Introduction
Why have states, historically, exchanged military attachés and what significance does this practice hold for our understandings of international relations?Footnote 1 Attachés are military officers stationed as uniformed diplomats in foreign states or on the battlefields of wars to which they are third parties. They are thus gatherers of potentially sensitive technical and strategic information. In so doing, they fill an ambiguous or ambivalent role between warrior, diplomat, and spy, engaging in both diplomacy and potentially surreptitious information gathering. The practice has at times been characterised as ‘sanctioned spying’.Footnote 2 How did states come to regard exchanging attachés – in wartime and peacetime alike – as a legitimate and desirable practice?
Drawing on work on communities of practice,Footnote 3 this article offers an exploratory account of military attaché use during the period in which it became a widespread and commonly accepted international practice. We aim to explain the phenomenon by looking at the localised interactions of attachés as a community. We do so in a moment of wartime use that saw military observers deployed in record numbers and for the first time to belligerent states explicitly beyond the ‘Western core’ of the Eurocentric state system. We focus on two mechanisms – one at the level of attachés themselves, as they came to instantiate and consolidate a professional community, and the other at the level of receiving states, showing powerful states have complex reasons for permitting foreigners to observe their military activities.
First, we show that in this context attachés themselves were implicated in driving their relatively rapid emergence, by thinking of and positioning themselves in the field as communities of practice dedicated to producing and disseminating military knowledge. Early attachés and wartime observers were often self-starters, who sought permission from their home states to observe, as much or more than being deployed on orders from above. Associating as communities of practice in host countries or theatres of war, they made themselves useful by both gathering and exchanging information about their host, thereby increasing the pool of intelligence available to their governments. Sharing information and bringing together expertise, they developed consensus assessments of difficult subjects. In periods of geopolitical and technological transition, such information was likely invaluable for third-party observer states. Military attachés as a community thereby directly participated in the process of defining themselves as a nascent profession.
Second, we argue that receiving states have had reasons of their own to encourage the practice. Host states receive military observers as a matter of diplomatic reciprocity – states received attachés so they could later send them. However, they have often also done so simply to be observed. By accepting attachés, host states could be seen engaging in respectable and effective military conduct – in effect, to be performing the role of a state, or even that of a great power. As witnesses to military activity, attachés could be expected to report back to their home states that their hosts had conducted themselves both properly and effectively. Put differently, attachés were received as audiences for status performances.Footnote 4 Performance allows states with marginal or parvenu international status to consolidate their perceived statehood. Historically, this may have been particularly important for non-Western states aiming to establish status in the otherwise Eurocentric international system.
We focus specifically on wartime military observers as a crucial subset of the phenomenon. As Maureen O'Conner Witter notes, ‘wartime observation efforts … most directly stimulated the growth of the permanent attaché’.Footnote 5 The close quarters of wartime combat observation made transnational professional community building across diverse nationalities more likely and more intellectually productive. The emergence and consolidation of the attaché system – and use of military observers in particular – formed part of what Tarak Barkawi had called the ‘globalization of Western forms of military discipline’.Footnote 6 In this way, the historically situated community of practice we focus on in this study provides an important case of the often-neglected ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘transnational’ inflection of military organisation.
To probe the plausibility of these claims, we turn to a relatively early case of widespread and institutionalised observer use: the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05). The conflict pitted a large land empire from Europe's margins against a rising Asian naval power.Footnote 7 Japan won handily – soundly defeating its more ‘Western’ opponent, shocking European capitals, and signalling its rising great power status. The conflict was witnessed and documented by the largest and most nationally diverse deployment of military observers to that time by a significant margin, with over 80 officers from 16 countries observing by the war's end. We trace both the role these observers played and how they were received by both sides. To do so, we draw on a primary source base of official reports, memoirs, and personal reflections by the observers, alongside secondary historical research.Footnote 8
We proceed in three stages. First, we set out the puzzle of the military attaché or observer. Second, we show theoretically how a communities of practice account helps to make sense of attachés. Third, we turn to the case, documenting the attaché community in the field, on the Japanese and Russian sides. We conclude by considering postwar consequences and assessing the importance of attachés for our understanding of world politics.
