El control civil de los militares

Abstract

Good morning, I was asked to talk about civilian control of the military, and I added a subtitle "A frustrated Venezuelan aspiration that will become a reality in the 21st century."

The expression civil control is part of the lexicon incorporated into the university academy by a relatively recent area of ​​knowledge, such as civil and military relations. The pioneering and controversial studies are from the end of the 1950s, the proposal of Samuel Perham stands out in political science, the sociological studies carried out by Morris Yanowitz, and a critical vision of both, is held by the British social scientist Samuel Edward Finer. .

The basic concern of this interdisciplinary area of ​​knowledge is a consequence of the formation of gigantic armed forces during the Second World War and the development of atomic weapons. They largely respond to the warnings of the sociologist Harold Lasswell in his famous article in the American Journal of Sociology of 1941 about the potential dangers of what he describes as a Barracks State. This expresses the old liberal, rational fear of militarism when the specialists of violence, the military, according to Lasswell, arrive by a kind of metastasis to permeate the entire fabric of a society and subordinate it to their corporate interest.