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Demilitarization in the Contemporary World

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Demilitarization: Unraveling the Structures of Violence

ANDREW BICKFORD

Demilitarization can and should be studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Essays in this volume take mainly a historical approach, recounting stages in the demilitarization process in key regions along with causes of change and subsequent shifts and modifications. This essay also offers a case study—of East Germany after reunification—but it frames it in terms of a larger and interdisciplinary inquiry into what demilitarization is all about. The result is arguably a rather demanding definition, essential, however, to any thorough process, and thus a more guarded look at recent developments, specifically in the German case, than will emerge from some of the later historical essays.

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From one military standpoint, demilitarization is often understood primarily as the defeat, demobilization, and dismantling of a military; the eventual destruction of military equipment, weapons, and explosives; and the incineration and destruction of chemical and biological weapons. Of course, these are important steps in demilitarization, but they can also be seen as merely the "surface" level of demilitarization, one part of a sociocultural, political, economic, historical project designed to come to terms with war and militarization. If militarization is about both producing weapons and shaping and creating a populace that either embraces, or at least goes along with, positive ideas and values associated with war and killing, then simply destroying weapons after the fact is not enough to effectively demilitarize a society.

Narrow definitions and conceptions of demilitarization that are centered solely on the destruction of weapons fetishize weapons, and much like Marx's notion of commodity fetishism, these narrow views obscure analysis of the social relations and cultural constructions upon which militarization programs are dependent. Demilitarization implies a reversal of an implicit process or program, an unraveling, an unmaking of that which came before, of ways of thinking and feeling and seeing that made a military solution thinkable and desirable. Demilitarization therefore means much more than simply the junking or scrapping of weapons, of turning swords into plowshares: a plowshare is still a weapon if it is seen as a weapon, or as something that can solve a problem more "efficiently" with violence. In many ways the weapon is not the problem; it is the process that produces the mind-set and worldview that turns the thing—almost anything—into a weapon, and produces citizens and soldiers who see the world as a place requiring weapons.

In both historical and sociocultural terms, demilitarization is about understanding, analyzing, and contending with this kind of "production" and developing strategies to reverse it and deal with the aftermath of war and militarization. By examining recent demilitarization programs, as the contributors in this volume do, we can hopefully develop ways to counter militarization or develop more effective demilitarization projects in the future. In this essay my aim is not necessarily to lay out a comprehensive history or exhaustive overview of demilitarization theory, or an overview of the demilitarization literature, conflict resolution literature, or peace studies literature; rather I hope to highlight some of the areas I see as key focal points for understanding militarization and demilitarization based on insights from anthropology, sociology, gender studies, as well as history, and to examine how an understanding of militarization can lead to fuller and more nuanced considerations, analyses, and designs of demilitarization programs.

While the ensuing essays in the volume analyze the "macro" level of demilitarization, this chapter concentrates on what I see as the salient foci of demilitarization (and militarization) at the "micro" level of everyday life and lived experience, of how states attempt to make certain kinds of citizens, and how demilitarization programs must attend to the "unmaking" or dismantling of the structures and processes that are involved in militarization. Demilitarization is also about coming to terms with—and countering—deep-seated ways of seeing and being in the world based on military prowess, virtue, and values. As Cynthia Enloe notes, experiences of demilitarization depend on how men and women have experienced militarization; in other words, we need to attend to the lived experiences, goals, and motivations of both political, military, and economic elites and everyday citizens. And as I discuss in my work on militarization in the German Democratic Republic and the experiences of former East German army officers after German unification, the experiences of demilitarization for veterans and their families depends to a great degree on how the "victors" treat them as former soldiers and former elites.