Military attachés and observers in historical perspective
We begin with the role of military attaché itself, which remains under-developed in IR. A military attaché or observer is an officer seconded to an overseas diplomatic mission or embedded with another state's armed forces.Footnote 9 Attaché usually refers to the embassy posting; observer to the wartime position. They gather information about military capacity and conduct for their home government. Attachés are, ‘the quiet, unobtrusive, soldier-diplomats who collect and circulate information, intelligence, and opinion for the edification of their peers and superiors’.Footnote 10 They are neither strictly diplomats nor intelligence agents. They formally represent the interests of their government, but do not negotiate on its behalf. Nor are they strictly spies – their presence and purpose are accepted by their host. This has led to their characterisation by scholars as institutionalising a number of tensions: attachés must be both friends across borders and agents of their own government.Footnote 11
In basic form, the attaché observes and reports on military affairs, in peace and war. The role predates the label: while ‘the nomenclature dates from the nineteenth century, the functions … are much older’.Footnote 12 It was practiced between a few major powers during the Napoleonic wars, but went by varied names and in apparently limited number.Footnote 13 From the late nineteenth century, it was rapidly institutionalised in Europe. The number of attachés globally rose tenfold, from 30 or so in 1870 to 305 in 1914, rising past 450 by 1936.Footnote 14 At the national level, the increase could be even more rapid: as late as 1888, the US had no attachés abroad; by 1914 it had 31.Footnote 15 Attachés had gone from an idiosyncrasy to a globally widespread practice.Footnote 16 Official preparation was limited as well: as late as the Second World War, US military attachés received only minimal or idiosyncratic training.Footnote 17
Early observers often had wide latitude. In 1897, for example, the British officer-intellectual C. E. Callwell traveled to observe the Greco-Turkish War, largely on his own initiative. He secured permission from the War Office, ‘subject to acting with a faultless discretion’, but no specific instructions.Footnote 18 In 1947, while attached to the Kuomintang National Army, the French observer David Galula drove alone in a borrowed Jeep, through the no man's land of the Chinese civil war. He was detained by the communists twice – the second time for a week – gathering volumes of intelligence.Footnote 19 Early attachés and observers were often a self-motivated and entrepreneurial lot, creating the role for themselves to fill.
Attachés or military observers are sometimes subsumed under the categories of diplomat, consul, intelligence agent, and others besides. In historical practice, the role emerged autonomously, apart from intelligence agencies or civilian diplomatic services. Thus, Harold Nicolson's classic study Diplomacy raises military attachés only to differentiate them from diplomats as such.Footnote 20 While often found in diplomatic settings, their professional cultures and trajectories followed their uniforms. Referring to late nineteenth-century attachés, Matthew Anderson observes that ‘These men were not diplomats … Military and naval attaches usually regarded their appointments merely as interludes in their service careers and often had little sympathy with the outlook and preoccupations of professional diplomats.’Footnote 21 Charles Wheeler Thayer notes attachés (military or otherwise) are ‘seldom … career diplomats’ who are ‘almost invariably’ seconded from their respective departments or areas of government.Footnote 22 International law is largely silent on the practice.Footnote 23 Military observers in the field are further removed again from conventional diplomacy.
Nor however are they simply spies. As uniformed officers stationed abroad, they are received by host nations directly, presenting themselves without false pretenses, and exchange information with one another across boundaries of nationality. They collect information on the technical military capacity of their host states, but do so openly. ‘For example, when military attachés attend another country's military exercises they are engaged in overt intelligence collection. The host government expects that the attachés will report the event and any relevant information from it to their own governments.’Footnote 24 They may coordinate with their national intelligence agencies, but are not on their staffs.Footnote 25
The existence of attachés confronts us with a puzzle: why have states exchanged gatherers of sensitive military information, permitting them to operate on their soil? It is not especially puzzling that states send attachés to gather military intelligence. However, this does not explain why states institutionalised the acceptance of attachés and observers. Reciprocity offers a possible explanation, but does not tell us how states overcome incentives to defect – incentives that are considerable, in the face of core concerns about secrecy surrounding national defence and security. Attachés occupy their roles at the pleasure of their host states, requiring governments to trust one another to the extent of taking in sanctioned military intelligence gatherers. Yet states readily accept foreign attachés from non-allies. Indeed, before the Russo-Japanese war, Japan and Russia had exchanged them. Both hosted observers from their enemy's alliance partners throughout the conflict.Footnote 26 Inversely, even friendly or formally allied states collect intelligence on one another. Wartime observers were initially more common and collect even more sensitive information.Footnote 27 For these reasons, we focus on wartime observers specifically.
The timing of attachés’ historical appearance is also striking. As L. W. Hilbert notes, the mechanisation of war, circa the end of the nineteenth century, made expert, technical intelligence collection newly useful and important.Footnote 28 The attendant bureaucratisation of war likely also increased both the volume of intelligence to collect and bureaucratic capacity to gather it.Footnote 29 Yet late the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century bureaucratisation and formalisation of military practice did not extend to attachés themselves: ‘In a twentieth century world featuring increasing specialization, the military attaché remained a jack-of-all-trades.’Footnote 30 Indeed, the institutionalisation of attachés reduced specialisation, as the ad hoc roles of wartime and peacetime observers were rolled into one.Footnote 31
To explain, we draw theoretically from the literature on communities of practice. Empirically, we focus on a turning point in the role's expansion: the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese war, during which Western states deployed military observers in unprecedented numbers, to both sides of the conflict. We show Western observers formed distinctive professional communities and participated in innovating novel forms of international security practice. Their reports and observations appear to have shaped and conditioned the revised western assessments of both belligerents in the context of the conflict.
