states, armies and empires: armed forces and society in
TRANSCRIPT
DRAFT: Not for quotation or citation without permission
(Comments welcome: [email protected])
States, Armies and Empires:
Armed Forces and Society in World
Politics
Tarak Barkawi
Department of Politics, New School for Social Research
Thanks to Alex Anievas, Josef Ansorge, Duncan Bell, Shampa Biswas, Shane Brighton, John Conant, Devon Curtis, Catherine Gegout, Janice Bially Mattern and Iver Neumann for comments and assistance on previous
drafts of this paper.
1
The central problematic in International Relations (IR) is that of a system of sovereign
states competing with one another in the absence of higher authority. How states manage or
resolve the ever present possibility of war among ‘like units’ under ‘no common power’ is
amenable to realist, liberal and constructivist analyses, and as such is the site of defining
debates in security studies and IR. This problematic entails ‘units’ that are ‘formally’ alike, in
that they are sovereign entities, even if they differ in their relative power and capabilities. It
separates the ‘international’ from the ‘domestic’, with the former the site of collective action
problems and strategic interaction, and the latter a realm of order provided by the sovereign
state’s ‘monopoly on violence’. An overall organization of the social sciences and humanities
becomes possible, in which IR studies the interactions between states, a socially ‘thin’ realm,
while other disciplines attend to the socially ‘thick’ world contained behind sovereign
borders. While there are many exceptions to this broad characterization, it is difficult to
overestimate the power of a nation-state ontology of world politics not only for IR but for the
social sciences and humanities in general.
Underlying this world of units is a set of assumptions about the organization of armed
force, signaled by the frequent invocation of Max Weber’s definition of the state involving an
administrative staff that successfully upholds the claim to the monopoly on the legitimate use
of force in a given territorial area.1 The monopoly of violence is seen as the essence of the
state-force-territory relation and underpins sovereign power. The rule of the state over
population and territory ultimately is backed up by coercive bureaucracies. This control over
force creates the basis for the state as a “social-territorial totality”, or “bordered power
container”.2 What makes a unit a unit in a world of units, what gives a state the properties of
a community of fate in world politics, is force, and in particular the sovereign territorial
1 Weber (1978: 54).
2 Giddens (1985: 120); Halliday (1994: 78-9).
2
organization of violence. As John Herz put it in his seminal article on the territorial state,
“The decisive criterion . . . is actual control of one’s ‘estates’ by one’s military power, which
excludes any other power from within and without.”3 Interestingly, others have rarely
followed Herz’s lead in identifying military cracks and permeabilities in the “’hard shell’” of
the state’s frontiers, such as ballistic missiles, in predicting the demise of the sovereign and
territorial state.4 Rather, critiques of nation-state ontologies in world politics focus on nearly
everything but armed force. Whether conceived in IR, globalization studies or imperial
historiography, the world of flows, transnational networks, non-state actors, and
interdependencies, consists mostly of culture, economy and organizations other than armed
forces.5 Force remains the conceptual hard core of the sovereign and territorial state, and
therefore of a world of units and their relations with one another.
Does this ‘trinitarian’ co-location of state, armed forces, and society—the ‘nation-
state’—provide an adequate understanding of state-force-territory relations for international
theory?6 While for Weber control of armed force is an essential dimension of the political, his
oft-quoted definition of the state was intended for the European states of his day. Are there
reasons to question the wider applicability of this image of the organization of force? If so,
what are the implications not only for IR and understandings of world politics but for social
and political inquiry more generally?
In a variety of ways, states regularly constitute force from, and exercise it over,
populations beyond sovereign and national borders. The coercive power of states has
international and transnational dimensions occluded by the image of a world of territorial
monopolies. These dimensions are one of the principle ways in which states, most especially
but not only great powers, project power. The modalities vary historically, but practices such
3 Herz (1957: 479). 4 Herz (1957: 474); cf. Herz (1968); Ruggie (1993: 143). 5 See e.g. Appadurai (1996); Castells (2000); Cooper and Stoler (1997); Keck and Sikkink (1998); cf. Shaw
(2000). 6 Cf. Creveld (1991) on ‘trinitarian war’.
3
as raising colonial armies, the advice and support of the armed forces of subordinate states,
and covert or deniable uses of foreign military manpower are widespread and profoundly
consequential for the fates of many peoples and places.7 These ‘foreign forces’ are normally
used to exert power over colonized populations and the Third World or Global South, but
their significance is not limited to subordinate states and societies in world politics. They
have direct implications for the character of civil-military relations in core states and for the
kinds of imperial and foreign policies they can sustain. From the early modern period, the
processes of European expansion that interconnected the world—making possible the
capitalist world system and the globalized world of flows—relied on the availability of armed
force. This was because imperial intervention and rule continually encountered and generated
armed resistance. The primary military burden fell not on the populations of core states but
on those being subjugated. Foreign forces enabled the histories of imperialism and core-
periphery relations that continue to shape the modern world.
The image of a world of units arises from generalizing certain European histories,
experiences and ideas to establish putatively universal norms and concepts that guide inquiry.
Accordingly, the discussion begins with a critique of the Eurocentric teleologies which frame
ideas about nation-states and armed forces. In political-military visions of modernity, the
nation state and its wars against ‘peer’ competitors loom large, while the military dimensions
of imperial expansion receive considerably less emphasis and attention, displaced into a
separate category of ‘small wars’. Recent decades have advanced considerably the project of
‘provincializing’ European social and political theory.8 In part because military history and
sociology, and what might be called ‘war studies’, are underdeveloped theoretically and not
integrated into the main disciplines in the human sciences, the need to provincialize ‘military
7 See e.g. Kiernan (1998); Lumpe (2002); McClintock (1992); Spector (1985).
8 Chakrabarty (2000).
4
Europe’ is little realized. The relations between armed forces, society and politics have been
understood through perspectives developed from Western experience.9
However valuable and astute these perspectives are, however useful in their specific
contexts and even outside them, they are liable to mislead if used without modification and
qualification in inquiry on armed forces and society in world politics. As opposed to IR,
which focuses mainly on relations between and among great powers, the idea of world
politics entails placing the strong and the weak, core and periphery, in the same analytic
frame, as co-constituting amid relations of hierarchy and domination.10
An important step in
provincializing military Europe, then, is to connect that which Eurocentrism separates, the
political-military histories of the Western nation-state with those of empire and imperialism,
and more generally with the world of flows. Also necessary is the critique of the often
implicit assumption of an organic relation between a national people, their armed forces and
their polity, an assumption that does a great deal of work in visions of a world of units. The
first section below launches this critique of ‘military Europe’.
The sovereign and territorial assumptions shaping understandings of armed forces and
society are not found only in inquiry, but are built into practices of diplomacy as well as
national and international juridical structures. For example, both officially speaking and as
encoded in data sets such as those of the Correlates of War (CoW) project, the Republic of
Vietnam (South Vietnam, or RVN) was an independent sovereign state with its own armed
forces from 1954. Backstage, as it were, the RVN and its considerable armed forces were
created and sustained in large measure through the projection of US power; it was not an
autonomous unit, but a subject of ‘nation-building’. Locating and anatomizing ‘foreign
forces’ in world politics, the task of the second section below, requires working through a
twofold power/knowledge problem engendered by the ways in which juridical and other
9 Black (2004).
10 Barkawi and Laffey (2006).
5
‘official’ categories are entwined both with practice and social scientific inquiry. As will be
seen below, quite significant and often sizeable ‘foreign forces’ have eluded IR scholarship,
lost amid categories and definitions based on the sovereign territorial organization of
violence. In a postcolonial world, the constitution of force beyond borders adapted to the
sovereign independence of the new states. Patron-client relations were clad in sovereign garb,
soldiers and equipment reflagged, and categories such as ‘national’, ‘foreign’, ‘public’ and
‘private’ manipulated for political-military purposes. In using juridical relations as a guide to
the organization of force, especially in the construction of statistical databases but also in
historical inquiries, IR scholarship failed to disentangle itself from power/knowledge
relations that facilitate the exercise of force in world politics.
Another frame which informs the study of armed forces and society, especially in
military sociology and comparative politics, is that of ‘civil-military’ relations, as in analyses
of military involvement in politics or of the sociological makeup of the armed forces of a
state.11
The use of nation-states in these studies as discrete cases or units of analysis reifies
the world of units critiqued here. Moreover, as Ronald Krebs comments, this approach asks a
narrow range of questions for a subject matter of such breadth and significance. He calls for a
broad research agenda centered around “the relationship between the armed forces, the polity,
and the populace.”12
While the sovereign territorial state and the domestic/international
distinction are assumed in his formulation, Krebs points to the mutually constitutive relations
between politics, force and society, “arguably a polity’s most central questions.”13
If this is
so, as it surely is, what are the consequences of the fact that a taken for granted image of the
international organization of force has structured social scientific inquiry across a host of
disciplines, an image of provincial applicability?14
What happens when the sovereign
11 See e.g. Huntington (1957); Luckham (1971). 12 Krebs (2004: 123). 13
Krebs (2004: 89). 14 Cf. Ayoob (1995).
