DCAF as Policy Myth

DCAF may be understood as a particularly potent policy myth, or ‘narra­tive created and believed by a group of people that diverts attention away from a puzzling part of their reality’ (Yanow 1992, 401).

Liberalism ‘regards war as an unnecessary aberration from normal international intercourse and believes that in a rational, orderly world wars would not exist: that they can be abolished’ (Howard 1989, 137). It is this belief, and the impulse to act upon it—the ‘liberal conscience’ (Howard 1989, 11)—that informs the narrative aspect of DCAF as meta-policy.

That the utility of DCAF as a means of protecting rights and reduc­ing violence meets Yanow’s third criterion of myth—belief—hardly bears stating. While Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ may not have come to pass, it is difficult to imagine a policymaker intelligibly arguing for any other approach to the management of the armed forces. This explicit promotion of DCAF by the ‘international community’, however, points to a contra­diction between the domestic understanding of DCAF—as containing the violent capacities of the military in order to safeguard external defence and internal liberty (Akkoyunlo 2007, 7)—and its apparent utility for the ‘international community’ as a means of preventing conflict.

The contrast between DCAF as a policy of individual states and as a policy goal of the ‘international community’ highlights the final aspect of Yanow’s myth—‘incommensurable values—two or more equally valued but incompatible principles embodied within a single policy issue’ (Yanow 1992, 402).

The active promotion of DCAF by the ‘international community’, however, belies the limits of its pacific nature, as it contains an implicit acknowledgement that non-liberal democratic states are potential enemies. After all, the (liberal) state monopolisation of violence necessarily entails its exercise against those whose liberal credentials are lacking or suspect [van Kreieken quoted in Bowden (2009, 147)]. The proselytising impulse inherent to the liberal historical narrative driving the West to help Others become ‘like us’ is driven as much by a self-interested desire for survival, and perception of difference as threat, as it is by an altruistic attempt to raise all peoples to a universal standard of civilisation. Accession to DCAF thus becomes the logical means of insulating a particular state from the force of the liberal West. While liberalism may be couched in the language of universalism and progress, it has a profoundly exclusivist logic, differen­tiating amongst the enlightened and political, and the retrograde, violent Others, so as to rationalise (and facilitate) the use of force against them.

Despite what might be understood as the ‘defence’ exception, there­fore, the myth of DCAF-as-taming military/violence, on its own, is not capable of completely reconciling this tension between the pacific liberal self-understanding with the war-making activities of democracies. There are many examples of democratic states—in full control of their armed forces—undertaking aggressive foreign policy, from the promotion of democracy-by-force by the USA in Iraq to the eagerness with which the French and British greeted World War I (Doyle 1983). While DCAF’s normative narrative allows it to justify the coexistence of a defensive mili­tary with a democratic society, the myth struggles to account for instances in which democracies demonstrate the aggressive use of military force paired with an apparent societal approval of (or eagerness for) war. For this, DCAF relies upon a second myth, premised upon the same norma­tive convictions and structural understanding of military-state-society rela­tions: militarism.