DRAFT: Not for quotation or citation without permission

(Comments welcome: tarak.barkawi@gmail.com)

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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