Revolutionaries (32 page)

Their political analogue was rather the civil service, a body of persons obliged, whatever their private views, to carry out the wishes of any government which had formal sovereignty and the responsibility for taking political decisions. This did not mean that civil services could not drag their feet, indulge in gentle sabotage, in backstairs lobbying for their policies, or interpret such policies in ways congenial to them. It meant that formally they were and are
arms
of government, not government itself The late A.B. Cobban pointed out this analogy for the French army. Indeed, it is to a great extent true, in spite of the various interventions of that army in politics, and in spite of the fact that for long periods the social origins of its officers, their ideology and their political views (Catholic and Royalist) conflicted almost head-on with those of their political masters. The first Napoleon was the great exception – but only until he seized power. After that he was a normal ruler who happened to go off from time to time to win battles. The army was no more important in his regime than in any other which wages war. Napoleon
III
was not even a soldier, and his rise to power owes little to the military; if they supported him in 1851 it was because he was
already
the effective government. The army which raised
Marshal Pétain to power was German and not French. As for General de Gaulle he freed himself of the military conspirators who brought him to power as soon as he could, and subordinated the army to civilian control in the usual way, and with little trouble. He called on it again in 1968, but evidently (until the present) without reviving its political ambitions.

Conversely in such countries (France) the attempts of the army to coerce the politicians were, on the whole, remarkably unsuccessful. When the French army did not accept the existing and operational government as the legitimate one, whatever it happened to be – and it changed loyalties without a tremor in 1830, 1848, 1851 and 1870 – it proved itself weaker than the government. During the Third Republic, when army confronted civilian rulers, as during the Boulanger and Dreyfus crises, the civilians won. I think one can safely say that the threatened refusal of the British army to operate Irish Home Rule in 1914 was the result not of its own determination, but of the chicken-livered hesitations of the liberal government. It did not give firm orders, and an army established on the principles of obeying such orders, had none to obey. Truman was never seriously threatened by Macarthur. In the most extreme case of a self-conscious dissident army opposing the established government, the revolt of the German army leaders against Hitler, the outcome was clear. The real way in which armies in western countries have intervened in government is by playing politics, and the most successful generals in this respect were not those who mobilized their support among brother officers, but in courts or the lobbies of Parliaments. Indeed, one of the reasons for General de Gaulle's strength was his rare combination of the gifts of the army commander and the remarkably subtle, not to say devious, politician. This is a combination which one and a half centuries have taught any French general who wishes to get anywhere, but few have been competent to learn the lessons.

All this suggests that armies are politically neutral, serving
any regime with equal obedience, though not equal loyalty. This is the situation of many policemen, and some of them have been known to take pride in their Hobbesian readiness to serve any Leviathan that is likely to come along, though revolutionaries who find themselves interrogated under both capitalist and communist regimes by the same official, have appreciated the virtues of this political theory less. However, though both are disciplined, hierarchical, largely uniformed and armed forces designed to execute and not to make policy, armed forces and police forces are quite different in their political behaviour. As for armies, there appear to be limits to their loyalty. Will they accept social-revolutionary regimes? The answer is: probably not, though the subject is as usual surrounded by myth. (We do not, for instance, know adequately how many of the armed forces of Spain remained loyal to the republic in 1936 – probably more than is commonly realized – or how large a proportion of tsarist officers loyally served, or would have loyally served, the Soviet government.) Since most revolutions are victorious because the armies which ought to suppress them are no longer reliable instruments of order, and therefore arise on the (perhaps temporary) ruins of the former armed forces, few have doubted that armies are fundamentally against social revolution. Still, they probably are. By and large the evidence shows that army officers in western countries are socially conservative, and so, very often, are the ranks of career soldiers, as distinct from those of conscripts.

