CHAPTER THREE: POLITICS AND THE MILITARY
Having looked in some detail at the military, I now turn to the muchdisputed topic of the military role (if any), in politics.
TYPES OF POLITICS
Here, I am concerned with politics as a practical activity, since that is how
the military officer will perceive it. We can distinguish three basic types of political
activity for this purpose (as ever, the boundaries between them are not entirely
watertight). They are all directed to the acquisition or maintenance of Political
Power, which is defined as the ability to make things happen, or to prevent them
from happening.
 Mundane Politics. The evanescent politics of the newspaper front page.
The daily struggle for political advantage.
 Formal Politics. Policy-making and parliamentary activity.
 Power Politics. What actually happens (or does not happen), and why.
A few words about each will make the degree of potential military involvement
clearer.
Mundane Politics is the day-to-day political activity which makes the
headlines. It is the way in which parties and factions jockey for advantage, the
way that individual politicians strive to advance their careers, the government to
wrong-foot the opposition, and vice versa. It involves speeches, debates and
interviews, television appearances and articles in newspapers, votes in
parliament and opinion polls in the country. Mundane politics is largely about
publicity: good for you (and your party if possible), bad for your opponents, in
whichever party they might be. Mundane politics takes up the vast majority of the
active politician’s life, even if very little of any lasting importance ever comes of it.
Formal Politics corresponds most closely to that which is normally studied
and written about. It is concerned with the apparatus and bureaucracy of politics,
including policy formulation and implementation, and the political and
parliamentary process itself. It also includes formal and informal negotiations
between states, both bilaterally and in multilateral fora like ASEAN or NATO.
Power Politics is about the forces acting on a government to make various
policies and decisions either possible or impossible. It is the most important of
the three processes, because a policy which is talked about, decided upon, and
even affirmatively voted, can still come to nothing if the forces ranged against it
are too powerful. By comparison, mundane politics is largely theatre, and formal
politics is largely ritual .Policies often require the passive consent, or even active
1
assistance, of important groups if they are to be implemented. In any society, the
rich and powerful (or powerful and rich, depending on the political system), are at
best a speed-bump for government policies, at worst an absolute obstacle.
Vested interests are also extremely powerful (as numerous attempts in different
countries to tame the legal and medical lobbies will justify), and financial markets
have ways of punishing governments which worry too much about the welfare of
their own citizens. Powerful neighbours, allies and trading partners can all
exercise a determining role over many aspects of government policy.
International organisations like the Mafia or the IMF are very powerful in some
states. Public opinion may also play a role.
In some cases, power politics may simply rule certain ideas out of
contention, such that they are not spoken about, or acted upon. The idea that
(say) Malaysia should develop nuclear weapons, or the Netherlands should
leave NATO, are simply ruled out by power politics, and have no chance of ever
coming about, even if they were to gain overwhelming public support. Silence is
often more eloquent than anything else about where power lies, and vested
interests are often able so to affect the discourse of politics that certain subjects tax increases, for example - are simply never discussed. Indeed, it is probably
true to say that only if the correlation of forces in power politics permits it, will a
subject even feature in mundane and formal politics, no matter how widely it is
supported (numerical support, needless to say, is not the same as political
power). The obvious example of this is the one-party state, but the tendency is
observable in any democracy. Politics is rather like physics, in the sense that
governments tend to be pushed this way and that by various forces. There is a
difference, however, between a controversial policy (and since no policy will be
popular with everyone, most policies are controversial), where the government
will try to weigh the likely political damage against the attractiveness of the
policy, and a situation, which often happens in power politics, where there is no
realistic choice, because of the power and extent of the opposition.
THE NATURE OF POLITICAL LIFE
Practical politics - the first two of the categories I have enumerated above,
has a number of characteristics which I will briefly list here, before comparing
them with the similar list we made for the military in the previous chapter.
 Impermanence. Political life is by its nature impermanent and transitory.
Politicians have little control over their careers, and luck plays a larger
role in politics than in almost any other walk of life. You can be a
Minister today and a private citizen tomorrow. Even in political systems
which have a high degree of stability (such as one-party states) the
abrupt and total end of a political career is quite common. A single
mistake or error of timing, a decision to back X rather than Y for the
leadership or Presidency, an incautious remark or a long-forgotten
indiscretion, can all bring a career to an end in hours or days.