Attachés as epistemic communities of practice
We turn theoretically to the literature on communities of practice.Footnote 32 Communities of practice are ‘like-minded groups of practitioners who are informally as well as contextually bound by a shared interest in learning and applying a common practice’.Footnote 33 Membership entails participation in its shared activities, assumptions, and tacit knowledge. Such professional communities may be enacted transnationally, even globally, as in Knorr Cetina and Bruegger's account of financial markets, and may have global stakes, as in Jasanoff's study of scientists as policymakers.Footnote 34 They may traverse state/non-state boundaries.Footnote 35 Communities of practice can be transformative, insofar as they ‘contribute to the learning of new identities via the negotiation and reification of meaning’.Footnote 36 Our concern is with their capacity to instantiate themselves as producers of expert knowledge – what Emanuel Adler terms ‘epistemic practical authority’ – and the relationship they thereby construct with the wider social world.Footnote 37 By establishing transnational communities of practice, military observers justified themselves to their superiors as purveyors of practical military knowledge. For host states, attachés were prospective audiences for a performance of statehood, at a symbolically laden nexus of security, diplomatic, and intelligence-gathering activities.
The attaché professional community emerged at the end of the long nineteenth century, with a shared informational agenda, professional identity, and set of practices. To participate in it was to participate in a distinct form of military-diplomatic relations, one that contributed to enacting modern international political practice. Attachés were military professionals, loyal to both their states and professional identities. If, as Barkawi stipulates, soldiers in the modern world are subject to ‘a cosmopolitan form of discipline’ – a shared professional culture transcending national identities – attachés should be well suited to community building.Footnote 38 Deployed together for long periods, they found they had much in common, and much to learn from one another. The Russo-Japanese war was a (though not the only) landmark event in this process, in which this network was systematically instantiated at a single conflict.
If observers made themselves useful to their home states, their hosts found they had a use for them, too. Attaché acceptance was a way to enact participation in the elite international conduct of war and peace. To participate in the attaché system allowed states to publicly engage in ‘performing’ the modern international system.Footnote 39 Foreign military observers could bear witness to their competent combat performance as states, and often as great powers. We show that in the Russo-Japanese war, Japanese military elites adroitly engaged with the emerging attaché system as an opportunity to perform Japanese status as a fully-fledged, great power member of international society.
We focus on practice and communities of practice instead of Bourdieusian fields or other approaches, for two reasons.Footnote 40 First, we are more concerned with cooperation and community building than with the competition, contention, and conflict that field theory is commonly deployed to explain. While these phenomena could in principle be engaged with in field-theoretic terms, we argue an emphasis on community better foregrounds the aspects of the case we are most concerned with: community building and knowledge production among attachés or observers, and their apparent relationship with international change.Footnote 41 Second, our emphasis is on micro-level knowledge production, rather than the often-larger scales in which fields operate. We begin with a view from the ground, located at the micro level, and scale up. While fields may in principle be micro-scale as well, a focus on communities of practice locates analysis squarely at the interpersonal level.Footnote 42
Our argument intersects in three ways with work on status and hierarchies. First, because sending and receiving attachés was initially a practice of great powers, to participate in the attaché system allowed states to signal elite status, through inclusion in the symbolic economy of great power relations. In the same way states accrue status by receiving embassies, to receive military attachés and observers serves to signal hierarchical standing.Footnote 43 As the system widened and became more formally institutionalised, states could signal status by sending and receiving more of them. In the Russo-Japanese war, two great power states with ambiguous status received especially large numbers of observers and Britain, the hegemon of the moment, sent the most. Second, because of their intelligence gathering function, attachés could be expected to report to their governments specifically on their hosts’ good conduct. Receiving states acquitted themselves both as hosts, in the sense of respecting emerging diplomatic practices, and as great powers, in the sense of their conduct of war and peace befitting that status, understood in terms of rule observance and military effectiveness. In 1904, Japan was already powerful, having rapidly modernised and avoided the formal or informal colonialism imposed on its neighbours, but was also foreign to the European great power system. Japanese handlers ensured members of the attaché community were both well treated and witnessed a resounding Japanese victory.Footnote 44 The result was a recalibration of the perceived status hierarchy. Third, the community of practice itself was internally hierarchical, recognising authority derived from the status of one's nationality and from seniority. Much practice-theoretic work shows how the impact of individuals scales up within formal institutions, such as intergovernmental organisations.Footnote 45 We find similar effects in a relatively informal setting. Our account thus suggests linkages between micro-level social settings and macro-level international status hierarchies.Footnote 46
Attachés in the Russo-Japanese War
We explore this theoretical account through a single focused case: that of military observer use by Western states during the Russo-Japanese War.Footnote 47 We focus on this case not because it was typical, but because it was an exceptionally strong case of wartime observer deployment in practice. This is an exploratory, theory-building exercise, not a test of generalisability.Footnote 48 We thus focus on a case that is neither the first instance of attaché exchange, nor a perfectly typical one. Instead, the Russo-Japanese war was a linchpin moment in the history of the practice: ‘the most extensively observed war of the pre-1914 era’.Footnote 49 It presents an ideal juncture to cut in analytically and assess the scope of both the phenomenon itself and its potentially transformative effect. The case provides a strong basis in the historical record for considering the extent of attachés’ potential impact on the international system. Here, we aim only to provide a configurational and thus case-specific account of the wartime community and related systemic effects. Attachés other involvements in other contexts are grist for future research.Footnote 50
A practice-oriented account calls for a broadly abductive approach, with the balance of focus on induction rather than deduction. Put differently, it calls us to start chiefly with the data. We draw on a mix of primary and secondary sources that provide access to the empirical base of textual evidence necessary in such a historical context to ‘offer a window onto enacted practices’.Footnote 51 The historical distance of our case presents methodological constraints in terms of data, which is confined to material available through existing primary sources and existing analysis of them.Footnote 52 At the same time, the observers produced a trove of texts documenting their experiences and impressions, texts that shed considerable light on the self-understandings underlying their roles and activities. We proceed by surveying the published memoirs and official reports of Western observers of the war. In taking up memoirs, we follow Christian Bueger and Frank Gadinger in treating these texts as ‘ego-documents’ with a particular import for understanding and interpreting the activities undertaken by individuals.Footnote 53 Official reports focus more directly on technical aspects of military life. They also contain records of activities that can be used to unearth and foreground micro-practices of community building, highlighting informal rules and practices of sociality. These reports are publicly available and offer remarkable insights into the intentions, expectations, and interpretations of the military observers themselves. We emphasise British and American observers, as two complementary vantage points. The British sent the largest delegation, and thus offer extensive access to practice. The Americans were newcomers to the attaché game, and were forced to think consciously and write about what their European peers took for granted. They thus provide a parvenu perspective on pre-established practice. We supplement with other reports – chiefly German – as well as existing historical scholarship.
