In Ethics, Security, and the War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military, Ned Dobos asks whether armed forces and constant preparation and readiness to make war—regardless of the justice of any war—are worth the consequences of preparing for war.Footnote 1 The just war tradition, which focuses on when it is legitimate to go to war and what conduct is permissible in war, necessarily puts some questions aside, and this is one of them. Dobos is correct to point out that we rarely ask about the moral, political, and economic consequences of militarization, preparation for war, and long-term mobilization. He argues that militaries are an inherent risk to democracies because they always pose the threat of a coup, and indeed, coups are rather too common. But the more subtle consequences of maintaining standing armies, militarization, and war itself are to the norms and practices of democracy; conversely, democracy may shape war itself.
Given the origins of the just war discourse—during an era when representative democracy was not the norm—it is no wonder that the form of government and the effects of war on it are not a central focus of the tradition. The way the form of government makes its appearance in the just war tradition is in the idea that a “sovereign authority” should make the decisions about the resort to war; that authority, in the time of Augustine and Aquinas, was the sovereign, usually the king.Footnote 2
By definition, democracy is the promise of inclusive decision-making. Democratic procedures forswear the arbitrary rule of force and fiat, and ideally guarantee that citizens are able to select their leaders and participate in processes of deliberation. While war certainly undermines the prospects for peaceful resolution of interstate conflicts, I focus here on the effects of war on democracy within states. Democracy requires an informed citizenry and representatives capable of conducting robust debate and discerning truth.Footnote 3 As Elizabeth Kier and Ronald Krebs argue, “War's effects on liberal-democratic institutions and processes are diverse, contradictory, and not always negative.”Footnote 4 Although there is not space here for a literature review—readers should see essays in Kier and Krebs's book for that—I summarize some of the arguments about war and democracy. I conclude by suggesting that two of these lines of argument are particularly important to add to a discussion of jus ante bellum, the term that Dobos uses to describe the ethical considerations of having a standing military and preparing to use it.
Four Approaches
There are at least four ways that scholars approach the relationship between democracy and the preparation and conduct of war: arguing (1) that there is nothing special about democracy vs. any other form of government making war; (2) that war is good for democracy; (3) that democratic practices and norms tame the propensity to war; and (4) that war harms democracy. On this last point, while there is a growing body of scholarship about the causes of democratic erosion, for the most part, the literature ignores the role of militarism and militarization.
First, the view that war affects democracy no differently than it affects any other form of government assumes that militaries are necessary as the symbolic sine qua non of a sovereign state, and that the capacity to make war is essential to any state—the de facto guarantor of a state's existence in an anarchic world order. Any potential benefits or problems caused by high levels of military spending, standing armies, and war are not any different for democratic than for authoritarian states.Footnote 5 On the strategic and existential level, too much war can be the undoing of states (whether they are democratic or authoritarian) and wars can improve or undermine a state's place in the international order.