2
Advancement has little to do with ability, except in the broadest sense,
and so most politicians are risk-averse, hoping that they will progress
by avoiding mistakes.
 Short-Termism. A corollary of the above is the short-termism of most
politicians. The only day you can be certain you can enhance your
reputation is today. Mundane politics, in particular, is almost
obsessively topical: a good speech will find X being feted in the media
the next day as a future party leader. A fluffed interview, or error of
judgement will lead the media to ask whether X is finished. So there is
a scramble to announce, and be associated with, popular policies, and
to disassociate yourself from unpopular ones. Politicians will strike the
fashionable attitudes of the moment, trusting that no-one will remember
when they change their mind six months later.
 Isolation. Politics, whatever else may be suggested, is entirely a matter
of individuals. They may come together for tactical reasons, or cluster
round an ideology, but political careers are by definition singular rather
than collective. It might make sense for an election to be lost by your
party, if the leader, your enemy, is destroyed at the same time. In terms
of the distinction in the previous chapter, politics is a Low Trust
business (one is tempted to say No Trust), where genuine friendships,
as opposed to alliances of convenience, are quite rare. Paranoia is a
consistent feature of politicians, and those who do not have it at the
beginning usually develop it later.
As well as these factors, which operate at the level of the individual, there
are also various aspects of politics as it is performed in public which are very
obvious to the military, or indeed to any other observer. They apply with
particular force to democracies.
By its very nature, democracy is divisive, Political parties survive, and
seek power, by emphasising their differences from each other. In turn, groups
within these parties also seek mutually to distinguish themselves. Individual
politicians try to carve out a public profile by associating themselves with a
particular tendency or group. Particularly during times of political conflict, there is
always space at the fringes for a more extreme party or grouping, but politicians
who move to the centre or seek openings with political opponents will find that
they lose clarity and definition, and are elbowed aside by more extreme and less
scrupulous colleagues.
This kind of thing is containable in a society whose political culture is
similar to most Western nations in orientation, ie the differences between parties
are mainly ideological, running in a reasonable orderly spectrum from Left to
Right. But most nations (including some in the West), are not like this. Political
parties are often the product of personal, family or local loyalties; they may also
3
be the expression of religious or ethnic groups. In such cases, orderly political
life is next to impossible, since the interests of one party will be impossible to
reconcile with the interests of another. Particularly where the infrastructure of a
country leaves something to be desired, and the electoral process is not perfect,
losing parties may well cry foul, and either refuse to accept the result, or work to
overthrow the government by extra-parliamentary means. And in a family or clanbased political system, the successful party will often feel required to reward its
supporters with jobs and contracts, thus opening the way to charges (and often
the reality) of corruption.
It is common to find fault with the nation in question for having a political
system of this kind, and quite often (as in Pakistan, for example), the political
elite itself publicly wrings its hands in despair about the state of the nation. But in
fact the real problem lies in the uncritical transfer of assumptions about political
processes from Western states to states where, whatever the theoretical
attractions of the system on offer, it has little chance of actually working. It is not
surprising if groups in society (not least the military), start to ask themselves
whether anything is really to be gained by persevering with a foreign system
which is clearly not meeting the needs of the nation.
THE MILITARY AND POLITICS
From what has been said above, it will be clear that, at least as far as
mundane and formal politics are concerned, there is little if any contact between
the ethos of the military, and the normal working methods of politics. Some of the
grosser differences are:
 the military ethos is collective; politics is a solitary activity
 the military provides a structured career. Politics is largely ruled by
chance
 the military officer seeks the approval of colleagues. The politician
needs the support of voters.
 The military require co-operation. Politics is about conflict.
And so on. Indeed, if we define politics here to mean public (or even institutional)
political activity, then it is hard to see why the military should ever wish to play
any active political role at all. When the military do play such a role, it implies that
something quite extraordinary has happened, which requires them to abandon
the habits and assumptions of a lifetime. However, as I have noted, politics is not
one thing, but several, and there are different judgements to be made about the
extent and acceptability of a military presence in each.
