Bringing the Military Back In: Military Academy and State-Building in Latecomer States

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  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Political Sociology Refereed Roundtable #16

Abstract

The Eurocentric narrative of “war makes states and states make war” assumes that institutional and political changes in military apparatuses seamlessly passed along to civilian governance. However, “latecomer” states such as Republican China (1911-1949) not only had to swiftly “catch up” by lumping centuries of development into decades, they also were confronted by both external geopolitical threats from industrialized, powerful Western states and internal conflicts. These states might have to rely heavily on military as the only viable political force that could achieve both centralization of power and maintenance of social order; they therefore faced an even more acute challenge of transferring modernization of military to modernization of the state while balancing military and civilian power.
I argue that studying military academies provides a new perspective to re-evaluate the influence of war and military on state-building. Military academies were the forerunners of technology-based modernity and produced a new social stratum of professional officers whose political indoctrination and socialization occurred within the academies. My research is based on comparison between the Baoding Military Academy (BMA) and the Whampoa Military Academy (WMA). My initial research suggests there appear to be two conditions under which military academy graduates become constructive rather than undermining forces in state-building in latecomer states. First, the military academy must operate under strong tutelage of a political center committed to state-building. Second, harmonious relationships between military academies and civilian education institutions can help forge future cooperative relationships between civilian and military elites. When these two conditions are met, I hypothesize that military academies facilitate state-building, as they produce cohorts that are 1) loyal to a specific regime and 2) capable of adapting to other political positions outside of the military sphere and/or able to settle into civilian careers after their military careers.

Author

• Zhicao Fang, Johns Hopkins University