Mechanisms and impacts of military rule

Militaries are hierarchical organizations that specialize in the deployment of violence, so it is often assumed that militaries rule by force and by force alone. However, military rule often involves complicated attempts to secure some measure of consent from the governed. Some military regimes, for example, have permitted elections to national and subnational representative bodies. Others have used judiciaries, of varying degrees of independence, to approximate or simulate the rule of law. Still others have promulgated, and sometimes actually adhered to, constitutions. Even so, the application of military law to civilians and the threat or use of extrajudicial repression (such as torture, disappearances, and killings) by the state’s security forces studies are commonplace under military regimes.

Although part of the state apparatus, militaries enjoy a high degree of relative autonomy because of their control over the means of coercion. (That control, though still significant in most places, does not necessarily represent a monopoly, because of the prevalence of irregular armed forces in the developing world.) However, militaries do not constitute a monolithic single actor. They are hierarchically divided between a high command, junior officers, and enlisted personnel, and horizontal competition and rivalry between the different service branches (typically the army, navy, and air force) can be intense. Further, they are often divided along class, regional, and gender lines (although militaries in most developing countries still allow only very-limited roles for women). In ethnically divided societies, variation in rates of military recruitment across the major ethnic groups can result in the armed forces being seen as constituted by, or representing, one ethnic group against others. All those divisions tend to be exacerbated when the military comes to power, and many military regimes have foundered as a result of their inability to manage them.

Military rule increases the probability of subsequent military coups and attempted coups. The rewards of direct rule often increase competition and conflict within the armed forces. Some military regimes attempt to manage that competition by, for example, allocating the spoils of office equitably between the different service branches. (That was true of the 1976–83 military regime in Argentina.) Other military regimes carefully monitor and purge personnel within the armed forces and the state as a whole.

Military regimes also tend to foster militarism or the glorification of war and military prowess. Many military leaders see politics as a continuation of war by other means. That leads them to resort to force in the resolution of conflicts. Military rulers may demand that civilian organizations develop hierarchical and disciplined configurations along military lines.

Such demands can backfire. Some military regimes have inadvertently stimulated a flowering of oppositional cultural and political activity, as artists, students, religious leaders, dissidents, and others express themselves in new ways in opposition to the authoritarianism inherent in military rule. The attempted imposition of martial standards of behaviour on recalcitrant populations can produce rare moments of political electricity in which large numbers of people are united in defiance of the generals. The popularity of Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the outspoken musician and critic of military rule in Nigeria, or the participation of many of the most popular artists of the day in the “Direct Elections Now” (Diretas Já) campaign in Brazil in 1984 are cases in point.

Transitions from military rule

Most military regimes of the 1960s and ’70s became civilian in subsequent decades. Analysts distinguish between regime liberalization, or the lifting of repression and the restoration of various civil liberties, and democratization, or the reestablishment of a civilian multiparty regime with accompanying democratic rights. There is some debate over whether the first process leads inevitably to the second. Regime transitions presided over by the military, in which democracy is the ostensible end goal, have been especially problematic because militaries have tended to periodically interfere in the process in order to produce their desired outcome. An example of that is Nigeria, where the military regime of Ibrahim Babangida (1985–93) initially promised to return the country to civilian rule by 1990, pushed that deadline back to 1992 after a coup attempt, and then annulled the presidential elections of 1993. The Babangida “transition” ended in a coup led by General Sani Abacha in 1993.

Military regimes have ended in a variety of ways. Some have collapsed after a failed military adventure (e.g., Greece in 1974 and Argentina in 1983), whereas others managed to negotiate their way out of power through the use of formal or informal agreements (an example of the former is the 1984 Naval Club Pact in Uruguay). In an unusual example, the Chilean military regime (1973–90) was voted out of office in a 1988 plebiscite scheduled in its 1980 constitution, and that was followed by a 1989 election that restored civilian rule. Not all transitions actually lead to civilian rule, of course. Military regimes are sometimes replaced by a new version of the same type of regime, as in Nigeria in 1993, when Abacha replaced Babangida.

Military prerogatives established under military rule can outlast the military regime itself. Those prerogatives may include army control over the police or a role for the military in internal public security; a special responsibility for “law and order” or the rule of law being bestowed on the armed forces in the constitution, giving it constitutional cover for political intervention; a fixed allotment of the national budget for the military; higher salaries for military officers than other state officials; control over the intelligence apparatus; control over civilian activities (such as civil aviation); economic privileges (such as special export-import licenses, direct control over state-owned firms, and the like); and military veto power over various decisions beyond national defense. It is not uncommon for post-military regimes to find that they must seek military approval for a wide variety of state activities. Stable civilian rule, however, is not synonymous with the reduction of military prerogatives, and, indeed, civil-military peace is sometimes purchased at the price of not reviewing or reforming any of those legacies of military rule.