4
The Military in Mundane Politics. Military distaste for politics is most firmly
shown in this case. The degree of self-prostration which the average politician
has to practice, and the elasticity of ideology and conscience which is required,
are not usually part of military training. Indeed, few military officers who have
attempted to go into mundane politics have had any gift for it, or any success in
it. This is one reason why military coups generally suspend the political process:
in the view of the new rulers, that process, with its divisive and factious
consequences, is part of the problem. As a result, military officers who play an
active role in politics tend to do so on a non-elective basis: sometimes (as in
Thailand), this process is itself formalised, with the military being allocated a
certain number of places in an Upper House of Parliament.
The Military in Formal Politics. In almost every political system in history,
the military have stayed out of formal politics in its public and conflictual sense.
There have been cases of the military trying to influence voters indirectly, and
even to proselytise among troops for one party, but these are fairly rare, and
normally indicative of serious problems in civil-military relations. But the following
could be regarded, depending on the country, as a normal degree of involvement
by the military.
 a full and appropriate part in the policy-making process.
 appearance by military officers before Parliament, to explain technical
military issues.
 appearance by military officers, in support of Ministers, at press
conferences and presentations of government policy.
 On or off-the-record briefing of the media on military issues.
All of these roles will be dealt with in considerable detail in the second half of this
book, which is concerned with good practice and how to arrive at it.
The Military in Power Politics. There are many occasions in different
countries where the military have sought to use their power and influence to
promote or hinder causes, to seek decisive influence in government, and even to
overthrow a regime and replace it, either with another or with themselves. I do
not intend to say very much about this subject - others have covered it in great
depth - but I will say a few words here about why such things happen, and how
they relate to the picture of the military and politics which I have sketched out
above. This section examines cases where relations with the military have gone
wrong. The rest of the book is concerned with how to put them right.
THE ROOTS OF MILITARY INTERVENTIONISM
5
Although there have been many brutal and disastrous military
interventions in the political process, I think it is fair to say that the vast majority
have been for reasons which the perpetrators themselves believed good, or even
worthy of praise. Although there have perhaps been cases where desire for
power or wealth has prompted military involvement, these cases are not
numerous. More usually, the military themselves - if often misguidedly - see their
intervention as safeguarding the country in some form. As I have shown, politics
is the last thing the average military man wants to get involved in, so military
intervention, far from being a pathological disease of the military, capable of
prevention with a strong enough inoculation of professionalism, flows directly
from the characteristics of the military, and the motives for becoming an officer,
which I discussed in the previous chapter.
But what gives a General the idea that he has any right, let alone duty, to
intervene, even in a situation of great national danger?
Parliamentary democracy, admirable in itself, contains a number of covert
assumptions which must be met if it is to function as intended. Politics has to be
seen, if not as a game, then at least as a process where defeat is just something
you have to accept. As a political loser, you may have said in public that a victory
for your opponents will be a disaster for the country, but that is a rhetorical point,
rather than a genuine belief. You would rather have won, of course, but you
settle down with good grace to opposition. But what if you really believe that your
opponents’ rule will be a disaster? You may be from an ethnic group which
greatly fears for its safety under the new government. You may be from a
religious party which regards some of the policies of your opponents as sinful.
You may simply fear that the new government does not care very much for
democracy or human rights. In such circumstances, it can be almost impossible
for parliamentary democracy to function, since the minimum necessary
commonality of views which it demands does not exist.
Likewise, there is an assumption that, in some form at least, parliament is
putting into effect what the people want. But even a functioning parliament may
not actually represent public opinion very well. Politicians may confine
themselves to squabbling and manoeuvring for advantage as the nation falls
apart. The divisions in the country and in the parliament may be so deep that
there is no chance of putting together a workable government anyway.
The problem of the inherent divisiveness of democracy has been
recognised since its beginnings, in the time of the French Revolution. A number
of its theorists, indeed, went so far as to argue that a multiplicity of parties and
points of view was actually a bad thing, since the popular will was always unitary.
