the process of security sector reform - ISAC Fund

Narcís Serra TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY AND MILITARY REFORM: POSSIBLE FRAMEWORK
Narcís Serra TRANSITION TO DEMOCRACY AND MILITARY REFORM: POSSIBLE FRAMEWORK
The third question that must be analysed is what usually happens when power is
taken from armies. The military usually decide on firm entrenchment in military
autonomy. They seek to increase control of their organisation and combat
any attempts at external control by, in certain cases, reinforcing the elements
that distinguish them from the rest of society. Although there will always be
a certain measure of autonomy, even in consolidated democracies that have
been functioning as such for a very long time, it becomes a question of the
levels of power withdrawal decided by the military themselves, not by political
authorities.
From this position of autonomy they can maintain different attitudes. Military
reform is nothing but a process that forces the military to move gradually towards
positions of greater democratic normalisation. In my opinion, from the Spanish
experience and that of the two other southern European countries that went
through such a process at more or less similar times, we see various positions of
military intervention in the political domain. From greater to lesser autonomy,
they are the following:
1. Control of political power. In such a scenario, a military official is usually
the President or Head of State. There are collective decision-making
bodies which are military in nature, many political posts which
are occupied by military officers and the domestic security apparatus
is made up of military officials and under military control, including information
systems and Intelligence.
2. The military as guardians of the national essence. The Armed Forces
consider themselves above politics and parties, not just a sector of
the administration of the state. They thus maintain the threat of acting
when as a collective body they consider that their mission so demands,
instead of acting as instruments of government. Something of that nature
occurred in Spain in the course of the constitutional debate. Even the
United States have experienced this attitude because General McArthur
placed himself in such authority when he denounced “the dangerous
concept according to which the members of our armed forces owe loyalty,
first and foremost to those who temporarily exert their authority in the
executive sector of the government instead of owing it to the country
and its Constitution, which they have sworn to defend”.
3. The military as the force that conditions government policy, by placing
limits on reforms and vetoing certain lines of action. In such cases the
military usually maintain full autonomy and levels of direct intervention
in political questions and questions pertaining to the running of the
Administration.
4. Defenders of their organisational and operational autonomy. It is a
situation that usually arises when the military are losing or have already
lost the possibility of political and administrative intervention. The usual
response is to prevent the civil authorities from intervening in those
fields they consider to be the exclusive preserve of military authorities.
5. Formal, though partial, acceptance of civil supremacy. Though no declarations
are made against this, and though they don’t act against the laws
that authorise civil supremacy, certain orders are disobeyed, and actions
are also taken on their own initiative, that have been neither ordered nor
desired by civil authorities. An example is the behaviour of the military
high command at the beginning of the Spanish political transition, when
only minimum sentences were handed down for acts of insubordination
against the democratic government.
6. Maintenance of ideological control by the military. In general, organisational
and operational controls are accepted, but control is maintained
over the professional definition, over the values to be cultivated, with
control, in particular, over military education and access to the military
career.
7. Democratic civil control of the Armed Forces. In this situation, executive
power defines military policy, the Minster directs and exerts control and
direction of the Armed Forces, legislative power controls executive
power and the military as a whole, and military justice is integrated
within judicial power. In democracy that is unique and binding.
It must be emphasised that in real situations, there is no defined limit between
transition and consolidation, so that several of the situations described might
have to be dealt with in this second phase, especially from point four onwards.
On the other hand, to control the process the overriding issue is not so much a
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