By the end of the civil war, a vibrant rural civil society of militant campesino organizations claimed extensive areas of land in Usulután and other contested areas. Their gradual emergence during the years of the military stalemate reflected the changing terrain of the civil war, as the two armed parties concentrated increasingly on building political loyalties among civilians rather than only on overt military competition. This development posed a profound contrast both to the historical absence of opposition organizations in rural El Salvador (until the mobilization of the 1970s) and to the decimation of overt political organizations in the extreme repression of the early 1980s.

In contrast to the insurgents' success in building a dense network of political organizations, government efforts to quell insurgency through agrarian reform, ongoing repression, and the incorporation of campesinos into organizations aligned with the Christian Democratic Party failed. While activists and their organizations in some areas were demobilized by government policies, the reforms did not reach two-thirds of the landless campesinos, a subset of whom in contested areas continued to mobilize. And even some beneficiaries of the reforms continued covertly to support the insurgents. Campesinos headed most of the organizations that comprised this dense network of associations, an unprecedented representation of the interests of the rural poor.

The Israeli opposition to the Lebanon war did not revolve around a single issue, nor was it consistent in content and emphasis throughout the war. As was the case with the French war in Algeria – and as is perhaps often the case with significant social protest against war – several ideological camps opposed the war, each guided by its own agenda. Still, the Israeli opposition to the Lebanon war was rather homogeneous, embracing mostly people from what can be defined as a non-radical soft left. The majority of the opposition to the Lebanon war was led by, or identified most clearly with, the agenda of the Peace Now movement. Moreover, as the agenda of this constituency was rather consistent, and the time frame of the events rather short, it is easy to follow the development of protest, and identify, define, and classify its key themes with relative clarity.

The Utilitarian Debate about the Human Cost of War

It is clear that the single most important theme of the anti-war campaign, which was responsible for the initial mobilization of Israelis against the Lebanon war, was the rate of IDF casualties. The fact that casualties had a great social impact is far from trivial. Before the Lebanon war, the human cost of Israeli wars hardly ever divided the Israeli public or raised the question of whether a war itself was worthwhile.

In Chapter 3, I noted the key developments – the rise of the educated middleclass, the emergence of the free marketplace of ideas, and the birth of a normative difference between state and society – that are responsible for the eventual inability of liberal democracies to win small wars. Still, we know that Western powers continued to fight and win small wars past the turn of the nineteenth century, even though the underlying conditions supporting the use of unbridled violence were continuously eroded. My discussion this far cannot fully explain this period of the twilight of Western capacity to win protracted small wars, for one major reason: In Chapter 3, I discussed only half the story, that which concerned “society.” If one wants to gain a full picture of the forces that shaped the fate of “democratic” small wars, then one also needs to consider the other half of the story: that which concerns the measures that rulers and states took in reaction to social changes and challenges.

Thus, this chapter is devoted to the “state” perspective. Specifically, four issues will be addressed. First, I will briefly discuss, in the abstract, possible institutional reaction to internal challenges. Second, I will review certain developments, most notably in the realm of formal education, that permitted the state to wage war in general and small wars in particular, in spite of the emergence of the normative gap.

El Salvador drew my interest beginning in the early 1980s when I worked as a volunteer paralegal and translator helping Salvadoran refugees prepare applications for political asylum. I was disturbed by their accounts of political violence and inspired by their resilience in the face of danger and hardship. I was less impressed with U.S. accounts – both official and oppositional – of the civil war. I eventually decided to resign my position teaching physics in order to devote myself full time to social science research in general and to research on the origins and resolution of civil wars in particular.

I first went to El Salvador in 1987 to study an unprecedented agreement negotiated by officials of the Catholic Church with representatives of the Salvadoran military and of the insurgent guerrilla forces. Under the terms of the agreement, the residents of Tenancingo, who had fled the town when its history of intense conflict culminated in its bombing in 1983, could return there regardless of their past political involvement, and Tenancingo would be an “unarmed zone.” The agreement was sharply contested on the ground and in the pages of national newspapers, but those who returned were able to plant corn fields, rebuild houses, and participate in an experiment unlikely in the midst of a civil war: a representative town council.

Why did campesinos in Tenancingo and Usulután support the FMLN and join insurgent organizations, despite the high costs of doing so? The Salvadoran insurgency was about land. Perhaps access to land, a key material interest of campesinos, accounts for why so many campesinos participated in the insurgency, thereby resolving the puzzle of collective action posed in the opening pages of this book. However, at the time the insurgent cooperatives were formed, residents of the case-study areas had access to land whether or not they participated, as long as they refrained from informing on insurgent activities and made occasional material contributions (which they also had to make to passing government forces). Thus during the middle and later years of the civil war, it was possible for those who did not support the rebels to reside in the case-study areas as “free riders” on the benefits of the insurgency. The benefits included improved working conditions in some areas and unprecedented access to land and freedom from the often capricious authority of landlords and security forces in others. But none of these benefits required participating in the insurgency beyond the coerced minimum contribution. In short, the material benefits of the insurgency took the form of a public good that was available to all residents.