The attachés were uniformly white and male, and defaulted to a strongly Eurocentric worldview – it was this view that Japanese elites laboured to overcome. While the community itself was deeply Western, we focus beyond it, attending to the involvement of non-Europeans and their role in producing and transforming world order. In this sense, ours is not a story about the spread of a presumptively European international system or society.Footnote 54 It is the story of complex interactions between that system and other parts of the world, by way of attending to the micro-level activities and mediation of knowledges involved with those interactions and their outcomes. Put differently, this is not a macro-level account of expansion – it is a contextual reconstruction of transformation or integration, and the localised negotiations and revisions implicated in it.
The case below proceeds as follows. We begin by framing the war itself. We then identify and delineate the observer community. From there, we turn to their relations with, first Japan, and second, Russia. Finally, we consider the postwar impact of the experience for the profession, Japan, Russia, and the broader Eurocentric international system. We aim to show, both that a community of practice existed, and that the community was treated differently on the two sides of the war. Japanese authorities were motivated to demonstrate their status as a European-style great power, and consequently both treated the observers lavishly and ensured they witnessed a resounding Japanese victory. Russia enjoyed greater status as a result of prior historical participation in the dynamics of the Eurocentric state system. However, the observations of attachés – and the broader outcome of the war itself – led to a considerable revision of this assessment. The attaché community provided on-the-ground data that was available to orient and give shape to contemporary understandings of the unanticipated Russian defeat and Japanese victory in the conflict.
The Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05
The Russo-Japanese war has been termed ‘World War Zero’: a globally significant conflict, between powers from different regions, and involving unprecedented technology and mechanisation by a non-European belligerent.Footnote 55 It was the only great power war of the long nineteenth century fought wholly outside Europe, and the only one won by a non-European people against Europeans.Footnote 56 It signalled Japanese entrée into the Western great power system, yielding the only major empire built by non-Europeans during the period. Yet as a testament to the ambivalent status of this moment in international politics, Japanese success in the conflict was also celebrated by anticolonial and nationalist intellectuals throughout the non-West.Footnote 57 It was a multiply transformative event.
Japan's military engagement was its largest before the Second World War. A million Japanese served in the army alone; almost 90,000 from the army and navy died. Beyond the significant human cost, the country went significantly into debt to pay for the war effort. Victory became a major source of prestige and national pride.Footnote 58 Linked to significant colonial industrialisation, Japanese-occupied Manchuria became ‘the most lucrative railroad colony in history and a center of gravity for the whole economy of northeastern China’.Footnote 59 But perhaps more crucially for our purposes, Japanese victory helped to reshape European attitudes towards Japan.Footnote 60 The French attaché in Tokyo, in 1898, saw the Russians as ‘greatly superior’ to the Japanese. In 1902, the British military representative thought much the same. The war reshaped these attitudes. It concomitantly destabilised Russia's European standing. Western powers, to varying degrees, viewed Russia as imperfectly European, but certainly as more so than Japan.Footnote 61 Russian defeat shocked Europe and cast doubt on Russia's imperial standing. The war was among a series of reversals that ‘wrecked the regime's legitimacy and resulted in domestic turmoil’, which subsequently gave rise to the failed revolution of 1905.Footnote 62 Russian expansion into East Asia was a gamble that went badly. Its aims in the region were thwarted for decades.