It might not appear so, but, of all the points of view put forward, only one actually
represents the popular will. Other points of view are the product of
misunderstandings and lack of education and awareness. Once the populace is
properly enlightened, all views except one will disappear, and the popular will will
6
become manifest. In the meantime, however, parties should be dispensed with
(since no amalgam or compromise can represent the popular will), and those
who know what the popular will is, or should be, ought to be in power. This
doctrine, which has been called Totalitarian Democracy, 1 logically implies that a
single leader or group may well incarnate the popular will, and can rule, even in a
dictatorial fashion, in a way which incarnates this will, even if the appearance is
very different. Even if relatively few military men have read Rousseau, it is by
now a fairly well-established thought in some quarters that political parties can
be an obstacle to democracy; and all of us, of course, are quite sure that we
know what the nation wants and needs.
This judgement, about the danger of political disunity, provides a semiintellectual underpinning for intervention by the military. Three types of occasion
can be distinguished where these interventions have happened.
(1) Keeping Things Together
The fundamental duty of the military is the protection of the nation and its
interests. In normal times, this means training and preparing for the use of force
as directed by the legitimate government. By definition, however, military
intervention takes place in abnormal times.
Most work on military intervention has been done, one must recall again,
in the comfortable West, where it is normal to see the military as a bit like a
rather expensive insurance policy; necessary, perhaps, but not very welcome
when the bill has to be paid. With a few exceptions, Western states run
reasonably well, and have not disputed their boundaries by force very much for
fifty years now. Classical liberal economics, moreover, finds the military an
expensive nuisance, pre-empting resources which could be used for more
productive things. The military forces of such states will generally be as small
and cheap as the finance ministries can get away with.
It is necessary to insist (though it should not be), that the whole status and
position of the military varies greatly from this model in the rest of the world, not
only in terns of history and culture, as I outlined in Chapter 1, but in the function
that the military perform, and always have done. The military may have a role in
development, it may have a large civic action programme, it may own and run
factories. It may even be the only organisation in the country which has any real
legitimacy with all ethnic and religious groups. It may be more acceptable than a
discredited police force, and may be admired more than a corrupt government.
For all these reasons, therefore, the situation in which the military find
themselves, even before a crisis develops, can be completely different in every
country, and is most unlikely to conform to Western liberal-democratic norms.
1
See J.L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy, Penguin edn., London, 1986.
7
Moreover, if we analyse military intervention in terms of these Western
norms, which has usually been the case, we have to accept, in turn, a number of
important hidden assumptions about the government which might be intervened
against::
 the government has an effective majority in the legislature, and is able
to carry out its programme.
 the government is at least passively accepted as legitimate by all its
citizens.
 the government is minimally popular with the electorate.
 the government is minimally competent.
 all interest groups in the country obey the laws promulgated by the
government.
 political opposition and dissent is able to express itself without fear.
 the government is reasonably united within itself.
 government ministers are regarded as honest.
This is a demanding list, and one which perhaps not every Western country
could confidently claim to be fulfilling. But the roots of military intervention
frequently lie in the inability of governments to satisfy many (or any) of these
criteria. This can be a comment on the quality of the government or the political
class. It can also be a comment on the sheer impossibility of maintaining a
working democracy in situations of great ethnic and religious diversity, or in a
state whose infrastructure is not advanced enough to tolerate the stresses which
such democratic functions as elections place upon it. Finally, military intervention
may be a last attempt to prevent something even worse, as was the case in
Poland in 1981.
A representative scenario might be as follows:
A nation is riven by internal ethnic and religious strife. A weak
government, without an overall majority, has emerged from elections whose
results are disputed by the losing parties. International observers have noted
significant irregularities in the conduct of the election. One province of the
country is largely in the hands of secessionists, and terrorist groups (perhaps
supported by a neighbour), have carried out atrocities in the capital. There are
several court cases pending for corruption against Ministers in the current
government, but the judicial system and the police themselves are notoriously
corrupt, and few expect guilty verdicts. The economy is in poor shape, and
8
massive tax evasion has undermined the national accounts. International donors
are insisting that something should be done.
At that point, a small party leaves the governing coalition because of a
disagreement about allocation of seats. The government falls and there is no
clear alternative. In spite of repeated efforts over several weeks, the President
cannot organise a new government. Encouraged, the secessionists launch major
military operations against the central government, and carry out assassinations
in the capital. At that point, the military take over. There are widespread arrests
of corrupt Ministers and others, and swift and summary trials. The Army is let
loose against the secessionists and some kind of order is restored. The military
provide guards for tax collectors, and the flow of revenue improves.