6
boundaries around Kreb’s formulation are lowered, when it becomes polities, armed forces,
and populations without the presupposition that these elements are necessarily in an
isomorphic relation with one another? The implications go beyond the study of matters
related to the military alone, for generally speaking political thought, the social sciences and
humanities all have relied on a world of usually national units to organize their subject
matters. For inquiry, the place of the international expands considerably if even in its hard
core of armed force, the sovereign and territorial state turns out to be a limited and
misleading guide to analysis in important respects. A research agenda opens up around
politics, armed forces, and societies, and their international co-constitution amid a world of
flows. A third and concluding section expands on these matters.
Eurocentric Teleologies of State, Army and Society
The nation-state is an essential component of political modernity, and it involves a
particular imagining of the organization of violence and its relationship with territory and
authority. In a nation-state, armed force is bureaucratically organized behind sovereign
borders, under public control, and staffed by citizens. This image of the organization of
violence draws on Greek and Roman ideas regarding the political virtues of citizen soldiers
and reflects fundamental assumptions of political and democratic theory, most centrally the
link between military service and having a voice or franchise in a polity.15
From the time of
the “French and American revolutions, participation in armed conflict has been an integral
aspect of the normative definition of citizenship.”16
Studies of European state formation also
sustain nation-state imaginaries. Located at the intersection of historical sociology and
realism, accounts of the transition from the late medieval to the early modern order in Europe
focus on the relations between political elites, capital and armed force that produced the
15
Hanson (1989); Levi (1997); Machiavelli (1998). 16 Janowitz (1976: 190).
7
territorial state.17
Bureaucratically organized armies supported by taxation and under the
control of the sovereign replaced the feudal host centered on knightly cavalry and mobilized
through fief and vassalage. Originally heavily reliant on mercenaries, over the course of the
nineteenth century the norm of the public and national citizen army became universal.18
“It
became common sense that armies should be staffed with citizens.”19
Whether rooted in
power politics or normative commitments, this norm was powerfully popularized by the great
conflagrations of the world wars, in which national armies of millions hurled themselves
against one another. Warfare “is engaged in by public militaries, fighting for the common
cause” and Weber’s definition is the “obvious starting point” for investigations into the
international organization of force.20
Debates in historical sociology, IR and military history concerning the transition from
the medieval order to the territorial state, and from mercenary armies of often foreign
professionals to the citizen army are notable for their historical and theoretic sophistication,
and for interdisciplinary engagement and cumulation. These debates, however, are notable
also for their extraordinary Eurocentrism in two interlinked ways. First, in descriptive terms,
their subject matter is mostly European. It concerns what is happening in Europe (and latterly
the US), not elsewhere, with relatively less attention even to what European powers are doing
outside Europe. The debate over the move to citizen armies, for example, focuses on the
timing and nature of military reforms in the major European states.21
This ‘descriptive Eurocentrism’ is an essential precursor to ‘normative Eurocentrism’.
Here, what is happening in Western contexts is assumed, often implicitly, to have
international and universal significance, in the sense of establishing taken for granted
concepts and ideas about states, armies, and societies, as well as of war and politics more
17Tilly (1992). 18 Percy (2007); Thomson (1994). 19 Avant (2000: 41) 20
Avant (2005: 1); Singer (2003: 19). 21 Avant (2000); Percy (2007); Posen (1993).
8
generally. IR’s core problematic provides an excellent example, elevating a peace treaty
named after a region in Germany to the “cornerstone of the modern state system.”22
International thought imagines an equivalence between an interpretation of happenings in
Europe in the seventeenth century, modern forms of rule and political community, and
universal applicability. “[T]he distinctive feature of the modern system of rule is that it has
differentiated its subject collectivity into territorially defined, fixed, and mutually exclusive
enclaves of legitimate dominion.”23
It may appear that all the trouble happens in the move from the first to the second form
of Eurocentrism, in the unwarranted generalization of European events to universal norms.
However, descriptive Eurocentrism already makes a crucial assumption: that what is
happening in Europe can be accounted for with mainly European developments. But from the
early modern period, European powers were embedded in imperial and trade relations of
global reach. African slaves, American gold and silver, Caribbean cane, Chinese porcelain
and spices as well as Indian opium and cotton, made ‘European’ modernity and capitalism
historically possible.24
“Indian surpluses enabled England to create and maintain a global
system of free trade.”25
These global interconnections are essential to understanding
European political, economic, cultural and social developments. They are part of ‘European’
modernity.
Only roughly for the century from 1850 to 1950 did European imperialism outside Latin
America generally take the form of exclusive, territorial authority over formal colonies.
Before, during and after that time a variety of overlapping, informal forms of penetration and
rule carried out by an assortment of agencies including trading companies, local potentates,
state officials, missionaries and private citizens, characterized relations between Western
22 Morgenthau (1985: 294); quoted in Osiander (2001: 261). 23 Ruggie (1993: 151). 24
Bayly (2004). 25 Wolf (1997: 261).
9
powers and the extra-European world. Beneath and behind an official world of sovereignties
was a world of imperial networks.26
Today, multinational corporations, international
governmental and non-governmental organizations, and international forms of state also
exercise powers, and do so not only in the Global South.27
These relations are as much a part
of the modern as the sovereign and territorial state in Europe. Yet, for IR, “The chief
characteristic of the modern system of territorial rule is the consolidation of all parcelized and
personalized authority into one public realm.”28
A discipline could only arrive at such an
image of political modernity by ignoring what the ‘modern system’ consisted of outside
Europe.
In recent decades other disciplines commonly link developments inside and outside
Europe. “The history of European expansion interdigitates with the histories of the peoples it
encompassed, and their histories in turn articulate with the history of Europe.”29
You need
‘the rest’ to understand the West, now a common claim in imperial historiography, historical
sociology, and cultural studies, and long essential in radical political economy.30
When it
comes to political-military relations, however, and to the forms of exclusive territorial rule
engendered by the pact between the sovereign and bureaucratically organized armed force,
there is an unacknowledged assumption that only what happened in Europe matters in setting
the terms of debate. It is in this way that the norm of the territorial and sovereign state was
established. Once it becomes the taken for granted setting, civil-military relations in political
science, military sociology and elsewhere are imagined primarily as internal to the nation-
state, as about relations between the state and its citizens and minorities over matters such as
conscription and conditions of military service.31
One of the ways of thinking about the issues
26 Bayly (2004); MacDonald (2009). 27 Barnett and Duvall (2005); Panitch (1996). 28 Ruggie (1993: 151). 29 Wolf (1997: x). 30
Cooper and Stoler (1997); Said (1993); Wallerstein (1980-88). 31 See e.g. Levi (1997); Moskos et al (2000). Cf. Barkawi (2002).
10
this paper is trying to raise is to ask whether there is a political-military equivalent of the
Caribbean sugar plantation, with its African labor and European capital, an interconnection
with constitutive effects in different locales, not least in the cheap calories that fueled
industrial laborers in the UK and elsewhere?32
Are ‘domestic’ civil-military relations
fundamentally shaped by international interconnections, by, for example, the ability of the
state to draw on foreign sources of military manpower?
Armies of the West?
Integral to the rise of the state in Europe were new forms of military organization,
addressed in the debate over the ‘military revolution’, a debate which reflects both senses of
Eurocentrism discussed above.33
The regularly organized national armed forces of the
sovereign and territorial state became a central construct in the Western political-military
imagination. The often implicit but widespread identification of the military institution with
the West and its nation-state rivalries works to obscure political-military interconnections
constitutive of modern world politics. The regular military is conceived as a product of
Western culture, politics and society. At base here is the army of soldier/citizens who fight
for their own political communities in a distinctly Western way of war, a set of ideas
packaged together in the work of Victor Davis Hanson but which also operate widely as an
implicit set of assumptions in scholarly and political life.34
Making the military essentially European or Western requires two moves, which can be
made in different ways. The first involves the construction of a specifically Western heritage
for drilled and disciplined infantry armies which engage in decisive battle. This is usually
accomplished via the Renaissance recovery of Greek and Roman military ideas that
accompanied the return of infantry formations to battlefield dominance in early modern
32 Mintz (1985). 33
Rogers (1995). 34 Hanson (1989; 2002).
11
Europe. But it can also be done in a Weberian and Foucaultian idiom through assumptions
about the Western character of modern discipline in general. The second move is to establish
an organic connection between the will to combat of soldiers and their polity and culture.
Hanson, for example, links Western soldiers’ desire for decisive battle with ‘freedom’ in
political arrangements, it is their polity they are fighting for. A more general instance of this
move emphasizes the role of nationalism and political ideology in the motivation of
soldiers.35
Putting these moves together produces the state as a community of fate defended
by its own soldier/citizens, who fight in a distinct Western style, one powerful enough to
achieve Western world dominance. This vision of the disciplined regular military
simultaneously establishes a notion of the West as dominant in world terms, but also as
consisting of separate nations or political communities, Eurocentrism and a system of units.
