The Very Model of a Major Modern Military: World System Influences on the Proliferation of Military Weapons, 1960-1990 (original) (raw)

1997, Dissertation, Stanford University

In recent years, Third-World militarization has become a hallmark of the international order. This build-up has been marked by the proliferation of “advanced," high-technology weaponry in the “developing” world. Today, twenty developing countries possess or are developing ballistic missile systems and over seventy have deployed supersonic fighter aircraft. Well-equipped “state of the art” militaries are no longer restricted to the industrialized “core” powers; military development and economic development, it seems, have become decoupled. This dissertation investigates this rapid militarization by identifying and examining factors affecting the adoption of a variety of force structures (e.g. an independent air force) and weapons systems (e.g. supersonic aircraft, main battle tanks) by nation-states in the 1945-1990 period. Three broad arguments are taken from the literature in efforts to understand this trend. These are the superpower manipulation, national security, and internal political process arguments. Each stresses that weapons acquisition and military force structures are the result of rational calculation by actors in the pursuit of their own self-interest, but vary in their identification of central actors and actor motives. This dissertation adds and emphasizes ideas drawn from institutional theory to develop arguments emphasizing the impact of world-level cultural models of the nation-state on the proliferation process. Reduced to the simplest, but strongest, possible statement, I argue that weapons spread, not solely because of a match between their technical capabilities and national security needs, but because of the highly symbolic, normative nature of militaries and their weaponry. Weapons spread, in part, because highly technological militaries symbolize modernity, efficacy, and independence. The empirical portion of the dissertation is made up of two parts. The first develops panel regressions, using national weapons inventory data as dependent variables for the years 1960,1970, 1980, and 1990. This analysis is supplemented by logistic regressions using indicators of force structure as dependent variables, and by an exploratory event history analysis. The second empirical portion of the dissertation is a series of case studies, designed to explore the mechanisms through which membership in the world system translates into weapons inventories. The primary case examines overall patterns of weapons procurement, and their relationship to regional patterns of conflict in Latin America. This case focuses on the role of national strategic doctrines as a central mediating mechanism, linking the “objective" national security environment with national military organization and procurement. These analyses demonstrate clearly that institutional arguments provide substantial insights into the process of weapons proliferation. Despite reasons for believing that the world military system may function in a unique way, these results demonstrate that it does not. Weapons proliferation, and the spread of modern forms of military organization, are shaped by the same institutional processes that shape the spread of human rights, welfare systems, science policy boards, and conceptions of individualism. A substantial body of institutional theory research has argued that “uniform ideologies and practices are an indication of the responsiveness of nation-states to the wider cultural environment.” (McNeely, 1989:150). This research has demonstrated that that responsiveness does not end in the military realm. National militaries, just as other parts of the nation-state, occupy a constructed identity that shape their structure, practices, purposes and contents. The acquisition of a canonical modern military organization, including modern weaponry is, like the acquisition of a flag, at least in part a product of world-level cultural definitions of the modern nation-state. Like a flag, a military its weaponry are enactments of sovereign status. The results of this research demonstrate that the more a nation interacts with the larger world cultural system, the more it visibly asserts and confirms its sovereign status with the ultimate symbol of nationhood: a military.