An overview of some of the various definitions of demilitarization lends an insight into the "epistemological murk" of the concept—a murkiness that can set the stage for what is foregrounded and what is backgrounded in a demilitarization program; definitions and cultural understandings inform policy, and demilitarization is dependent upon the decisions of policy makers. For example, if you define and conceptualize demilitarization in terms of simply destroying weapons over attending to militarized language or militarized identity, what kinds of long-term outcomes will be the result? While demilitarization is not necessarily a choice, the ways in which a state conducts demilitarization, and what politicians and other state actors choose to focus upon as part of a demilitarization process, are fundamentally sociocultural/ political/economic choices that intersect with all areas of everyday life and shape the local particularities of all demilitarization projects.

Militarization and Demilitarization: Terms and Process

In Europe and the People without History, anthropologist Eric Wolf makes clear the need to think about "process": "The world of humankind constitutes a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes, and inquiries that disassemble this totality into bits and then fails to reassemble it falsify reality. Concepts like 'nation,' 'society,' and 'culture' name bits and threaten to turn names into things. Only by understanding these names as bundles of relationships, and by placing them back into the field from which they were abstracted, can we hope to avoid misleading inferences and increase our share of understanding." Rather than simply taking the terms "militarization" and "demilitarization" at face value, we need to think about how they are variously defined and understood along with what these definitions mean and how they affect demilitarization programs. Rather than turning militarization and demilitarization into things, we need to think about them as local-level processes informed and shaped by—and informing and shaping—national and international processes.

For example, both militarization and demilitarization imply "war": the preparation for war, the garnering of support for war, the conduct and experience of war, experiences after war, and the aftereffects of war. While there are many definitions of war, Brian Ferguson, for example, notes that the "standard anthropological approach to war" is to "relate some aspect of war to some other aspect of social life—to ecological stresses, to features of social structure, to belief systems, and so on. This is consistent with twentieth-century social science, which generally sees war as a thing to be explained, not an explanation in itself. What is less obvious is that war is a major causal force strongly affecting all areas of social life. War is a threat to physical and social existence. As such, people must cope with it, sometimes on pain of death." Wolf's and Ferguson's insights are important for thinking about militarization and demilitarization as well. Like war—which can be argued is the midpoint of the sequence—militarization and demilitarization are major causal forces as well. What do they mean to those who are involved and affected by them, to those who design and implement them? How can we think about ways to study both in order to gain a deeper understanding of both and to develop more effective demilitarization strategies?

Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians tend to view militarization as a social process designed to bring about support for the military and to shape social structures to support the military. John Gillis sees militarization as "the contradictory and tense social process in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence." Catherine Lutz's definition of militarization as "the shaping of national histories in ways that glorify and legitimate military action," as well as her concept of the "military normal," are particularly useful in thinking through militarization programs and the strategies necessary to implement a successful demilitarization program. Anthropologist Roberto Gonzalez, who examines the increasing militarization of the United States, draws upon historian Richard H. Kohn's definition of militarization: "The degree to which a society's institutions, policies, behaviors, thought, and values are devoted to military power and shaped by war." International relations scholar and feminist theorist Cynthia Enloe sees militarization as "a transformative process that happens over time—sometimes rapidly, though often at a slow, hard-to-spot creep. And like the process of globalization, militarizing trends can simultaneously change the influence one person has on another, can alter how stories are interpreted, can turn meanings upside down. To become militarized is to adopt militaristic values (e.g., a belief in hierarchy, obedience, and the use of force) and priorities as one's own, to see military solutions as particularly effective, to see the world as a dangerous place best approached with militaristic attitudes."

Militarization is an exercise in attempting to establish hegemony through the promotion of military values, fear, and defense, of making these values seem natural, normal, and desirable (which, in practice, is not a smooth or entirely successful process, as evidenced by resistance to militarization, conscription, and war). In his discussion of Antonio Gramsci's conception of hegemony, T. J. Jackson Lears states that the idea of cultural hegemony is to take apart the question "who has power" at both ends and to analyze both the "who" and "power." The "who" includes parents, preachers, teachers, journalists, "experts" —and here we need to add state and military elites—and "power" includes both cultural as well as economic and political power. Gerald Sider states that hegemony is the dominance of a particular class as expressed in and through specific institutions of "civil society": churches, schools, newspapers, public buildings and spaces, systems of status symbols, and so forth; we should add "the military" to this equation as well. If militarization is about citizens eventually internalizing military values as their own, how then do we change these deep-seated, "natural" values through demilitarization? A successful demilitarization program would have to attend to all of these loci of power and institutions and replace those who held power and promoted and carried out militarization programs to begin with.