That the Reichswehr between the wars was prepared to be loyal to the Weimar Republic and Hitler, both regimes with which its generals had no sympathy, does not prove that they would have been equally loyal to a communist regime. Pretty certainly, they would not have been. Armies refusing obedience to such social-revolutionary regimes might well justify their failure on the grounds that these represented not any kind of order, but disorder and anarchy, or that they were not real
regimes, since their power and authority was contested (as might well be the case), but whatever the reasons, they would be following the inclinations of their officers. Conversely, social-revolutionary governments have felt little confidence in the armies of the old regime. Those which have, like the German social democrats of 1918, can by this criterion alone be safely classified as not really revolutionary.

In developed countries which do not happen to be undergoing social revolution (and few of them have) armies therefore intervene in politics only under very exceptional conditions, and then – so far – invariably on the political right. Under what conditions? A breakdown of the normal processes of politics normally seems necessary, the classical example being the conflict between the formal pattern of the system and political or social realities which cannot be absorbed into it: a small, oligarchic party system which threatens to be swamped by mass forces outside it (as seems to have been the case in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s), an organized block of voters whom the electoral system must admit, but the dominant party structure refuses to, thus producing permanent instability. In Argentina, France and Italy, for instance, no stable government can be based both on free elections, the sovereignty of the elected assembly, and the exclusion of the Peronists or Communists respectively from the process of forming governmental alliances. Military rule (as in Argentina), the imposition (by military coup) of a new presidential constitution which devalues the assembly (as in France), the fear of military coups (as in Italy since the middle 1960s) are the consequence. However, one hopes that the Italian example proves that, while necessary, the breakdown of the political system is not a sufficient cause of military intervention. On the other hand the injection into such an endemic crisis of some political issue about which the army, as a corporate professional or even political interest feels very strongly, undoubtedly makes the situation much more explosive. A
controversial war, for which the army feels it is not getting sufficient moral support and material resources, may make the temptation to sweep away the hesitant or traitorous civilians irresistible. Still, armies might even so prefer to substitute a ‘good' or ‘efficient' civilian government for a ‘bad' or ‘ineffective' one, since in developed countries they are profoundly imbued with the sense of being not political ‘masters', but a ‘service', and in any case acutely aware of their lack of qualifications for politics. The Reichswehr in Weimar Germany sought any solution rather than that of taking over power itself, and thought it had found a satisfactory one in the strong right-wing Nazi-Nationalist coalition of 1933.

The term ‘army' in this context refers for practical purposes exclusively to the officer corps. Among its members the generals are in theory best capable of action, since their numbers are small, they generally know each other and can therefore concert policy more easily, and above all, because they can actually order large bodies of troops about. In practice they are less likely to act (as distinct from permitting action), partly because of the notorious jealousies and ambitions of senior officers, to which the literature of military autobiography bears witness, partly because their personal fortunes are directly dependent on the civilian government, i.e. on playing orthodox politics. They have much to gain within the existing system, and more to lose by abandoning it. Less eminent officers have more to gain, but find it hard to concert action outside the limited field of the regiment, the garrison or the small expeditionary force, though being members of some old-boy network helps to extend their range. On the whole, in developed countries coups not organized, or at any rate covered, by generals, seem unlikely. The most dangerous situation is likely to be one in which the less senior officers are politically mobilized and organized, e.g. in secret nationalist societies, and take the initiative in attempting coups or mutinies, which, even though abortive, force the generals into showing
solidarity with movements which are in any case more congenial to them than the discredited civilians. We need hardly discuss the problem of the special role of certain elite corps and units designed for rapid action, such as parachutists and commandos. By and large, in developed countries one may guess that the colonels, halfway between their senior and juniors, are likely to be politically the most dangerous ranks.

As for the rest coups by non-commissioned officers are rare even in underdeveloped countries with armed forces of any size, and practically negligible in developed ones. If the rank and file of any army plays politics, it is no longer military politics. They intervene in politics because they act as civilians. Their most powerful weapon is analogous to that of the civilian workers' strike, namely the refusal to obey orders. At crucial moments this may decide the fate of governments. The most recent example is perhaps the refusal of the French conscripts in Algeria to follow their officers into a putsch against de Gaulle. To this extent conscript armies have a certain built-in resistance to military coups, but one would not speculate how far this resistance alone would take them. Probably not too far.