Several scholars have argued that too much mobilization and war can undermine a state's administrative and economic capacity, and even the human capital of states. This is the case even if a state consistently “wins its wars.” Paul Kennedy argues this point in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers.Footnote 6 He suggests that in the pursuit of power some great powers overreach, overspend, and create adversaries, which causes them to go to war to defend their previous gains and spheres of influence. Thus, too much war and military spending can break a state's treasury and weaken its overall power. On the other hand, major war and the sustained mobilization for it require intensive social mobilization and resource extraction. Thus, as Charles Tilly argued, wars make states and states make war. By this, Tilly meant that the development of military capacity tends to require and make state capacity. It generates forms of organization to extract the taxes that fund war and war material; it requires the administrative capacity to conscript citizens; and it necessitates educational systems capable of producing national identity and well-educated soldiers.Footnote 7 In sum, wars have been instrumental to state formation in Europe and, I would add—along with Theda Skocpol, Stephen Skowronek, and others—in the United States.Footnote 8
The second approach claims that war and military mobilization are salubrious for democracy—as mobilization and war develop and enlarge state capacity (whether or not the state is democratic), they have a potentially democratizing effect. As Paul Starr put it, “Some wars have triggered waves of democratization.”Footnote 9 The argument is that war can lead to the reform or even undoing of authoritarian states, potentially laying the conditions for transforming authoritarian states into democracies. In other words, large-scale economic mobilization for war—at precisely the time when other workers are pulled into the armed forces—may require including historically excluded and marginalized members of society, such as women or minorities, in the workforce or granting labor more rights to organize and form unions.Footnote 10 For example, it is arguable that apartheid South Africa's wars and occupations in Mozambique, Angola, and Namibia in the 1970s and 1980s and its general level of domestic militarization were, paradoxically, part of its undoing. Facing tight oil and arms embargoes, and a desire to remain at war with its neighbors, South Africa relaxed some of the economic and political elements of apartheid in order to mobilize import substitution industrialization. Specifically, the government relaxed the job reservation system, which reserved high-paying jobs for whites; allowed more technical education for black and colored South Africans; and allowed the formation of trade unions, which strengthened the anti-apartheid movement.Footnote 11
Further, war, and the preparation for it, requires both social cooperation and the capacity to convince others that they should go along with a risky and potentially costly endeavor. Thus, wars depend on people believing that the cause is worthwhile and legitimate, and the provision of social benefits to those who sacrificed for war; for instance, by enlarging the welfare state.Footnote 12 Convincing people that they live in a worthwhile society, such as a democracy, is a good way to develop a sense of legitimacy—as is promoting a national identity.Footnote 13 It is possible that the process of mobilization for war creates political opportunities for democratic movements to organize. But to the extent that these are structural-functionalist arguments, they share the indeterminacy of such arguments. Something else, such as another overarching goal requiring mass cooperation and mobilization, could have produced the outcomes of state building, democratization, and domestic peace and cooperation, and likely with fewer costs in blood and treasure. Overall, the empirical support for war itself leading to democratization is weak and, as Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder argue, “determined almost entirely by [other] contextual factors.”Footnote 14
Related to this is Ian Morris's argument that there are productive wars that actually tame violence and put more people under a stable political order. (There are shades of hegemonic stability theory here with a democratic twist.) Building on Tilly and others, Morris says that productive wars create Leviathans that can keep a stable international peace. As he explains:
We have made bigger societies that constantly revolutionize their military affairs. Fortifications, metal arms and armor, discipline, chariots, massed iron-armed infantry, cavalry, guns, battleships, tanks, aircraft, nuclear weapons—the list goes on and on, with each advance allowing us to wage ever-fiercer wars; but to compete in these conflicts, our bigger societies have also had to find ways to get their members to cooperate better, which has pushed them toward stationary bandits, internal peace, and prosperity. In this peculiar, paradoxical way; war has made the world safer and richer.Footnote 15
So, Morris turns Tilly on his head, essentially arguing that war makes states and states make peace.
