Controlling Blue Berets: The Consequences of Political Neglect in the Case of Uruguay’s Participation in Peacekeeping

Abstract

Peacekeeping has widely been seen as conducive to submit the military to democratic rule. We put the assumption to an empirical test based on the case of Uruguay, today a fully democratic state that has consistently ranked among the world’s top peacekeeping contributors per capita. Specifically, we ask whether participation in peacekeeping has increased civilian control over the military. To answer this question, we focus on three aspects of democratic civil–military relations: civilian oversight, civilian policy management, and armed forces–society relations. We conclude that peacekeeping has done little to trigger greater involvement of civilians in the area of military and defense policy but that it contributed to reduce the gap between the armed forces and society. Nevertheless, due to political neglect by civilian authorities, the state of civil–military relations is one of subordinate military autonomy short of ideal, even if it does not represent a threat to democratic rule.

Keywords

peacekeeping civilian control armed forces Uruguay

Civil–military relations have long been a topic mainly for students of undemocratic regimes. More recently, however, the question of who controls the military and how has found its way into debates on the quality of democracy. Yet, disagreements over what democratic control over the armed forces exactly entails persist (Bruneau & Matei, 2008; Croissant & Kuehn, 2010; Feaver, 1996). Interestingly, the lack of agreement on a definition contrasts with a fairly strong consensus on the use of peacekeeping as a means of establishing, consolidating, or simply maintaining such control: peacekeeping, thus has been the general consensus, promotes democratic values within the military, keeps officers away from internal politics, and reduces the gap between the military and civilians (Bruneau, 2005, p. 116; Bruneau & Mendee, 2015; Crocker, Hampson, & Aall, 2001; Moskos, 1975; Sotomayor, 2014, p. 2; Worboys, 2007).

Only recently, a number of studies began questioning the peacekeeping-democratization thesis. Sotomayor (2014), in his book on Latin American peacekeepers, called the claim a “myth.” Cunliffe (2018) studied military interventions in politics in Bangladesh, Fiji, and the Gambia and found that “in each case, peacekeeping was a necessary but insufficient condition” not of democratization but “of military rule” (p. 232). The “link between peacekeeping abroad and democracy at home” (Cunliffe, 2018, p. 219) was further called into question by Levin, MacKay, and Nasirzadeh (2016), who argued that authoritarian regimes can draw on resources from peacekeeping to bolster their rule.

What about peacekeeping’s effects on civilian control in countries that transitioned successfully to democracy? This article is concerned with Uruguay, a country with a strong tradition in civilian control over the armed forces that was significantly interrupted only during the dictatorship of 1973–1985 (González Guyer, 2013, pp. 100, 116). Like in other Latin American countries, the return to democracy was accompanied by a steep rise in Uruguay’s contribution to UN peacekeeping. While the country had previously participated with military observers, from 1992 on Uruguay has kept significant numbers of troop contingents abroad. During 1992–1997 and again since 2001, the country has consistently ranked among the 25 top troop contributors to UN peacekeeping (United Nations, 2019). This is especially remarkable considering that Uruguay’s population counts less than 3.5 million. In peacekeeping contributions per capita, this places it way ahead of major troops contributing states such as Bangladesh and India.

Although fostering democratic control over the military has never been a declared objective of Uruguay’s contribution to peacekeeping, it certainly has been an indirect one. In the 1990s, politicians and lawmakers presented peacekeeping as an opportunity for the armed forces to acquire a new mission after the leftist guerrilla had ceased to exist (Sotomayor, 2014, p. 61). Furthermore, authorities across the political spectrum have highlighted peacekeeping’s economic benefits ever since Uruguay has turned into a top contributing country (Cámara de Diputados, 1996, p. 6; Cámara de Senadores, 1992, 2013; Sotomayor, 2014, p. 58). Both motivations are intrinsically linked to civilian control. For the democratic governments, defining a new military mission meant trying to divert “the focus of the armed forces away from domestic politics and budgets to external roles” (Sotomayor, 2014, p. 61). On the other hand, finding an external source of income meant appeasing an officer core dissatisfied with significant budget cuts and, ultimately, avoid a more fundamental debate over the role and budgetary relevance of the military in democracy. Has participation in peacekeeping effectively promoted democratic control of the military, as Uruguayan policy makers have at least indirectly hoped for?

Our findings are mixed. Civilians were slow to assert oversight in matters relating to peacekeeping and have only been minimally involved in peacekeeping policymaking. However, there is some evidence that peacekeeping has diminished the gap between the foreign policy elite and the military and that it brought the military closer to society. Nevertheless, although the armed forces are subordinate to democratic rule, democratic control falls short of ideal as the military enjoys considerable autonomy in the area of peacekeeping and defense more generally, largely due to a lack of civilian neglect.

