DCAF as International Policy
The contemporary status of DCAF as a major policy goal of a range of international organisations stems from the twin post-Cold War desires of Western powers to (a) ensure European security following the breakup of the Soviet Union; and (b) maintaining the trans-Atlantic NATO alliance despite the demise of the Warsaw Pact (de Santis 1994, 61-81).
To this end, NATO created the 1994 ‘Partnership for Peace’ program, intended to support the democratisation of aspiring NATO members through a variety of measures (NATO 2012), including the promotion of DCAF (Rose 1994, 13-19). Given its perceived utility in the promotion of democracy and regional stability—and in the absence of an ideologically acceptable alternative—DCAF became a preferred policy of the ‘international community’ (see Kaczmarska, Chap. 11) promoted by the United Nations, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the African Union, among others (OSCE 2005, DCAF 2013a, b; UNGA 2008; OECD 2006). Perhaps the best expression of the growing international consensus as to the importance of the promotion of DCAFpolicies is the creation of the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of the Armed Forces in 2000 (DCAF 2013a, b), which works with virtually every major international organisation in the furtherance of DCAF. It is supported by 61 member states, reflecting the extent to which DCAF has become a common policy (goal) of the ‘international community’.
While a great deal of DCAF literature was developed in the 1960s and 1970s in relation to the ‘new’ post-colonial states in Africa and Latin America, this chapter highlights the extent to which, following the decline of the Soviet Union, it has become possible to promote the Western, liberal policy of DCAF as that of the ‘international community’ as a whole.
In other words, while DCAF is not a recent development, its promulgation as the commonsense consensus of a range of international institutions is. Correspondingly, the iteration of DCAF of interest here is not its context-specific meso-/micro-practice within a particular organisation but rather its broader construction and dissemination as an overarching policy goal throughout the ‘international community’.At this general level, DCAF is articulated as a policy regarding the formal structure of institutional arrangements, consisting of: (a) a clear constitutional/legal division of authority between military and civilian authorities; (b) the dependence of defence budgets and military deployment upon parliamentary approval; (c) the cultivation of military professionalism; and (d) building the capacity and expertise of civilian ministries of defence [Simon quoted in Szemerkenyi (1996, 67)]. In many instances, such structural arrangements are supplemented by a parallel emphasis on the role of civil society in maintaining DCAF, through a removal of military-related media censorship, consultation with non-governmental ‘watchdog’ organisations, and the formation of military labour unions (Encujescu 2002, 87-94).
The overall policy goal of DCAF is to address both the ‘functional imperative stemming from the threats to the society’s security and [the] societal imperative arising from the social forces, ideologies and institutions dominant within society’ (Volten 2002, 315-16; Huntington 1972, 2). DCAF thus may be understood as reflecting the division of the modern (liberal) world into separate ‘spheres’ of social activity—generally understood as public and private, but, in this case, comprising the state, the military, and society, or the ‘Clausewitzian trinity’ (von Clausewitz 1989, 89). The goal of isolating the military from the ‘public’ life of politics represents a normative commitment to ‘detaching and freeing the other sectors from the use of force, and so eventually reducing and marginalizing the military sector itself’ (Buzan 1997, 23). Despite its technical emphasis on structural and institutional reform, DCAF is very much aimed at ‘containing’ the military/violence in order to promote peace and ‘protect’ democracy—a project embedded in the broader Western cultural and ideological heritage of liberalism.
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