The third approach, which flips the causal arrow, suggests that the effect of republican democracy is to tame the impulse toward war.Footnote 16 The democratic constraint on the use of force is structural and normative. On the structural side, Francisco de Vitoria argued that asking the people whether or not to go to war would lead to worrisome delay: “A prince is not able, and ought not always to render reasons for the war to his subjects, and if the subjects cannot serve in the war except they are first satisfied of its justice, the state would fall into grave peril.”Footnote 17 Similarly, Immanuel Kant argued that “if the consent of the citizenry is required in order to determine whether or not there will be war, it is natural that they consider all its calamities before committing them to so risky a game.” To assure peace, all states should be representative republics: “under a nonrepublican constitution, where the subjects are not citizens, the easiest thing in the world to do is to declare war.”Footnote 18
Those who want states to be able to mobilize their full destructive capacities are concerned that citizens in democracies are too sensitive to the costs of wars and their recalcitrance makes it more difficult for states to win. Specifically, citizens may not only constrain the spending on war but also the behavior of a democratic state at war. A democracy may limit the number of soldiers it is willing to send and be squeamish about causing enemy civilian casualties. Thus, Gil Merom argues that “democracies fail in small wars because they find it extremely difficult to escalate the level of violence and brutality to that which can secure victory. They are restricted by their domestic structure and in particular by the creed of some of their most articulate citizens and the opportunities their institutional makeup presents such citizens.”Footnote 19 Even President Donald Trump felt the constraining power of norms in the sense that he did not give in to what might have been an urge or a plan on the books to use overwhelming and indiscriminate force in the U.S. war in Afghanistan. “I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth, it would be over in literally in 10 days and I don't want to do that—I don't want to go that route,” he remarked.Footnote 20
This should not be surprising because, as Randall Forsberg argued, democracy, human rights, and the decreasing acceptability of arbitrary uses of force are reciprocally linked. “Hierarchically structured politics have always been maintained through threats of the use of force by the ruling elite.”Footnote 21 In her view, “Commitment to nonviolence lies at the core of democratic institutions.”Footnote 22 Forsberg argued that there has been a fundamental change in the last two centuries, “embodied in democratic institutions . . . toward asserting egalitarian values.”Footnote 23 While the belief in human rights fostered the desire for democratic rule, and democracies protected human rights, democratic institutions enabled the organizing that pushed for the abolition of slavery and forced labor, as well as a more inclusive democracy. At first, humanitarians only argued that it was wrong to kill certain people—that is, those who were like you, members of your same religion or civilization—but acceptable to kill barbarians. But humanitarians later argued that everyone—all civilians no matter their race, religion, or membership in a different civilization—deserves protection, at least in theory.Footnote 24 As Forsberg argues, the “rise of an individual-centered view of the world has been associated with (and . . . caused) a declining tolerance for violence in general, and specifically the replacement of violence with verbal persuasion.”Footnote 25
I agree. It is no accident that constraints on monarchical rule, the abolition of slavery and forced labor, and the development of democratic institutions occurred together. Process and content were mutually reinforcing. Humanitarian efforts were part of the larger cultural shift that challenged the institutions of slavery, forced labor, and summary punishment over the past several hundred years. Humanitarian activists were part of the human rights movement that extended the protection of bodily integrity to those outside the group, and they promoted the democratic practice of resolving disputes through the rule of law rather than by arbitrary use of force.Footnote 26 In sum, the mutually reinforcing ideas of human rights and democracy—movements that were tightly linked—and the process of democratization, which ratcheted up the potential for change, prepared the way for the regulation of war.
The fourth approach argues that war and the preparation for it undermine democratic norms and practices; that war, especially long wars, corrupts democracy and democratic citizens. This view parallels Dobos's argument that war and military training undermine and corrupt individual soldiers’ moral agency, and that military training inflicts moral injury and degradation on individual soldiers.Footnote 27 This is an old concern. In 1795, James Madison, one of America's founders, warned in The Federalist Papers that “of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. . . . No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” Madison worried that “war is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement” that could increase public debt and lead to a “degeneracy in manners and morals.”Footnote 28 President George Washington, in his farewell address in 1796, urged Americans to protect their union and to “avoid the necessity of those overgrown Military establishments which, under any form of Government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty.”Footnote 29 In sum, Madison and Washington were worried that prolonged war could lead to the concentration of power.
In his 1941 article “The Garrison State,” the sociologist Harold Lasswell articulated the “possibility that we are moving toward a world of ‘garrison states’—a world in which the specialists on violence are the most powerful group in society.”Footnote 30 Specialists on violence would, Lasswell argued, permeate the civilian sphere, increasingly acquire the skills associated with civilian functions, mobilize the citizenry for military production and military service, and most perniciously, decrease civil liberties and sideline democratic processes. He warned that “decisions will be more dictatorial than democratic, and institutional practices long connected with modern democracy will disappear.”Footnote 31 In a garrison state, the symbols of democracy would remain, but legislatures and voting would “go out of use.”Footnote 32 Lasswell warned against the concentration of power that accompanies military mobilization: “To militarize is to governmentalize. It is also to centralize. To centralize is to enhance the effective control of the executive over decisions, and thereby to reduce the control exercised by courts and legislatures. To centralize is to enhance the role of military in the allocation of national resources.”Footnote 33 Yet, as Matthew Evangelista recently reminded me, very little sacrifice might be necessary for some democracies; Lasswell did not anticipate that wars could be sustained by all-volunteer professional armed forces bolstered by large numbers of contractors and paid for by running up massive debts and deficits.
