Patterns in Liberal Democratic Civil-Military Relations

Abstract

According to "the regime theory of civil-military relations," responsibilities for such relations are conditioned in every state by a nationally evolved regime of "principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge" in matters of civil-military relations. This article amplifies this theory by setting out a normative, Westminster-based model of the regime that provides the legal, regulatory, traditional, and institutional structures for civil-military relations in liberal democracies. The author contends that the importance of controlling behavior has been eclipsed in many civil control progams in emerging democracies because of a drive to build the hardware of civil-military relations while ignoring or incompletely installing first the regime, the software, that supports them.