Ronald R. Krebs

A School for the Nation? How Military Service Does Not Build Nations, and How It Might

Theodore Roosevelt and his fellow Progressives hoped that universal military training would “Americanize” the mass of newcomers who had recently landed on America’s shores. Leonid Brezhnev similarly believed that widespread service in the Red Army would forge a uniaed Soviet citizenry committed to “the Socialist Motherland,” internationalism, and “the friendship of the peoples.”1 Like many leaders before and after them, Roosevelt and Brezhnev turned to the armed forces and the policy of universal military service at least in part to help build cohesive national communities out of their countries’ multinational jumbles. This view of the military as a key institution for the labeling and transmission of social values has roots stretching back to ancient Greece,2 but the armed forces arst achieved great popularity as a nation builder toward the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, the military was widely hailed across Europe as a “school for the nation,” and its apparent success was emulated as far away as czarist Russia and Meiji Japan. As countries across Africa and Asia won independence in the decades following World War II, they charged their armies with weaving a national fabric rent by communal rifts. Throughout the twentieth century, countries across the ideological spectrum have turned to the armed forces in the quest for national integration.3 A School for the Nation?

The Citizen-Soldier Tradition in the United States Has Its Demise Been Greatly Exaggerated?

Many contend that the citizen-soldier tradition in the United States is dead. They argue that the elimination of the draft in 1973, and the establishment of the all-volunteer force (AVF), severed the link between military service and citizenship. The author maintains that this conventional wisdom is wrong. Critics of the AVF have idealized the pre-AVF U.S. military; they have failed to recognize that the AVF was more a product of change in U.S. citizenship ideals than a cause of them; and they have asserted a homology between institutional design (military recruitment system) and a cultural phenomenon (the citizen-soldier tradition) that has little historical purchase. This article reconceptualizes the citizen-soldier tradition as a set of rhetorical conventions, and it demonstrates that these tropes continue to shape political debate in the United States. From this perspective, the AVF did not condemn the citizen-soldier to death: it gave him or her a new lease on life.

Talking about terror: Counterterrorist campaigns and the logic of representation

Counterterrorist state forces and terrorist insurgents compete to control not only territory and populations but language.The success of counterterrorism, therefore, hinges crucially on representational practices. Defeating terrorism in the long run requires both undermining the legitimacy of political violence and its purveyors and opening space for the pursuit of a less violent but still legitimate politics, and these are fundamentally rhetorical projects. Yet the literature has not shed much light on either the range of conceivable counterterrorist representational strategies or on states’ particular representational choices.This article presents and illustrates a typology of counterterrorist representational strategies. It argues that state leaders should ideally delegitimize the extremists’ means while politicizing some of their aspirations. Leaders often do not pursue this rhetorical path, however, due to the constraints imposed by existing understandings of terrorist organizations and especially by foundational discourses. These arguments are explored empirically through studies of the Indian, Spanish, and Turkish counterterrorist campaigns. The article concludes by extending the framework to clarify why the militarized rhetoric of the so-called ‘War on Terror’ is counterproductive.

Rhetoric, Legitimation, and Grand Strategy

This introductory framing paper theorizes the role of legitimation—the public justification of policy—in the making of grand strategy. We contend that the process of legitimation has significant and independent effects on grand strategys constituent elements and on how grand strategy is formulated and executed. Legitimation is integral to how states define the national interest and identify threats, to how the menu of policy options is constituted, and to how audiences are mobilized. Second, we acknowledge that legitimation matters more at some times than others, and we develop a model specifying the conditions under which it affects political processes and outcomes. We argue that the impact of legitimation depends on the governments need for mobilization and a policys visibility, and from the intersection of these two factors we derive five concrete hypotheses regarding when legitimation is most likely to have an impact on strategy. Finally, we explore who wins: why legitimation efforts sometimes succeed in securing public assent, yet at other times fall short. Our framework emphasizes what is said (the content of legitimation), how it is said (technique), and the context in which it is said. We conclude by introducing the papers in this special issue, revisiting the larger theoretical stakes involved in studying rhetoric and foreign policy, and speculating about how changes in the technologies and sites of communication have, or have not, transformed legitimation and leadership in world politics.

