International conflict, crisis, and war, along with civil-military relations, stand together as sustained interests among scholars and policy-makers. But how often are these important subjects considered in relation to each other? It would seem that the nexus of international conflict and civil-military relations is in need of sustained and systematic research, if events such as militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) are to be more fully explained and understood. In this article, we attempt to introduce civil-military relations, from the perspective granted by comparative politics, into the neo-Kantian world of international relations. Based on a statistical analysis, which relies upon a logistic regression of crossnational, time-series data, we find that military influence in civil-military relations significantly increases MID involvement. This result indicates that building a bridge between the fields of civil-military relations and international relations is essential to account for MIDs and other commonly studied forms of conflict.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
As will become apparent, MIDs are the near-standard choice of data on interstate conflict within the field of international relations. An MID is defined as “a set of interactions between or among states involving threats to use military force, displays of military force, or actual uses of military force” (Charles S. Gochman and Zeev Maoz, “Military Interstate Disputes, 1816-1976: Procedures, Patterns, and Insights,”Journal of Conflict Resolution28, 4 (1984): 587).
2.
The neo-Kantian or “triangular” peace, which stands as the most recent variant in the series, links democracy, interdependence, and international organizations with peace (Bruce Russett and John R. Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001).
3.
Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace; Brandon C. Prins, “Democratic Politics and Dispute Challenges: Examining the Effects of Regime Type on Conflict Reciprocation, 1816-1992,” paper prepared for delivery at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 2002.
4.
It also should be noted that, as Diamond points out, civilian supremacy in civil-military relations is one of the most important attributes of democracy; see Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy Toward Consolidation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999): 11. So it is necessary to delve into civil-military relations in the context of the democratic peace as well as the discipline of international relations.
5.
Although there exist more sophisticated and complex definitions for civil-military relations, we employ the degree of influence for reasons of parsimony. For a more compelling treatment of concept formation, see Glen Segell, “The Nation-State, Nationalism, and Civil-Military Relations Theory,” in Constantine P. Danopoulos, Dhirendra K. Vajpeyi and Amir Bar-Or, eds. Civil-Military Relations, Nation Building, and National Identity and Security: Comparative Perspectives (forthcoming).
6.
Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret.
7.
and Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, Civilian-Military Relations and the Use of Force (forthcoming). While these works address American foreign policy alone, our paper, in a sense, attempts to broaden the temporal and spatial domain of those studies by including all states.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).
10.
an excellent review of civil-military relations appears in Peter D. Feaver, “Civil-Military Relations,” in Annual Review of Political Science, ed. Nelson W. Polsby, 2 (1999): 211-241.
11.
Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises, vii.
12.
Feaver, “Civil-Military Relations”; Julian Schofield, “Militarized Decision-Making for War in Pakistan: 1947-1971,”Armed Forces & Society27, 1 (2000): 131-148.
13.
Colin S. Gray, “Hawks and Doves: Values and Policy,”Journal of Political and Military Sociology3, 1 (1975): 86.
14.
Harold D. Lasswell, “The Garrison State,”American Journal of Sociology46, 4 (1941): 455-468.
15.
Allison, Carnesale, and Nye, Hawks, Doves, and Owls.
16.
Jack Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984,”International Security9, 1 (1984): 108-146.
17.
Snyder, “Civil-Military Relations,”140.
18.
David Laurent Rousseau, Domestic Political Institutions and the Evolution of International Conflict (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1996), 69.
19.
Bob Buzzanco, “The American Military’s Rationale against the Vietnam War,”Political Science Quarterly101, 4 (1986): 559-576.
20.
The second and third emphases are ours. Graham T. Allison, “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis,”American Political Science Review63, 3 (1969): 714.
21.
Feaver and Gelpi, Civilian-Military Relations.
22.
and Janowitz, Civil-Military Relations.
23.
Huntington, The Soldier and the State: 70.
24.
Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises.
25.
Stanislav Andreski, Wars, Revolutions, Dictatorships: Studies of Historical and Contemporary Problems from a Comparative Viewpoint (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1992): 103.
26.
Feaver and Gelpi, Civilian-Military Relations.
27.
and Kenneth J. Campbell, “Once Burned, Twice Cautious: Explaining the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine,”Armed Forces & Society24, 3 (1998): 357-374.
28.
Patrick M. Morgan, “Disarmament,” in The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World, ed. Joel Krieger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 246.
29.
Michael Brecher, “Crisis Escalation: Model and Findings,”International Political Science Review17, 2 (1996): 220.
30.
Daniel S. Geller, Domestic Factors in Foreign Policy: A Cross-National Statistical Analysis (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Books, Inc., 1985): xviii.
31.
Seung-Whan Choi, Civil-Military Dynamics, Democratic Peace, and International Conflict, 1886-1992: A Look Beyond the Triangular Peace (PhD dissertation, University of Missouri, 2002).
32.
The independent variable is lagged by one year, so it is not affected by the degree of international conflict present in the dyad-year to be explained in the second step.
33.
For example, Diamond, Developing Democracy.
34.
Sam C. Sarkesian, “Civil-Military Relations in a Liberal Society: The United States in a New Security Era,” paper presented at the OSU Mershon Center Conference on Civil-Military Relations, Columbus, Ohio, 4-6 December 1992.
35.
Michael C. Desch, Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999): 3.
36.
Gary Zuk and William R. Thompson, “The Post-Coup Military Spending Question: A Pooled Cross-Sectional Time Series Analysis,”American Political Science Review76, 1 (1982): 60-74.
37.
William A. Niskanen, “The Peculiar Economics of Bureaucracy,”American Economic Review58, 2 (1968): 293-305.
38.
Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, “Measuring Military Allocations: A Comparison of Different Approaches,”Journal of Conflict Resolution30, 3 (1986): 554.
