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Backgrounder: Multiethnic Armies and National Unity

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Michael Moran, Executive Editor
August 22, 2006

Introduction

Throughout history, armies composed of varied nationalities and religions have faced special challenges in dealing with ethnic diversity and keeping a lid on the political frictions inherent when rival groups comingle. A number of authoritarian regimes have used the army to enforce ethnic dominance rather than dilute it: the Russian-dominated Red Army of the Soviet Union, Saddam's Sunni-dominated military in Iraq, and the Arab army of multiethnic Sudan. As Omer Bartov writes in the Times Literary Supplement, Lenin and Stalin's use of the Red Army alternatively to promote the "molding and destruction of ethnic groups was part of a complex, and often brutal, process of trying to create a Soviet nation from a conglomerate of peoples under their control." Lebanon, of course, operates on a much smaller scale, but the degree to which its multiethnic army is able to function and establish order is crucial for efforts at reviving the Lebanese state.

Mitigating ethnic chauvinism

Maronite Christians originally dominated the officer corps in Lebanon. Today, however, with hopes for stabilizing the Lebanese-Israeli border at least partly dependent on the army's ability to act as a national, rather than tribal force, issues of ethnic superiority warrant new examination. As with recent efforts to build national armies in multiethnic Afghanistan and Iraq, the effort is fraught with difficulty. Previous attempts—in Yugoslavia, for instance—ultimately came to grief.

Yet nations which have had success in ethnically integrating a national army often have translated such success to a broader scale, with examples ranging from the polyglot armies of Alexander the Great, the Roman and Ottoman Empires, the Indonesian military, and, in a slightly different sense, the immigrant-fed armed forces of the United States.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.