Before critiquing this ‘military Europe’ some caveats are necessary. Nothing below
should be interpreted as meaning there were not Greek and Roman influences on the military
forms developed in early modern Europe, or that there are not various connections to be made
between the character of a polity, the motivations of its soldiers, and its way of war, whether
or not one accepts Hanson’s particular version of these claims. To be Eurocentric is not
necessarily to be wrong.36
The military revolution debate comprises impressive scholarship
by any standard. However, what is at issue here is the “global currency” of these concepts
and analyses.37
Hidden pitfalls and presumptions arise from the provincial nature of Western
experience when compared to world history and politics. Consequently, the point of what
follows is to begin to identify what ‘military Europe’ occludes, and how it does so, not assess
the many ways in which Eurocentric political military inquiry is an appropriate and effective
frame for inquiry. The idea is to provide a basis for rethinking and reconceiving armed forces
and society in world politics.
35 Bartov (1992); Posen (1993). 36
Chakrabarty (2000: 29). 37 Chakrabarty (2000: 45).
12
The military can be situated it in the formative tradition of Western exceptionalism in
social and political theory, the various ways in which special properties are attributed to the
West to explain its modern world dominance. Military power is an obvious example of this
exceptionalism, and is articulated with ideas about disciplinary society and ascetic culture,
rationality, science and technology, and capitalism, nationalism and mass politics. These
ideas provide the classic sociological basis for thinking about ‘the rise of the West’ in world
history, while wrapping up the military in European developments. While the West certainly
rose, there remains the question of just what is essentially Western about these different
social and political phenomena, especially when considered in disaggregated terms.38
Rational bureaucracies and markets are found in diverse times and locales, Western and
otherwise, as are drilled and disciplined troops, and decisive battle. That the West had and
has great military power, does not mean that drill and discipline as techniques of military
organization are themselves inherently Western. While perhaps obvious, these points are
mentioned because ‘military Europe’ involves the idea of a distinctive Western military
heritage that perseveres through historical time.
Accordingly, military drill and discipline are widely assumed to be Western inventions in
some significant way, and to be powerful expressions of the superior European capacity to
operate rationally and efficiently as members of organized groups, “impressive monuments to
the capabilities for rational organization which seem to be inherent in European
civilization”.39
In Discipline and Punish, a text representative of the Western European
libraries and archives on which he largely based his work, Michel Foucault saw the military
as an incubator of the basic techniques of modern discipline.40
Along with ‘means of correct
training’ such as hierarchical observation, normalizing judgments and examinations, the
38 Cf. Hobson (2004). 39 Ralston (1990: 9). “Europeans have shown themselves able to think and act more effectively as members of a
group than those of any other civilization.” (2) 40
Foucault (1979: 168). See also Gerth and Mills (1946: 255-261) for Weber’s essay on the origins of discipline
in war.
13
military deploys parade and battle drill, officer/other ranks hierarchies, obedience to
command, regularized sub-units, and institutional boundaries from civilian society.41
Foucault’s interest was in the modern generalization of disciplinary techniques throughout
society. It is curious nonetheless that these techniques were ancient in origin, well known to
Hellenistic officers and Roman centurions. They were also known to others.42
Disciplined
Indian infantry opposed Alexander the Great’s incursions into the Punjab, and drill and
organized warfare are found in ancient China as well. The Europeans did not introduce
firearms drill to the Indian subcontinent in the eighteenth century, as armies there were
already using it, as were the Japanese in the sixteenth century.43
“As African and Asian
archers had released arrows on command for thousands of years, the non-Western world did
not have to wait to be told that firearms could be used in the same manner.”44
The Marathas,
for example, had their own infantry traditions and a powerful indigenous artillery arm that
outgunned the British. They were finally defeated not by the superior discipline of the ‘thin
red line’ but by the East India Company’s bottomless lines of credit and a very well
conducted campaign of espionage.45
The idea of ‘military Europe’ requires forgetting this cosmopolitan world history of drill
and discipline. By articulating the regular military with civic or ‘free’ political arrangements,
Hanson is able to construct the West as a continuous fighting subject in history, in no small
measure via the notion of a classical heritage. “Civic militarism . . . was an entirely Western
phenomenon . . . Asia, Africa and the Americas shared no intellectual or cultural heritage
with Rome and Greece and thus possessed no source from which to adopt fully the peculiar
Roman republican notion of voting assembles and formal citizen soldiers.”46
Hanson
41 Foucault (1979: 170-194). 42 See McNeill (1995: 101-150) for an overview. 43 Cooper (2005b: 536-538); Parker (1988: 140). 44 Cooper (2005b: 537). 45
Cooper (2005a: 297). 46 Hanson (2002: 128-129).
14
emphasizes the role in transmitting Roman military ideas of texts such as Vegetius’ De Re
Militari, which circulated widely in early modern Europe. Although Vegetius, a fourth or
fifth century writer, had no direct knowledge of the Roman discipline he valorized, Hanson
identifies him as an authority on “this peculiar Western emphasis on drill”, and in so doing
imputes a link among Romans, Westerners, and drill across the centuries.47
But what is the
significance of the fact that early modern European mercenary captains in part learned about
drill and discipline form those in their retinue who read classical texts, or from manuals that
popularized ideas partially derived from those texts? These Europeans were in an historic
situation in which standing armies again could be maintained through tax revenue and
bureaucratic regulation, making possible a recruited army that derived its fighting abilities
through more or less systematic disciplined training. Techniques and ideas about how to do
this came in part in Greek and Roman form, as did much else at the time, but serviceable
versions could be found in other quite diverse and disconnected historic contexts.
In appropriating drill and discipline as Western phenomena, ‘military Europe’ requires
either identifying European expansion as the source of the worldwide spread of rational
military forms, or simply ignores the fact that non-Westerners evolved similar forms. For
example, via the device of an unrelated citation from an anthropologist writing on ‘primitive
warfare’, Hanson figures the nineteenth-century Zulus as uncivilized, undisciplined, lacking
in organization or structure, and limited to tactical principles derived from animal hunting.48
In fact, the Zulu military machine was highly organized and well trained, in age grouped
cohorts akin to those of republican Rome, and with dedicated logistics support. The proper
use of the Zulus’ short stabbing spears “required considerable skill and practice”. Moreover,
“What always impressed the British at the time was their skill and rapidity in utilizing
47 Hanson (2002: 331-332). Writing long after the Roman legions proper had passed from history, Vegetius
compiled a variety of sources in an effort to convince his contemporaries to stop relying on ‘barbarian’ forces
and return to the old military system of the early empire. 48 Hanson (2002: 332-333).
15
ground, and the way in which they advanced in open skirmishing order in the best approved
European fashion.”49
The Zulus only concentrated when they were upon the enemy and about
to engage in hand-to-hand combat, which they prefaced, like Caesar’s legions and their pila,
with a shower of throwing spears. The Zulus did not derive their age groupings, their open
order on the approach, or their throwing spears from the Romans or Europeans, but arrived at
these solutions on their own, when facing similar tactical problems in comparable conditions.
As Randolf Cooper comments in a related context, when it came to small arms drill “there
was no magic or racially exclusive ‘Western way’. The mechanical requirements and
ergonomic realities of weapons systems’ dictated a certain degree of commonality in the
behavior of the weapons’ operator. Those physical realities . . . suggest that parallel
independent behavioral developments were indeed possible and that this entire ‘who was
first, which was best’ debate is a culturally motivated canard.”50
Had China or India risen to
world power instead of the West, drill and discipline would have had a Chinese or Indian
character around the world, and no doubt these great civilizations would have produced
scholars who claimed this was essentially so.
Above all, ‘military Europe’ involves accounting for the ‘rise of the West’ by reference
to superior military power, rooted in drill, discipline and technology and conceived as
indigenous to Europe. Two significant aspects of the regular military are obscured by rooting
it in Europe. The first is the histories of international interconnection which inform the
development of military organization, that is, the military itself is part of the world of flows.
The second is that the very point of drill and discipline as a means of military training is that
“anyone’s son will do”.51
They are generic organizational and ritual techniques that given
certain conditions can be used to raise effective troops from nearly any population. There is
no particular cultural or ethnic prerequisite to effective infantry service; non-Westerners can
49 Laband (2007: 61, 67). 50
Cooper (2005a: 287). 51 Dyer (1986: 101).
16
fully participate. Additionally, while nationalism may be a motivation for military service in
many contexts, it is not essential.52
Nonetheless, a common and powerful theme of representations of the military and war in
political life is the idea of an organic bond between armed forces and the political
communities for which they fight, as in the connection between nationalism and national
military service. Democracies and republics are another way in which armies and polities are
linked and bounded by sovereignty, both in political thought and in empirical inquiry.
Hanson falls into this camp. Given his concern to connect ‘freedom’ and ‘civic loyalty’ to his
Western way of war, he not only matches armies and polities together, but also must ignore
or distort troublesome cases in which democracy and the Western way of war are not found
marching hand-in-hand, such as the Wehrmacht or the Roman empire. Elsewhere, he makes
the category of civic militarism so elastic that even Cortes’ conquest of Mexico can be
included.53
Xenophon’s Greek mercenaries, stranded in Persia when their employer was
killed trying to take the imperial throne, become a “marching democracy” in Hanson’s
hands.54
Even when considering Greeks in Persian service, Hanson loses sight of the
circulation across time and space that characterizes the development of military forms,
turning the mercenary phalanxes into their own polities instead.