By contrast, Aaron Friedberg believed that liberal democracy is protective against the garrison state. Friedberg argued that despite predictions that Cold War mobilization would lead to increased militarization of the economy and a decline in civil liberties, the United States did not become a garrison state.Footnote 34 It was America's distinct ideology—free enterprise, private industry, and low taxes—and the decision to rely on a nuclear deterrence strategy that avoided a massive mobilization of conventional forces that would have required a more centralized economy that prevented the United States from becoming a garrison state. On the other hand, Friedberg suggested that the fact that the Soviet Union became a garrison state—“one that sapped the nation's economy, militarized its society and led it ultimately to the brink of collapse and disintegration”—explains the outcome of the Cold War.Footnote 35 There is obviously a lot to unpack here, but I would agree with Friedberg that part of what undermined the Soviet Union was its militarization. Yet, I see the case a bit differently. Like South Africa, militarization ironically forced the Soviet Union in some ways to open up. Perestroika and glasnost were responses to the desire to maintain the empire that had been put under strain by its war in Afghanistan and its decades of high levels of military spending.
Democratic Constraints on War and Militarization's Danger to Democracy
My own view is that Dobos misses an important consequence of militarism and militarization. Democracy can constrain the resort to war and its conduct, as argued above; war can also undermine democratic norms, institutions, and practices. Representative democracy entails democratic elections, where the people decide who will govern them, and processes for horizontal and vertical oversight and accountability. Democratic legitimacy depends on the ability of citizens to engage in public deliberation, which in turn relies on the health of a deeper conception of democracy—an inclusive ideal of democratic deliberation guaranteed by human and civil rights. The more democratic a society is, the greater the limits it puts on the use of force both at home and abroad. We generally do not take out weapons to resolve our disputes within a democracy (although even democracies can have violent police forces), and democracies are, sometimes, more constrained in the use of force abroad.
Militarism's values—the beliefs that force is effective, efficient, controllable, and legitimate—are antipodal to democracy and ultimately undermine democratic norms and practices. Jus ad bellum, of course, depends on a distinction between war and peace. If democratic societies accept that civil liberties and checks on the power of the executive must be constrained in wartime (and they do not have to accept this premise), constant or permanent mobilization for war may blur or erase the distinction between wartime and peacetime, and between war and peace. If democratic societies accept militarist beliefs, they risk using force too often and distorting their democratic institutions to enable mobilization and war.
Because war is the assertion of might makes right, the negation of the rule of law, and because the values of war and militarism are antithetical to the normative values of democracy, it is hard to hold these conflicting norms at the same time. But oddly enough, we often try to. Democratic governments in the grip of the militarist assumption that force works sometimes use the desire to spread democracy and other liberal values as a justification for war, on the assumption that military force can bring peace and democracy.
For example, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration argued in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America that deterrence would not work against terrorists, “rogue states,” and “the enemies of civilization.”
Given the goals of rogue states and terrorists, the United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker, the immediacy of today's threats, and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons, do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.Footnote 36
Rather, “Our best defense is a good offense.”Footnote 37 Fear justified the post–9/11 U.S. interventions, but the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were waged simultaneously as a massive reconstruction effort. As the Bush administration said, “The events of September 11, 2001, taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states. Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers. Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders.”Footnote 38 Thus, democratic values were fused with liberal economic institutions, with both to be fostered through military force. In other words, the argument was that to promote peace, the United States must promote democracy, but it could and would use force to do both. As George W. Bush told West Point graduates, “We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace—a peace that favors human liberty. . . . Building this just peace is America's opportunity, and America's duty.”Footnote 39 Thus, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were not only, respectively, waged to remove the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction but also to make those states into democracies, all while ignoring the tensions between democracy and war.