In the early 1980s, some of the campesinos who had been active in the 1970s mobilization allied with guerrilla forces in Usulután, Tenancingo, and other contested areas of the countryside. A few, mostly younger men, became full-time fighters, others gave logistical and intelligence support. Together their support was sufficient to underwrite the FMLN's expansion from strongholds in Morazán and Chalatenango to a broad swathe of national territory, including significant areas of Usulután, by the end of 1983. While the provision of supplies and the movement of ordnance were important, the provision of military intelligence concerning the movement of government forces was the essential campesino contribution to this expansion and thus to the emergence of a military stalemate by the end of 1983. As a result, large areas of the countryside exhibited dual sovereignty by the mid 1980s. In some, state authority had been effectively replaced by novel insurgent institutions. In others, government and insurgent forces contested the authority to rule.

As insurgent forces expanded their activities in 1982 and 1983, the government changed its strategy toward winning the “hearts and minds” of residents of contested areas while intensifying the use of force in FMLN “controlled” areas.

In the course of El Salvador's civil war, insurgent campesinos redrew boundaries of class, culture, and citizenship. By the end of the war, insurgent cooperatives occupied about a third of Usulután's farmland. While desperately poor, insurgent campesinos in most of the case-study areas enjoyed an unprecedented autonomy from landlords and traditional authorities. They participated in a dense network of insurgent organizations that defended land occupations against the return of the landlords. The settlement that ended the civil war between the two parties was a democratic political bargain: in exchange for laying down their arms and abandoning their socialist objectives, the insurgent organization joined the polity, which was to be reformed along liberal democratic lines. Over the next several years, the provisions of the agreement were generally carried out, despite resistance on the part of the government to the implementation of some aspects of the agreement. That positive outcome required an extended process of negotiation and ongoing pressure on government officials (and to a lesser extent on the FMLN) by the United Nations in its role as observer and verifier of the peace agreement and by donor countries in their capacity as funders of reforms. Since 1994, elections have been held regularly and the FMLN has garnered an increasing share of political power, becoming the leading party in the national legislature in the 2000 elections.

The French people at large were not captive of the “Algérie française” theme. But neither were they convinced that Algeria must be abandoned because of moral or economic considerations. Most French people simply chose to exclude themselves from the debate over Algeria. Of course, some regions and sectors tended to be more opposed to the war than others. Certainly the war was not too popular in Left-dominated regions or in regions whose inhabitants' interests were threatened by the Algerian economy. Thus, Marseilles, where a solid one-third of the vote was Communist, produced greater activity against the war than other cities. And among the least favorable to the plight of the pieds-noirs were regions in the south-east of France, where the population was inherently separatist and regarded the Algerian settlers as unwelcome competitors in the market of lesser wines.

The general French apathy was above all shown by the small scale of anti-war activity. The first demonstrations against mobilization and against the war usually attracted no more than several hundred people. Later, demonstrations grew larger. At times, they consisted of a few thousand people. But, with the exception of three mass demonstrations that had either to do with the future of democracy or were organized after Algeria's future was all but decided, they rarely consisted of more than 10,000 people. In fact, at least initially, the pro-French Algeria forces were able to counter-rally against the anti-war protestors.

As I noted in Chapter 2, all other things being equal, the readiness of strong powers to escalate the level of brutality is the key to winning small wars. This readiness, however, is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition. States, as I further noted in the Introduction, need also to be able to mobilize and convert societal resources into military might, and then use the latter with little, if any, restraints. Thus, leaders must secure the readiness of the military forces to meet the “requirements” of the battlefield, and ensure the people's “acceptance” of the military strategy and the costs it involves. The capacity of strong powers to win small wars, then, is almost by definition a function of their domestic structure. Or, formulated otherwise, society cannot a priori be overlooked. If the political order in a country leaves room for society to intervene in politics, then the capacity to win small wars becomes a function of the state of normative alignment (or conversely, the magnitude of the normative gap).

In this chapter, I review the foundations of the “space” that was opened for social forces to influence policy in liberal democracies. I combine again inductive and deductive logic, and I draw on historical observations in order to explain the origins of social defiance of the conduct of state in small wars.