One Greek mercenary who served with the Persians was Iphicrates, who returned home
to reform the training, tactics and discipline of Greek light infantry, or peltasts, drawing on
his Persian experience, possibly from seeing “Egyptians with long spears”.55
So focused on
rooting the West in ancient warfare, Hanson overlooks the rich history of cross-cultural
circulation, hybrid organization, and multicultural armies that so characterize the ancient
Mediterranean world. Hannibal melded North Africans, Iberians and Gauls into an army that
52 Barkawi (2004). 53 Hanson (2002: 170-232). 54
Hanson (2002: 3). 55 Ueda-Sarson (2002).
17
humbled Rome; Numidians and Germans marched with Caesar on Gaul; and Viking
berserkers were the shock troops of Byzantine emperors. Vegetius’ text may not be evidence
of a shared Western way of war between the classical world and modern Europe, but it is an
example of the transmission of military ideas across contexts. Along with Aelian and
Frontinus, it helped inspire early modern European soldiers to adapt drill and discipline to
their own armies. In turn, they produced various versions of Vegetius as well as their own
manuals which circulated among military professionals across Europe, as they shared and
emulated each other’s techniques and innovations. For professional soldiers, military service
and war involve travel, and the experience of other ways of doing things. These ideas are
brought home. They are compared and contrasted with indigenous practices, and new hybrid
forms are developed, and then circulated in texts or through further military travel and
wartime experience.56
Although the military is often associated with national chauvinism, in
both peace and war soldiers go to new places, interact with other peoples, and frequently
serve alongside foreigners.
By associating in an essential way the military institution with particular political and
cultural identities, such as some or another version of the West, we forget the circulation that
is an inherent part of its history and practice. Militaries are shaped by ‘multiethnic’,
interconnected histories. Iphicrates was far from the last soldier to borrow from abroad. The
military is also a cosmopolitan institution—at home anywhere. The regular armies of states
around the world are one example. Soldiers can be created from nearly any population if a
power deploys the requisite disciplinary techniques effectively.
This discussion has sought to loosen the grip not only of Eurocentrism but of the
sovereign and territorial imagination in thinking about the military and its relations with state
and society. The idea is to provide an opening to rethink relations between armed forces and
56 Cf. Clifford (1997); Robertson (1992).
18
society in the making of world politics. Thinking about the international organization of force
in terms of discrete units, whether territorial states, civilizations, or other kinds of polities,
forecloses prior matters: what is the relationship between political boundaries and the
historical and social development of military organization? In what respects are the social
relations of armed force contained—or not contained—by sovereign borders? Which
dimensions of military institutions can be accounted for by reference to specific national
societies, and which lie in the realm of more general social forms and processes? What are
the implications of these considerations for political and military inquiry, and for
international theory?
The sovereign, territorial and national monopoly on violence, conceived in Eurocentric
terms, provides one set of answers to these questions, to the extent they are raised. This
discussion has posed the issue of the ‘international’ in political-military relations in broader
terms. On the one hand, in different historical contexts but similar social conditions,
comparable military techniques arise. We should not think only in terms of the diffusion of
modern techniques from Europe. On the other hand, military ideas and technologies from
Europe and elsewhere did circulate, in the form of soldiers, texts, weapons, and through
practices of emulation and hybrid fusion of the foreign and the local.57
The military is part of
the world of flows, not only that of discrete political entities. The world of flows, however, is
structured by powers which mobilize the transnational and cosmopolitan capacities of the
military for their own purposes. In the modern world, those powers most often have been
Western.
The remainder of this paper traces out some of the implications of these ideas for
thinking about armed forces and societies in IR and world politics. Foreign forces, recruited
from beyond the boundaries of the political community, are an important way in which the
57 See e.g. Resende-Santos (2007); Roy (2005).
19
relations of armed force exceed a world of units. Inquiry oriented around the sovereign and
territorial state has misconstrued their character and significance. The discussion below
recovers and anatomizes their place in modern world politics. In so doing, it seeks to
demonstrate the value of the openings broached by the critique of ‘military Europe’ for
political and international inquiry. It begins by looking at how these forces predominantly
have been conceived in IR and military history, as ‘mercenaries’ or some other form of
‘private violence’, and draws out where and how Eurocentric presumptions refract attention
from a major dimension of the exercise of military power in North/South relations.
Foreign Forces in World Politics
In Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, Janice Thomson writes that “the last instance in
which a state raised an army of foreigners was in 1854,” when Britain hired some
mercenaries for the Crimean War.58
Thomson wants to account for how force came to be
organized in terms of territorial monopolies and controlled by states. States had important
interests in using international and domestic law to assert public control over armed forces
and to eliminate “extraterritorial violence”, or armed forces in the international system
controlled by non-state actors.59
When nationals enlisted in foreign armies or served in a
mercenary capacity, they risked involving their home state in foreign disputes. Moreover, as
great powers turned to building mass national armies in the latter half of the nineteenth
century, they preferred to reserve their national population for their own military uses. States’
“common interests in building state power vis-a-vis society produced an international norm
against mercenarism.”60
The combination of the institution of neutrality and the imperatives
of nation-state building spelled the end of mercenarism, understood as “the practices of
58 Thomson (1994: 88). Percy makes the same claim (2007: 123, 167). 59
Thomson (1994: 3). 60 Thomson (1994: 88).
20
enlisting in and recruiting for a foreign army.”61
These processes “consolidated the territorial
basis of state authority and the boundary between domestic and international politics.”62
Thomson’s text is in many ways the most sophisticated and historically informed
contribution to a growing literature on mercenarism and private violence in IR. This
literature, along with cognate work in military history and historical sociology, is in general
agreement that over the course of the nineteenth century force came to be organized in
sovereign and territorial monopolies, under the authority of states, ending the institution of
mercenarism and depriving non-state actors of their armed forces. While Thomson roots the
end of mercenarism in state interest, for Sarah Percy the norm against mercenarism
developed because mercenaries exercised violence outside the control of legitimate authority
and because of the moral opprobrium that comes from fighting for financial gain rather than
some “larger conception of the common good.”63
Peter Singer and Deborah Avant agree that
historically states monopolized violence in territorial and sovereign terms, but argue that in
the contemporary world the public monopoly is under threat from the privatization of
violence, although the consequences vary with state capacity.64
Rather than simply assuming a world of territorial monopolies as in IR generally, these
analysts empirically investigate how this world came about or how it may be coming to an
end. However, their conception of the sovereign and territorial monopoly on violence is
underwritten by Eurocentric assumptions. Even in the case of Thomson’s realist standpoint,
formal and juridical categories based on the national/foreign and public/private distinctions
inform these analyses in ways which blind them to the continuing role of foreign military
service in a sovereign state system. In particular, there is an assumption that state control over
armed forces meant they were staffed by nationals recruited from home territories.
61 Thomson (1994: 27). 62 Thomson (1994: 6). 63
Percy (2007: 1). 64 Avant (2005); Singer (2003).
21
Additionally, there is a tendency to read back into history contemporary liberal
understandings of the public and private spheres. As a consequence, substantial foreign forces
elude IR scholarship directly concerned with the question of foreigners serving in state
armies. A return to the mid-nineteenth century, and to British India, draws out some of these
points and serves as an introduction to the world of foreign forces.
Thomson is interested in two developments around this time. One is the end of an era in
which the great mercantile imperial trading companies fielded their own military forces. The
other is that states stopped employing foreign mercenaries and enacted legislation to prevent
their nationals from serving abroad. Until 1858, the official agency of British imperialism in
India was the East India Company. Regulated by a Board of Control in London, it managed
relations with Indian powers, administered territory, and waged war. After a major rebellion
sparked by the mutiny of the Company’s most powerful Indian army, the British parliament
declared Queen Victoria the sovereign of India. The Company’s administrative and military
apparatuses were brought under a Government of India led by a British Viceroy and a
Secretary of State in the British Prime Minister’s cabinet. Its Indian forces were formed into
the British Indian army, under the authority of the Government of India and London. An
Indian army serving at the behest of liberal Britain is a rather different relation between
democracy and armed forces then suggested by thinking that begins with an idealized polis
and its citizen-soldiers.65
In the IR literature, early modern mercenarism (as opposed to contemporary privatized
violence) is understood as both private and foreign, universalizing European experience. As
Avant explains in an article focused on three Western European states and the Napoleonic
Wars, “The practice that was established internationally was that each state used its own
65
Cf. Percy (2007: 165): “The debates in the British parliament demonstrate that by [the] mid-[nineteenth]
century there was a belief that civilized states did not use foreigners to fight their wars.”
