Page 230

REVISTA IEEE 9

http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee 232 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies Núm. 9 / 2017 INTRODUCTION It is commonly accepted that healthy civil-military relations (CMR) are essential to the stability of democratic regimes, and that toxic relationships between civilians and soldiers produce either ineffective armed forces or militaries that become a permanent threat to the polis they are supposed to protect. In either case, a deteriora-tion of the democratic life of the state ensues. What exactly “healthy” means is positional, culture-dependent –one man’s medicine is another man’s poison-, and remains open to debate. To the effects of this paper, the term refers to a relationship that has stricken the optimum balance between the Huntingtonian functional and societal imperatives;1 one that maximizes the professional effectiveness of the armed forces without damaging the democratic essence of the state,2 even if environmental changes force the system to adapt; and that is based on mutual trust, respect and recognition. CMR regimes are dynamic and change with the circumstances, both external and internal, generating friction in the way until the system finds a new point of equilibrium and adapts to the changed environment. The stability of a CMR pattern, thus, cannot be taken for granted and requires nurturing through a constant process of dialogue and bargaining that should preserve the key principles of civilian supremacy and of military neutrality. As part of this nurturing, the CMR pattern has to be scanned in order to identify flaws and to be able to introduce the corrective measures necessary to redress the stability and health of the system. This scanning has to be comprehensive and methodical so as not to neglect dark areas apt to generate instability. Among the abundant scholarly production on CMR, there is nowhere to find a methodology that comes to the help of the analyst who wants to conduct such a scanning. Specialized literature is abundant, but most of it approaches CMR from partial angles,3 and it is not possible to find works that offer a comprehensive model for CMR analysis. With all its limitations, this paper proposes one such model. 1  HUNTINGTON, Samuel P., The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957, p. 2. 2  ULRICH, Marybeth P., “Infusing Normative Civil-Military Relations Principles in the Officer Corps,” in The Future of the Army Profession, ed. Lloyd J. Matthews, Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 2005, p. 656. 3  Just to mention a few authors, Desch approaches CMR from the point of view of the influence of external threats on the quality of civil control. (DESCH, Michael, Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999). Finer’s study of military direct intervention in politics is a classic of the CMR literature (FINER, Samuel Edward, The Man on Horseback: The Role of the Military in Politics. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1972). Feaver and Herspring deal in their research mostly with the civil-military nexus, respectively

REVISTA IEEE 9
To see the actual publication please follow the link above