Civil-military relations : enhancing international security

Abstract

The thesis describes how civil-military relations at the international level enhance international security, in particular, the way of development of international society in trying to orient its progress towards international peace, security and sustainable development. It focuses upon civil-military relationships in the League of Nations and the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, The International Committee of Red Cross. The thesis identifies particular types of relationships created by these international organizations and explains how participants influence each other. A short historical overview of emerging international civil-military relationships shows how civil-military relationships have developed at international level. The ongoing Iraq crises illustrates how civil-military relationships are functioning and serving for enhancing international security. The examples and the analyses have shown that the international community has made great progress toward establishing norms of civil-military relations, while trying to regulate behavior of independent states. From ad-hoc experiments included a system of agreements under the International Red Cross, and then the community recognized the need to control military forces as it created the League of Nations that established a strictly centrally managed, or authoritarian, civil-military relationship system on the base of the accumulated knowledge and experience of aristocratic societies. The United Nations, created also in the aftermath of a world war, established decentralized civil-military relationships that have a robust array of interactions and well-defined policy-formulating bodies, the General Assembly and the Security Council, but never gotits standing army etc.