principal activities are in the civilian arena and who only take up arms in an
emergency, are likely to be loyal members of a stable, democratic and fairly
egalitarian society. They will wish to preserve the existing political system,
unless it lackslegitimacy, in which case they may refuse to bear arms in its
defence. But they will not be interested in overthrowing the system and
installing a militaryjuntaor some political e ́lite, whereas professionalarmies,
divorced from the society they defend and holding a monopoly of force, may
well come to control the political system against the interests of the mass.
The second characteristic is that a citizen soldiery is much less likely than a
professional military machine to tolerate aggressive or adventurist foreign
policies: it fights only when it absolutely has to and consequently, it is argued,
will only take part in genuinely defensive wars. Whether this is an objective
truth is unclear, as under certain conditions whole populations can be aroused
to expansionist fury. The French armies of the early revolutionary days were
citizen armies in the sense that they were more or less voluntary mass move-
ments of people who had previously been civilian, and they fought with great
eagerness to spread their revolution. A general distaste for military life and
military thinking arises from a desire to have a society in which the values of
the military are minimized. This is linked to the idea, to be found in classical
Greece, that it is every full citizen’s duty to defend their state, and that to have a
purely professional and permanent military organization takes away both the
common duty and indeed the chance for ordinary citizens to demonstrate their
full commitment to society. In this sense, and it is to be found to some extent in
Swiss attitudes, a citizen army reflects egalitarianism and binds society
together; everyone has to serve, and the rich cannot, by paying taxes, transmute
the burden of their military obligation to some less unpleasant service. Even
this, however, has not always been true. The late 19th century French army
was notorious for a system which allowed the rich to pay a poor young man to
take their son’s place in the annual conscription.
Civic Culture
The Civic Culture was the name given to a study based on research carried out
in five countries in the early 1960s. It proceeds from the observation that
political culturesvary considerably in the extent to which they encourage a
sense of trust in political authority and facilitate political activity on the part of
ordinary citizens. The ideal civic culture would be one in which the political
ideas and values of the citizenry were attuned to political equality and
participation, and where government was seen as trustworthy and acting in
the public interest. This comes close in many ways to the classical Greek notion
of thepolis, and toAristotle’sdescription of man as ‘a political animal’. In
fact this sense of ‘citizen competence’ was found to vary considerably,
Civic Culture