This study examines the phenomenon of informal civil—military relations. Informal behaviors are those that normally do not occur within the chain of command, are not mandated by law, and do not conform to official procedures. Politicians and soldiers discover that formal, institutional routines are sometimes too constraining and that they can advance their interests more effectively by amending, circumventing, or violating those routines. The party most aggrieved by the rules of the game initiates an informal solution. Whether the other side goes along depends on how divergent its preferences are with the aggrieved party. Greatly divergent preferences result in unilateral informalities, less divergent but still negotiable positions yield bilateral-conflictive encounters, and convergent preferences result in cooperative ventures. Case studies on Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia exemplify three different kinds of informal encounters and their impacts on civilian policy choices and military interests.
Martin Edmonds, Central Organizations of Defense (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1985).
2.
These informal presidential contacts occur on a regular basis in Colombia. President Alvaro Uribe is known to directly communicate with battalion commanders, bypassing not only his military brass but also his defense minister. Robert Goetze, email communication, January 28, 2009; Joaquín Romero, email communication, January 27, 2009.
3.
A search reveals that there are no article-length studies titled "informal civil-military relations" or something akin to that. Some articles from Armed Forces & Society mention informal behaviors. As an example, see Kobi Michael, "The Dilemma behind the Classic Dilemma of Civil-Military Relations: The Discourse Space Model and the Israeli Case During the Oslo Process," Armed Forces & Society 33 (2007): 518-46. Michael conceptualizes an amorphous "discourse space" where military elites influence politicians, but not according to any set, institutional rules. Also see J. Mark Ruhl, "Civil-Military Relations in Post-Sandinista Nicaragua," Armed Forces & Society 30 (2003): 117-39. There are books that contain anecdotal discussions about informal civil-military relations. On the U.S. case, see James Kittfield, Prodigal Soldiers: How the Generation of Officers Born of Vietnam Revolutionized the American Style of War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 217-19; H. R. McMaster, Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 18-23.
4.
Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968); Douglas Chalmers, "The Politicized State in Latin America," in Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America, ed. James Malloy ( Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 23-95.
5.
As an exemplar of this literature, see Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics ( Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, 1979).
6.
One scholar of Latin America who has paid attention to these relations is Gregory Weeks. See his book The Military and Politics in Postauthoritarian Chile (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003). Harold Trinkunas discusses informal methods of monitoring armed forces activities in Venezuela. See Crafting Civilian Control of the Military in Venezuela: A Comparative Perspective (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 124-25, 147-48.
7.
Peter M. Blau and W. RichardScott, FormalOrganizations: A Comparative Approach (San Francisco: Chandler, 1962). Also see Donald Chisholm, Coordination without Hierarchy: Informal Structures in Multi-Organizational Systems ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
8.
Peter Feaver, Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 72-95.
9.
On informal behaviors, see Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, eds., Informal Institutions and Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Jack Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Blau and Scott, Formal Organizations; Chisholm, Coordination without Hierarchy.
10.
Helmke and Levitsky, Informal Institutions, 5.
11.
See Guillermo O’Donnell, "Illusions about Consolidation," Journal of Democracy 7, 2 (1996): 36. On differences between rule-driven and non-rule-driven behaviors, see Knight, Institutions and Social Conflict, 67-69.
12.
Gregory Weeks has made the useful distinction between informal and semiformal points of contact, with the latter referring to those relations conducted in an official capacity. All of the examples we refer to here relate to official business. For that reason, and for purposes of simplification, we retain the informal concept, folding semiformal contacts into that category. See his Military and Politics, 19.
13.
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 958, 973.
14.
For the importance of Weber’s bureaucratic model for understanding the military as well as deviations from the model, see Deborah L. Norden, "The Organizational Dynamics of Militaries and Military Movements: Paths to Power in Venezuela," in Civil-Military Relations in Latin America: New Analytical Perspectives, ed. David Pion-Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 108-34.
15.
It is a well established in the literature that militaries consider their institutional interests as paramount. See Samuel Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); Eric Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics: Military Coups and Governments (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hal1, 1977); Bengt Abrahamsson, Military Professionalization and Political Power (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1972).
16.
See Sven Steinmo, Kathleen Thelen, and Frank Longstreth, eds., Structuring Politics: Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 22, 57-89. For a Latin American application, see David Pion-Berlin, Through Corridors of Power: Institutions and Civil-Military Relations in Argentina (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997).
17.
Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth, Structuring Politics, 9.
18.
On the use of preference divergence to assess civil-military relations, see Risa A. Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Politics of Strategic Assessment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 23-27.
19.
This is not a model of civil-military cooperation, akin to Rebecca Schiff’s concordance theory. Unlike her, I fully accept the separation of the military and civilian spheres as given, and I do not rely on cultural contexts to understand variations in civil-military interaction. My model is a rational-institutional one that derives preferences for informality based on biases that either or both sides encounter within the formal defense sphere. See Rebecca Schiff, The Military and Domestic Politics: A Concordance Theory of Civil-Military Relations (London: Routledge, 2009).
20.
This presumption holds true for many Third World countries that have weak legislatures. It is obviously not true for the United States and its Congress.
21.
This occurred frequently in Chile during the early postauthoritarian years. See Weeks, Military and Politics, 60-94.
22.
Ibid., 158.
23.
David Pion-Berlin , "Defense Organization and Civil-Military Relations in Latin America," Armed Forces & Society35 (2009): 562-86.