At first, military rule is greeted with relief, but the military can do nothing to
cure the country’s underlying problems. Secessionist violence flares up again,
and resentment against the high-handed policies of the government grows.
Opposition to the military regime unites all the parties as nothing else could. After
several violent clashes between the Army and demonstrators, world opinion calls
for democracy to be restored. Protesters in many countries demand that the
Army should “go back to its barracks”. It does so. New, inconclusive, elections
are held. .
(2) Soldiers of the King
Another frequent cause of military intervention has been because of a
dispute about the legitimacy of the government itself. Several hundred years
ago, the position was fairly clear-cut. The Army was, in effect, the private
property of the ruler of the country, to be used in that ruler’s wars. The loyalty of
the Egyptian or the Zulu or the Chinese Army was to its ruler, and that was all.
Whilst some military forces did have loyalties to Republics (such as those of
Greece and Rome), the circumstances were very special, and, indeed, it was
when the commanders of the Roman Army began to intervene in politics that the
Republic passed away, and a succession of Emperors with dubious title took the
throne, many of them brought to power by the Army; hence the expressions
Caesarism and Praetorianism.
The democratisation of the past couple of centuries has complicated this
position greatly. It is easy enough to agree, in the abstract, that the military owes
its loyalty to the government of the day. But this incorporates the assumption, not
merely that the government (ie the party or coalition) is accepted, but that the
type of government which is in office is regarded as legitimate also. Now there
will clearly always be a minority who are unhappy with the system of government
they live under: Marxists used to argue (perhaps they still do), that all “bourgeois”
governments were simply fronts for the class interests of the ruling class,
irrespective of which party was in power. And some religious extremists have
9
argued that no government is legitimate except one organised on theocratic
principles (or theirs, at any rate). But for most of the time, at least, even those
who hold these views do not act as if they were literally true.
Problems have arisen where there is a fundamental division at the heart
of a society about what kind of a government is legitimate, and therefore an
uncertainty about to what (or to whom), the Army is ultimately loyal, or indeed
whose Army it actually was. In general, for example, colonial armies (like that of
India), took an oath of allegiance to the colonising country itself, rather to the
country they were recruited from. But the same problem arose even within
democratising states. The general tendency of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries was to replace authoritarian monarchies with democratic republics,
although not everywhere, and not always at the same speed. Yet if we regard
this transition now as a praiseworthy thing, it was not universally thought so at
the time. For many traditionally-minded people, there was something wrong,
even blasphemous, about these changes which seemed likely to upset the
natural order of things. Those who had most to lose (royalty, the aristocracy, the
rich, landowners, in some countries the Church), were loudest in their protests,
and the military, in most, but not all, countries, aligned themselves with this
tendency.2
Influential sections of society regarded the democratic and republican
structures of the nineteenth century (and even gestures in that direction), as
illegitimate, and, in effect, treason. It was common to see republicanism, indeed,
as a plot by Jews and Freemasons to undermine Christian civilisation. This was
a view that persisted in some quarters well into the 1960s. 3The military, in such
contexts, regarded the object of their loyalty as either the ruler (as in Japan and
Germany), or some abstraction of a nation’s history, as in France. In all of these
cases, they both allowed and assisted governments with some kind of
democratic pretensions to come to grief, and collaborated enthusiastically with
authoritarian regimes which replaced them.
Yet at all times, individual officers felt that they were discharging their real
duty to the object of their loyalty, which did not include this tedious group of
clowns claiming to be, or to favour, democratic government of some sort.
Representative, but more guilty than most, is General Maxim Weygand.
Weygand was the commander of French forces in the last desperate days
and weeks of the German invasion of 1940. Like most French military men, he
was an ardent anti-republican and anti-democrat, who looked forward with relish
2
Turkey is an obvious example of a country where the military played a largely progressive role.
Most of this nonsense was based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a crude forgery
perpetrated by the Tsarist secret police in the early years of this century. Military dictatorships
found the book of special interest, and a luxurious edition was published in Spain (then, of course,
busily defending itself against democracy), in 1963. See Norman Cohn, Warrant for genocide: The
Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Penguin edn.,
London 1970, p. 11.