39.
Dixon standardized this operationalization by calling it the “weak link” approach when applied to democraticness in a dyad. The likelihood of an international dispute within a dyad should be a function primarily of the degree of constraint experienced by the less constrained state (i.e., the smaller value) in each dyad, that is, the less democratic of the two. In the present context, the lower value of military expenditure by percentage in a dyad establishes the “lowest common denominator.” See William J. Dixon, “Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict,”American Political Science Review88, 1 (1994): 14-32.
40.
It should be noted that students of arms races “assume that military spending is an important measure of a nation’s future military capabilities and therefore also intentions and commitment” (Thomas Hartley and Bruce Russett, “Public Opinion and the Common Defense: Who Governs Military Spending in the United States,”American Political Science Review86, 4 (1992): 909). It also is assumed that, in a situation of conflict, civilians will support military spending to defend the state and its people. Our two-step method does not distinguish different roles and responsibility between civilian and military leaders, and we leave more refinement of the measurement issue to the reader for future study.
41.
D. Scott Bennett and Allan Stam, “EUGene: A Conceptual Manual,”International Interactions26, 2 (2000): 179-204. The webpage address is http://www.eugenesoftware.org/.
42.
See http://www.orst.edu/dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/sahr.htm for an explanation of this method.
43.
Mark Souva and Brandon C. Prins, “International Trade and Militarized Dispute Initiation, Reciprocation, and Revision, 1950-1992,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Chicago, IL, 2001.
44.
Richard Rosecrance, The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1986).
45.
After four years, the lagged term for civil-military relations becomes statistically insignificant. With no theoretical reason to include a different number of terms, the choice of three is justified on statistical grounds.
46.
and Anderson and Honegger’s edited volume, The Military Draft: Selected Readings on Conscription (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1982), provides an excellent collection of the pros and cons.
47.
Thomas W. Ross, “Raising an Army: A Positive Theory of Military Recruitment,”Journal of Law and Economics37, 1 (1994): 109-131.
48.
Simon Duindam, Military Conscription: An Economic Analysis of the Labour Component in the Armed Forces (Heidelberg: Physica Verlag, 1999): 119.
49.
Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace, 19.
50.
Gary M. Anderson, Dennis Halcoussis, and Robert D. Tollison, “Drafting the Competition: Labor Unions and Military Conscription,”Defence and Peace Economics7, 3 (1996): 189-202.
51.
Michael D. White, “Conscription and the Size of Armed Forces,”Social Science Quarterly70, 3 (1989): 780.
52.
Seung-Whan Choi and Patrick James, “No Professional Soldiers, No Militarized Interstate Disputes?: A New Question for Neo-Kantianism,”Journal of Conflict Resolution47, 6 (2003): 796-816.
53.
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, World Armaments and Disarmament: SIPRI Yearbook 1985 (London and Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis, 1985).
54.
Zeev Maoz, Dyadic Militarized Interstate Disputes (DYMID1.1) Dataset—Version 1.1. Dyadic MID Codebook (1999): 1-9, downloaded from ftp://spirit.tau.ac.il/zeevmaoz/dyadmid.html. It should be noted that the level of hostility is originally based on MIDs data assembled from the Correlates of War project (see Gochman and Maoz, “Military Interstate Disputes”).
55.
The GEE is one of the most commonly employed statistical methods among students of international conflict, crisis and war. Stata Statistical Software (version 7.0) is used for empirical tests. Our model is corrected for the first-autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity. The Wald test statistic of 471.37 is statistically significant at the 0.001 level. For explanation of GEE in practice, see Christopher J.W. Zorn, “Generalized Estimating Equation Models for Correlated Data: A Review with Applications,”American Journal of Political Science45, 2 (2001): 470-490.
56.
The numbers in parentheses are standard errors.
57.
Oneal and Russett, “The Kantian Peace.”
58.
Another advantage of the use of Oneal and Russett’s model is that diagnostic tests become less necessary because their model already is verified. In fact, our combined model will demonstrate an improved explanatory power in the section on Empirical Results.
59.
The other five variables in the democratic peace model from Oneal and Russett are (1) national capability ratio (i.e., to control for power preponderance); (2) whether the members of each dyad are allied; (3) non-contiguity; (4) geographical distance; and (5) whether each member of the dyad is a minor power. These five variables are expected to decrease the likelihood of interstate disputes.
60.
and Oneal and Russett, “The Kantian Peace,”10.
61.
According to Oneal and Russett, after testing both MID involvement and initiation, they find that both dependent variable measurements have “produced nearly identical results.” Oneal and Russett report only the MID involvement results in their article. See Oneal and Russett, “The Kantian Peace,”23.
62.
See Table 1 in Oneal and Russett, “The Kantian Peace,”22.
63.
Nathaniel Beck, Jonathan Katz, and Richard Tucker, “Taking Time Seriously: Time-Series-Cross-Section Analysis with a Binary Dependent Variable,”American Journal of Political Science42, 4 (1998): 1260-1288.
64.
Oneal and Russett, “The Classical Liberals.”
65.
Patrick James, Eric Solberg, and Murray Wolfson, “An Identified Systemic Model of the Democracy-Peace Nexus,”Defence and Peace Economics10, 1 (1999): 1-37.
66.
Russett and Oneal, Triangulating Peace.
67.
Betts, Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War Crises, vii.
68.
We acknowledge that our exploration into the relationship between civil-military relations and MIDs is still early in the process of discovery. So our empirical findings may open doors to inquiry rather than provide some kind of definitive answer.
69.
Since Oneal and Russett use a continuous measure for democraticness, the present study is not able to address this important issue for the time being.
70.
Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis, first paperback/CDROM ed. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
