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>> 15 1 The Right to Protect and the Right to Protection As argued in the Introduction, an unequal burden that also guarantees rewards to those bearing the burden establishes the state’s capacity to provide protection to its citizens by sacrificing its young people. Thus, the implementation of the Hobbesian contract is anchored in a social hierarchy that creates a balanced affinity between two sets of rights—the right to protect and the right to protection. Imbalance between the rights may risk the state’s capacity to provide protection and encourages it to rebalance the rights. This chapter presents the theoretical framework that underlies the empirical study. 1.1 The Essence of Rights The interplay between rights can be deduced from the school of state formation . At the heart of the state formation tradition lies the mutually generating mechanism between war and state formation, as put forth in Tilly’s (1992) “war makes state” argument. Historically, the extensive introduction of artillery and gunpowder into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century warfare 16 > 17 improve their social standing by serving in the military (Burk 1995; Janowitz 1976). Over time, working-class groups, ethnic minorities, and, gradually, women and homosexuals all strove to utilize military service as a mechanism for (expected) social mobility. Unlike the middle-class groups whose right to serve had been established, for these groups, access to arms entailed breaking down barriers that had hitherto prevented their military participation. The more the discourse was predicated on republican underpinnings, the more instrumental it was in providing opportunities for groups to convert their military sacrifice into rights (Krebs 2006). This may explain the mechanism of claim making: it can take the form of groups claiming unrestricted recruitment as a means to lift barriers to improvements in their social position (such as African Americans’ “right to fight”) or struggles to convert past sacrifice in war into access to rights (which typified this group, as well), or it can be a demand by majority groups to enlist minority groups to match their duties to already attained rights (such as the application of military service to second-generation foreign immigrants in France in the 1880s; see Brubaker 1992, 104–105). That is why the right to protect applies to social networks more than to the enlistees alone. By differentially classifying social groups, moreover, military service not only determines uniform eligibility for citizenship but also establishes its hierarchical status (see Soysal 1994). The degree of legitimacy conferred on groups’ access to power in the military determines whether the conversion of military status into social status will proceed in an orderly fashion or will trigger intergroup tensions. When seemingly universalist criteria for recruitment and promotion are coupled with the conferral of existential meanings regarding the application and consequences of these criteria, privileged groups are able to invoke their military status to legitimate their social status—the rights, positions, wealth, and power that they possess relative to or at the expense of their subordinated counterparts, a process that does not occur smoothly in a class-based military (Levy 1998). It follows that, even with the introduction of universal conscription, groups varied in the level of sacrifice they bore and the level of benefits they acquired by this sacrifice, thus molding social hierarchies. Examples of hierarchy making include (1) the male-dominated system of war that influences intergender power relations in society (Goldstein 2001); (2) the privileged social position of dominant groups in the military, such as the Ashkenazim (Jews of European descent) in Israel, who converted their preeminence in the military into social dominance, or the American military ’s historical role in entrenching the inferior position of African Americans (Levy 1998); (3) the role of the French levée en masse of 1793, which 18 > 19 Teachman 2004). Furthermore, soldiers assigned to labor-intensive jobs are in practice being prepared for blue-collar jobs in civilian life—low-status work in advanced capitalist societies. On the other hand, officers and soldiers who serve in technology-intensive posts are better prepared for whitecollar jobs after their discharge (Weede 1992). Containment of the militaries and their subordination to civilian control, in the sense that more areas of their activity were monitored by a widening circle of political and social groups, were part of the allocation of rights, in this case political rights. The citizen-soldier embodied the republican model that transferred the sovereignty from the ruler to the community of citizens that staffed and politically controlled the military. Republicanism extended to...

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