The article makes three contributions. First, it adds to the literature on the effects of peacekeeping on contributing states, specifically on their quality of democracy, which is an area that has received relatively little attention as compared to the literature on peacekeeping’s effects on host states (Cunliffe, 2018, p. 219). Ruffa and Vennesson (2014), for instance, have examined how civil–military cooperation is externalized from a sender state to assistance missions abroad. Here, we conversely consider how peacekeeping experiences overseas might exert a corrective effect on civil–military relations at home. Secondly, while there are a number of studies that have shown an interest in peacekeeping’s effects on democratizing states (Bruneau & Mendee, 2015; Sotomayor, 2014) and, more recently, on the politics of authoritarianism (Levin, MacKay, & Nasirzadeh, 2016) and undemocratic practices (Aning, 2007), little attention has been paid to peacekeeping’s effects on democratic control of the armed forces in consolidated democracies. Thirdly, therefore, our analysis is original in that it draws attention to the costs associated with a situation where democratic control of the military is legally guaranteed but falls short of ideal in practice. Even if the risk of a coup d’état is minimal, the lack of adequate oversight over the armed forces continues to be relevant for countries in Latin America and beyond (Pion-Berlin & Trinkunas, 2007).

The remainder of the article is divided into three parts. We begin by substantiating the relevance of the Uruguayan case to the study of civilian control over the armed forces in relation to peacekeeping. To this effect, we review Uruguay’s peacekeeping trajectory and the establishment of democratic control. Next, we introduce three dimensions of civil–military relations that are relevant to democratic control: civilian oversight, civilian policy management, and armed forces–society relations. We then discuss how peacekeeping has affected civil–military relations in each of them. The concluding section reflects on the question what the findings mean for the quality of democracy in Uruguay and beyond.

Uruguay: Democratic Control of the Armed Forces and Participation in Peacekeeping

The Uruguayan case is a permissive case in which a high number of military personnel—more than 40,000 (Manini Ríos in Brown, 2017, p. ii)—count with experience in at least one peacekeeping operation. Considering that the armed forces’ current personnel strength is roughly 23,000 men and women, this means that if peacekeeping effectively has an impact on civil–military relations, it should be visible in the case of Uruguay. Permissive cases are particularly suited for studies with a strong explorative motivation such as the present one, given that the existing literature has not yet developed strong theoretical insights on how civil–military relations in consolidated democracies are affected by peacekeeping.

Although the first Uruguayan peacekeeper was deployed in 1952, the country’s history as a significant contributor to UN peacekeeping began with its participation in the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), in 1992. The number of Uruguayan peacekeepers reached its peak between 2004 and 2013, when roughly 1 in 10 members of the armed forces was deployed abroad.

Uruguay’s peacekeeping record compares favorably to other states in the region including Brazil, Latin America’s biggest country that has looked at peacekeeping as part of its bargaining portfolio for a reformed UN Security Council. Figure 1 compares Uruguay’s participation in UN peacekeeping to Argentina and Brazil, who follow in the list of Latin American contributing states. For both countries, but only in part for Uruguay, the scores in the years 2004–2017 are owed to participation in the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). Thus, apart from Uruguay, no other Latin American country has maintained a significant number of over 1,000 troops outside the region over a sustained period of time, turning it into the most likely candidate for democratization effects from peacekeeping.

Figure 1.

Participation in UN peacekeeping operations by top South American contributors, 1990–2018. Source. Adapted from United Nations (2018).

Uruguay’s contribution to peacekeeping also stands out in global comparison. In a country of less than 3.5 million inhabitants, there are about 28 peacekeepers for every 100,000 inhabitants (see Table 1). These numbers are significantly lower for top contributors such as Bangladesh (4.5), India (5.2), Ghana (9.5), and Pakistan (3). As a percentage of all active armed forces, Uruguay maintains currently 3.8% of its military personnel deployed in UN peacekeeping operations. While this number was more than double during 2004–2016, it is still far ahead of India and Pakistan as well as its regional peers, where peacekeepers represent currently less than 1% of the armed forces.

Table 1.

Contribution to UN Peacekeeping Relative to Population and Size of the Armed Forces, 2018.

Country	Total Population	Active Military Personnel (000)	Contribution to UN Peacekeeping	Peacekeeping Contribution
Country	Total Population	Active Military Personnel (000)	Contribution to UN Peacekeeping	Per 100,000 Inhabitants	As Percentage of the armed forces
Argentina	44,293,293	74	258	0.6	0.35
Bangladesh	157,826,578	157	7,111	4.5	4.53
Brazil	207,353,391	335	265	0.1	0.08
India	1,281,935,911	1,395	6,711	5.2	0.48
Ghana	27,499,924	16	2,621	9.5	16.38
Pakistan	204,924,861	654	6,098	0.3	0.93
Uruguay	3,360,148	25	949	28.2	3.8

Note. Population data from World Factbook, military personnel from International Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance 2018, contributions of military personnel to UN peacekeeping operations from UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations as of July 31, 2018.

