Democracy as it is:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There is a claim that is made that democracy rises peacefully, naturally, and is a blessing for all others. There are others, like Michael Mann and his thesis of genocide as democracy that note that democracy is nothing in reality like what it is made out to be in rhetoric. I frankly find Mann's thesis far more convincing. In practice, republics tend to be far more aggressive than authoritarian regimes. Rome, to use one example, mushroomed during the Republic but expanded very far less during the Empire. The United States, for another, has never had a decade in its history where its soldiers were not fighting some war somewhere. Why is this so, and why does democratic peace theory tend to fail?

The answer is actually surprisingly simple: the republican ethos is that of a citizen-soldier. The ideal is that of Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria More, that it is sweet and proper to die for one's fatherland. The Republic's very ethos is thus that of politically involved citizens, citizen carrying its Greek sense of property-owners who are politically involved, and these citizens expand the boundaries of Republics and defend them by keeping and bearing arms. Armies like things to be simple and not complex, they handle the murky, ambiguous world of politics very, very badly. This is because a soldier's training is how to kill enemy soldiers with the greatest result for the least loss of his own buddies. A soldier is trained to give clear orders and to follow them, and is accustomed to much more spartan and difficult lives than civilians as a rule are. Establish this as the ethos of a republic and you get both simplicity and the perpetuation of the idea that warfare is both necessary and proper. Establish this also and you get a concept where for the Republic's existence, the army is all and is in all, and thus a professional army is a menace to the system.

However more modern republics and democracies invariably have these professional armies, of which the USA's is the largest, and wealthiest, and most politically influential in the modern world. The contradiction between the USA's republican ethos and its present reality with a large professional army has created all kinds of issues with rule of law here, in the EU countries they by contrast have much simpler military realities and have much less issues with this for that reason. This is one of the reasons why I think either we must change the structure of democracy to modify it with the reality of 21st Century militaries, certainly here in the USA, or we must scrap the huge, expensive armies of the modern world and revert to the clumsy, political militia-levies of the last centuries. Modern democracy can have large professional armies or it can stay democratic, it cannot do both, raising and supplying these forces leads to what we call the MI-Complex, with all its attendant evils.

This is not, I might note, to say individual soldiers or the military itself is a menace. The problem is when modern-day societies have political structures built for entirely different worlds and refuse to recognize the inherent clash of systems. This is what leads to Auspicious Incidents when those systems have to begin the process too late, and the mere adjustment makes them fall. The military as it is now is a necessity, the problem is that the political systems of the present are oriented in a different way, one not suited to both meet military needs *and* preserve democracy. If both must be done, then the system must change. Your thoughts?

Comments

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Your thoughts?
I don't really see it. From what I can tell, the democratic peace theory is just a nice way to state that modern nation states of the Western world have become too powerful to make war a good decision. So people say "Democracies don't fight each other..." when all it means is, "Large powers don't fight each other anymore because they're democracies and because the powers of war are diluted amongst a professional class rather than a titular or royal class."

We do, of course, fight every other country which is profitable to do so, and we also, of course, enact "international law" which outlaws any military action not undertaken by us. It is simply the beginnings of the legal monopolization of power: we get to make war, nobody else does-- just like a government.

So in conclusion, I think simply that modern technology and Western development has progressed to the point where warring with each other is a losing proposition. That's why there's Africa or the Middle East.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's a good counterargument, and I might note that where I disagree with it is that the EU countries even then don't really use their armies to the degree that say, the USA, Russia, or China might in these cases. I would add, too, that for all its flaws the EU has broken at least for now a recurring cycle of Anglo-French, Franco-German, and Franco-Central European wars not by blood and iron but by speeches, conventions, and common currency. So it's not simply military equality but economic union that ensures EU countries don't need to worry about fighting each other.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Well yeah, economic integration is the chief reason people don't fight anymore, it's why we're not going to fight with China. That's why sanctions make it ok to go to war with a weaker nation, once you take away the economic integration, there's no reason not to attack them since the only damage you'll have is war costs.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

So then what does this mean about economic integration with Africa or the Middle East? Wouldn't this lead to a cynical view that economic separation is sought primarily to ensure that there's always free room to fight in?