Before the civil war in El Salvador, almost everyone in Tierra Blanca worked on the Hacienda California, a giant farm stretching from the edge of town across the fertile coastal plain to the Bay of Jiquilisco ten kilometers to the south. From their small houses in town or their shacks along the railway and roadways, every morning the workers walked past the hacienda's security post, past the gun ports of the fortified bunker, and through the gated entrance. They continued past the hacienda compound and the soldiers' quarters, past the barracks that housed the migrant workers during the harvest, and on toward the vast cotton fields, pastures, and salt flats beyond.

Before the war, the children of this town in southwestern Usulután had little reason to doubt that when they grew up, they would join their parents tending cotton and cattle and processing salt on the Palomo family's vast and well-guarded estate.

But in the mid- and late 1970s, some residents of Tierra Blanca joined in local protests and strikes, a few marched in the capital, San Salvador, and a very few collaborated with guerrilla organizations that would become the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation, or FMLN).

In response to intensifying political mobilization by campesinos and coffee mill workers for access to land and higher wages in Santiago de María in the late 1970s, Héctor Antonio Regalado, a local landlord and dentist, began to recruit young men to what appeared to be a Boy Scout troop. Members, who on one account may have numbered as many as a hundred, wore uniforms in marches through town. Rather than the usual scouting activities, however, members of Regalado's troop killed dozens of activists and suspected activists, including teachers, unionists, cooperativists, and students, not only in Santiago de María but in the cities of Usulután, Berlín, Alegría, Jucuapa, Villa El Triunfo, and Chinameca. In interviews at the end of the war, townspeople told stories of cadavers appearing at the edge of town, of a decapitated head found in a ditch, and other public displays of extreme violence.

Presumably the French state started the war in Algeria from an advantageous position in the marketplace of ideas. Algeria was a part of sovereign France, and therefore the war could be convincingly portrayed as involving core national security interests. Furthermore, the war could be framed in the larger context of the Cold War, and thus be presented as a part of the effort to defend the free world from “the Communist threat.” Finally, FLN savagery provided a moral justification of the war and the resort to “extreme” measures. For the last two reasons, France could also present the war not only as a matter of national security, but also as embodying a struggle between the forces of light against those of darkness.

At the same time, however, the Algerian situation also involved some complexities that made the marketing of the war less easy and the state less enthusiastic to engage in such an endeavor in the marketplace of ideas. First, although legally part of sovereign France, Algeria nevertheless remained somewhat remote from continental consciousness. Second, the war in Algeria had to be fought in the shadow of a long and disastrous involvement in Indochina (which eventually was ill-received by the French) and thus not likely to create much enthusiasm or willingness to sacrifice among residents of continental France. Moreover, the temptation to play down the situation in Algeria was further strengthened by the fact that initial FLN activity was somewhat sporadic and therefore seemed to require only a limited investment.

To explore why some campesinos rebelled in contested areas of El Salvador before and during the civil war, my principal research strategy was to ask participants in the insurgency why they supported it, and to ask others why they did not. For revolutionary social movements, this is not usually done; the scholarly analysis of peasant rebellions, revolutions, civil wars, and even some social movements often relies on official or elite sources. In particular, as Nancy Bermeo (1986) and Nora Kriger (1992) argue, the study of peasant insurgency often relies not on the accounts of peasants themselves but on the memoirs of elite revolutionary leaders who are usually from a different class or on macro level data. One reason of course is that peasant actors are often illiterate or semi-literate and leave few written accounts of their actions, although oral sources in the form of stories and songs may be very rich. Participant accounts, be they elite memoirs, the few biographies of peasant participants available (which were often dictated to journalists or other literate interlocutors), or other accounts based on oral histories, rarely address social science concerns of how representative the narrator is or whether alternative accounts better explain available evidence.

In launching the Lebanon war, the Israeli state enjoyed three convenient domestic conditions. First, public support was virtually guaranteed for a campaign against the PLO since most Israelis regarded the Palestinian organization as a vicious enemy that deserved to be fought, and if possible, eliminated. Second, the war leadership had ample time to prepare the marketing of the war. Third, the solutions the Israeli leadership devised for the international reactions it anticipated were also highly compatible with the problems the government was likely to face inside Israel.

In the final analysis, however, the structural advantages the government enjoyed also had a serious downside, as they worked as blinding agents, confining the internal political debate almost exclusively to international considerations. Thus, for example, as was indicated in the pre-war deliberations, considerations and anxieties of ministers, and even members of the liberal press, power politics took central stage. Indeed, with few exceptions, neither officials and ministers nor even columnists in the liberal press were particularly concerned with potential domestic objections to the war or with its social consequences, until the first wave of reservist protest.

It was not that the possibility that the war could unleash some opposition at home was utterly absent from the mind of all decision-makers. Indeed, the gap between the declared “40 kilometers” objective of the war, on the one hand, and the military actions and the unfolding real goals, on the other, seem to indicate that at least Sharon sensed a potential domestic problem.