The comparison with the Latin American countries of Argentina and Brazil is revealing in so far as they experienced roughly simultaneously the end of military dictatorship. In all three cases, the consolidation of democracy was an important factor in motivating an increased role in UN peacekeeping.¹ After an initial peak in peacekeeping contributions in the early 1990, however, the Uruguayan exceptionalism clearly comes to the fore. As democracy consolidated, Uruguay’s participation in peacekeeping did not decrease, but it began to experience an unprecedented high.

The election in 2005 of the first left-wing President ever in Uruguayan history, Tabaré Vázquez, marked an important point in the evolution of Uruguayan civil–military relations (Pion-Berlin & Martínez, 2017, pp. 73–74). Parts of the left and center-left coalition Frente Amplio (literally: Broad Front), among them members of the former guerrilla group Tupamaros, had been declared “internal enemies” during the dictatorship. The unconditional subordination of the armed forces under the Supreme Command of the Frente Amplio government was a critical test case for the democratic control of the military, which it passed without major incidents. Vázquez made important strides in calling those responsible for grave human rights violations during the dictatorship to justice. His government reinterpreted the 1986 Law on the Expiry of the Punitive Claims of the State (Ley de Caducidad de la Pretensión Punitiva del Estado), an impunity law that had been passed under pressure by the military and that was later confirmed in a public referendum. The prosecution of several military officers, a former minister and ex-President José María Bordaberry, show that even if there existed a tacit understanding between the military and the political elite that had negotiated the agreement that ended the dictatorship (Pacto del Club Naval), this was not irreversible.

Vázquez’s government also moved to reform the legal and institutional framework of the security and defense sector, which had been left largely untouched during the first two decades under democracy. In February 2010, the National Defense Framework Law was passed providing for an overarching legal frame to govern the defense sector according to the highest democratic standards (Pion-Berlin, 2013, p. 49). The Framework Law was the result of a deliberative process that involved all major political parties, civil society organizations, and military stakeholders. Unanimously approved in Parliament, the political conditions appeared to be in place for the incoming President José Mujica (2010–2015) to implement policies strengthening civilian oversight in day-to-day policymaking and to address the pending reform of military service.

However, after 2010, changes were slow to come about. Two defense policy directives (Uruguay, 2014, 2016) that were adopted in 2014 and 2016 entailed few substantial innovations but largely consolidated the military doctrines already in place. In 2019, in a symbolically important act, a new Organic Ley of the Armed Forces (Ley Orgánica de las Fuerzas Armadas, Law Nº 19.775) replaced the one adopted during the dictatorship. The new law eliminated the military courts of honor, reduced the number of generals, coronels and navy captains, and reformed the rules of promotion, amongst other. Nevertheless, the Ministry of Defense, a key institution for democratic control, has remained institutionally weak. With a reduced number of civilian staff, it does not match the capacities for agenda setting and policy evaluation of the generously staffed armed forces commands, especially the Army.

In sum, while the military’s involvement in peacekeeping peaked during 2004–2013 and remained high afterward, there appears to be no cumulative effect toward the strengthening of civilian control, especially after the adoption of the Framework Law in 2010. Quite to the contrary, in the most authoritative study of peacekeeping’s effects in Latin America of the 2000s, Sotomayor (2014) concluded that Uruguay’s massive involvement in UN peacekeeping “has increased the army’s leverage vis-à-vis other services and even civilians” (p. 97). Sotomayor further argued that peacekeeping failed to introduce significant changes in the military (pp. 118–123) and that it “has neither empowered diplomats nor increased civilian intervention in defense policies” (p. 189). This article not only updates Sotomayor’s contribution but complements the rather broad approach mandated by his comparative research design with an in-depth discussion of three elements of civil–military relations in the context of peacekeeping that were not, or only partially, discussed by Sotomayor: civilian oversight, civilian policy management, and armed forces–society relations. In what follows, we first present our operationalization of democratic control and then proceed to examine empirically whether and how Uruguay’s participation in peacekeeping has influenced civil–military relations.

Peacekeeping and Democratic Civil–Military Relations

Civilian control of the military constitutes a basic criterion of democratic rule (Feaver, 2003, p. 5). However, there is no agreed upon standard how to measure democratic control (Born, 2006; Bruneau & Matei, 2008; Feaver, 1996). For the purpose of this study, we take a practical approach and focus on three aspects of civil–military relations relevant to democratic control that can be examined in the light of a specific policy field: civilian oversight, civilian policy management, and military–society relations.

Civilian oversight refers strictly to control functions. Ideally, these are exercised through institutionalized mechanisms (Trinkunas, 2001, pp. 169–170) in order to ensure that the military acts according to standards defined by civilian authorities. Furthermore, scholars widely agree that democratic control entails civilian involvement in defense and defense-related policies, especially in consolidated democracies where it can be assumed that the military stays out of domestic politics (Cottey, Edmunds, & Forster, 2002, pp. 37–38). We refer to this as civilian policy management,² the extent to which civilians penetrate and are immersed with (peacekeeping) policies. As Fitch (2001, pp. 62–63) writes, under democratic standards, the military is subordinate politically, subordinate to the rule of law and to policies. Thus, civilian policy management emphasizes the day-to-day practices of oversight and working hand in hand in military and defense policymaking.