22
citizens to fight and would avoid foreigners, or mercenaries, in their armies”.66
When the
Indian army was formally brought under public control, it ceased to be ‘mercenary’ in these
terms but still involved the military service of foreigners. The contradiction is not apparent to
Thomson, who claims foreign service ended with the Crimean War, because of an implicit
assumption that recruiting within sovereign boundaries means national armies. She
specifically notes that the Company employed some 100,000 Indian soldiers in 1782, but
thereafter the larger Indian forces Britain continued to field until 1947, along with other
European colonial forces, disappear from her book. Both before and after 1858, British
imperialism held India primarily with Indian soldiers, that is, with a foreign force. The Indian
army made Britain an Asian land power for two centuries, fighting in numerous imperial
campaigns from Southwest Asia to the Far East and played a significant role in both World
Wars, numbering over two million in the Second. It was “the leading British strategic reserve
on land”.67
While the Indian army was the most powerful and long standing colonial force of
its kind, the French fielded considerable West and North African forces, while the Dutch,
Belgians, Portuguese, Germans, Russians, Japanese and Americans also maintained
significant forces raised from colonized populations.68
Percy makes the same assumption,
that the end of ‘mercenarism’ meant the end of foreign military service. She writes that after
the French Revolution “states began to fight wars using their own citizens exclusively, and
foreigners disappeared from the armies of Europe.”69
As a statement of fact, this is incorrect.
Alongside the Indian Corps in France in the First World War were over 200,000 French
colonial troops. West Africans alone made up nine percent of the ‘French’ army in 1940 and
twenty percent of the ‘Free French’ forces in 1944-45, while some 275,000 colonial soldiers
66 Avant (2000: 41, n.1). 67 Black (1998: 178). 68
Clayton (1988); Kiernan (1988); Killingray and Omissi (1999). 69 Percy (2007: 94).
23
served the allies in Italy in 1943-45.70
The hybrid armies of the ancient world have their
modern counterparts.
It could be objected that colonial troops are not really foreign in the juridical sense of the
term, as they were normally sovereign subjects of the colonial powers. While correct in
formal terms, this move erases the social and political significance of the fact that European
powers were relying on troops recruited from outside the national political community. It
suggests there is no substantive distinction to be made between national citizens and imperial
subjects, between the British army and British imperial forces. Percy tries to argue just this.
She claims that colonial troops “were not really ‘foreign’ in the sense that they were
considered to be part of an imperial project.” Her normative analysis is based on the idea that
mercenaries are disapproved of because they lack “deeper attachment to a cause which would
bind them to the community for which they fight.”71
So in cases such as colonial armies, the
French Foreign Legion or Nepalese Gurkhas, she claims the soldiers fight for the goals of the
states that recruited them.72
The argument that such troops ‘pursue the same project’ as the
states they serve contradicts the emphasis throughout her book on states’ “preference for
citizen soldiers” and substitutes without much comment an imperial ‘community’ for the
national community and its causes that everywhere else informs her analysis.73
Due to an understanding of mercenarism as at once private and foreign, the literature
considered here in effect conflates state control with national staffing of the armed forces. It
is more or less assumed that public monopolization of violence also means national citizens
in the armed forces. This is the nation-state ontology at work, the sovereign territorial and
national organization of violence shaping images of international politics and blinding
analysis to alternative realities. Both Thomson and Percy are thrown off by a change in the
70 Clayton (1988: 98); Echenberg (1991: 88); Ready (1985: 220). 71 Percy (2007: 10, 164). 72
Percy (2007: 59, 64). 73 Percy (2007: 28, 164, n.240).
24
modality of generating military power beyond the borders of the nation-state. Focusing on a
shift in the public/private distinction, they miss an important underlying continuity: the
continued utility for states of generating military power from outside the national citizenry,
from other territories and populations. Foreign military service did not cease in the 1850s,
only some ways of organizing it did.
An important reason why this continuity is missed stems from the effects of the category
of ‘private’ on contemporary thinking. Thomson shows some awareness that this term can be
misleading outside of particular contexts, particularly that of the modern, liberal and capitalist
state. She refers to ‘non-state’ violence, a broader category, in her discussions of the
mercantile trading companies and notes that contemporary distinctions between the economic
and the political and between state and non-state should not be read back into history.74
But
she in effect does just this by placing such significance on the dates when supposedly 'non-
state' entities like the East India Company were deprived of their armed forces. In some
respects the Company was a ‘state within a state’ in the sense of combining political, military
and economic power, but it was also closely articulated to the national state, its ‘colonial
frontier’ in Sudipta Sen’s terms.75
The Company had been subject to formal political
regulation since the India Act of 1784, with ministers sitting on a Board of Control and the
Governor-General in India made a royal appointment, and informal regulation long before
that.76
More specifically, terms like state and non-state artificially sever the arrangements
weaving together crown, parliament, joint-stock companies and Britain’s leading families.
The formal end of Company rule in 1858 takes on greater significance in contemporary
perspective because it seems like the nationalization of a private company. But to conceive of
the Company prior to that as a ‘non-state actor’ is to ignore the ways in which the Company
was articulated with British power. A family like the Wellesleys in the era 1750-1850 were at
74 Thomson (1994: 41). Others are less careful. See Singer (2003: 7). 75
Sen (2002). 76 Keay (1991: 390-1)
25
once investors and businessmen, ministers and members of parliament, and Governors-
General and commanders of Company and crown forces in India, who profited from the
Indian empire while also influencing and directing British policy there in their varying
capacities.77
The notion of the private sphere raises additional issues having to do with understandings
of the state. There is a strong tendency in the private violence literature to see the private as
outside the state, as ‘non-state’, and to conceive the public and private as separate spheres.
“In keeping with the most common usage, I will use ‘private’ to refer to non-governmental
actors.”78
In respect of organized violence, the state is normally conceived as an actor or a set
of organizations, distinct from society, which monopolizes and uses legitimate force.
However, in thinking about the public/private distinction, it is important to remember other
dimensions of the state, as a legal and institutional order and an “enduring structure of
governance and rule in society”.79
In this sense, the boundary between public and private is
internal to the state, regulated and determined by the state. For example, ‘private property’
seems straightforwardly in the private sphere when the state is thought of as a public actor.
But in fact property relations, and any rights and responsibilities that appertain to ownership,
are defined by the state as a structure of order. These considerations are absolutely essential
in the analysis of liberal and capitalist states. This is because a defining feature of liberal
capitalism is the formal separation of political and economic power, of the public and the
private, within an overall order regulated by the state.80
In this way, capital is free to
accumulate in the ‘private’ sphere of the market, and defend itself more or less successfully
from ‘public’ interference by democratically elected governments and the their regulatory
apparatuses.
77 See Cain and Hopkins (2002) on gentlemanly capitalism and empire. 78 Avant (2005: 24). See also Singer (2003: 7). 79
Benjamin and Duvall (1985: 25, italics removed). 80 See e.g. Wood (2003: 10-14).
26
Part of what goes wrong in conceiving early modern mercenarism as ‘private’ is that a
world in which it is possible to make such distinctions between private and public, state and
civil society, was only in the process of being made. In the century before 1850, Britain
formally separated political and economic power in the colonies, placing the former under the
control of the crown, as exemplified in the series of parliamentary acts that progressively
incorporated the East India Company into the official apparatus of state.81
Only after this shift
was complete, would it make sense to use the term ‘private’ as a category of analysis for the
organization of violence, qualified by the considerations in the preceding paragraph. After
1858 one could speak of the Indian army being under (British) public control, but prior to that
date to conceive of the East India Company’s sepoys as ‘private mercenaries’ in the
Company’s employ is to presume a modern liberal order that did not yet fully exist, either for
the British or the Indians.
Once that order is in operation, it is important to remember that the public and the private
are principle and shifting spheres for the organization of power in modern society, and that
they open up strategic possibilities, such as those exploited by capital. For example, the
executive arm of the state can utilize the private sphere to evade the legislative regulation and
publicity that comes with official organs of government.82
Similarly, ‘nationality’ is not an
immutable category. Who is and who is not a national, and who can and cannot serve in the
armed forces, is a prerogative of state. Should a state require foreign military manpower, it
can legislate accordingly, for example making military service a route to national citizenship
as in the US today.83
Alternatively, national soldiers can be secretly seconded to a foreign
power, or disguised as ‘private’ mercenaries. In an order in which there is a formal distinction
between the state and its responsibilities, on the one hand, and civil society and the private
sphere on the other, state actors can make use of informal and covert instruments of policy, in
81 Cain and Hopkins (2002: 278-288). 82
Avant (2005: 146-157). 83 Julia Preston, “U.S. Military Will Offer Path to Citizenship”, New York Times, 15 February, 2009.
27
order to avoid taking ‘official’ responsibility. Rather than being ‘objective’ categories for the
analysis of organized violence, the public/private and national/foreign distinctions should be
thought of as marking out fields for the constitution and use of force for various purposes by
strategic actors. With these considerations in mind, the ground is prepared to consider the
transition of foreign forces into the worldwide sovereign state system of the post-1945 era.