How Dominant Narratives Rise and Fall: Military Conflict, Politics, and the Cold War Consensus

Contemporaries and historians often blame the errors and tragedies of US policy during the Cold War on a dominant narrative of national security: the “Cold War consensus.†Its usual periodization, according to which it came together in the late 1940s and persisted until the late 1960s when it unraveled amidst the trauma of the Vietnam War, fits well with a common theory of change in ideas and discourse. That theory expects stasis until a substantial unexpected failure (in this domain, military defeat) discredits dominant ideas and unsettles dominant coalitions. However, systematic data reveal the standard history of this important case to be wrong. Based on a large-scale content analysis of newspaper editorials on foreign affairs, this article shows that the Cold War narrative was narrower than conventional accounts suggest, that it did not coalesce until well into the 1950s, and that it began to erode even before the Vietnam Wars Americanization in 1965. To make sense of this puzzle, I develop an alternative theory of the rise and fall of the narratives that underpin and structure debate over national security. Rooted in the dynamics of public narrative and the domestic politics of the battlefield, the theory argues that military failure impedes change in the narrative in whose terms government officials had legitimated the mission, whereas victory creates the opportunity for departures from the dominant narrative. Process-tracing reveals causal dynamics consistent with the theory: failure in the Korean War, which might have undermined Cold War globalism, instead facilitated the Cold War narratives rise to dominance (or consensus); and the triumph of the Cuban Missile Crisis made possible that dominant narratives breakdown before the upheaval of Vietnam. This hard and important case suggests the need to rethink the relationship between success, failure, and change in dominant narratives of national security—and perhaps in other policy domains as well.

In the shadow of war: The effects of conflict on liberal democracy

Events of and since 11 September 2001 have renewed interest in age-old questions about liberal-democratic governance in the shadow of insecurity, crisis, and war. Academic lawyers in particular have engaged in a vigorous debate about how liberal polities can confront security threats while maintaining their commitment to the rule of law. Yet few empirical political scientists, and even fewer scholars of international relations, have weighed in. The short- and especially long-run effects of international conflict on liberal-democratic institutions and processes remain an underexplored aspect of the second-image-reversed. Prompted by recent research in law, this article finds that prominent arguments often rest on shaky theoretical and empirical foundations. It argues that the two most notable traditions of thought on war and democracy are complementary, not competing; that small wars may also have substantial consequences; and that analysts must distinguish clearly among three distinct causal phenomena—threat, mobilization, and warfare—when considering conflicts impact on democracy. The article critically reviews the effects of conflict on both participation and contestation; identifies the salient outstanding questions and suggests hypotheses addressing them; and explores the implications for contemporary normative debates over executive authority and emergency powers.

Washington's troubling obsession with public diplomacy

‘Public diplomacy’ has become the holy grail of American foreign policy. In a Washington polarised by sharp partisan divisions, few issues have generated as much consensus. Numerous recent reports from think tanks, blue-ribbon commissions and government advisory groups offer recommendations for how the United States could improve its efforts to sway public opinion abroad, but public diplomacy is the object of a neverending, ultimately futile quest. While the tone and style of US foreign policy could stand improvement, the rest of the world is far more troubled by its substance. Rather than fixating on public diplomacy, pundits and policy makers alike should recognise that Americas power and policies are the problem, not its inability to communicate.‘Public diplomacy’ has become the holy grail of American foreign policy. In a Washington polarised by sharp partisan divisions, few issues have generated as much consensus. Numerous recent reports from think tanks, blue-ribbon commissions and government advisory groups offer recommendations for how the United States could improve its efforts to sway public opinion abroad, but public diplomacy is the object of a neverending, ultimately futile quest. While the tone and style of US foreign policy could stand improvement, the rest of the world is far more troubled by its substance. Rather than fixating on public diplomacy, pundits and policy makers alike should recognise that Americas power and policies are the problem, not its inability to communicate.

Correspondence: Selling the Market Short? The Marketplace of Ideas and the Iraq War

Chaim Kaufmann’s recent article on the selling of the Iraq war makes a valuable contribution both to the debate over the origins of that war and to scholarship on threat inoation.1 I agree with much of his argument: George W. Bush’s administration misled the public on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) capability; its control over information helped skew the public debate; and the media were insufaciently critical of its claims. I take issue, however, with Kaufmann’s contention that the White House enjoys unparalleled authority in foreign policy matters and that this mainly accounts for the administration’s success. In contrast, I suggest an alternative explanation rooted in the transformative impact of the September 11 attacks on political contest in the United States.

Tell Me a Story: FDR, Narrative, and the Making of the Second World War

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was, by all accounts, a master orator. Yet success eluded him as he sought to make his fellow citizens aware of the threat Nazi Germany posed and to banish isolationists to the illegitimate margins. At other times, however, Roosevelts campaigns to shift the underpinnings of national security debate were more effective. Notably, his definition of the adversary as the Nazi regime, rather than the German people, deeply shaped public discourse during the Second World War. This article explains the uneven results of Roosevelts narrative projects—and those of other presidents—as a product of the intersection of the rhetorical mode he adopted and the rhetorical demands of the environment. During unsettled times, public demand for storytelling is elevated, and presidents who seize that opportunity can shape the narrative landscape and thereby policy. Presidents who fail to align their rhetoric to the moment—such as Roosevelt offering predominantly argument during these critical junctures—allow alternative narratives to proliferate. More broadly, this article offers an account of the structuring of legitimation in the national security arena.

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