The second commentary in our ongoing symposium on Katharine Millar’s Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community. Pinar Bilgin is a professor of International Relations at Bilkent University, Ankara. She is the author of The International in Security, Security in the International (Routledge, 2016) and Regional Security in the Middle East: A Critical Perspective, 2^nd ed. (Routledge, 2019). www.pinarbilgin.me

---

“Support” has emerged as “the new service” following a moment of disconnect with the troops in the UK and the US, we learn from Kate Millar’s book, Support the Troops. How about other parts of the world that apparently experienced no such disconnect? Support the Troops makes no claim to explain what happens outside the US and UK cases. But I wonder if, by missing aspects of the international, we’re missing a part of the condition of possibility of all this? In what follows, I will consider the international that has allowed for “support” to emerge “as the new service” in some parts of the world, even as others continue to serve and support in some other parts of the world.

Millar acknowledges that “StT discourses—almost uniformly—fail to engage with the international” in that Iraqi, Pakistani, and Afghan civilians killed by the wars are rarely mentioned” (175). But then, inter-state wars do not exhaust the international. The author also considers the colonial background. “These states— the US, UK, and others with pervasive support the troops practices, notably Canada and Australia—are also unified by their status as colonial states”, she notes (177). Indeed, following Tarak Barkawi’s argument in Soldiers of Empire, colonial military relations have shaped post-colonial military relations. Yet again, post-/colonial relations do not exhaust the international.

The international in Support the Troops can also be located in post-World War II relations between ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’. When I write ‘Europe’, I refer to Western Europe and North America as the geographies that are put at the centre by those who are carriers of this particular way of relating to the world (Bilgin). Support the Troops underscores the self/other dimension of relations between the ‘Europe’ that left militarism behind and ‘non-Europe’, which seems to fail to do that, when it remarks that

The good story of liberalism is reinforced by the “bad story” of militarism, which align in their understanding of a stark differentiation between violence and formal politics: militarism occurs when something goes wrong with the institutional and normative separation of the civil from the military” (24).

But then, how did militarism come about in ‘non-Europe’?

Let us consider the case of militarism in Africa. Rita Abrahamsen writes that “at the time of independence, Africa seemed an unlikely site for militarism to flourish…Most African political leaders and citizens were torn between distrust and disregard for the men in uniform” (21). However, it all changed “within a short decade”, notes Abrahamsen, highlighting the agency of external actors. While the role of the superpowers in militarising in other parts of the world is well-established, the local driver of militarisation was viewed as innate (see, for example, Thee). In contrast, Abrahamsen underscores that while militarism “had its own internal agents” in Africa, it was learned in a Cold War context where external actors were looking for reliable allies (22):

For Africa’s Western allies, functioning militaries…[were] regarded as naturally conservative institutions that could be relied upon to temper and contain the social pressures and dislocations arising from rapidly changing societies (22).

Needless to say, what is portrayed as “naturally conservative” behaviour on the part of the military had to be rendered as such through training, offered by external actors also referred to as “the professionalization of the army as part of building the modern nation-state” (22). Militarism in Africa was by no means innate, writes Abrahamsen, but “externally dependent and fuelled by external actors”—such ‘dependence’ and fuelling was not isolated to arms transfers and mere technical training, but involved ideological training as well. Put differently, our contemporaries in ‘non-Europe’ do not happen to belong to a past world marred by militarism by their own accord alone. They received expert guidance in developing and maintaining their militarist ways.

Also consider Turkey where the “myth of the military-nation” as explored in Ayşe Gül Altınay, has defined and sustained the Military’s ‘special’ status in the country’s politics since the early days of the Republic. The Military’s claim to something more than a special status, indeed an insistence on their capacity for better governance as compared to the civilians, in turn, was not innate, but learned. Some officers learned these ideas from the mid-1950s onwards, through the training they received in the United States as part of the relationship institutionalised through the NATO membership attained in 1952 (see Bilgin). It was not only NATO members who had access to such training; some regional allies of the United States also had access, as with Brazil’s officers attending the School of the Americas (Hepple).

The set of ideas that sustained the Military’s claim to better governance was known as geopolitics, which was a compound of ideas drawn from Classical Geopolitics but transformed into a theory of state governance (i.e., not only foreign policy). In Turkey’s context, the production and dissemination of this particular understanding of geopolitics as ‘‘science’’  allowed the military  to begin to regain the  room for manoeuvre it began to lose  during the transition to multi-party democracy, Geopolitics as a theory of state governance helped to discursively justify the centrality of the role the Military began to play in Turkey’s governance following the 1960 coup d’etat(Bilgin). While the 1960 coup in Turkey was not organised by US-trained officers alone, it resulted in the marginalisation of old-school officers, who were viewed as less professional compared to their US-trained colleagues. As such, Turkey’s militarisation was no exception to trends in other parts of the world (see above).

To conclude, beyond the two spaces identified by Millar, the international in Support the Troops is also in the ways in which feeding militarism (in ideational as well as material terms) in ‘non-Europe’ has allowed for the kind of ‘stability’ that the superpowers sought in lieu of international security during the Cold War. It was partly through the militarisation of ‘non-Europe’, then, that a non-war community evolved in ‘Europe’, to invoke Tarak Barkawi and Mark Laffey’s critique of the democratic peace literature. These relations took new but still militarist dimensions in the post-Cold War era (Abrahamsen).  This is what I mean when I point to the international as the condition of possibility for “Support the Troops”: while a ‘disconnect’ was allowed to emerge between peoples and the Troops in ‘Europe’, people in in ‘non-Europe’ have learned and/or sustained militarist ways of doing things.