War and militarization also erode democratic processes within states. This occurs in several ways, including, first, the direct and deliberate constriction by governments of information and debate. The press and courts may be denied access to information that could allow for oversight and accountability. The urgency of war, and the need for secrecy and speed, it is argued, justifies the concentration of power and information. Bush administration lawyer John Yoo even argued that in the U.S. context the president has the authority as commander in chief to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—created in 1978 to curtail and oversee government spying on its own citizens—and that Congress does not have the authority to circumscribe the president's power to gather intelligence for national security purposes.Footnote 40
Second, not only do some argue that efficiency demands consent to unbridled executive authority but there is also a tendency for the people and their leaders to assume that patriotism demands an unquestioning or submissive attitude toward the military and the executive. Lasswell noted this when he said, “Continuing fear of external attack sustains an atmosphere of distrust that finds expression in spy hunts directed at fellow officials and fellow citizens. Outspoken criticism of official measures launched for national defense is more and more resented as unpatriotic and subversive of the common good. The community at large, therefore, acquiesces in denials of freedom that go beyond the technical requirements of military security.”Footnote 41 Legislatures and courts tend to become more deferential to the executive in times of war, explicitly giving up some of their prerogatives on the argument that it is not their role to interfere in questions that touch upon national security. When dissent is allowed, the rally-around-the-flag mentality may come to dominate discourse and create an atmosphere of what we might call “political fear.” Of course, this deference to the commander in chief when a state is preparing to conduct war is the norm in all states whether they are monarchies, autocracies, or democracies. Further, politicians seeking to burnish their credentials as supporters of the military support high levels of military spending, which can have the effect of increasing the concentration of wealth and therefore increasing inequality and political polarization.Footnote 42 And, as I have argued elsewhere, citizens often believe the arguments against their participation in debates about the justice and conduct of war—that time is of the essence, that the issues are too complex to understand, or that state secrets will be exposed—even when those arguments are weak or undermine their democratic agency.Footnote 43
Third, militarism and the focus on threats or even threat inflation undermine the institutions that promote the capacity of citizens to deliberate and keep a democracy healthy. Specifically, in war biological fear is often part of the equation and fear may be deliberately heightened and threats inflated. We know that when humans are afraid they tend to pay more attention to fearful information and think less critically. This can bolster groupthink dynamics among decision-makers who might otherwise provide horizontal checks and accountability to leaders. Militaries and military doctrines themselves embody the institutionalization of fear.Footnote 44 War propaganda can increase domestic polarization and promote racism and intolerance, and this can, in turn, increase fear.Footnote 45
Conclusion
Ned Dobos's book is a contribution to understanding the impact of war, militarization, and militarism on us when we are not at war. This short essay outlines a number of ways to think about the relation between the military and democracy—moving beyond the democratic peace theory—before and during war. I have here reviewed some of the major arguments about the relationship between democracy and war. My main aim is to suggest that we need to know more about how war shapes the normative and procedural dimensions of democracy, and vice versa. To Dobos's concerns we should add that it is arguable that, on balance, the preparation for war, and war itself, undermines democratic norms and practices and the institutions that guarantee those norms and practices.
Democracy and war, as antipodal norms and modes of decision-making, negate each other. This has two consequences. First, democratic norms and institutions can and do constrain the resort to war and its conduct—a familiar argument made by Kant and others. Second, the greater the militarization of a democratic state, and the longer a state is at war, the more its democratic norms and procedures are potentially undermined as militarization is normalized. While some might argue that it is natural to concentrate power in times of war, the concentration of power is not always necessary; in any case, necessary or not, war is often given as the reason for the diminution of public deliberation, the loss of civil and human rights, and the secrecy and speedy decision-making that strategy and tactics in war are said to demand. While some of these effects are thought to be merely the practical consequences of a need for greater efficiency, I argue that it is the nature of the normative beliefs and emotions that are the content of militarization, militarism, and war that undermines democratic deliberation and institutions.
