Since the establishment of modern democracy in Europe and North America in the late eighteenth century, the competing models of civil–military relations proposed by Republican and Liberal theorists have influenced the institutions and practices by which Western societies have sought to ensure the democratic accountability of the provision of national and international security. The ideal-type models of the state and the soldier outlined in Chapter 2 have played crucial parts in this respect. The ideological and practical definitions of the roles of the state have influenced the degree of its monopoly on the legitimate use of military force and the democratic control of its powers in recent history, while the models of the soldier have defined the roles, responsibilities and relations of the armed forces with the state and society. However, changes in these roles and relations have been a regular feature of past centuries. As argued in the introduction, three factors in particular have influenced when and how these transformations have occurred, namely the emergence of new security threats, the inconsistent implementation of both ideologies and the inherent problems of each ideal-type model.

By analysing these changes in the examples of the UK, the USA and Germany, this chapter illustrates that the contemporary privatization of military services is neither new nor inevitable, but is part of a historical cycle of critique and transformation of the state monopoly on collective violence.