Although the analysis which follows centres upon the West African state of Mali, much of what is said applies in varying measure to other examples of military state capitalism in Africa and elsewhere. Its importance is underscored by the fact that this is an increasingly common régime variant in the Third World. Similarly, domestic militarism has been transformed from an unusual occurrence to a phenomenon which evokes little more than a déjà vu response. Today nearly half of the governments of the ‘South’ are directly or indirectly dominated by the military, whereas three decades ago little more than 15 per cent could be so classified.

The focus of this article is upon the costs of high military burdens and militarization. While the primary concern is with the Third World, this analysis also considers costs to advanced capitalist as well as state socialist systems. The work synthesizes findings by more than three dozen researchers, many of whom have published comparative or case studies of substitution effects of military expenditures in socio-economic areas. Particular attention is focused upon damage to the American socio-economic order by high militarization since the early 1960's. In both the North as well as the South, the costs are most obvious in terms of specific tradeoffs when military burdens are high or rapidly increasing. They are occasionally pronounced in such welfare areas as health and particularly education. More frequently, they appear in terms of diminished economic growth rates, unemployment, reduced exports and inflation. In developing nations welfare is less adversely affected in civilian, more industrialized, economically dynamic, heavily aided, state capitalist and especially socialist oriented regimes. Military dominant systems tend to be the most repressive and exhibit the heaviest military burdens. In general, however, systems in both the North and the South vary in how they absorb such tradeoffs as appear. Emphasis is placed upon East-West competitive intervention and commercial gain as a source of both militarization and accelerating militarism in the South.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs. Analyses of military roles in LatinAmerica during the two decades following World War II often assumed the military were both isolated or apart from politics, and hence amenable to civilian control. The resurgence of militarism since the early Sixties has been reflected in scholarly works reassessing these assumptions. Whereas the pioneers in this field, such as Lieuwen (1964) and Needler (1969), are clearly civilianist-reflecting a democratic and distinctly liberal bias in their values-students of Latin American militarism in the late Sixties and Seventies have increasingly, if tacitly, assumed the unviability of civilian hegemony and tended to downplay the democratic normative issue. Terms such as militarism, democracy, and civilian supremacy have been virtually eclipsed from analyses of military intervention (Johnson, 1964;Einaudi, 1969;Ropp, 1970;Stepan, 1971;Rankin, 1974;Needler, 1975;Fitch, 1979).Regardless of how one assesses the legitimacy of domestic militarism, the new scholarship has undoubtedly increased the precision and extended the range of our understanding. The armed forces are conceptualized as an integral component of Latin American political systems rather than as an isolated, AUTHOR'S NOTE: The author wishes to express his appreciation to John Saxe Fernandez and Octavio Rodriguez Aranjo of UNAM for facilitating this research, and to Liisa North for her criticism. 396 JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS nonpolitical institution. At the same time, there has been a healthy decline in reification as the focus of analysis is refined to include intramilitary factional, and even individual, actors. AsStepan (1971) demonstrated in hissuperb study of the Brazilian Armed Forces, even within one service, career experiences and socialization may vary so markedly that, given appropriate leadership, one faction is prepared to use arms in defense of increasingly radical leftist policies.The present study's objective is to ascertain what cluster of career and background characteristics is most likely to be associated with military radicalism of the left and right. In doing this, there is an assumption that ideologically, armed forces, regardless of the degree of professionalization, are neither invariably unified nor isolated from other political sectors. While it may well be true (Vagts, 1959;Nun, 1969;Lang, 1972;Abrahamsson, 1972) that insofar as they become politicized, military officers are more likely to opt for the right, this is not necessarily engendered by conservativism...

Patterns of civil-military relations associated with ten deposed reformist regime are delineated.The case studies were selected because of their historical prominence and the consequent availability of information.