Lastly, relations between society and the armed forces are important in that they reflect and reinforce the stance of civilian authorities vis-à-vis the military. The exact link between democracy and armed forces–society relations is complex and not straightforward. Nevertheless, there is broad consensus in the literature that in democracy, “somehow, society at large must also be shaken from its slumber so that defense and military affairs become subjects of renewed public curiosity” (Young, 2006, p. 28; see also Pion-Berlin & Martínez, 2017, p. 3). Underlying this reasoning are Janowitz’s (1960) ideas on the necessity of military values to reflect broadly those of society (see Burk, 2002; Cottey et al., 2002). As Feaver and Kohn (2001) have warned, “the all voluntary military drifting too far away from civilian society” creates a “gap” that poses “real problems for civilian control” (p. 4). Not least, because politicians that stand democratic elections are bound by their constituencies’ will, the way society positions itself in relation to the military will be reflected in the degree of responsibility civilian authorities perceive regarding their democratic duty of controlling the armed forces.

The assessment of civilian oversight, policy management, and armed forces–society relations builds on qualitative analysis of secondary literature and primary sources, including publicly accessible government documents, newspaper articles, survey data, public opinion polls, informal conversations with military personnel and policy makers as well as interviews carried out with the same target groups in Montevideo, Uruguay, during July 2018. All conversations and interviews were held in Spanish. All Spanish sources we cite are our own translations.

Civilian Oversight

In order to assess whether and how civilians exercise oversight in the area of peacekeeping, we review how the UN’s reimbursement of peacekeeping has been managed. There are two types of reimbursement. The first is for uniformed personnel, which is reimbursed at a standard rate of US$1,428 per person per month (UN Peacekeeping, 2019). The second is for equipment as well as personnel and support services to peacekeeping contingents (such as aerial transport or drinking water) according to a rate set in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed between the UN and the contributing country. Over the years, the UN has developed a sophisticated verification system to guarantee that peacekeeping contingents and their equipment meet the standards agreed to in the MoU.

Between 1992 and 2009, the military handled UN reimbursements independently. The commanders in chief of the three services managed and invested the compensations received for equipment and services without supervision by the Ministry of Defense or any of the three national accounting agencies: the Internal Audit Office and the General Accounting Office, both independently operating institutions under the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the Court of Audits, which is independent of the government. Self-management, which fell clearly short of adequate oversight, failed to raise serious concerns in either the government or the opposition parties. Instead, political authorities, like the military leadership, publicly welcomed the economic returns from peacekeeping (Cámara de Diputados, 1996; Cámara de Senadores, 2013).

The first step to establish civilian oversight over the so-called UN funds dates from 2007, when Defense Minister Azucena Berrutti commissioned an internal audit of the Army (Auditoría Interna de la Nación [AIN], 2007). This was soon followed by a second one (AIN, 2009) as well as by audits of the Navy (AIN, 2009) and Air Force (AIN, 2011, 2012). Additionally, in 2008, the government-independent Court of Audits requested information from the Ministry of Defense after newspaper reports had denounced financial irregularities in managing the UN’s reimbursements (Observatorio Cono Sur de Defensa y Fuerzas Armadas, 2007).

All of the different reports found inconsistencies and irregularities, including undeclared and unauthorized expenses and the existence of several unknown bank accounts. The Army’s management of UN peacekeeping funds, the Ministry’s Audit Office (AIN, 2007) concluded, had “substantive weaknesses that are manifested in the lack of sufficient control mechanisms and adequate supervision”. Based on the available documentation, in most cases, the AIN found it impossible to even evaluate the administration of the funds. Its conclusion was thus that the systems of all three services did “not conform” to the financial accounting procedures as defined in Uruguayan law (AIN, 2007, 2009, 2011). In the case of the Army, according to the former President of the Court of Audits, this included the fact that UN reimbursements were used for purposes other than peacekeeping, such as the construction of a special prison for military personnel found guilty of human rights violations during the dictatorship (Búsqueda, 2008).

The situation failed to trigger any consequences for those involved. It did prompt a legal reform, however, that subjected the reimbursements to the same control and oversight mechanisms as other public funds (Uruguay, 2008, Art. 88). Nevertheless, the UN payments would still not appear on governments’ annual budget statements until 2016, preventing both Parliament and the public from exercising oversight unless the Minister of Defense was formally requested to report before the legislature.

Based on information from internal audits of the Ministry of Defense (AIN, 2007) and its annual reports to Parliament,³ a conservative estimate reveals that during 1992–2008, the military self-managed roughly US$700 million without civilian oversight. With a yearly average of US$54 million, peacekeeping funds represented about 50% of the average annual investments of the military during the same period.⁴ In 2005 alone, UN reimbursements amounted to about one third of the total military budget that was managed without any form of external control (GlobalSecurity, 2019).

