The past decade has been marked by an explosion in the government deployment of private security contractors both at home and abroad. In this timely and thought-provoking new book, Elke Krahmann endeavors to expand our understanding of this twenty-first-century phenomenon through two analytical innovations. First, she probes national differences in the deployment of privatized force in a comparison of U.S., UK, and German policies. Second, she endeavors to shed light on changes in the democratic control of the use of force with a philosophically informed framework that highlights the role of ideas in shaping political choices.
Krahmann focuses on two competing ideologies or ideal types, republicanism and liberalism, which, she argues, have shaped the debate to date. Republicanism “advocates the centralization of the provision of security within the state and national armed forces comprised of conscripted soldiers.” Liberalism “suggests the fragmentation and limitation of governmental powers and the political neutrality of professional armed forces” (p. 3). Each leads to differing models of civil–military relations: liberalism, which eschews conscription in Krahmann's depiction, facilitating the privatization of security, and republicanism, which embraces conscription, impeding it. In turn, conscription enhances democratic control of foreign policy, while reliance on an all-volunteer force undermines it. Each model has its own shortcomings: “The Republican ideal of centralized government has been criticized for overregulation, bureaucratization and cost-expansion. The Liberal model of fragmented and privatized governance has been faulted for unresponsiveness to national security needs and profiteering” (p. 83).
The author maintains that countries favor either republicanism or liberalism at different points in their history. In the United Kingdom, a liberal orientation prevailed until World War I intervened. In the United States, “a mixture of Liberal and Republican ideological principles” characterized the period between 1788 and World War I (p. 54). In Germany, “democratic control over the use of armed force,” otherwise known as the triumph of Republican principles, did not prevail until the mid-twentieth century. All three countries expanded democratic control of their militaries in the Cold War years. In the post–Cold War era, the liberal model has reasserted itself, albeit to varying degrees. In the UK, “the rise of Neoliberalism has played an important role in legitimizing the growing contribution of private military contractors to UK security” (p. 117). In the United States, the growing use of private security contractors can be explained by “the changing ideological preferences of US governments from Republicanism to Neoliberalism” (p. 154). In Germany, the privatization of security has not been as extensive, because of an enduring commitment to republican ideals; “it is impossible to fully understand the transformation and privatization of the Bundeswehr and its implications without reference to the persistent German commitment to the Republican models of the state, the citizen and the soldier” (p. 192). The book thus maps the variance in approaches across both time and space, using competing philosophical orientations to illuminate empirical outcomes.
The question that naturally arises, given this mapping of the empirical landscape, is a causal one: How are we are to account for the variance? Krahmann's approach establishes the link between philosophical or ideological orientation and policy outcomes, aiming “to illustrate the importance of Republicanism and Liberalism for the explanation and evaluation of the privatization of military force in Western democracies” (p. 4). It does not tackle the interesting causal question of precisely why preferences change. The final chapter of the book, for example, refers to “changing internal and external circumstances,” which have been “inextricably linked” as the cause of preference transformation (p. 241), but it neither presents nor evaluates competing explanations of the sources of preference change, something the case studies might arguably have given one the requisite leverage to do.
Instead, Krahmann deploys republicanism and liberalism to both explain and prescribe. The penultimate chapter considers the future of democratic security, framing the choice as one between “contractorization or cosmopolitanism.” She argues that the preceding chapters have shown how “the theoretical models presented by Republicanism and Neoliberalism have become corrupted in the process of their adaptation to the contemporary political environment and the political praxis” (p. 241). The implication is that liberalism has morphed into neoliberalism as the animating rival to republicanism, but the solution is not a return to liberalism but instead a choice between what Krahmann calls “contractorization” (representing a continuation of the status quo) or cosmopolitan republicanism, which takes republicanism to the global level and might be seen to be embodied in the European Union's external orientation. The concluding chapter ruminates on these competing alternatives (contractorization becomes neoliberalism along the way), and the last sentence of the book concludes that the “answer to Kant's vision of the abolition of standing national armies might, thus, be found neither in their replacement with private military contractors nor in the rise of cosmopolitan militaries, but the civilianization of international conflict resolution” (p. 285).
The ambitious nature of the overall undertaking is both the work's principal strength and weakness. While the attempt to marry political philosophy and empirical work is admirable and worthwhile, the inherent demands of applying a complex tool kit of philosophical concepts across both time and space often threatens to overwhelm the coherence of the overarching argument. For example, clear lines are drawn early on between republicanism and liberalism, but the distinction between neoliberalism and liberalism is never sufficiently distinguished. Neoliberalism as a concept first appears on page 11 without definition and then reappears on pages 34 to 36, where it is effectively equated with the ideas of Milton Friedman. But since liberalism also has an intimate relationship with the celebration of free markets, many questions linger on the differences between the two. When Krahmann deploys neoliberalism to elucidate where the United States and the UK are today, the blurry edges of key concepts can make the argument difficult to follow; the book, in places, cries out for better editing. Moreover, the basic association of Friedman's thought with the privatization of national security may well be misplaced. While he was indeed a leading advocate of minimal government, Friedman also saw the defense of the country against foreign enemies to be an inherently governmental function.
Krahmann is to be applauded for giving us an extensive first-cut mapping of the ways in which the public–private relationship in the civil–military area has varied over time and in three different countries. The empirical contribution of the book is therefore significant, in that it explores the privatization of security and changing norms of democratic control in three countries over time. Chapter 7, a comparative exploration of the ways in which the UK, United States, and Germany have used contractors in deployed operations, primarily in Iraq, breaks new ground by extending the analysis beyond the perspective of a single country. Since much of the study of private security contracting has focused exclusively on the United States or United Kingdom, this is significant.
Krahmann's comparison assembles a wealth of interesting and important data in one place, thereby forcing the reader to think about the issue of privatization in new ways. Those with an interest in the comparative dimensions of the privatization of security should find much to be gained from grappling with his challenging contribution.
