In case any of us needed reminding, the events of the Arab Spring have highlighted once again the crucial role that coercive state agencies in general, and the military in particular, often play in regime transitions. Those seeking a clear and well-grounded overview of the role of the military in periods of major political change and of the way in which the army is subjected to democratic civilian control after such episodes will find a valuable guide in Zoltan Barany's new book.
The Soldier and the Changing State is an extraordinary book in both senses of that word, simultaneously remarkable and rare. Most notably, the book is built around 27 country case studies that span the globe—it really does encompass Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, as the subtitle promises. Barany traveled to all of those continents to conduct interviews, although not surprisingly in a book of this scope, the major source for the case studies is the existing secondary literature. The case studies are grouped by three different “contexts”: after war, after regime change, and after state transformation. Each of these contexts is further subdivided into types, or what the author calls “settings”: Postwar contexts can be found after both external and internal war, post–regime change contexts can be either postpraetorian or postsocialist, and state transformation can be either after colonialism or after (re)unification. Further, some of his settings use multiple chapters to cover different regions, and so there are three chapters on postpraetorianism (Europe, Latin America, and Asia) and two on postcolonialism (Asia and Africa). Each substantive chapter has two main case studies and one secondary case. Overall, his 27 cases are Germany (after World War II), Japan, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, El Salvador, Lebanon, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, Slovenia, Russia, Romania, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ghana, Tanzania, Botswana, Germany again (after reunification), South Africa, and Yemen. This book is a one-man-edited volume.
This empirical ambition is coupled with a disarming theoretical modesty. At one point, Barany declares (p. 300; emphasis in original), “the generalization we can make is that it is extremely difficult to make useful generalizations,” and his “skepticism regarding grand theories” (p. 345) is evident throughout. This skepticism is not about theory per se; rather, it is rooted in a largely implicit historical institutionalism that emphasizes the importance of context, timing, and leadership. Some readers may find this “it depends” stance frustrating, but this reviewer thought it was both refreshing and largely warranted. Barany is also explicit about his normative bias in favor of democracy and his interest in providing useful advice to policymakers seeking to construct democratic civil–military relations.
The book is organized in the conventional fashion for comparative, qualitative case study research. The nine case study chapters are sandwiched between an introduction and theory chapter and a conclusion that summarizes the major arguments and provides policy advice. The theory chapter has a brief overview of the classic civil–military relations literature, starting with Plato and running through Machiavelli and Clausewitz before arriving at the founders of the contemporary social science work on the topic, such as Samuel Huntington, Morris Janowitz, and Samuel Finer. Barany sets out his standard for good democratic civil–military relations in terms of the “triangular nexus between state, society, and the armed forces” (p. 11), which he then employs in the cases to assess the amount of progress toward this ideal. This theoretical setup will be particularly useful for general scholars of democratization and comparative politics who are less familiar with the civil–military relations literature.
Barany's theoretical restraint does not mean that there are no general claims—indeed, his belief in the importance of context and starting points is one of his principal arguments. For example, in analyzing the radically different trajectories for civil–military relations in Pakistan and India, he stresses the circumstances of the 1947 partition and the differing bureaucratic capacities of the new states.
The most important general argument is that “democracy cannot be consolidated without military elites committed to democratic rule” (p. 3). Relatedly, the author also asserts that “building democratic civil-military relations may be the most fundamental prerequisite of the transition to and the consolidation of democracy” (pp. 10–11). If he is right, then he has located another necessary condition or prerequisite of democracy, along with a state (Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, 1996, 17–19).
It is thus somewhat disappointing that Barany does not more explicitly measure military views of democracy in the case studies. Although he asserts in the conclusion (p. 340) that “it was easy to discern that the armed forces were not committed to democratic values” in the cases with authoritarian outcomes, the reasons for his confidence are not clear. To prove his case, he needs some way to assess officer-corps beliefs independent of the outcome that these values are supposed to explain—a democratic, authoritarian, or hybrid regime. For example, J. Samuel Fitch (The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America, 1998) used interviews with retired and active-duty officers to classify the “role beliefs” of Argentine and Ecuadorian officers into five distinct categories. Obviously, such a method was not available to Barany given the scope of his project, but more explicit attention to his coding of military “commitment to democracy”—either yes, no, probable, or unclear, according to the summary tables—would have helped. Without more detailed treatment of military elite beliefs, it is hard to know whether a commitment to democracy is a cause or consequence of democratic consolidation, or indeed whether some form of apolitical professionalism, indifferent to regime type, is also compatible with stable democracy.
Another significant general argument, although Barany features it less prominently, concerns the importance of “institutionally balanced civilian control of the armed forces” (p. 239). Indeed, in my view this is his most notable and best-supported claim, especially since it goes against one of Huntington's arguments in The Soldier and the State (1957), the urtext of contemporary civil–military relations from which Barany takes his title. Huntington contended that the institutional design of American civil–military relations as set out in the Constitution was seriously flawed because it divided power over the armed forces between the legislature and the executive, thus provoking a struggle for control that tended to draw the military into politics. He even suggested that the situation in Imperial Germany, in which the Kaiser had unquestioned dominance of the military and the parliament was toothless, was far preferable. Barany, in contrast, demonstrates throughout the book that an empowered parliament that is actively involved in defense and security policy is a key ingredient of democratic civil–military relations. The same could be said for societal actors, such as nongovernmental organizations and the media. Moreover, another type of civil-military balance is also important. An extreme form of civilian control, in which the military has no real voice in the policy process, such as in Germany, India, and Japan and more recently in Argentina, is also a problem, leading to ineffective defense policy.
The Soldier and the Changing State will probably be most widely read among specialists of civil–military relations, who will learn a great deal from the case studies in particular. But it should also find a considerable audience among democratization scholars. The book neither offers up a new theory of regime change nor tests existing theories, but there is no better general historical treatment of the ways in which civil–military relations influence the transition process in countries around the world.
