Conclusion: Patterns and Trends in Armed Forces and Society Relations

Abstract

It is worth restating the scale and nature of the ambitions of this volume. As the introduction sets out, the approach which underpins this research is that a comparative politics method can shed new light on a number of old issues, and illuminate a number of overlooked issues in contemporary debates about armed forces and societies in Europe. In part the diminution of ‘politics’, both as an issue in civil-military relations and as a disciplinary contribution to the field, reflects the dominance of sociologists of the military in developing the terrain and establishing the parameters of key civil-military relations debates. But it also reflects a reticence on behalf of many political scientists to take the military seriously as a complex political organisation. In some (perhaps many) cases this also reflects opposition to the raison d’être of the military and its various forms of social and cultural organisations.¹ In a similar vein, given the priority of the structural level (and particularly for neo-realists its anarchic nature), few international relations scholars have made a serious attempt to open up the ‘black box’ of the state and its key institutions, as differentiated units in the international system (Smith, 1995). The argument here is not to belittle other disciplinary contributions, but rather to open up new foci of enquiry, and to use existing insights to integrate rather than fragment analysis of civil-military relations. In this way the purpose of this volume is to offer a contribution to multidisciplinary debates that are respectful of existing knowledge, but not constrained by them in terms of method, focus or critical engagement.