The war began in February 1904, instigated by Japan, and lasted 19 months. The primary action consisted of a Japanese siege of Port Arthur (a Russian-controlled city in Manchuria, leased from China), an early battle at the Yalu River, on the Korean border, a major battle at Mukden (lasting 13 months, and implicating 600,000 combatants – the largest globally before the world wars), and a concluding naval battle in the Tsushima strait, separating Korea and Japan.Footnote 63
The attaché community
By the turn of the twentieth century, Japan had already extensively adopted the practice of sending military attachés abroad, having stationed them in Sweden, Russia, China, Germany, Britain, Austria-Hungary, Korea, and the United States.Footnote 64 Russia also participated in the European attaché system. Observer deployments to the 1904–05 war were historically large, with two distinct attaché communities emerging, on either side of the conflict.Footnote 65 Russia received a total of 27 officers as observers.Footnote 66 Britain and its dominions sent 15 officers to the Japanese side alone – as many observers as were sent by the other major powers combined.Footnote 67 Japan and Britain were allied at the time, which no doubt shaped these numbers – however, most major powers deployed observers to both sides. More strikingly, France, a military ally of Russia, was also permitted to deploy observers to Japan; British observers were equally accepted by Russia, despite the Anglo-Japanese alliance.Footnote 68 On the Russian side, they were joined by the other European great powers, as well as ‘delegates from such smaller European states as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, and neutral Switzerland, as well as the trans-Atlantic United States and Argentina’.Footnote 69
The two communities of military observers on each side of the war were, by all appearances, quite similar to one another. Both became close-knit. Many observers were already well acquainted, having been posted to other countries together in peacetime. In many respects, they belonged to a global military elite.Footnote 70 Bound by professional skill and duty, they recognised shared social hierarchies and unofficial rules of good conduct. On the Russian side of the war, once stationed with Russian troops,
they immediately created their own autonomous, corporate diplomatic community which, despite their individual nationalist rivalries, fully reflected the transnational society of the day. In so doing, the attachés imposed their own sense of the appropriate protocol in a manner that was perhaps unique in the history of such attaché-observers.Footnote 71
The British representative, Lieutenant General Sir Montagu Gerard, most senior by rank, became a recognised community leader.Footnote 72 On the Japanese side, attachés were similarly sociable with one another: ‘Given their diverse national mix, the degree of corporate comradeship that the attachés developed is remarkable. The German Eberhard von Tettau recalled that his mission had “especially friendly relations” even with their traditional opponents, “their French comrades”’.Footnote 73 This informal sociability helped shape the attaché community. While the community was hierarchical, and often formal, the frequently acknowledged social interactions of observers formed the constitutive context to their associative behaviour and sense of group solidarity.Footnote 74
The American observer (and later General of the Armies) John Pershing remarked in his subsequent memoirs that
We were a friendly lot and often exchanged information and observations. We also had good times together, taking rides within our restricted sphere and entertaining each other. Each group of officers whose country's national day happened to come when we were together gave a banquet in honor of the occasion, and we all drank to the health of his sovereign or chief of state.Footnote 75
Two Americans on the Russian side, Walter Schuyler and Carl Reichmann, did not fit in as well. They arrived speaking no language other than English and were full of unsolicited advice for their more senior peers. Whatever their flaws, however, the Americans were concerned to learn the informal practices of the profession, and to report them to their superiors back home. Reichmann's report recorded and commented at length on the rules of propriety and informal protocols of the attaché community. He noted ‘the man who could talk constantly about no matter what and take part in all conversation, whether or important or not, was always persona grata’.Footnote 76 He devoted an entire subheading of his report to ceremonies, for which dress uniforms – up to and including swords – were an unspoken requirement.Footnote 77 In contrast, British reports make only passing references to other attachés, and almost none to the community as such.Footnote 78 They had little need to explicitly document its customs and expectations, being already near the top of its social hierarchy.Footnote 79
The observers shared information.Footnote 80 They discussed the specifics of battlefield and other wartime conduct and sometimes produced consensus views of ambiguous or informationally difficult matters.Footnote 81 They did not appear to habitually conceal information from one another.Footnote 82 As a result, the concentration of nationalities yielded information not just about the war and the armies fighting it, but also about the armies delegating observers. One of the Americans noted that ‘The attaches of the several countries differed very much in their equipment, giving a good opportunity for comparison of the different systems.’Footnote 83 The extent of information sharing was such that William Judson, an American attaché deployed among the Russian attaché contingent, flagged it in his official report as a potential problem for operational security going forward.Footnote 84 These concerns were expressed only after the war and likely little shaped it, but indicate the extent to which information circulated freely among the observers.
Communal life extended to discipline. When the two Swiss observers on the Russian side casually predicted Russian surrender within earshot of their hosts, representatives from neutral countries engineered their recall by their home government.Footnote 85 The point was not that they were wrong – by this time, the others shared a dim view of Russian efforts and prospects – but that observers could not be seen to conduct themselves in this way (nor the community be seen to tolerate it). Similarly, Gerard, the senior British officer, had his own subordinate, Major J. M. Home, sent back to London, apparently on the basis that his garrulous conduct offended their hosts. Per the Russian officer who hosted them, he ‘was a jolly, sprightly fellow and immediately put himself on back-slapping terms with the junior representatives of the other countries, treating me as well without ceremony’.Footnote 86 While their Russian host appeared have taken no offense, Gerard seems to have viewed his junior's behaviour as inappropriate to professional and communal standards.Footnote 87
In short, the community functioned not unlike any social circle of diplomats. There was formality, friendliness, and social hierarchy reflecting both domestic-organisational and international hierarchy, and norms of good social conduct – norms cast in relief by the odd fit the Americans made of themselves. The community nonetheless differed in several important respects. Their work was focused on substantive military matters that were by their nature sensitive. They pooled technical information predicated in part on their own military expertise. They also did not serve ambassadorial or consular functions, for there were none to be undertaken here. In short, theirs was a distinctive role, and they formed a distinctive community – one that did not easily reduce to existing social categories.Footnote 88
Attachés and the Japanese military
European observers attached to the Japanese armed forces typically arrived with orientalist views, and saw their hosts as especially other. The Japanese subjected them to varying strategies of control, emolument, and constraint, managing their activities and perceptions much more extensively than the Russians did. This in turn seemed to reflect a deliberate Japanese concern with appearances, as outsiders to a European dominated international system.
