Armed Forces and Societies: Differences and Similarities

Abstract

Previous chapters have argued that armed forces across Europe have different functions and societal roles which have varying implications for their relationship with society and their bases for legitimacy. Armed forces-society relations are however crucially affected by a further consideration, and that is the degree to which the armed forces resemble or differ from the societies they are designed to serve in terms of social composition, value systems, rules and procedures. In the 1970s Charles Moskos argued that a continuum existed between military organisations that were ‘highly differentiated’ and divergent from the societies they served and those less differentiated and ‘highly convergent’ with civilian structures, the former militaries being characterised as an Institutional model and the latter as an Occupational model (Moskos, 1973: 266). Moskos went on to argue that militaries were rarely homogenous institutional or occupational types but rather synchronic, with most ‘…internally segmented into areas which will be either more conver­gent or more divergent’ with a focus at the level of branch or service (Moskos, 1973: 266; Moskos, 1988a). The central concern of this chapter is to broaden and aggregate upwards the level of analysis to explore the extent to which national armed forces as a whole, with their unique set of operational obligations in terms of the protection of the state and society against external and internal threat, are different from or similar to society.