24.
Mark J. Ruhl, "The Guatemalan Military since the Peace Accords: The Fate of Reform under Arzú and Portillo," Latin American Politics and Society47, 1 (Spring 2005): 68-69.
25.
See Feaver, Armed Servants, 73-87.
26.
For the Mexican case, see Roderic Ai Camp, Mexico’s Military on the Democratic Stage (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005), 86-98.
27.
Hans-Joachim Lauth, "Informal Institutions and Democracy,"Democratization7, 4 (Winter 2000): 21-50; Helmke and Levitsky , Informal Institutions, 13-18.
28.
Scholars who espouse this view are plentiful. See Christopher Jones and Natalie Mychajlyszyn, "Overview: Civil-Military Relations in Central and Eastern Europe in Former Communist Societies," Armed Forces & Society 28 (2002): 375-84; Trinkunas, Crafting Civilian Control; Thomas C. Bruneau and Scott D. Tollefson, eds., Who Guards the Guardians and How: Democratic Civil-Military Relations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006).
29.
Weeks, Military and Politics, 158. This is not to say that official channels are always conducive to civilian supremacy. Defense institutions in some countries have been designed in ways that give the military certain advantages. See Pion-Berlin, "Defense Organization."
30.
Michael C. Desch , Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 4.
31.
In the longer term, repeated circumvention of official channels-not to mention the chain of command-may sour relations between the government and the armed forces, as military leaders store up resentment over not having been appropriately consulted. This occurred in the United States after Vietnam and led to a significant reform of defense organization in a way that strengthened unified military input by empowering the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
32.
McMaster, Dereliction of Duty, 18-23.
33.
Bob Woodward , War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008 (New York: Simon & Schuster , 2008).
34.
Mario I.Aguilar, "The Disappeared and the Mesa de Diálogo in Chile 1999-2001: Searching for Those Who Never Grew Old," Bulletin of Latin American Research21, 3 (2002): 413-24.
35.
José Zalaquett, "La Mesa de Diálogo Sobre Derechos Humanos y el Proceso de Transición Política en Chile,"Estudios Públicos79 (Winter 2000): 7.
36.
Ibid., 19.
37.
"Family Members of Disappeared Criticize Roundtable Information," Santiago Times, January 9, 2001, received from subscribers@santiagotimes.chip.mic.cl.
38.
See Aguilar, "The Disappeared," 420; Human Rights Watch, World Report: Chile (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003), 2, http://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k3/americas3.html. The Pinochet case had an adverse impact on the willingness of the military to be cooperative. This became evident in 2000, after the Appellate and Supreme Courts stripped Pinochet of his senatorial immunity, clearing the way for prosecutorial action.
39.
Rut Diamint, "Crisis, Democracy, and the Military in Argentina," in Broken Promises? The Argentine Crisis and Argentine Democracy, ed. Ed Epstein and David Pion-Berlin (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books , 2006), 172.
40.
Bendini had been stationed in Kirchner’s home province of Santa Cruz, where he was commander of the XI Mechanized Brigade. It was no secret that he had affiliations with Patagonian political elites who eventually accompanied Kirchner to power.
41.
The last comparable purge was in 1955, that one conducted by a military government against Peronist officers. Rosendo Fraga, "La Cuestión Militar debe volver a los carriles profesionales," La Nación, May 30, 2003, 7, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=499893.
42.
Argentine Constitution, Second Division, title I, chap. III, sec. 99.13, http://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Argentina/argen94_e.html#title1firstdivisionch3 .
43.
"Un General de brigada que llegó temprano a la cima del Ejército," La Nación, June 2, 2003, 8, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=500695; "Kirchner aceptó reducir los retiros en el Ejército," La Nación, May 31, 2003, 10, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=500220 .
44.
República Argentina, Ley para el Personal Militar 19.101, June 30, 1971, art. 49, no. 2.
45.
Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Overview: Argentina, 2006 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2007).
46.
"Transformaron a la Plaza Murillo en objetivo militar," El Diario, February 13, 2003, 9; "Cronología del conflicto en la Plaza Murillo," El Diario, February 13, 2003, 2.
47.
"President Mesa Addresses Armed Forces on Justice, Accountability," BBC Monitoring International Reports, October 21, 2003, Lexis-Nexis.
48.
"Armed Forces Upset by Attempts to Try Servicemen in Civilian Courts," BBC Monitoring International Reports, April 14, 2004, Lexis-Nexis.
49.
"Bolivian Troops Confined to Barracks following Ruling on February Violence," BBC Worldwide Monitoring, May 9, 2004, Lexis-Nexis.
50.
"Cuatro oficiales irán a la justicia ordinaria, las FFAA no acataran," El Deber, May 8, 2004, www.eldeber.com.bo/anteriores/20040508/nacional_3.html.
51.
Constitutions of the Countries of the World: Bolivia (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 1992), title 7, art. 209, 57, emphasis added.
52.
"Bolivia: Armed Forces to Use Legal Means to Try to Overturn Two Court Rulings," BBC Worldwide Monitoring, May 11, 2004, Lexis-Nexis.
53.
Human Rights Watch, Bolivia: Letter to President Carlos Mesa Gisbert, December 22, 2003 (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2003).
54.
"Militares desconocen al Tribunal Constitucional,"El Deber, May 9, 2004, www.eldeber.com.bo/anteriores/20040509/nacional_2.html.