The Japanese treated their Western guests with extravagance and a good deal of formal (though evidently merely symbolic) deference. Visiting observers reported multiple official functions, lavishly catered. Ian Hamilton, a British observer, noted that ‘The banquets are frequent to properly accredited foreigners; too frequent, indeed, for the taste of quiet folk.’Footnote 89 He later described at length an evening of food, drink, and comic theatre, put on in the presence of a visiting Japanese prince.Footnote 90 Pershing's experience was similar: ‘The first night we were there we were given a feast consisting of sardines, pâté-de-foie-gras, chicken and mushrooms, eggs, bacon, and coffee, after which all hands slept soundly.’Footnote 91 On King Edward VII's birthday, in November 1904, during fighting at Port Arthur, a Japanese field marshal sent the British observers a case of champagne and a congratulatory note.Footnote 92
The purpose of all this was not only to impress their guests, but also to pacify them, often while curtailing their access to the front. Japanese officials prevented the British delegation from reaching the front until the summer of 1904 –‘when the war was half over’, or so the British thought – producing considerable frustration.Footnote 93 Denied first-hand access to the battlefield, the Westerners fell back on orientalist clichés.Footnote 94 A British journalist wrote home that ‘The Japanese were silent as sphinxes, patient as the pyramids, impenetrable as the Sahara.’Footnote 95 A Canadian observer deployed with the British complained that ‘until a thing is accomplished, nothing is heard about it & and not necessarily even then’.Footnote 96 Only when Japanese armies landed on the Manchurian mainland in May did the situation begin to change. Even these restrictions impressed some observers, in terms of both strategic reasoning and rigor of execution:
One of the most striking things in connection with this war has been the way in which Japan has handled the question of the censorship. There can be no doubt that the standard set in this war has furnished an object lesson which will be represented to all the great powers by their attaches in the field in such a way as to make some similar method a necessity in all future wars.Footnote 97
The Japanese had not merely succeeded at wartime management of military observers, they had set the standard for so doing.
The Japanese impressed their guests systematically with the efficiency and good order of their operations. The British were keen on Japanese organisation and achievement in general.Footnote 98 An American attaché reported that ‘All the foreign observers were of one accord in their estimate of the Japanese artillery’ as ‘excellent’.Footnote 99 Moreover, the polite refusal to provide information seems to have fallen away, once attachés were put to field with Japanese troops in Manchuria. Observing alongside Pershing, Edward McClernand reported that
On taking our leave next morning, Lieutenant-General Nishijima said he was sorry we had been exposed to such inclement weather, and trusted we had derived some satisfaction from the march in spite of the rain, adding that he hoped to see us again and that he would take pleasure in giving us all the information in his power. I wish to emphasize this conversation in view of the reported experiences had by attaches on other occasions, and to call attention to the fact that on the march mentioned we were allowed to mix with the troops about as freely as were their own officers.Footnote 100
McClernand thus acknowledged prior Japanese efforts to courteously sequester the observers, but also the effectiveness of subsequent Japanese handling of the observer experience at the front – which was actually quite curated – in an atmosphere of putative access and openness. They thereby countered any prior negative perceptions. The Japanese were, in short, effective managers of Western impressions.
European and American respect for the Japanese was by no means a given. Even setting orientalism aside, the British naval attaché in Tokyo, in 1902, reported
It is an unpleasant fact that among Europeans out here it is the practically unanimous opinion that the value of the Japanese army as a fighting force is much overrated, in short that they have won their reputation very cheap, and that at the first shock with European troops they would ‘crumple up’. I cannot speak of that of my own knowledge, but it is the opinion of our military attaché, and according to him, of all the foreign attachés.Footnote 101
This belief was not universal: another British official thought ‘the Japanese infantry in time of war are second to none in the world’.Footnote 102 Still, prewar European opinions of Japanese military capacity were uneven at best. This perception was no accident. Porter notes that ‘Japan had deliberately concealed the strength of its forces, shielding information from foreign military attaches, thus enabling Russia to underestimate them.’Footnote 103 The war itself corrected the record, in a way consistent with Japan's strategic interests as a rising power.