3
10
to the fall of the Republic he allegedly served. It was Weygand who mainly
persuaded the French government to seek an Armistice; partly raising the
spectre of imminent revolution, partly by threatening to resign if this was not
done. The Armistice was duly signed, and the parliament of the Third Republic
voted itself out of existence, to be replaced by the authoritarian, militarist regime
of Petain. After the war, Weygand was taxed with disloyalty and helping to
overthrow the elected government, a charge he indignantly denied when he gave
evidence at Petain’s trial. He was, he claimed, a loyal and faithful servant of the
Republic:
“The government of the French Republic is that which, as a soldier, I have
always obeyed; it is the government of my country. .... I have never been
involved in politics; as a consequence, I never dreamt that there might be
another government than the government of the French Republic .... The
National Assembly .... decides by a majority on something .... I think that the
government which succeeded the [Third Republic] is a legitimate government; I
can think nothing else. 4
Although there can be no doubt that Weygand both hoped and intended to
overthrow the Republic by his actions, he does genuinely seem to have believed
that by doing so, he was rescuing France from the terrors of democracy. This,
however, was not the same as “involvement in politics”, and he could therefore
claim, to his own satisfaction, to be loyal even to the Republic he had helped to
destroy.
(3) Disciplining the Nation
Similarly, there have been many cases in modern times where the military
have involved themselves in politics because they are deeply worried about the
way in which civilian politicians have been leading the country. Usually, this is a
product of political and social modernisation of the kind that has happened more
or less everywhere.
If asked to pick out those things that we value most in the modern world,
the majority of us would probably come up with much the same list: democracy,
respect for human rights, free trades unions, universal education, emancipation
of women and so forth. Yet there have been times when all of these
developments, and many more, were seen in some political circles as deadly
threats to the well-being, and even survival of the nation. Traditionalists in
general, including all of those mentioned before, but this time including people of
humbler origins, often from rural areas, looked back with nostalgia to an earlier,
God-fearing age when everyone knew their place. The modern world -
4
Proces du Marechal Petain, Paris, Imprimerie des Journaux Officiels, 1945, p. 144.
11
Surrealism, secularism, atonal music, votes for women, mass industrialisation seemed, by comparison a madhouse.
To these general complaints, the military brought a specific further worry.
New-fangled ideas like democracy or the welfare state would make the nation
soft and decadent, and so the very security of the nation was endangered by
politicians who, for example, passed laws to limit the working week. Votes for
women would undermine the father’s position as head of the family, and so
endanger the structure of society. Annual holidays for all would make the
workforce lazy, and you would never get them back to the factory again.
Unemployment pay would destroy the “will to work”. Even electricity was to be
discouraged because the poor would stay up all night carousing and be late for
work the next morning. And of course, all of these social evils would undermine
the martial spirit and discipline of the nation, and put it in danger of invasion and
occupation. All of this, no matter how bizarre it may seem now, was implicitly
believed by large parts of society, at a time when the popular mind contained
half-digested morsels of Darwin and Spengler, trying to get out.
Finally, of course, there was an ideological edge to these theories. After
1917, and even more from about 1947, most modern political and social ideas
could be seen plausibly, by some, as a communist plot. For those, like the Greek
Colonels and the military who tried to assassinate de Gaulle, the Third World
War had been going on for some time; but not on battlefields in the classical
sense. Rather, it was an ideological war being fought for the “hearts and minds”
of all of humanity, in every street, in every town, in every country. It was the duty
of the military to fight this good fight, and their enemies were probably not in
uniform, but ordinary people, even their neighbours. In such a climate, of course,
respect for democratic legitimacy and the process of law were not required: the
situation was far too urgent for that.
Military interventions - whether full-blooded coups, or just heavy breathing
from the sidelines - have cited in their defence all of the factors above: often
mixed together. The plotters who overthrew President Allende of Chile in 1973,
for example, produced a list of 14 justifications, covering almost all of the ground
of this chapter. Usually, these motivations are mixed up together, and the military
themselves may not be entirely sure what they are doing. But what they do
believe is that they have the good of the country - as they define it - at heart, and
are acting in its best interests.
 CONCLUSIONS
 the ethos of the military and the political ethos are quite different.
 there is no general military desire to intervene
 so military intervention in politics is highly unlikely and unusual.
12
 It usually happens because the military believe themselves to be the final
guardians of the safety of the nation.
13