman and Morris' distinction between the first and second groups of countries classified according to the military's political influence (those in which the military enjoyed a “marked” and “moderate” political role) is far smaller in actuality than the assumed equal difference between the second and third groups of countries (“moderate” and “negligible” political influence), I collapsed the first two categories and performed the above tests without any differences in the resulting measures of association.

35 Adelman and Morris, op. cit., p. 75.

36 A separate analysis of the Adelman and Morris data indicates that the nature of the bureaucracy has an important bearing upon economic change where governments are attempting to modernize their economies.

37 Ibid., pp. 78–81.

38 Adelman and Morris' political stability index is based upon (1) the extensiveness of internal security, or in reverse fashion, the level of violence, (2) the extent of continuity in the form of government (which partly overlaps with the political strength of the military), and (3) the extent of overt consensus regarding the prevailing form of government. (Op. cit., pp. 81–83.)

39 Janowitz, op. cit., pp. 49–58; also see the references to Shils, Johnson, McAlister, Pauker and Halpern above.

40 And this despite C. Wright Mills' assertion that “social origins and early background are less important to the character of the professional military man than to any other high social type,” in The Power Elite (New York, 1952), p. 192 Google Scholar. Although this generalization has a good deal of validity, the present study centers upon those officers that are acting outside of their instrumental or professional role. And Janowitz has noted that the officers' social origins are politically more salient in contemporary non-western countries than in western societies, (op. cit., p. 56)

41 Until recently, the prevailing view among students of Latin American politics contradicted this assertion. It was thought that the middle class and the military were mutually antagonistic, the military blocking the middle class' quest for economic modernization and democratic government. However, since José Nun pointed to the frequency of “the middle class military coup,” the opposite viewpoint has gained a respectable measure of support: Nun, José, “The Middle Class Military Coup,” in Veliz, Claudio (ed.), The Politics of Conformity in Latin America (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Wagley, Charles, The Latin American Tradition (New York, 1968), pp. 203–212 Google Scholar.

42 The greater salience of corporate interests compared to class interests is sharply illustrated in the case of the 1963 Ecuadorian coup. The rationale for the take-over was a thorough-going anti-communism. But the officers' anti-communism was not primarily the product of their middle class interests: it was based upon the protection of their corporate interests. For the officers believed that if the communists came to power they would replace the army with a militia. See Needler, Martin C., Anatomy of a Coup d'Etat: Ecuador 1963 (Washington, 1964)Google Scholar.

43 With respect to Latin America, a contrary generalization is found in Johnson, The Military and Society …, op. cit., pp. 137–138.

44 Adelman and Morris, op. cit., pp. 30–33.

45 Admittedly I have already imputed the officers' concern with industrial growth to their corporate interests, thereby possibly over-determining this variable.

46 Huntington, op. cit., pp. 221–222 and passim. As it applies to Latin America, the same argument is found in Nun, op. cit., esp. p. 103.

47 Huntington, op. cit., p. 219.

48 Adelman and Morris, op. cit., p. 50. Although there is a high correlation between this index and the size of the middle class (r = .72), the two variables are analytically and empirically distinct and thus they should be analyzed separately.

49 Ibid.

50 On a more speculative level, it may be that the threat from below engenders a sense of political insecurity among soldiers in mufti, which would further decrease their readiness to fulfill the lower classes' economic demands. Social psychologists are well aware of the aggressiveness, hostility and distrust that grows out of feelings of insecurity. And these reactions could only provide the officer politicians with an added impetus to ignore or repress popular demands. This hypothesis would be particularly applicable where the demands are of a novel type or especially wide-ranging in their impact, such as demands for land reform. Whereas politically secure politicians may or may not be capable of departing from past practices and accepting innovative changes, insecure politicians are likely to reject or repress them due to an anxiety-dictated rigidity. Robert E. Scott emphasizes the insecurities found among Latin American elites due to continuing economic and political change. See his “Political Elites and Political Modernization: The Crisis of Transition,” in Lipset, Seymour Martin and Solari, Aldo (eds.), Elites in Latin America (New York, 1967), pp. 117–127 and passimGoogle Scholar.

51 There is some reason for thinking that the correlation coefficients for the African countries are somewhat artificial. The military were politically influential in only 6 of the 23 African regimes during the 1957–62 period, and in only one other did officers occupy the seats of government. And an examination of the scatter plots shows that the positive correlations are largely the product of 14 “low-low” cases, civilian regimes doing poorly economically, rather than officer-politicians doing well.

52 Needler, Martin C., Political Development in Latin America: Instability, Violence and Evolutionary Change (New York, 1968), p. 65 Google Scholar.

53 Ibid.

54 Rustow, Dankwart A., “The Military in Middle Eastern Society and Politics,” in Fisher, Sydney Nettleton (ed.), The Military in the Middle East (Columbus, 1963), p. 15 Google Scholar.

55 Bill, James A., “The Military and Modernization in the Middle East,” Comparative Politics, 2 (10 1969), 56–57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Lieuwen, Arms and Politics …, op. cit., p. 126.

Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.