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Coping With Super Militarists
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14532 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1988 |
1,934 Words |
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James L. Payne
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What leads nations to reach eagerly for military might? In the West, where combating militarism has been a crusade for generations, this question identifies a central foreign policy concern. Unfortunately, a faulty diagnosis has left policymakers without a sound way of responding to the problem.
The first principle of disease control is to localize the illness, to find out who has it and who doesn't. The prevailing approach to the study of militarism avoids making this determination. Militarism is held to be a "world" problem, a diffuse malady that taints all countries--and perhaps Western countries more than the rest. The way to "solve" the problem of excessive military preparations thus becomes, first, to urge everyone, especially ourselves, to cut back on armaments, and secondly, to place our trust in international "arms control" agreements.
A study of the facts of militarism shows how misguided this view is. All countries do not acquire military forces at an equal rate. Two particular types of countries stand out. These are nations that emphasize violence in their affairs and are, overwhelmingly, the main source of fighting and bloodshed in the world today. These cultures of war are, first, the Marxist-Leninist regimes and, second, the nations with strong Muslim traditions.
Force ratios
This conclusion is supported by a number of measures of militarism. Perhaps the best indicator of a nation's commitment to military power is its "force ratio," the number of full-time regular military personnel per 1,000 population. This number not only directly gauges the manpower commitment to the armed forces, it also serves as a good indirect measure of the fraction of national wealth devoted to military purposes. As the table shows, the Marxist and Muslim countries have force ratios over twice as high as those of the rest of the world. (In this table, the Marxist regimes are those countries where the rulers have explicitly announced adherence to Marxism-Leninism. Countries are classified as Muslim where Islam is the state religion or where more than 90 percent of the population is Muslim.
The picture of the growth of military forces tells the same story. The popular image is that the world is doubling and redoubling its emphasis on military forces, with all nations equally to blame for an accelerating arms race. This view is based on a misinterpretation. People look at specific new weapons or at measures of absolute growth, and these give the impression that the military sector is growing. But it is unsound to gauge the intensity of any activity in this way. As a country grows, it has more of everything: more teachers, more policeman--and more soldiers. The proper way to assess change is to use relative measures that express the size of the military sector in relation to the population or to the entire economy.
For example, it is widely believed that the U.S. military sector is growing, but this impression is based on higher dollar budgets and the appearance of new equipment. In relative size, the military has been shrinking over past decades. The U.S. force ratio declined from 17.9 in 1968 to 9.3 in 1986; in the same period the fraction of the GNP spent on the military dropped from 9.6 to 6.3.
Once world military growth is
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