In sum, the Japanese appear to have worked hard to establish a strong national reputation, and to have succeeded in so doing. Broadly, the observers were impressed with the Japanese when they denied them information, were doubly so when they furnished it, and appreciated Japanese battlefield conduct once they had access to it. That impression no doubt resulted from Japanese battlefield effectiveness itself – they defeated the Russians soundly – but also from extensive and at times elaborate efforts to impress and satisfy their observer guests, likely relying on them to report as much to their capitals.Footnote 104
Attachés and the Russian military
Matters were different on the Russian side. The Russians knew that Europeans saw them as somewhat foreign, but thought of themselves as considerably more European than the Japanese.Footnote 105 Count A. A. Ignatyev, who was assigned to host Western observers at the Manchurian front, spoke some European languages, but had no prior experience of the attaché system. He was unexpectedly assigned to manage the foreigners, on his arrival, with instructions to ‘take care of everything … but be economical’.Footnote 106 The Russian officers were friendly with their guests, regarding them as colleagues. Attaché communal life extended to a good deal of informality, and often included Russian officers: ‘This group's real center of social activity was the smoky bar at the buffet at the Liaoyang railroad station. There the observers mixed more freely with each other, as well as with Russian officers and civilians, and kept track of news and rumors.’Footnote 107 The Russians were friendly and professionally at ease with their guests in a way the Japanese could not easily be.
Nonetheless, the Russians came to be seen with disdain: their military operations were less efficient and effective than the Japanese. They lost the war, the observers retrospectively concluded, in part on account of these weaknesses. American observers were sceptical from early on of both Russian war efforts and Russian management of Western observers. Peyton March, an American observer with the Japanese, reported that captured Russian wounded
were always questioned by the attaches with this column who speak Russian. These captives were in nearly every instance surprised by the Japanese point, and their accounts gave a very unfavorable impression of the manner in which the Russians were conducting their service of security and information, while that of the Japanese was characterized by alertness and snap.Footnote 108
On first observing live fire on the front lines he noted the Russians were more poorly equipped and less well trained.Footnote 109 The Russian censorship regime struck the British as unremarkable and poorly implemented.Footnote 110 A German observer noted that ‘The carelessness in the handling of things which it is absolutely necessary to keep secret is a fault to be frequently noticed with the Russians.’Footnote 111 German observers also took a dim view of General Aleksei Kuropatkin, who led the Russian war effort, whom they viewed as a dogmatic and ineffectual micromanager.Footnote 112 They saw the Russian military leadership generally as parochial, poorly educated, and incompetent.Footnote 113 In contrast, they saw the Japanese as an effective military force.Footnote 114 Multiple German observers noted that ‘the Japanese act while the Russians react’.Footnote 115 The food service experienced on the Russian side was also considerably more haphazard than with the Japanese. Some attachés commonly ate, drank, and recreated with their hosts; others were left more or less entirely to their own devices.Footnote 116
The Russians appear to have made comparatively little effort to emolliate their guests, whether with food, drink, access to troops, or otherwise. These were small matters, but likely shaped how the Western observers saw their hosts. Russian treatment of attachés also reflected Russian efforts – or, rather, the lack thereof – to manage observers’ impressions and expectations. As hosts to the attaché community constituted by Western military officers, the Russians saw themselves as presumptive peers, and thus made no overt effort to be seen succeeding.
Postwar consequences
The war ended officially with the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by US President Roosevelt. Victory marked Japan's arrival as both a great power and an empire. Defeating Russia allowed it to formally annex Korea, take over the lease on Port Arthur, and establish itself as the pre-eminent power in East Asia, at least as assessed by Europeans. For Russia, defeat was a shock and a humiliation, and precipitated revolt, contributing to the Russian revolution of 1905. For China and Korea, over whose territory Russia and Japan had fought, the war was a disaster. Like the Opium Wars, Sino-Japanese War, and Boxer Rebellion before, the Russo-Japanese War signalled the Qing Empire's decline. For Korea, already in Japan's sphere of influence, it precipitated formal Japanese annexation, in 1910.
Throughout the conflict, the observers constituted themselves as communities on the ground. For those securely inside the community, it became an important source of intelligence, professional observation, identity, and comradery. Those who did not fit were socially disciplined, excluded, or sent home. As a result, their status as observers was constituted not just through designation by their home governments, but also their relationships with one another. To be an attaché was to be a member of the community, and vice versa. The observer community in this war, and likely others, may well have shaped the profession thereafter.
The presence of military observers afforded Japan a chance to be seen playing the part of an imperial power, operating a robustly modernised, Western-style military and defeating a fellow great power in war. Observers’ reports cannot have been the only signal to European capitals that Japan's status needed to be revised upward. At a minimum, European statesmen also had access to reams of journalism from the war testifying to both Japanese effectiveness and relative Russian ineptitude. Still, the observer reports were expert and official documents of the outcome and its causes, and likely shaped metropolitan views and those of government elites in national capitals. At the outset of the war, the British had viewed their Japanese allies through a deeply orientalist lens.Footnote 117 Afterward, Hamilton reported that ‘the Japanese infantry are simply superb. There is none better in the world.’Footnote 118 In contrast, he had little good to say about their opponents: “The Russians are disappointing as soldiers. They seem to have absolutely no go or initiative and the men are not well trained as individuals & probably could not be really well trained as they have not the intelligence.’Footnote 119 His reports, and others like them for the governments of Britain, America, Germany, and beyond, explore the strategies, tactics, and mechanisation of the Japanese army at length. Kuhn, one of the Americans, summarised the consensus view among the observers that the Japanese armed forces were ‘excellent’.Footnote 120 The formal cataloging of the experiences of military observers from third-party states underscores not only the increased bureaucratisation of national military establishments, but also the apparent importance ascribed to observer efforts in the field.