From Colonial Armies to Foreign Forces in a Sovereign State System
European expansion generated ubiquitous violent resistance, ranging from major wars to
local revolt. There was a continual need for military and police forces, and from the mid-
seventeenth century Europeans began using indigenous personnel in drilled and disciplined
formations led by various combinations of European and indigenous officers. These forces
were progressively regularized and institutionalized and provided a large proportion of the
forces used both for internal security and conquest. In 1863, for example, there were 62,000
British army troops stationed in India along with an Indian army of 135,000, and while
numbers fluctuated this ratio of approximately two Indian soldiers for each British soldier
remained roughly the same until 1914.84
Fighting in Morocco in 1908, the French had on
their books at one point 4,250 European (French army and Foreign Legion) troops and 6,216
West and North African troops, while in 1913 these numbers were 35,867 and 25,825
respectively.85
In Indochina in 1953, the French fielded nearly 74,000 European troops, over
47,000 West and North African troops, 53,000 Indochinese in French colonial service, and
150,000 more in the army of the French sponsored Vietnamese state as well as 13,000 each in
its Laotian and Cambodian counterparts.86
Even if imperial conflicts infrequently reached the scale of great power war, they still
had to be fought, and local revolts had to be put down. The figures above give some sense of
84 Menezes (1999: 189). 85
Echenberg (1991: 28). 86 Clayton (1988: 160).
28
the modest but significant scale of the armed presence necessary, as does the basic history of
‘small wars’.87
The commitment of resources, military and otherwise, was always an obstacle
for metropolitan advocates of empire, and often at the center of political debates over
imperialism.88
With the extension of the franchise and the emergence of a literate mass public
from the second half of the nineteenth century, political military events in the extra-European
world played an increasingly important role in electoral politics and the rise and fall of
governments, from William Gladstone to William McKinley. That the Western forces used
consisted almost entirely of professionals and volunteers testifies in part to the political
sensitivity of imperial military commitments. The French evolved a colonial marine service
for French troops, while the Foreign Legion always accounted for a heavy proportion of their
white troops on imperial service. The British army remained a professional force until World
War I. When the enlistments of US Volunteers serving in the Philippines ran out in 1901, the
US stepped up formation of a paramilitary Philippine Constabulary reaching some 7,000 by
1904. This was in addition to the Philippine Scouts, a force of similar size integrated into the
US army. Together along with local police they carried on counter-guerrilla operations for
years after the war was formally over.89
The overall contribution of colonial and other foreign
forces was not only in their military significance, but in the more or less delicate political
dispensation they enabled in Western civil-military relations. Also among their advantages,
colonial troops were cheaper to maintain and less likely to die of disease.
After 1945, both the scale and political salience of wars and revolts in the Third World
increased dramatically. The mass politics of anti-colonial resistance led to significant fighting
in Asia and Africa, and the advent of nuclear weapons contributed further by shunting
superpower conflict into the Third World. Wars fought by proxy on at least one side were
much less likely to lead to nuclear confrontation, and offered opportunity for strategic
87 See e.g. Hernon (2003). 88
See e.g. Cain and Hopkins (2002: 281); Ferguson (2004: 170-1); Kanya-Forstner (1969). 89 Jose (1992: 18); Linn (1999: 118-119); (2000: 204, 215-216).
29
advantage.90
At the same time, these conflicts generated political crisis in the West, leading to
regime change in France and Portugal, while the Vietnam War is one of the most significant
events in US politics and society in the second half of the twentieth century. The military and
political demand for indigenous forces remained, yet the colonial framework that produced
their most powerful expression in the regular colonial armies was disappearing. It is at this
juncture that the characteristic modality for the constitution of foreign forces in a sovereign
state system was significantly expanded, that of ‘advice and support’ to the armies of
formally independent but subordinate states. ‘Advice and support’ was an example of what
Andrew Scott has referred to as “techniques of informal penetration” that blossomed after
World War II and gave powerful governments “direct access to the people and processes of
another society.”91
Both the superpowers developed extensive programs for foreign military
training, advising and the supply, sale and maintenance of weapons, equipment and
munitions.92
In other cases, the former imperial powers maintained links to their former
colonial militaries, which had become the national armed forces of the new states and were
now avenues for various kinds of influence.93
Elsewhere, the US took charge of the transition
from colonial to sovereign army. The US based the South Korean army (ROKA) as well as
the national police on Koreans who had served the Japanese.94
In the last stages of their
presence in Indochina, the French created a Vietnamese state and formed a Vietnamese
National Army. After the Geneva Accords, this became the Army of the Republic of (South)
Vietnam (ARVN), and the US took over the role of patron.
For the US, expansive definitions both of the Free World and of the communist enemy
entailed political and military commitments across the Third World.95
Since the US was
90 Aron (1968); Kolko (1988). 91 Scott (1982: xi). 92 See e.g. Johnson (2004: 131-140); Lumpe (2002); Neuman (1986). 93 See e.g. Luckham (1971); Martin (1995). 94
Cumings (1981: 169, 172-176). 95 Kolko (1988); Westad (2007).
30
constrained in using its national armed forces, partly because of limited resources and,
especially following the war in Indochina, because of popular disenchantment, it sought to
raise, train and advise foreign forces for purposes of countering what was seen as informal
Soviet aggression. Successive US presidents conceived of the various programs for ‘advice
and support’ as a means of utilizing foreign manpower for Cold War purposes. As President
Eisenhower put it, “The United States could not maintain old-fashioned forces all around the
world”, so it sought “to develop within the various areas and regions of the free world
indigenous forces for the maintenance of order, the safeguarding of frontiers, and the
provision of the bulk of the ground capability”. After the trauma of the Korean War, for
Eisenhower, “the kernel of the whole thing” was to have indigenous forces bear the brunt of
any future fighting.96
After Vietnam, the Nixon Doctrine was similarly concerned with
limiting the role of US national forces. The US would “look to the nation directly threatened
to assume primary responsibility of providing manpower for its defense.”97
Well before Nixon expanded ‘Vietnamization’, the ARVN and other South Vietnamese
forces supplied the majority of the troops and suffered the majority of casualties. ARVN
strength hovered around 700,000 between 1964 and 1968, and rose to a million between 1969
and 1975, suffering around 250,000 KIA during the war, numbers that do not include the
numerous paramilitary forces raised by Saigon.98
The US clothed, trained, supplied and
armed the ARVN, as well as advising it down to the company level in combat. The ARVN
played a primary role in projecting US power in Indochina, defending the Saigon regime as
well as invading Cambodia and Laos and carrying the war largely on its own for the final
three years. Notably, Thomson’s discussion of Vietnam overlooks entirely the ARVN, as it
was officially the army of an independent sovereign state, and supposedly not an example of
‘extraterritorial violence’ despite its utter dependence on the US. She focuses on more minor
96 Quoted in Gaddis (1982: 153). 97
From a clarification of the Nixon Doctrine provided by the White House and quoted in Gaddis (1982: 298). 98 Brigham (2006: x).
31
matters, such as US payments to South Korea for use of ROKA divisions in South Vietnam
or General William Westmoreland’s quixotic interest in hiring Gurkhas when Washington
would not agree to higher troop levels.99
The ARVN was only one of many Third World
militaries drawn into US policies concerned with the defence of the Free World from much of
its own population. An informal empire was maintained primarily with locally-raised forces
in the face of indigenous revolt, just as previous formal empires had put down revolts mostly
with security forces recruited from the colonized.
While the ARVN was a more effective force than its reputation suggested, ‘advice and
support’ had limitations, especially when compared with the European-officered colonial
forces. The ARVN’s military effectiveness was compromised by Saigon politics in various
ways, and as American officers were officially advisors their powers of command and control
were formally restricted.100
There were, however, other modalities for the military support of
sovereign clients which had roots in the era of European imperialism. After the Opium War
of 1839-42, the Western powers sought to prop up the newly pliable Qing dynasty in the face
of a series of domestic revolts inspired in significant measure by foreign influence on the
decaying imperial regime. They supported ‘private’ mercenary armies led by Western
soldiers and recruited from third country nationals, such as the American Frederick
Townsend Ward’s ‘Ever Victorious Army’ with many Filipinos, which played a role in
seeing off the Taiping rebellion.101
A notable feature of this kind of military support is that
officially speaking, the outside powers are not involved with their own national armed forces,
although in reality they are directly involved. These diplomatic niceties are maintained in the
CoW data, which lists the Taiping rebellion as an intra-state, or civil, war, because CoW
requires that a state’s own armed forces be present for it to be considered involved in the
99 Thomson (1994: 94-96). 100
See e.g. Sheehan (1989: 121-125). 101 Carr (1992).
32
war.102
Informal, foreign forces like Ward’s and its equally important French-sponsored
counterpart, fall through the cracks, even though they were both military instruments of
Western policy engaged in the fighting. Similarly, although it is unlikely that the RVN would
have been able to fight for long from 1960 without the extensive US support it was receiving,
economically, militarily, and diplomatically, including over 20,000 US military personnel on
the ground by 1964, CoW does not list the US as a participant in the Vietnam War until 1965
when its ‘official’ national combat formations were committed to the fighting. Formal and
juridical criteria, derived from the world of sovereign and territorial monopolies, trump
informal but substantive involvement in the war.