States and military blocs create different rationales for different types of militaries, soldiers, and citizens based on perceptions of local and global contingencies. These competing visions contain different moral economies that then shape ideas about soldiering, killing, allegiance, human rights, and conceptions of justice and law, and form the "justification" for the use of military violence, rearmament, and the production of weapons. As such, militarization entails much more than an attention to weaponry. As I see it, militarization programs are desired forms and visions of the state and the moral universe of the state. In this sense, militarization programs are just as much about values and "commonsense" ideas about the world as they are about producing tanks and planes and landmines; demilitarization needs to come to terms with common sense just as much as it needs to come to terms with chemical weapons. Indeed, as the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) came to terms with unification and the absorption of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the new unified state, it had to contend with decades of both the buildup of military equipment and bases as well as militarization policies designed to produce "socialist military personalities."

Many analyses of demilitarization conceptualize it as a process occurring within international politics and treaties—that is, as a process occurring between states, but not as an internal process within a state, or as an internal process within a state that entails much more than the production of weapons or maintaining a military (for example, the SALT I and II Treaties between the United States and the USSR). While this is of course an important component, it fails to recognize how culture and everyday life are militarized. As such, these definitions—and the programs and projects defined and delineated by these definitions—take a very narrow view of demilitarization, restricting it to questions of military weapons and hardware, but leaving out a consideration of military mind-sets, culture, and worldview.

Militarization is often viewed as a question of increased military weapons production, with the concomitant definition of demilitarization as the reduction or destruction of weapons and weapons production capabilities. For example, Jozef Goldblat of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) provides a definition of militarization that links it to an increase in military spending and equipment: "The basic ingredient in the process of militarization, which involves an increasing role for the military in both national and international affairs of states, is the growth in military spending and in military hardware."

Each year, the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) lists its annual Global Militarization Index; this index rates the degree of militarization in the world, showing not only the amount of funds being allocated to the military of one state but also the relation of military expenditure to its gross domestic product or other areas in society such as health care. Although this is a useful definition and ranking system, it does little to shed light on larger social relations and power relations or the relationship between shifts in values and the military. The definition is useful for thinking about certain aspects of militarization, but it obscures others.

Susan Willett provides a definition of demilitarization that moves beyond weapons and attends to the ideological and sociocultural aspects of militarization: "Demilitarization includes disarmament in the cost-saving and arms control sense, but it is a more all-encompassing concept, which attempts to deconstruct the ideological and institutional structures of militarism and reassert civil control over organs of the state and over the economy. It also implies the search for a new normative framework for conceptualizing and implementing security at both a national and regional context."

An approach that examines sociocultural-historical aspects of militarization allows for an examination of how states and military service influence and shape the identities, worldviews, and life courses of individuals, including how they cope with life in the civilian world after military service. Militarization programs are dependent on the establishment of deep networks within the state and the deployment of discourses around courage, strength, honor, masculinity, femininity, credentials, health, marriage, violence, and identity. It is a process of social, political, and military reproduction—the reproduction of the state through military values and identities, the naturalization of the creative and (re)productive violence of the state in and through the very bodies of its citizens. Rather than simply assuming that scrapping planes and tanks and ships is the sign of a successful demilitarization program (even though this is an important part of the process), we need to consider how states have dealt with these deep networks within their borders, and to learn from particular historical experiences in order to better conceptualize demilitarization programs.

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Excerpted from Demilitarization in the Contemporary World by Peter N. Stearns. Copyright © 2013 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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