Though Western orientalist perceptions did not entirely clear, Japanese standing in Europe increased significantly.Footnote 121 Postwar British conceptions of Japan emphasised strength, grounded in a striking fusion of divergent ideals: Japan was imagined as both ancient and modern, as a martial culture capable of supporting commercial industry, as both deeply Eastern and increasingly Western.Footnote 122
While it is more difficult to be sure from a single case, the observers’ effectiveness likely also helped cement the attaché and observer system as an accepted international practice. As Adler observes, ‘the diffusion of a practice entails not only the numerical or geographical enlargement of the group of agents who engage in it, but also the new agents’ participation in a community of practice where learning takes place and meanings and identities are negotiated and transformed’.Footnote 123 The military observers were there to learn, both from one another and from their hosts. The Japanese could only be seen to perform the role of great power, and thereby to secure it in Western eyes, by ensuring Western observers had a well-managed and curated view of their resounding victory. The war thus involved an odd but remarkable convergence of interests between the Western observers, who consolidated a professional identity by their presence, and Imperial Japan, which had an interest in being seen to win the war.
Some Japanese elites seem to have wondered if all of this was worth the practical and moral price their country paid. After the war, one account noted that
In the days when Japan was engaging in peaceful arts, the Westerners used to think of it as an uncivilized country. Since Japan started massacring thousands of people in the battlefields of Manchuria, the Westerners have called it a civilized country… if we have to rely on the odious glories of war to become a civilized country, we should happily remain barbarians.Footnote 124
These reflections indicate the at times ambivalent reception within Japanese society of the high human and financial costs of the war. Entrée into European international society also proved provisional. In 1919, Japan lost its bid to include a clause against racism in the Covenant of the League of Nations.Footnote 125 Defeat in the Second World War meant Japan accommodating itself to the West in new ways.Footnote 126 Nonetheless, postwar Japan became a member in good standing of the (still Eurocentric) international system – the result of a long, tortuous process in which the events of 1904–05 played a considerable role.
Conclusion
This article has provided an exploratory account of military attachés in world politics. Focusing specifically on wartime military observers, we treat them as a transnational community of practice. The community emerged out of professional military circles in nineteenth-century Europe, developing a shared repertoire of ideas and practices. The observer communities of the Russo-Japanese war marked a milestone for the profession, in both scale and significance for international politics. The observers made themselves useful not just to their governments, by documenting an unexpected conflict outcome, but also to their Japanese hosts, by recording their victory and how they attained it.
For their part, the belligerents treated the attachés differently, and were differently motivated in so doing. Japanese authorities went to great lengths to make a good impression. Beyond winning, they laboured to ensure observers sent home positive accounts of them – allowing access where it made the best impression, and curtailing it elsewhere. In contrast, Russia handled observers unremarkably. Already included in the Eurocentric international system (albeit with reservations), the Russian military made limited efforts to impress observers. The results, in the attachés’ reports, were clear. The Japanese not only won, they were reported as displaying greater battlefield effectiveness and as superior hosts, and thus better participants in the institution of attaché exchange.
This account contributes to understanding the micro-level dynamics of ordering and change. The attachés instantiated – temporarily and in micro – a defined community. That community generated longer-term order as well, helping to proliferate and consolidate the practice of attaché exchange. Put differently, the change scaled up. The use of attachés during the war was also indirectly implicated in transformation at a much larger scale: that of great power politics. Japanese victory produced entrée into the international system. The military observers reported to the European metropoles that controlled informal access to the great power system. While it is difficult to be sure of their full impact, these reports seem likely to have been implicated in the transformation of European attitudes towards Imperial Japan. Japan's elaborate treatment of its European guests looks to have been directed towards producing those changes. By extension, the attachés’ community-building and information gathering activities and Japan's impression management work, appear implicated in world ordering – involving stability and change alike – on a large scale.Footnote 127
This account also helps calibrate the scope and potential for community of practice building even under pressure of wartime exigencies. Communities of practice appear to extend to intelligence collection in times of war. Indeed, such communities may flourish under difficult conditions to which they are specifically adapted. Finally, it suggests that communities of practice may sometimes flourish because they are useful to those outside the community and their respective states, as vessels for disseminating preferred impressions of the events over which the community has epistemic authority. Here, the observer community, a product of the European great power system, had proven useful to outsiders trying to make their way in.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Ayşe Zarakol, Tarak Barkawi, Dave McCourt, George Lawson, Simon Pratt, Colleen Bell, Rosemary Shinko, and panel participants at conferences of the Social Science History Association and International Studies Association for helpful comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this project.
Kiran Banerjee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Dalhousie University. Author's email: kiran.banerjee@dal.ca
Joseph MacKay is Research Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University. Author's email: joseph.mackay@anu.edu.au