Civilian oversight was enforced in 2010, although not on the sole initiative of civilian authorities. The Ministry of Defense received information about budget irregularities in the Navy, including the illegal management of UN peacekeeping funds (Psetizki, 2010). It is widely believed that these were leaked due to internal quarrels within the Navy command (Búsqueda, 2010). The judiciary received over a dozen denunciations and in the course of the investigations, new cases of corruption and fraud were opened. What the prosecutors described as a situation of “institutionalized corruption within the Navy” (Búsqueda, 2013, p. 10) involved the repeated misuse of UN reimbursements (Búsqueda, 2011). In a complex and prolonged judicial process still under way, one of the three former commanders in chief of the Navy who have been investigated was sentenced to prison.

In 2016, the government’s annual budget statement included for the first time a detailed list of items for which UN reimbursements had been used (Uruguay, Poder Ejecutivo, 2016). According to government information, of the annual close to US$32 million, more than half (58%) were payments for personnel, 14% were destined to investment, and the remaining 28% was used for predeployment training and mission preparation (Cámara de Diputados, 2018, pp. 13–14). In comparison with previous years, the number of peacekeepers and thus reimbursement was considerably lower in 2016–2017. Even then, however, peacekeeping constituted an important addition to the regular defense budget that amounted to only 0.85% of gross domestic product in 2017 (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2018, p. 506), roughly similar to defense spending over the past 15 years.

Based on the review of civilian oversight over the management of peacekeeping funds, it can neither be said that peacekeeping has enhanced civilian control nor that it has reduced it. Over one and a half decades, UN reimbursements were not subject to civilian oversight unlike all other budgetary allocations for the armed forces. Yet, since the management and use of peacekeeping funds were regulated in 2008, the only misuse known were the frauds in the Navy reported in 2010. The military has strong incentives to avoid legal problems over UN funds given that peacekeeping has made up for a substantial part of its financial resources and hence it’s political standing. At the same time, the military’s obedience to and compliance with the regulatory framework reflects the historical pattern of civil–military relations in Uruguay, whereby the military’s autonomy is mainly the result of a tacit “pact of convenience” between military and civilian authorities. Civilians, as this section has shown, have only slowly developed an interest in exercising effective oversight over peacekeeping funds.

Civilian Policy Management

Historically, civilians’ involvement in military and defense policymaking in Uruguay has been low. Civilians have rarely looked at the armed forces as the ultimate guarantor of national security (Real de Azua, 1969, p. 20), and consequently, there was little interest in developing civilian capacities to create a sophisticated understanding of defense matters. Civilians’ neglect left the military with considerable autonomy not only in technical matters but also regarding military training and education, force structure, and strategic and intelligence matters (González Guyer, 2013, pp. 101, 118).

The same autonomy for a lack of civilian involvement is evident in the area of peacekeeping. If Uruguay has proven to be an active and reliable peacekeeping partner at the UN, this is largely because the Armed Forces and especially the Army have been eager to take on the role. The Army became a protagonist of peacekeeping in the early 1990s with the first massive deployment of peacekeepers under way. “Keen to push the issue,” (Interview with Hébèrt Figoli, designated in 1994 as Head of Communications of the Army, Montevideo, July 14, 2018), the military promoted the establishment of a National Support System for Peacekeeping Operations (Sistema Nacional de Apoyo a las Operaciones de Paz, SINOMAPA) in order to coordinate the different national actors and designate a single interlocutor for dealing with the UN. Officially established in 1994, SINOMAPA is headed by a general and brings together the three armed forces, the four ministers of Defense, International Relations, Finance and Interior, as well as the Military Hospital. It depends on the Joint Chiefs of Defense (Estado Mayor de la Defensa, ESMADE), which in turn responds to the Minister of Defense. Somewhat paradoxically, however, the Minister of Defense also serves as a member of SINOMAPA and thus under the lead of the Joint Chiefs of Defense.

Through the coordinating, executive, and advisory functions the military fulfills through its different representations in SINOMAPA (Decree 103/2017), it has exercised considerable influence on peacekeeping policymaking given that civilian authorities have depended on its operational knowledge. At the time Uruguay had a large military presence in the peacekeeping operations of Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, the Congo and Haiti, it had no ambassadors in the respective countries who could have served as an additional source of information to calibrate the military’s point of view and to communicate with the mission in direct representation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The knowledge asymmetry in favor of the military has further been accentuated by the fact that many peacekeepers deploy to more than one mission or go on to work for the UN. In consequence, the military has a privileged understanding of the UN system, which has proven crucial in the negotiations with New York. Thus, it is no surprise that in lobbying the Parliament for the approval of new peacekeeping contingents, the critical role has fallen on the military.