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

I would say it is a trivial fact that economic integration is politics by other means!

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I think the LOL might clue people in that the statement made was a joke. ;P

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Oh god what is wrong with my brain. Is it just me being dim or do people suddenly use a lot less penetrable style when they're getting the attention of the whole community? I don't usually have this much trouble following the comments, although maybe I just don't notice stuff bouncing off my skull.

I'm really not sure I'd describe the US as suddenly involved in wars, though. Please to consider that the US basically expanded its democratic territory by bulldozing or relocating the people who were standing there, often just after making treaties with them... it wasn't just that the army itself wasn't interested in politics, it was that Native Americans weren't politically recognized because that would be hella inconvenient. You seem to see a process expanding from a root where I see a continuum.

I think that Americans for one reason or another are making a mythology for the military. Why, I am not sure. It's like parts of it are becoming sacred. On the other hand, we did just de-DATD the whole thing, and we did successfully add women soldiers to it.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Well, it's also the "greatest generation" stuff. The greatest generation is not described, so much, as the people who did not enlist or who were conscientious objectors, but the soldiers who went out and the women who made quilts out of oven mitts and grew and canned their own elephants or whatever at home. WWII is still in living memory, so it seems strange to me that it's already enshrined as forefather territory.

I also think it cuts both ways.


Um. I was going off what female soldiers said, actually, and the pride they took in what they accomplished...

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

True, again. But I'm also not sure how much is backlash considering the overall opinion on the war hasn't swung back and these modern wars are just as unpopular, and it doesn't explain some of people's odder behavior. Like, for example, things are rough over there, right? Well, hold on a minute!

There. I put a yellow sticker on an SUV. Are things better now? I see a lot of token behaviors, like stickers and "support our troops" things, and not so many concrete ways to help. It's like to some charitable people "the army" is equivalent to "the mission field," distant and untouchable, and all you can do about it is think good thoughts a couple of times a day and leave it at that.


Sometimes I get the oddest feeling that you don't quite respect me. Can't put my finger on why. :p

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

The yellow-ribbon thing seems to me to be more a token gesture, almost a superstitious one. I think the voices of the ones who dislike it seem very loud to the supporters, and the way that the war itself is unpopular creates a different appearance.

I think it also reflects a sort of unease with the military, tbh. I'm going to have to go back to b-horror to find out how many have Vietnam vets in the slasher role, but at least one big-budget springs to mind (Know What You Did Last Summer.)


Yeah, I just can't quite put my finger on it...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

There's a difference: the USA has never had a large, professional standing army. Invariably when it creates a large army, that army is de-mobilized and the American Indian Wars are fought with a numerically rather shrimpy regular army. The post-WWII military is something that is unprecedented in US history, our tradition is to denigrate the military, not hagiograph it. No more today will you see fiscal conservatives be like Truman and take a cleaver to the military budget.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

I don't know about this; it seems to me more that it did, on and off. Andrew Jackson was operating in a military position when he made some treatments with the Native Americans, and was General Jackson during a lot of the related violence.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Andrew Jackson is the USA's most unpleasant sonofabitch bastard to have ever been President and is a home-grown US genocidal warlord. He's certainly to me the most evil President in the 19th Century and thus not exactly representative of the usual pattern in the 19th Century.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

He's not my favorite person either, but he didn't come out of nowhere, is part of what I'm saying.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

In several crucial ways, though, he actually did. None of the Civil War generals did anything comparable as far as using their armies as a springboard to power or using them for blatant power grabs and getting away with it.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

That sort of brings us back to, er, how much army they actually had and what position the armies were in to influence events.

(This is why I approached the topic from where I did, though. It seemed to apply. Sorry if I've ended up very off-topic.)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Jackson had the biggest army up to his day, but McClellan's Army of the Potomac, Sherman's and Halleck's Army Groups, and Grant's entire military machine were in the hundreds of thousands. This is akin to today's USA creating an army some 30,000,000 strong. And that was demobilized and re-integrated back into society.

....

Suffice to say *this* USA has never come close to that kind of thing.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Point.