So much for western and communist countries. However, there remains the very large part of the world in which military politics play a much more prominent role, especially in times of crisis. This comprises the bulk of the so-called ‘Third World' or ‘underdeveloped world', i.e. the Iberian and Latin American states, the Islamic states, Africa south of the Sahara and large parts of Asia. The case of Japan belongs more to the ‘developed' world, in the sense that military politics there appear as a temporary interim rather than as a permanent probability. However, I know too little about this country to speak with confidence about it.

Throughout this vast area military government has often been the rule and always implied by the very existence of an army, so that its elimination has often seemed to require that of the armed
forces themselves.
¹
This vulnerability to military politics has been demonstrated more than 150 years in Latin America, the only sector of the Third World which has enjoyed political independence under republics for so long a period, and became evident within a few years of the establishment of political independence in most of the rest of the underdeveloped countries. It is quite easy to draw up a list of western countries which have never been under military rule in the past 150 years, even though sometimes, like Britain and Belgium, engaged in major wars. There are very few countries of the Third World at present under civilian administration, in which the chances of maintaining it over the next twenty years are as good as even. Admittedly the recent drift towards military government has been by no means entirely spontaneous.

Why this is so is a question which cannot be answered simply by an analysis of the social composition or corporate interests of the armed forces. Their corporate interests are plainly not negligible, since military expenditure may receive 20 per cent or more of all funds expended by their governments in a given year, to cite one estimate for Latin America in the early 1960s, and the pressure to maintain this disproportionate share of budgets clearly involves armed forces (among whom armies are generally by far the largest group) in national politics. Their social composition itself is not adequately illuminating either. The officer corps is rarely drawn predominantly from a traditional landed aristocracy and gentry, like the Prussian junkers, or from that sector of it which has long family connections with the military life. Either such strata do not exist, or they have been swamped by officers of different social origin, as in Argentina,
where only 23 per cent of senior army and air force commanders come from ‘traditional' families. Leaving aside the special cases where large sections of the armed forces are recruited from particular minority nationalities, tribes or other groups (such as the ‘martial races' which were so conveniently used by former colonialist governments and have sometimes survived into independence), the bulk of officers in the underdeveloped world can be described in one way or another as ‘middle class'. But this classification in itself means very little.

‘Middle class' may mean that officers are recruited from the established strata exercising economic and political power, as in Argentina, where 73 per cent of army and air force generals come from the ‘comfortable bourgeoisie'.
²
In this case their politics, leaving aside corporate interests and the special patterns of military life, are likely to be similiar to those of their class, i.e. on the conservative side. Or, more typically, they may come from the lower middle class or modest provincial bourgeoisie, in which case the army is one of the more promising careers for social promotion open to the sons of this stratum. Officer corps composed largely of aspiring and rising members of a military middle class, increasingly professionalized and technically trained, are less likely to identify with an established upper class, where such a one exists. They may be politically more radical (or ‘modernizing') in the civilian sense (e.g., in the nineteenth century, ‘Liberal'), or in some specific military sense (as in twentieth-century, ‘Nasserism'). There are, of course, also the genuinely self-made military leaders who have risen from the ranks. They are common in and after revolutions, and during long periods of political disorder, as in nineteenth-century Latin America, where the
caudillo
was sometimes a grass-roots fighting man who had worked his way up to the point where he commanded a sufficiently large force to surround the nearest presidential palace. Today such self-made, and usually self-promoted
chiefs are probably common only in ex-colonies which, before independence, possessed either no native armed units specifically associated with the territory of the subsequent independent state, or at least no significant body of native officers. This is the case in most of sub-Saharan Africa.