Strictly speaking, in order to prove the influence of the military on peacekeeping policymaking, one would need to show that the military prevailed in disagreements with civilian authorities. However, it is difficult to provide such smoking gun evidence as civilians hardly ever disagree with the military’s well-argued, pro-peacekeeping initiatives. Uruguay is probably the only country in the world that has an Association for Peacekeeping Veterans (Asociación de Veteranos de Operaciones de Paz, AVOPU), a civil society organization representing the interests of Uruguayan peacekeeping (which effectively means: the military). Through its governing body, AVOPU has been able to successfully exercise political lobbying in support of the armed forces. Together, this leads to a situation a high-ranking officer with a distinguished peacekeeping trajectory at ESMADE described as follows:

Because of the lack of peacekeeping expertise in the Ministry of Defense, it has issued few guidelines on the matter. The Army, on the other hand, counts with a large number of trained and experienced personnel and was therefore able to make suggestions and keep control of the general agenda. (Interview with Roque García, Montevideo, July 12, 2018)

An example demonstrating the weight of the military in the area of peacekeeping is the potentially controversial question of where Uruguayan peacekeepers should deploy. As a small state from the global south, Uruguay has traditionally been a staunch supporter of nonintervention and the nonuse of force, two international norms that are reflected in peacekeeping’s fundamental principles of consent, impartiality and minimum use of force. Uruguay’s official foreign policy discourses still emphasize these principles (see Observatorio Sudamericano de Defensa y Fuerzas Armadas, 2013), but in practice, they have been challenged by the mandates of many contemporary peacekeeping operations including those Uruguay has participated in (see Bellamy & Hunt, 2015). An illustrative case is the mission in the Congo, where peacekeepers have been asked to protect civilians using force offensively if necessary. Yet, although one might expect the Ministry of Foreign Affairs voicing concerns over such missions, there has been no discussion on the limits of Uruguay’s peacekeeping engagement. “Uruguay has always dealt with those situations that existed. After all, one is a member of the UN so you abide by certain requirements,” a long-term member of the House’s Defense Committee remarked (Interview with Germán Coutinho, Partido Colorado, Montevideo, July 17, 2018). Politicians’ stance appears to have been one of going along with peacekeeping’s developments, and since the military has been keen on participating, the relaxation of Uruguay’s traditional foreign policy principles met no resistance.

The military’s proactive stance in providing for peacekeeping training and education is another example showing how the armed forces turned Uruguay into a top contributor. The Army was first in pushing for a specialized peacekeeping training center in 1995. The center became a school, and in 2008 the school became the National Peacekeeping School (Escuela Nacional de Operaciones de Paz del Uruguay, ENOPU) integrating all three branches of the armed forces. ENOPU has no civilian staff and only few civilians offering courses in specific areas such as legal issues and gender. The school uses UN peacekeeping manuals, but civilian authorities have left it to ENOPU to develop the specific contents and organization of its courses.

The development of a specific peacekeeping doctrine is another initiative of the Army that shows how the military has been filling spaces—and competently so—where civilians have shown scant involvement. The so-called Comisión Doctrina was set up in early 2018 to develop a set of guidelines for the Ministry of Defense containing information on where UN peacekeeping is headed and which criteria should be applied to define Uruguay’s participation (Interview with Roque García, Montevideo, July 12, 2018). Such a doctrine would provide not only a military but a political frame of reference and would constitute an important guide given the absence of any other defined peacekeeping policy.

The military’s autonomy in peacekeeping reflects neither illegitimate interference by the armed forces nor a breach of duty of civilian supervision. Rather, it is the result of a tacit agreement of mutual convenience that nevertheless falls short of the ideal of civilian control. Historically, Uruguayan politicians have had few votes to gain by involving themselves in military and defense policy, and this has been more so since the last military dictatorship left the armed forces with a tainted image. As an observing member of the Senate’s Commission on Defense affirmed, “there has never been a serious discussion on what the place of the armed forces in society should be” (Interview with Pablo Mieres, Partido Independiente, Montevideo, July 17, 2018).

Lacking a general political interest to get involved with military and defense policy, civilian authorities have not perceived the need to play a more active role in the day-to-day policymaking of peacekeeping. For the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “what mattered most was how we looked in New York, not so much what impact peacekeeping actually had in Africa and the Caribbean” (Interview with a former DG in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Montevideo, July 11, 2018). As long as the armed forces ensured their peacekeeping policies met the standards of the UN, the civilian leadership was happy to leave it in their hands.

Armed Forces–Society Relations

As stated above, the relation between the armed forces and society is manifold and complex, and so is its relation to democracy. This sections sheds light on different aspects of armed forces–society relations, which together represent the central relations in the citizen–soldier–politician triangle as proposed by Pion Berlin and Martínez (2017). First, we examine the process by which peacekeeping has been integrated into a broader set of policies. So long as peacekeeping stands as an isolated policy field, it is difficult to see how it can bring society and the military closer together. This was the case in Uruguay until the mid-2000s. Peacekeeping was strictly confined to the area of defense policy, and no attempt was made to integrate it into the country's foreign policy portfolio (Sotomayor, 2014, pp. 181–184). This began to change only in 2005, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was rather accidentally drawn into peacekeeping as Uruguay’s South American neighbors set up a coordination mechanism to discuss their participation in MINUSTAH. In the regularly celebrated meetings between 2005 and 2015, both the vice ministers of defense and foreign affairs took part (see Jenne, 2019, p. 19).