Okay, I'm gonna back up and approach it from a militia point of view. Did you suggest militias just because they're smaller and more a volunteer force, or would suggestions that have come up in earlier discussions of bringing back the draft result in the same thing?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Bringing back the draft will be equivalent to the same thing, especially if the draft is fairly applied across the board.

[lions-wings.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Good-

But it's December.

Maybe I'd better wait to participate in the exchange of ideas until Spring. Besides, people get their brakes checked then.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

An intriguing thesis. I need to chew on it a bit. A few random thoughts off the bat:

The point about professionalization of the military in modern warfare is surely of vital importance. This is one of the things that Second Amendment fetishists in the US have half right: the Second Amendment is intended as a check on tyranny, but not by empowering the populace to engage in armed rebellion, rather as part of a plan to keep the US from having a standing army. As the militia model is inadequate to modern warfare, the US has relied on cultural and institutional support for civilian control of the military.

The cultural valorization of the citizen-soldier certainly plays a major part in democracies' vulnerability to the cancer of fascism.

If you've not read Martin van Creveld, I think you'd find his work very much aligned with your interests. He argues, among other things, that the post-Westphalian nation-state is largely defined by raising armies to wage war, and that the technological shifts in warfare since WWII ultimately point to the obsolescence of the nation-state as we understand it.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The militia was always intended, however, as a means to fill out the regular army in terms of warfare, though the system was cumbersome, dangerous, and led to higher casualties than was strictly necessary, as well as being corrupt to astonishing degrees.

I might note, however, that it's not democracies that turned fascist where they were already established and committed to citizen-soldiery, it was the ex-absolutist states of Europe where the army *was* the nation-state that tended to turn fascist.

I've not read his works so I think I'll check them out.

[jonathankorman.livejournal.com]

Fascism has only taken control of a few countries, but fascist movements appear to be a perennial phenomenon in all democracies to one degree or another. I take the point about it only having metastasized in European countries which came late to democracy in the 20th century, but I'm not sure how to interpret that fact. I'm inclined to worry that it just means that these are the countries that went through the kind of modern crisis which lets fascists get the upper hand.

I highly recommend van Creveld. And I'll be taking a look at Mann.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, there's an obvious problem here in that most definitions of fascism would include the Soviet Union when the USSR was a very different kind of regime with a separate and distinct militarism at its own core, and of course most would probably also lump in the Maoists who were again not-fascists.

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

There is a claim that is made that democracy rises peacefully, naturally, and is a blessing for all others.

Who makes this claim? Aren't we supposed to be rereading The Federalist Papers? Cause Hamilton & Co. spend a lot of time disabusing the reader of this very trope.

There is a claim made that humans from all nations yearn for liberty. There is a claim made that democratic governments are less likely to go to war against other democracies. There is also a theory that democracies, any government that is directly beholden to the citizens, is much less likely to fight any war, but when they do go to war it is much more intense and is carried on much longer than might otherwise be the case. But it seems like you argument, once again, rests on a straw man.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Cold War-era and later statements and democratic peace theory. It's not related to the people that originated democracy. Democratic peace theory in particular rests on several unsound premises.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

We have a large professional army, equipped with the latest hardware. They do a great job. The problem is that we are becoming used to the idea that our larger society is not required to sacrifice during wartime. Hide the bodies coming home. Keep blood and agony off of our televisions. Herd the media into areas where the military can control the news (under the banner of "protecting the media people").

There is a lot to be said for draftees in the military: they aren't going to keep their mouths shut to protect their "career"; they spill the beans when undeserving people get medals; they are a pain in the ass - which is why civilian soldiers are valuable to the rest of us; they will tell the truth when things go wrong.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

and is accustomed to much more spartan and difficult lives than civilians as a rule are

Ever been to a township/favela/ghetto?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

"As a rule" recognizes there are exceptions to that rule. The slums/favelas would qualify for those exceptions.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Got any idea what % of the world's population lives in such places?

What's the criterion for defining an "exception"? Less than 20%? Less than 10%? I need a number.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I have no idea of the percentage.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Exactly. ;-)