Abstract
Two recent books, War Identity and the Liberal State by Victoria Basham and Military Migrants: Fighting for YOUR Country by Vron Ware, are expressions of the significance of social inquiry into war, militarism, and their implications for contemporary questions of national identity. Both are important contributions to the emerging field of critical military studies. Critical military studies, insofar as these books are concerned, are marked by attention to the lived experiences of the military subject, and the structural and discursive contexts, historical and contemporary, within which they live, work, and serve. Critical military studies reach beyond normative constructions of militarism and the military, questioning the cultural foundations upon which these phenomena are produced.
Both of these books contribute to a growing awareness that military society is immanent—we are in it. That is, the boundaries among civil society, the state, and the military are increasingly blurred and indistinct shaping new militarized cultural formations. Ware’s exhaustive and nuanced research into the being of multicultural militarism forcefully raises questions of war, identity, and the liberal state by drawing close attention to the parallel forces and drives of civil society. For example, she highlights the movement toward equity and diversity, multiculturalism, changes to labor relations and their implications for Ministry of Defense (MoD) recruitment, training, and the motivations of the postcolonial recruit to serve.
Basham lays this foundation in a material cultural analysis of the military. Her account of “being military” cuts across a wide offering of social and cultural theory. Basham’s text methodically covers questions of gender and sexuality, race, ethnicity, and whiteness. These interrogations are well placed within a geopolitical and materialist context of war, identity, and the limits of liberalism.
Both authors articulate authentic histories of the military life and its imperial context from outside the military, yet in different ways strike to the heart of fraternal military culture and military subjectivity. That is, the way in which the military creates soldiers within a profoundly white and masculinist frame, and how the military establishes itself in relation to and as separate from the state. Ware in particular sees the broader implications of this relationship with civil society in relation to the military migrant’s cultural identities and practices.
Basham proceeds methodologically with an ethnographic materialism that centers the military body within its structural and discursive contexts. She uses this frame to explore the gendered, sexualized, and racialized accounts of British personnel. Ware’s work is genuinely ethnographic, weaving her own sensibilities into a story about young men becoming Commonwealth soldiers. Ware interviewed a cohort of young men recruited in the late 1990s from distant parts of the Commonwealth at a time when the MoD adopted the strategy to address significant recruitment and retention difficulties, while also meeting legal obligations for cultural diversification. Her principal message is that the British military are, and have been, enthusiastic about their recruitment and employment of the “martial races” throughout its imperial history. However, in spite of this enthusiasm, the impulse for Britishness, or whiteness, in the military relegates the “ethnic hero” to the status of foreigner or immigrant. The Commonwealth soldier fights with the British forces, not in them.
Both the books demonstrate a more intricate awareness of culture than any other texts on military culture that I am aware of. This is despite the profound relevance of culture in matters such as military scandal, sexual harassment, or institutional discrimination, as well as in matters such as group cohesion and military identity, which are even less well articulated culturally across the area of military sociology.
In a sense, these two texts explore the same historical and political concern—the cultural disposition of the military in contemporary times and the cultural imperatives of militarism for all British people, of all ethnicities. Military Migrants, however, raises our awareness and personal encounter with militarism, the state, and identity in deeper and more personal ways. The deft weaving of narrative and material culture, articulated through an incisive historical record of defense policy, interacting with civil movements, is expressed with an extraordinary attention to detail, without ever losing track of the broader argument or narrative.
By gathering the stories and reflecting upon the lives of the militarized subject, we are exposed to the deeply ingrained presence of the principle of militarism—singularity of purpose, control, and ultimately violence. But by articulating the life experiences of the British soldier—white, British or British and other—both books are uncompromising and empathetic, never reducing the soldier to the evil agent of state-mandated violence, but rather agents within, and of, sexualized, gendered, and racialized cultural relations. Basham demonstrates this forcefully through an articulation of white British masculinities.
However, there is a missed opportunity in Basham’s book that Ware grasps unflinchingly. It is the deeply historical and political, profoundly naturalized impulse for fraternity—from the soldier, to the unit, through the institution, the Commonwealth, its imperial relations, and the political relations between the State and the military. Ware demonstrates how this impulse for fraternity is deeply embedded in the principle of democratic control of the armed forces. She argues that the national impulse for commonwealth is about the bonds of white men, forged through Britishness, and bound together through the constitutional legality of the Commonwealth. However, military migrants are never fully accepted, always identified by their ethnicity before their Britishness, and until recently never fully compensated for their service after discharge.
These books, both of which look at the cultural composition of the British military, are both relevant and important at the moment, as Western militaries are compelled to integrate women, manage sexual difference, and increase their ethnic diversity. Their sustainability depends upon it. Yet, cultural oppression is a hallmark of military institutional culture, and the dismantling of this cultural oppression is the foundation of a fair and progressive institution. But it is an imperative challenged by the demand for military effectiveness.
The practical question for the military is how do organizations established on the principles of hierarchy, regimentation, and command and control facilitate a critical, inquiring, and lateral thinking disposition? How do they diversify while retaining the principle of militarism, instrumentalism? The bigger concern questions the military itself and the human capacity to retreat from violence and domination, whether unfettered or articulated in the name of democracy and human rights. Both Ware and Basham provide rich and authentic accounts of these struggles in institutions that are so central to liberal democratic governance that their very presence has failed to be adequately questioned. Critical military studies, and these books, take these tasks to heart.