Civil-Military Relations and Democratic Control of the Security Sector

8
Conceptual Developments in the Security Sector
There exists no single type of consolidated democracy. It may develop and improve its
quality by enhancing the minimum economic level accessible to all citizens and by expanding
the participation of people in the political and public life of the country. Within the framework of
the category “consolidated democracy” there exists a process of development, from a democracy
with low-quality parameters to a democracy with high-quality ones. To Bulgarian society,
however, which is only at the beginning of the process of consolidation of democracy, it is important
that the specific conditions and requirements for its success are clearly understood.
The necessary conditions that have to be present, or need to be created to consolidate democracy
are: an independent and viable civil society; a political society and culture which respects
government procedures; a constitutional consensus that the democratic state embodies
the rule of law; and a public administration system capable of being used by, and accountable
to, democratic society. In short, this is a system of socially and politically elaborated norms,
institutions, and rules that is constitutionally placed between the state and the market. Today,
118 out of 193 countries in the world are democracies. The greater part of the world population
lives in them: 54.8%.
As an undisputed component of this process is the establishment of the classical judicial
and managerial pre-conditions for effective democratic control over the security sector organizations
and their activities. The principle list of requirements consists of the following issues:
A clear judicial division of authority between the constitutionally prescribed political authorities
– this is to guarantee the list of checks and balances that is designed by the constitutional
democratic formula, especially during the transition period, paying attention to strategy
and policy formulation, political control and management (of resources), emergency powers
in crisis and the authority to introduce emergency or martial law and to declare war;
Separation of the security organizations from the three functional areas: foreign security,
internal security and fight against organized crime and terrorism - this is to be done so that
security forces as a whole do not constitute a separate “government” or a “state in the
state”;
Established capacity of civilian political leadership and specialized institutional bureaucracy
that is serving to civilian leadership – this is to be done in order to create preconditions for
development and implementation of effective policy giving the decisive control over the use
of force (violence) and institutional resources (including promotions for senior uniformed
ranks) in the hands of political civilian leadership;
Officially prescribed, institutionalized and regularly and effectively executed legislative oversight
of the security organizations’ activities in both political and professional aspect – this is
primarily but not exclusively to be exercised through ‘the power of the purse’, which (a) goes
beyond perfunctory (rubber-stamp) approval of what the executive proposes, (b) engages,
through committees, the main opposition parties, and (c) is supported by knowledgeable
parliamentary staff and ‘outside’ expertise;
Effective arrangements for public information and accountability and practically executed
democratic oversight of the security sector– this is to be done to create conditions for public
and non-governmental institutions involvement into security sector development and use;