Another step toward integrating peacekeeping into the area of foreign policy originated with Uruguay’s candidacy for the UN Security Council for the term 2016–2017. After its bid had been made official in 2008, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs found in peacekeeping the country’s most tangible contribution to the UN and turned it into a key pillar of its candidacy. A high-ranking officer then in charge of peacekeeping at the Navy remembered that President Tabaré Vázquez had been given special honors by U.S. President Barack Obama during the UN’s annual General Assembly meeting. “No one knew why, but later we found out that it was because Uruguay has been one of the top contributing countries per capita in the world” (Interview with Ricardo Barboza, Montevideo, July 13, 2018).

Since peacekeeping has become fairly integrated in the international projection of Uruguay’s foreign policy makers, in 2016, a major security and defense document acknowledged for the first time the “fundamental” role peacekeeping has played for the country’s foreign policy (Uruguay, 2016). A staff member at SINOMAPA confirmed that “the fact that our ambassadors had to deal with peacekeeping in detail during the term at the UN Security Council brought them closer to the system [SINOMAPA]” (Interview with Carina de los Santos, Montevideo, July 13, 2018.). If the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had previously only sporadically attended the monthly meetings of the National Support System, in recent years “they would always be present” (Interview with Carina de los Santos, Montevideo, July 19, 2018.).

If peacekeeping has become part of a broader set of policies, has it brought the military and the general society closer together? Results from an online survey implemented in 2018 indicate that the experience of serving in a peacekeeping operation changed how the military sees its relation to society. A total of 649 officers and noncommissioned officers in the three branches were asked to what extent they agreed with the following statements: (1) Uruguayan society holds a positive image of the armed forces. (2) Uruguayan society values the work of the armed forces. A χ² test of independence was performed to examine the relation between the respondents’ perception of society’s view and valuation of the military, on the one hand, and whether the respondents have been deployed in a peacekeeping operation, on the other. The results indicate that a relation exists between the respondents’ answer and their peacekeeping experience (χ² = 26.22, p = .00; χ² = 17.58, p = .01). Tables 2 and 3 show the observed and expected distribution of answers.

Table 2.

Proportions (%) of Agreement/Disagreement: Positive Image.

Experience in Peacekeeping Operations	Disagree	Neither Agree Nor Disagree	Agree
	Statistical significance based on logit model
No experience	1.69	2.16	3.54
	[0.82]	[1.17]	[5.4]
	0.87	0.98	−1.86
Experience in at least one peacekeeping operation	9.4*	13.71*	69.49*
	[10.27]	[14.7]	[67.63]
	−0.87	−0.98	1.86

Note. Observed values in %, [expected values in %], and difference in % points (bold). χ² = 16.78, p = .00.

Table 3.

Proportions (%) of Agreement/Disagreement: Valuation.

Experience in Peacekeeping Operations	Disagree	Neither Agree Nor Disagree	Agree
	Statistical significance based on logit model
No experience	2.16	2.47	2.77
	[1.66]	[1.6]	[0.43]
	0.49	0.86	2.35
One peacekeeping operation	7.86	7.7	15.72
	[7.04]	[6.8]	[17.45]
	0.82	0.91	−1.73
Two peacekeeping operations	6.47	5.08	14.48
	[5.86]	[5.66]	[14.52]
	0.61	−0.57	−0.04
Three peacekeeping operations or more	6.01	6.47	22.8**
	[7.94]	[7.67]	[19.68]
	−1.93	−1.19	3.12

Note. Observed values in %, [expected values in %], and difference in % points (bold). χ² = 17.58, p = .01.

With regard to the question whether society holds a positive image of the armed forces, those who had been deployed in at least one peacekeeping operation tended to agree more often than those with no experience as peacekeepers (Table 2). There is almost no difference with regard to how often someone had served as a peacekeeper, but a logistic regression shows that the results are statistically significant for those who served once, twice, or three and more times.

With respect to valuation, the strongest and statistically significant relation exists between those who served at least 3 times as a peacekeeper and the perception that society values the work of the armed forces (Table 3). It is important to note that the results do not necessarily indicate causality as it is likely that some self-selection effect exists that prompts those with a more positive view of military–society relations to deploy as peacekeepers. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the differences between the observed and expected results are moderate, it is possible to conclude that peacekeeping has moved the military at least somewhat closer to society.

