Patterns of Civilian Control of the Military in East Asia's New Democracies

Abstract

Successful institutionalization of civilian control of the military is a necessary condition for the consolidation of democracy. This is particularly relevant for East Asia, where the military used to be a key player in the previous authoritarian regimes. This article analyzes the changes, advances, and setbacks in achieving civilian control in five countries that have made the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule: Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand. The empirical analysis is built on a conception of civilian control that distinguishes three areas of political decisionmaking: political recruitment and overall public policymaking, national defense, and internal security. The study shows that only in Taiwan and South Korea have civilians succeeded in curtailing military influence in politics. In contrast, in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, the military has shown itself more or less resilient in guarding its prerogatives in the postauthoritarian era. This seriously impedes the democratically elected authorities' effective power to govern in these countries and has led to democratic deterioration in Thailand and the Philippines. The article highlights three arguments to account for the profound difference between the cases: historical legacies of authoritarian rule and the path of democratic transition, the internal security role of the military, and the relationship between development and democratic consolidation.

Leaving Politics: What Burmese Generals can Learn from South Korean and Indonesian Experiences

“…According to military folklore, in Indonesia soldiers were not just a part of society but they effectively created the nation while South Korean generals have considered themselves the guarantors of national survival. 5 As in the former military regimes of Southern Europe and Latin America, the main challenges in these Asian states have also been the extraction of the armed forces from the political realm. Politicians in South Korea and Indonesia have approached these challenges differently given the disparate political and socioeconomic settings in which they operated.…”

“…One of Kim's main achievements was to destroy the army's traditional locus of political influence, the Hanahoe group, by removing more than one thousand high-ranking officers. 30 Kim reshuffled the 50 top generals and excluded all Hanahoe members from promotions and division commands. 31 In 1996, he succeeded in putting on trial and getting convictions for former presidents Chun and Roh along with thirteen other generals -something that would have been unthinkable just a few years before -for large-scale corruption and their roles in the 1979 coup and the 1980 suppression of the Kwangju uprising.…”

Zivile Kontrolle des Militärs in jungen Demokratien: Agency, Struktur und institutioneller Wandel

“…We do not believe that it is possible to assemble a definitive list of indicators a priori based on which the concrete set of strategies employed in a certain historical situation can be assessed. the actual actions undertaken by civilians are likely to differ depending on the area of civil-military relations they address and on the specific circumstances in which they are chosen and executed (trinkunas 2005;Croissant and Kuehn 2009). similarly, concrete actions are likely to take different shapes but can be functionally equivalent in their result on civil-military relations.…”

“…2 even though few countries remain under direct military rule after the third wave of democratization (siaroff 2009, pp. 92-93), in many newly democratized nations the degree of institutionalized civilian oversight over military affairs is low and the military enjoys considerable political prerogatives and a great deal of institutional autonomy (smith 2005;Beeson and Bellamy 2008;Bryden 2008;Croissant and Kuehn 2009). this ambiguity-the decline of direct forms of military intervention on the one hand and the persistence of military tutelage, prerogatives and contestation of civilian authority on the other hand-challenges scholars to think more thoroughly about how institutional Civilian control is not necessary for a political system to fulfill the minimal criteria of electoral democracy.…”

Overcoming Path Dependence: The Quality of Civilian Control of the Military in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia

“…If, on the other hand, the military has significant influence in political arenas typically reserved for elected leaders, the degree of civilian control is low (and so is the democratic quality of the polity). In order to evaluate the extent of civilian control, Croissant and Kuehn (2009) have proposed to zoom in on three main fields of policy-making: elite recruitment and overall public policy, national defence and internal security. In the following, I will analyse the degree of civilian control in contemporary Indonesia by assessing developments in these three arenas after 1998.…”