Abstract
All modern societies mobilize people to serve in the military. The question is how to do so. There are many possible institutional arrangements from which to choose, ranging from voluntary, local militia service to universal compulsory national service. Once made, the choice is consequential along at least three dimensions. It affects the prospects for winning war because the mobilization plan determines the size and affects the quality of the military force. It also affects formation of foreign policy because the mobilization plan presupposes a force structure and force structure determines the viability and variety of military options available for use in the conduct of foreign affairs. And it affects the way the military is integrated with-to influence and be influenced by-the society it is formed to protect, depending on who is drawn into military service and who is left behind. In this brief survey of military mobilization, it is shown that modern societies consider all three of these dimensions, war, geopolitics, and domestic political culture, when establishing institutional arrangements to raise a military for war. But they give these dimensions different weight at different times for reasons we have to explore.
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My language and way of framing these questions is borrowed from Cohen (1985), but should not be taken to represent his argument.
Deborah Avant (2000: p. 46) notes that it was not only the crown that preferred to hire mercenaries rather than natives for the armed forces. Captains in the military “believed that mercenaries fought better than natives” and so they “preferred to furlough the natives and retain only the foreigners under arms.”
This was an important theme, for instance, in the writings of Adam Ferguson, Edward Gibbon, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith. It was also an important idea in the earlier writings of Niccolo Machiavelli. Pocock (1975) shows how this theme influenced political thought in America.
For more on this point see Royster (1979) and Paret (1992a). Note that Britain was late to adopt the mass army model—not doing so until the middle of the First World War—and was, like the revolutionaries in the United States and France, moved to do so only after the volunteer system had collapsed. For the British case, see Adams and Poirier (1987).
Unless otherwise noted, the discussion of the Prussian reform movement draws on Posen (1993, pp. 95–99), Paret (1992a, pp. 68–72), and Avant (2000, pp. 59–63).
This point requires more study than it has received. It is well-known that the French mass army, born in a democratic revolution, nevertheless was an instrument of an authoritarian regime, as was the mass army of Prussia. Talk of French or Prussian citizenship cannot alter the fact. In contrast, the army mobilized to fight the American Revolution was never a mass army—despite the use of conscription, it was a mixed force composed of a relatively small regular army augmented by militia. It never became an instrument of an authoritarian regime. On the contrary, the ideology of the citizen-soldier formed in that conflict helped to ensure that the political settlement following the revolution’s success was a democratic one (Burk 2000). The open question is what accounts for these different outcomes.
Barry Posen (1993, p. 103) writes: “The Prussians were thus able to field 355,000 soldiers against the Austrians [in 1866], and, with the allies of the North German Confederation, a million in 1870.”
Raising a mass army to fight in the First World War caused political and military elites to be concerned about whether the young men recruited into the army were sufficiently well-educated to grasp the reasons for the conflict and the need for their efforts to fight for their country. To address these concerns, the army established in service educational programs that would develop the soldier “not only as an efficient fighting man, but also as a citizen” (Mackenzie, 1992, p. 5). Such programs were conducted during World War II as well.
The leading works in this tradition are Janowitz (1972, 1978, Chap. 6, 1983a), van Doom (1975), Martin (1977), Kelleher (1978), Moskos and Wood (1988), Segal (1989), Boëne and Martin (1991), Burk (1992), and Haltiner (1998).
Janowitz (1978, pp. 184–205) also challenged the argument that mass armies necessarily have egalitarian consequences. But this theoretical claim and the evidence for it were never fully developed, so I do not discuss them here.
I say “resurgent interest” because comparative historical work was common among the first generation of “classical” sociologists. Subsequently, the method was relatively neglected with the rise of reliance on social surveys. For a history of this resurgence see Smith (1991). Key works in the genre include Skocpol (1979), Giddens (1985), Mann (1986,1993), Tilly (1990), and Goldstone (1991)—which is not to neglect the classic work of Moore (1966) that provided a template for others to follow.
On the logic of functional explanations, see Stinchcombe (1987, pp. 80–101).
Avant relies on Blanning (1996) for her historical evidence on this point. The issue engaged, about the ideological motivations of soldiers and the importance of these motivations for military success is a controversial one and as yet unresolved. For contrasting arguments on the matter, see for example Bartov (1992), Shils and Janowitz (1948), McPherson (1997), Linderman (1987).
Janowitz, more than any other, is responsible for establishing military studies as a subfield within sociology. See Burk (1993).
In this regard, one should not overlook the Russian army in the 19th century, where conscription was compatible with “serflike [sic] sociopolitical relations” (Janowitz 1991, p. 224).
Unlike minority groups who have often struggled to gain political rights through military service, conscientious objectors have struggled not to lose political rights as a result of their refusal to perform military service (Burk, 1995).
Recent data suggest that this observation may no longer hold after the Cold War (Bianco and Markham, 2001).
His position should not be confused with an unqualified assertion that preparation for war and military conflict during the era of mass armies automatically promoted democracy. On the contrary, he explicitly argued that parliamentary control over the military was strained by preparations for war that create a strong military-industrial complex and that war created societal tensions that weaken democratic political institutions (Janowitz, 1991, p. 225).
For elaborations on this position, see Moskos (1988), Gorham (1992), and Burk (2000).
Janowitz’s concerns were based on an extension of his theory rather than strong evidence. Only recently have data become available to test the proposition that transition from a mass army to a volunteer professional army might create a “gap” between the military and society that is problematic for democratic well-being—and these data are confined to the United States. Feaver and Kohn (2001) provide a comprehensive review of the data and discussion of the issue.
Randall Collins (1975, pp. 355–364) offers a formal summary of the logic of this argument.
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Burk, J. (2006). Military Mobilization in Modern Western Societies. In: Caforio, G. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of the Military. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-34576-0_7
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