Civilian control over the armed forces under two conceptions of democracy

In a context marked by democratic backsliding worldwide and the additional pressures that hybrid warfare linked with the war in Ukraine places on democratic governance in European states, the foundations of military subordination to civilian authority warrant renewed scrutiny. Such strains can put pressure on defining characteristics of liberal democracy, not least civilian supremacy in civil-military relations. This principle found its paradigmatic expression in Samuel Huntington's concept of objective civilian control. Over the last decades, however, criticism of his approach has been increasingly voiced on the grounds of its inadequacy in the face of the changing pattern of civil-military relations, with some extreme positions even calling into question the absolute character of civilian supremacy in cases of flagrantly wrong political decisions. This paper undertakes to examine Huntington's objective civilian control and an alternative to it proposed by William E. Rapp, through the lens of Schumpeter's procedural democracy and of what Schumpeter terms the classical doctrine of democracy. This approach makes it possible to identify the epistemic and axiological assumptions, together with their implications in educational terms, underpinning the conceptions of both Huntington and Rapp on civilian control over the armed forces, and to assess on these grounds the degree of theoretical change entailed by departing from the Huntingtonian approach. No evaluative preference is expressed for either of the two competing approaches, the sole aim of the comparative analysis being to establish the theoretical distance between them in terms of the meaning of democracy corresponding to each.