The underlying idea behind foreign forces such as the ARVN or Ward’s was to bolster
the military power of a client unable to constitute sufficient force from its own internal
resources. This is an international form of the constitution of force, for patron and client. In a
sovereign state system, deniable or disguised modalities of this kind become much more
important. This was especially the case given the national principle underlying the system,
that peoples ostensibly determine their own conditions of rule, as well as the anti-imperial
politics among many peoples and leaders in the new states. In formal terms, force had to be
made to look as if it arose from within the political community concerned. Given the popular
and mass character of modern politics, this gave the powers concerned the ability to claim
their actions represented the will of the people to various audiences. The US could claim it
was helping a free people defend their country from a minority influenced (and assisted) by
international communism. The Soviets were caught in the same politics, representing their
policies as ‘fraternal assistance’. Note that this type of intervention was not limited to
sovereign clients. A rebel group representing the ‘true’ desires of the people could also be
supported or more or less invented, as in the case of the Nicaraguan Contras. Even when it
102 Cohen (1994: 217).
33
was relatively obvious to one or another audience that denials of foreign support were false,
both superpowers often had to maintain an official front of non-involvement in order to
appear to respect the principle of non-intervention and relevant treaty commitments. Advice
and support of the armed forces of nominally sovereign states fulfilled these requirements, as
did covert and deniable forms of military action and assistance. These were the primary
modalities for the constitution and use of foreign forces in a sovereign state system.
The Cold War politics of foreign forces presented various practical problems. Foreign
infantry was often relatively easy to generate. Air forces were another matter, yet were often
essential ‘force multipliers’ for clients who lacked popular support and the strength that came
with it. One option was to ‘reflag’ planes and pilots, making a state’s own forces appear
‘foreign’. United States Air Force (USAF) pilots or aircraft covertly became Indonesian,
Guatemalan, Vietnamese or Laotian.103
In the early 1960s, the South Vietnamese air force
(VNAF) lacked not only planes but trained pilots to fight the growing insurgency. USAF
planes were transferred to the VNAF: “With a bit of red and yellow paint, the planes . . .
became Vietnamese.” American pilots were not supposed to fly combat missions, as they
were officially present only for training purposes. But they regularly flew missions, carrying
a Vietnamese in the back seat in case they crashed or were shot down. “The Kennedy
administration could claim, as it did on occasion, that the American pilots were merely
‘conducting training in a combat environment.’”104
This kind of disguised but direct US military involvement was by no means an isolated
event. During the twenty years of what William Colby termed America’s “nonattributable
war” in Laos, USAF pilots were conveniently discharged and provided with aircraft painted
in Royal Laotian Air Force markings.105
In this case, the strike missions flown by this small
‘CIA air force’ had to be directed out of the US embassy in Vientiane because the 1954
103 See Castle (1993: 34-35); Cullather (1999: 70-71); (Leary 2002: vii). 104
Sheehan (1989: 64). 105 Quoted in Castle (1993: 98).
34
Geneva Accords prevented the US and the Soviet Union from deploying military personnel in
Laos even as advisors. For ground forces, in addition to covertly providing support and US
and Thai combat advisors to the Royal Lao Army, an eventually thirty thousand strong force
of Hmong was raised under Vang Pao. The CIA, under the authority of the NSC and the
president, was the executive agent of the advice and support program for L’Armee
Clandestine, as the force became known. Kissinger remarked of these arrangements that they
were chosen in order to “to avoid a formal avowal of American participation for diplomatic
reasons” and “because [they] were less accountable”.106
Continuing to assist Kissinger in
these efforts, CoW does not list the US as a participant in the Laotian ‘civil’ war. Other CIA
operations also required air forces and pilots. In Indonesia (1957-58), concerned that if he
carried no papers as ordered he would be harshly treated, one USAF pilot was shot down
carrying his US military identification and other official paperwork, creating a diplomatic
scandal. Caught out on the national/foreign distinction, President Eisenhower and his
Secretary of State reverted to the public/private when challenged about the involvement of
American personnel in a putatively Indonesian civil war. They claimed the Americans were
simply “soldiers of fortune”.107
The private sphere offered another route by which forces could be officially distanced
from the sponsoring power in a sovereign state system. The CIA’s covert action arm involved
a mix of the public and private and of the national and foreign. In the early Cold War, the
CIA’s proprietary airline, Civil Air Transport (CAT), was comprised of CIA officers, USAF
personnel on secondment, and a variety of foreign pilots privately hired but with anti-
communist credentials, such as Nationalist Chinese, or Poles and Czechoslovaks who had
flown for the Royal Air Force in the Second World War and were effectively stateless. The
Chinese flew strike missions for the CIA in Guatemala, while the Poles were active in
106
Quoted in Castle (1993: 57) 107 Quoted in McT.Kahin (1995: 175).
35
Albania and Indonesia. The CIA force that invaded Guatemala in 1954 was ostensibly an
indigenous revolt but was comprised of North and Latin American mercenaries trained and
directed by CIA officers.
That invasion is also coded as a civil war by CoW, with the explanation that “there was
no formal American participation in this war, although the CIA armed, trained and financed
the winning rebel force”.108
The use of the term ‘formal’ would appear to be crucial in
excluding American participation and coding the conflict ‘civil’. Yet, the CIA operation was
approved at the top levels of the Eisenhower administration.109
Without the ‘informal’ US
operation there would have been no ‘civil war’ in Guatemala in 1954. The invasion was an
act of US policy designed to change the government of Guatemala. The events in 1954 were
profoundly consequential for the subsequent fate of Guatamala, yet in the juridical and
sovereign terms of the leading IR database on armed conflict, the power that made the war is
not even a participant.
Cobbling together a foreign force through both private and public means reflected the
constraints imposed by putative sovereignty and the weakness of many clients. In ‘assisting’
the Sultan of Oman’s Armed Forces (SAF) from the late 1950s, the British and their client
even drew on old imperial and feudal relations as well. A British officer was seconded to
command the SAF along with British officers and NCOs who volunteered to serve in the
SAF. Other British officers were hired privately directly into the SAF and known as ‘contract
officers’, many having been recently discharged from the Indian Army (which continued to
employ British officers for some years after 1947). Due to feudal rights, the Sultan could
recruit soldiers from Baluchistan. Baluchis made up around 67% of the SAF in 1961 as the
Dhofar rebellion got underway. Indians were hired as dentists, doctors and other specialists,
and as navy officers. The air force had all “white faces”. The relative lack of Omani nationals
108
Small and Singer (1982: 324). 109 Gleijeses (1991: 243).
36
in the SAF was politicized by the Dhofar rebels. The British and the Sultan created an
“Omanization” plan in response. Along with efforts to recruit more Arabs, this had the Sultan
proclaiming in one speech in 1972 that “everyone knows the air force is an Omani air force,
and that the navy is an Omani navy, and that our Omani army is the only force which protects
the land of our nation”, all of which was true formally speaking, if not in terms of actual
personnel.110
If national soldiers can be made to appear foreign in a sovereign state system, a last set of
points concern the inverse relation: the continuing recruitment of foreign citizens into the
national armies of leading Western states. Thomson claims that “foreigners play a minor role
in most twentieth-century standing armies” and that “Today real states do not buy
mercenaries”.111
Much hinges on what one means by “minor”. There is the French Foreign
Legion, incorrectly identified by Thomson as the “only standing military force that is
composed of multiple nationalities whose loyalty to their employer is unquestioned.”112
Today, the Legion has members from 136 different countries and numbers around 7,600 in a
French Army of under 130,000.113
While relatively small in percentage terms, this overlooks
the political utility of the Legion as an expeditionary force that does not carry the same
political costs for the French government as would the deployment of national formations,
especially those composed of conscripts before 1996 (when conscription ended).
A similar percentage of citizens of foreign states serve in the British Army. Over 2,000
Fijians serve today in an army of just over 100,000. Caribbeans, Africans, and other
Commonwealth personnel bring the number of foreigners up to around 6,000, and when
Commonwealth citizens in the Royal Navy and Air Force are added, their overall numbers
110 Author’s interview with Major-General John Graham (ret.), former commander of the SAF, 26 September, 2004; “Addresses given by HM Sultan Qaboos”, 3/3 Graham Papers, Oman Archive, The Middle East Centre,
St. Antony’s College Oxford; “Report on Tenure of Command of SAF by Col. Smiley from April 1958 to
March 1961”, 1/1 Smiley Papers, Oman Archive. 111 Thomson (1994: 95-96). 112
Thomson (1994: 91). 113 See http://www.defense.gouv.fr/terre/, accessed 3 March, 2008.
37
are equivalent to the Legion.114
These numbers do not include the Brigade of Gurkhas and its
3,000 Nepalese soldiers, now based in Yorkshire. The British Army is some 3,800 below its
legislated complement and has difficulty recruiting infantry. Again numbers belie utility as
Gurkhas and Fijians are concentrated in infantry battalions.
France and the United Kingdom are “real states” by any measure. So is the United States.
