The Arms Race and Command Economies since 1945 381enemies.^19 Whether better-organized repression will suffice to prop
up existing regimes in the absence of real consent remains to be seen.
Military forms of discipline and policies intended to insulate armed
personnel from the rest of the population surely offer some prospect
of success. European sovereigns of the Old Regime, after all, exer
cised this sleight of hand triumphantly in times past. Moreover, as
armaments become more expensive as well as more lethal, small pro
fessional armies are likely to supplant the mass armies of conscripts
that dominated European warfare in the nineteenth and early twen
tieth centuries. If so, governments and their armed forces can perhaps
afford to dispense with popular support, and rely on force and the
threat of force, exercised by specialized professionals kept systemat
ically separate from the subjected population at large. Such a pattern
of governance would conform to the norms of the past, however much
at odds they may be with modern political rhetoric and democratic
theory.
On the other hand, contemporary forms of mass communication
probably act in an opposite sense and make such old-fashioned polar
ity between armed rulers and a subject population persistently un
stable. To be sure, selective recruitment into the armed services from
some special segment of the population can be counted on to induce a
social distance between the armed forces and ordinary civilians and
subjects. But whether such an armed force can monopolize organized
violence within state boundaries depends largely on whether dis
contented revolutionary groups have access to arms; and this in turn
depends on the policies of other governments as well as on the fanati
cism of the revolutionaries. As long as the globe is divided among rival
states, revolutionaries have a good chance of finding some foreign
patron and supplier of arms. Under these circumstances, strengthen
ing the police and army does not seem likely to assure political stabil
ity in those parts of the world where a rural population surge gener
ates widespread and radical discontent with the way things are.
In Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union population
pressures are of a different kind. How to come to terms with immi
grants and aliens, whether Latino in the United States or Moslem in
- Morris Janowitz, Military Institutions and Coercion in the Developing Nations
(Chicago, 1977), p. 35, says that expenditures for police forces in Africa, 1966–75, rose
by 144 percent while costs of armies rose by only 40 percent in the same decade. His
figures show that almost every government in the world has increased expenditures for
the means of internal coercion more rapidly than other defense costs. There is some
indication, too, that police consolidation made coups d’état harder to pull off and
therefore fewer in the 1970s than had been true in the 1960s. Ibid., pp. 42, 70.