Has peacekeeping had the same effect on Uruguayan citizens and how they relate to the armed forces? Considering the level of trust in the armed forces since 1995, Figure 2 shows that neither Uruguay’s large-scale deployments in the first half of the 1990s nor its quantitative leap as a top contributing country in the early 2000s seemed to have had a decisive impact. In fact, within the observed period, the number of those who expressed at least some trust in the military hit the 50% mark for the first time in 2000, just after a slump in Uruguay’s peacekeeping contributions. The significant change that occurred around 2012 and that potentially set off a new trend toward more generalized trust is too tardy to count as an effect of the military’s large-scale involvement in peacekeeping that began in the early 2000s.

Figure 2.

Uruguay: trust in the armed forces. Adapted from source: Latinobarómetro database 2017, Corporación Latinobarómetro. Available at http://www.latinobarometro.org/latContents.jsp

Instead, it is likely that the increase in trust reflects a new emphasis on civic missions and military assistance, which were at the heart of a public relations campaign the Army launched in 2012–2013 and that were highlighted by former Defense Minister Eleuterio Fernández Huidobro. During his term (2011–2016), controversial issues such as the crimes committed during the dictatorship were avoided (El País, 2015) and instead, the armed forces’ community work was highlighted.

The argument that community work rather than peacekeeping influenced the level of trust finds support when comparing the level of trust in the capital, Montevideo, and Uruguay’s interior. Based on data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (2019) for selected years between 2007 and 2017, on a scale from 1 (no trust) to 7 (full trust), the average of trust in the military expressed in Montevideo is 4.23; in the interior, it is 4.83. A mean difference hypothesis test shows that the contrast is statistically significant at the level of 0.05; in other words, it is not coincidental. In the interior, the military is more frequently called to assist in natural disasters and typically carries out a range of different community works such as painting schools, which has turned it into a highly visible, respected, and trusted actor.

Taken together, based on the indicator considered here, it is not possible to affirm that peacekeeping has changed how society relates to the military. Nevertheless, there is evidence that it has diminished the gap between the foreign policy elite and the military, at least to some extent and that it has brought the military a little closer to society.

Conclusions

The article set out to examine whether peacekeeping has changed democratic control over the military in Uruguay, a consolidated democracy. Sotomayor (2014) has previously argued that Uruguay’s participation in peacekeeping has increased the Army’ standing vis-à-vis civilians and other security forces and that it failed to trigger greater involvement of civilian actors in defense policymaking. Our findings are broadly in line with Sotomayor’s, although more nuanced, and we draw slightly different conclusions. Our discussion of the management of peacekeeping funds has shown that peacekeeping opened a new field of action for the military where civilians only gradually established full oversight. Like Sotomayor, we too found that the armed forces’ traditional autonomy in military and defense policymaking has persisted in the area of peacekeeping. However, we provided evidence that peacekeeping has created conditions to bring the military and society closer together.

Where we clearly part with Sotomayor is the conclusions regarding the quality of Uruguayan democracy. According to Sotomayor, peacekeeping “contributed to mostly illiberal and non-democratic causes” (Sotomayor, 2014, p. 194). Because it failed to “improve transparency and accountability, empower civilians, persuade the armed forces to democratize or to acquiesce, or fully reorient officers away from their interest in domestic politics,” he concluded that “Uruguay retained more traditional and undemocratic practices” (Sotomayor, 2014, p. 195).

Considering peacekeeping in the context of civil–military relations in Uruguay generally, it must be concluded that the consequences of political neglect have mainly been those of missed opportunities rather than democratic deficits. The military has abstained from overstepping its competences in peacekeeping and managed it largely successfully, except for a number of disciplinary problems during deployment (see, for instance, Montevideo Portal, 2003). Even with regard to these cases, however, civilian authorities adopted measures to improve the prosecution and sanctioning of misconduct once they began fearing that peacekeepers’ penal offenses would damage the country’s image internationally (UN Peacekeeping, 2016).

Although the military’s autonomy in peacekeeping falls short of the ideal where civilians are actively and competently engaged in military and defense policies, it reflects a rather common situation in Latin America and arguably in other parts of the world where civilians have few incentives to develop “defense wisdom” (Pion-Berlin, 2005; Pion-Berlin & Trinkunas, 2007). Such a situation does not necessarily affect the balance of power between civilians and the armed forces. The Uruguayan military has strong motivations to comply with the standards set by the government not least because peacekeeping is a profitable mission in monetary terms. Thus, the failure of civilians to manage defense may indeed have contributed to “managing” the military (Pion-Berlin, 2005). As long as civilian rule was provided, the military obeyed. Being all else equal, it is plausible to argue that without peacekeeping dissatisfaction in the military would have been higher due to low salaries, limited operational readiness and the lack of professional opportunities to perform military core tasks (as opposed to community assistance). Dissatisfaction, in turn, is one of the fundamental challengers of democratic civil–military relations.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was funded by Chilean National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) through Programa Fondecyt de Iniciación (2017), Project No. 11170387.

ORCID iD

Julián G. Guyer

Nicole Jenne

Notes

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