Abstract
The defense conversion was from the military point of view for a long time perceived as peace-activists’ slogan. During the Cold War it was seen as a threatening idea to the military, and as desired goal for the movements, which fought for humanity needs, other than military security. A lot of myths were created about it and many people naively expected the direct shift from military expenditure to other categories of social spending after the end of the Cold War (peace dividend). There were some positive results in quantitative measures of conversion in first decade of the post-Cold War period, but not so many as expected. Many other goals, not only quantitative economic, but also qualitative political, cultural, personnel goals of conversion, were achieved. Many military facilities, as bases, barracks, and training fields are closed. Demilitarization of the armed forces and of social values is pushing the contemporary military to the transformation.
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Notes
- 1.
The doubts of the sociology of the military towards the peace studies in general and defense conversion as the subject were indirectly expressed at the very beginning of the sociology of the military, when its scope of interest was defined. Kurt Lang, author of the annotated bibliography of sociology of the military in Current Sociology (16, 3, 1968, published in 1970), described the included pieces of bibliography according to the sociological approach, regardless of scientific affiliation of the author, but disqualified the works from peace studies.
- 2.
The Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC) began to publish the yearly Conversion Survey series in 1996 and finished it in 2005. The publication has brought recent data on the global disarmament, demilitarization and demobilization. The data were measured by BIC3D index (the BICC Conversion, Disarmament, Demobilization and Demilitarization).
- 3.
Voronkov argued that during the Cold War many myths had been created about the peace dividend as a magic tool for the resolution of all kinds of problems.
- 4.
The European Commission has launched the project within the framework of COST (Cooperation in Science and Technology Program) “Defence Restructuring and Conversion”, which was supposed to be the empirical test of different concepts of conversion, and of economic, social, cultural and political outputs of conversion in participating 14 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Slovenia, Spain, The Netherlands, United Kingdom).
- 5.
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was using the Russian volunteers who fought at the Serbian side in Bosnia-Herzegovina armed conflict (1992–1995), as a mobilization source also in time of NATO air strikes in 1999. The Russian volunteers attended the big anti-war demonstrations in Belgrade and in other cities in order to show the preparedness of Russia to help Serbia under NATO attack. Russian soldiers were accepted with ovations by other protesters.
- 6.
- 7.
The demobilization sometimes works out well for the armed forces, assuring reductions and reintegration of soldiers, but from the point of view of many individual soldiers the consequences are not so positive. The case of dissolution of the former East German armed forces went smoothly, but many professionals were not incorporated into the military of the unified Germany. They did not meet the conditions to be accepted and they were left on their own (Kingma and Pauwels 2000: 18).
- 8.
In post-socialist countries at least two different types of relations towards military jobs occurred. Due to drastic reductions of professional officers and NCO’s in some countries (like Hungary, Czech Republic), not only the older, less-qualified persons did leave the service, but also the young, well-educated, energetic officers, who were frustrated, because they could earn relatively little and who felt that their opportunities for upward mobility were poor. Beside, their workload increased significantly due to the shortage of staff, and they were forced to work overtime without adequate remuneration (Kiss 2000: 224–225). A different attitude towards the military job was developed in Slovenia after getting independence. The civilian labour market was overloaded with unemployed people from destroyed industry; the threat of bankrupts was hanging over many enterprises. Therefore, many middle and also top managers from the not-prospective civilian enterprises, having rank of reserve officer from the former military, decided to leave the civilian jobs and asked for military employment. They brought a lot of managerial knowledge and skills to the military and they retained their “occupational” expectations regarding the military profession.
- 9.
In Slovenian Armed Forces the precondition to enter the professional files of the army is the adequate civilian degree: the vocational degree for privates, the high school degree for NCOs and the college or the university degree for officers.
- 10.
There were many women combatants in Croatian Army in 1991–1995 war. They were allowed to serve in all services and branches, without restrictions and in general, their male comrades did not make any exceptions when letting them fight in all dangerous situations. Immediately after the war, in demobilization processes and soon after, women were restricted from some jobs and their military knowledge and expertise was put in question. It means that their expertise was good enough for waging war, but not to administer in peace.
- 11.
War in Croatia (1991–1995) produced large veteran population, because about 350.000 men and women circulated through Croatian Army. More than 900 war veterans committed suicides after the war. Incidents with weapons (hand grenades, rifles, and pistols) are still very common. Experts estimate that almost 20% of Croatian war veterans need psychiatric help (Zunec et al. 2000: 300).
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Jelušič, L. (2018). Conversion of the Military: Resource-Reuse Perspective After the End of the Cold War. In: Caforio, G., Nuciari, M. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of the Military. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71602-2_22
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