As a way of emphasizing just how illegitimate mercenarism has become, Thomson asks
whether it is possible to imagine “a rich state like the United States [forming] an army by
recruiting, say, poor, unemployed Mexicans?”115
As Percy has it “’good’ states [fight] their
wars using their own people.”116
In September 2003, there were approximately 30,000
foreign born, non-US citizens in the US armed forces, including Mexicans and other
Hispanics. Between October 2002 and December 2007, some 31,200 members of the U.S.
Armed Forces were sworn in as citizens, while in February 2008, 7,200 recently discharged
service members had citizenship applications pending.117
As in the UK, old colonial
connections also led foreign citizens into US forces. In 1970, the 14,000 Filipinos serving in
the US Navy outnumbered the entire Philippine Navy.118
US private military companies and
contractors are now another route by which foreign citizens are mobilized for military
purposes, including many outsourced support duties that used to be performed by US
soldiers. At one point, Halliburton employed approximately 35,000 third country nationals at
US military bases in Iraq, mostly recruited from South Asia and the Philippines. While their
114 See
http://www.theherald.co.uk/search/display.var.2033508.0.uk_overseas_armed_forces_match_french_foreign_le
gion.php, accessed 17 February, 2008. 115 Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns, p. 146. 116 Percy (2007: 122) 117 See Fernanda Santos, “After the War, a New Battle to Become Citizens”, New York Times, 24 February,
2008; Eric Schmitt, “Boom times for U.S. military recruiters”, International Herald Tribune, 22 September,
2003, p. 8. Only aliens legally resident in the US can be recruited into the military, although recruiters have
crossed into Mexico looking for young people with US residency papers. 118 Posadas (1999: 30).
38
relations fought in British infantry battalions around Basra, other Fijians passed by driving
trucks up from Kuwait for Halliburton.119
Summary of Foreign Forces
In a variety of sites in modern times, armed forces were constituted in and through the
world of flows, with intertwined multiethnic histories caught up in imperial hierarchies,
histories which have their own ancient precursors. Global circulation of bodies and resources
marks the creation and deployment of armed forces, as does mobility among apparently fixed
categories of nationality and of public and private. Armed forces, societies and polities are by
no means always in isomorphic, ‘trinitarian’ relations with one another, even in a sovereign
state system. The ‘guardians’ of the ship of state often hail from foreign shores and serve
foreign interests.
Powers of state structure these processes but not always in ways suggested by
Eurocentric frames of inquiry. The constitution and use of force has regularly involved
personnel recruited from outside national and sovereign borders, and from among colonized
and subordinate populations, and does so for purposes of securing and extending influence
and rule in peripheral lands. This is not a world of formally alike units in anarchic relations,
but one of hierarchies, cores and peripheries in respect of the organization of violence as well
as of economy and culture. Foreign and clandestine forces had a particular utility for the
various combinations of political and economic interests behind Western expansion and
intervention in the modern era, providing “untraceable troops” that could evade democratic
accountability and regulation.120
These personnel and forces also formed reserves and ‘fire
brigades’ for great power war. Organized as regulars and long service professionals, their
military qualities were often significant as were their numbers.
119
Chatterjee (2009: 142, 220). 120 Lens (1987:105)
39
That said, ‘scale’ in terms of the size of forces involved in war, or their casualties or
military qualities, also can be subject to Eurocentric distortion and construction. However
lacking in comparison to first-rate metropolitan forces, colonial and client state regulars and
security services mounted credible and enduring opposition to indigenous powers and local
revolt. The historic consequences and the numbers of people affected by imperial conflict and
organized violence between the strong and the weak are immense, even though the wars
themselves are often ‘small’ and do not usually command the same scholarly attention as
‘big’ ones. The Dhofar rebellion does not even qualify as a war for CoW, as deaths were too
few and spread out in time. Yet defeat of the rebellion determined the fate of Oman for
decades, as minor deployment of US resources did for Guatemala. In relations between the
strong and the weak relatively small armed forces can determine the fates of substantial
populations. There is no necessary correspondence between the scale or intensity of the
reciprocal organized violence that constitutes war and the political significance of the
outcome for the parties concerned. The Spanish conquest of the Americas, with its tiny
battles, was a down payment on modernity. As emphasized throughout this paper, these
outcomes are significant for both the strong and the weak.
To identify these imperial relations between states, societies and armed forces is not to
suggest that Eurocentric inquiry is somehow fundamentally invalidated, or that citizen armies
are not also a reality. It is, however and firstly, to question the purview of such inquiry, its
reach to unfamiliar places, and its pretensions to universality. Many of the forces and events
described above have been invisible or misconstrued in inquiry shaped by ‘military Europe’
and nation-state ontologies of the organization of violence. Moreover, the politics of foreign
forces contradict thinking framed by nation-states, republics and citizens. These forces derive
their various utilities from the fact that they come from outside the nation or citizenry; they
are used to evade democratic limits at home and impose rule on others abroad. It might be
40
more accurate to say that the politics of foreign forces underpin those of the nation-state, and
of imperial republics. These forces enabled the political bargains behind imperial expansion
and intervention, and have made historically possible, among other things, the different
imperial liberalisms of Britain and the US.
This leads to a second point of significance that arises from the critique of Eurocentric
inquiry. Foreign forces, and the broader imperial contexts in which they were located, played
a constitutive role in Western politics and society. They were consequential not only for
peripheral peoples and their histories, but for those of the core as well. Said another way,
Eurocentric inquiry is not fully adequate to understanding European realities. The imperial
and the peripheral are in part constitutive of the metropolitan. Here, armed force is not only
being conceived as an instrument deployed by state actors in the service of their interests, as
in strategic thought and most IR approaches. Rather the organization of violence also is seen
as socially productive, as generative of certain political orders, at home, abroad, and
internationally. The critique of ‘military Europe’ prompts a rethinking of force as constitutive
of world politics, not simply as an instrument of power. This is the ‘globalization’ of Krebs’
research agenda invoked in the introduction to this paper.
Conclusion: The Imperial Turn
The discussion in this paper has sought to create openings within Eurocentric
understandings of armed forces and society for alternative histories and their effects. What is
occluded by the image of the world as consisting of sovereign territorial monopolies on
violence? It sought to recover and anatomize a key dimension of the constitution and use of
force, specifically those forces recruited beyond the boundaries of the polity from among
foreign populations. The particular significance of these foreign forces for imperial relations
41
has been highlighted. Overall, the discussion has been expansive, programmatic, and
suggestive for further research, and by no means comprehensive or definitive.
One consequence of imagining force in terms of a world of units is to conceive of war
and other uses of force primarily in strategic terms, that is to say in terms of the
instrumentally rational calculation of means and ends. From Morgenthau on, the rational
calculations of statespersons in charge of ships of state have been central to IR in various
ways. Yet, in the social science most centrally concerned with war, this has had the effect of
limiting the social and historical significance of force to strategic calculation. War is a richly
creative and generative set of social processes and interactions, it makes possible particular
social and political worlds while destroying others. The consequences of major wars and
Western armed forces for industrialization, capitalism, state capacity, science, and technology
are well-trodden themes in historical sociology. This paper has sought to open an additional
front here, albeit a ‘small’ one, regarding the ways in which imperial and neoimperial
relations of organized violence have structured relations between the powerful and the weak
in world politics, making possible particular political, social and economic arrangements in
the Global North and South.
In recent decades, the idea of an ‘imperial turn’ has shaped the work of historians,
sociologists and anthropologists. The basic idea is that of co-constitution of core and
periphery, in cultural and social as well as political-economic terms.121
Much of this work is
written in a cultural register, and it has issued in an extensive multidisciplinary conversation
that has crossed over into critical IR but is almost non-existent in security studies. Implicit in
this work is a rich conception of the ‘international’ as a ‘thick’ social space of interaction and
co-constitution, in which flows of people, goods and ideas shape the states, societies, and
other entities that populate international relations. In this respect, the ‘imperial turn’ points
121 Cooper and Stoler (1997).
42
the way to a social science of international relations of far broader purview than IR as
currently configured, one in dialogue with other disciplines in the social sciences and
humanities. At the same time, to read much of the work that travels under the label of the
‘imperial turn’ is to enter a world in which domination and exploitation occurs seemingly
entirely in the realm of culture and political economy, as if no native powers ever had to be
militarily subdued, or peasants or laborers lined up and shot. With exception, the place of
force and the political military dimensions of empire remain understudied in any discipline.
In IR, ‘small wars’ have prompted questions about how and why the ‘weak’ prove so
formidable in places like Vietnam and Algeria, winning wars against major powers, and more
recently have led to extensive interest in counterinsurgency arising from US involvement in
Iraq and Afghanistan. These projects remain in the realm of force as an instrument, inquiring
about the conditions under which it is successful or not. From the perspective of the imperial
turn, such cases open up a much broader research agenda focused on the significant and
consequential role ‘small wars’ and foreign forces have come to play not only in metropolitan
politics, society and culture but also in the making of world orders. The imperial turn
suggests strongly that there is much to be gained by reconnecting IR and the study of the
international more generally with the histories of empires and their armies discussed in these
pages. Doing so would revive and deepen the insights of those realists who have long argued
for the decisive role of the political-military in shaping human affairs.
43
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