Military Conversion: The Balance Sheet
| Author | Michael Brzoska |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343399036002001 |
| Published date | 01 March 1999 |
| Date | 01 March 1999 |
Misguided Frustrations
Concepts, like fashions, come and go.
Conversion had its heyday in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, and now it seems to have
been all but forgotten, or even attained a
negative tone. Actors as well as analysts are
hesitant to put their work within the frame-
work of conversion.
The situation was different when large-
scale disarmament began in the late 1980s.
There was an expectation of large, more or
less automatic, economic benefits from
shrinking military sectors. Certainly in states
with central planning, such as the Soviet
Union, reorientation of resources was
expected to be a simple matter (Cooper,
1995). A substantial fiscal ‘peace dividend’
was also anticipated in the West.
However, such expectations were sim-
plistic and over-optimistic and could only be
frustrated. They took little or no account of
the wider political and economic environ-
ment shaping the shift of resources from the
military to the civilian sector, underesti-
mated the cost and speed of adjustment and
assumed shifts in political decisionmaking
parallel to large-scale disarmament which
would have to occur.
I will try to demonstrate that the often
found impression that ‘conversion has not
worked’ is simply wrong. It is based on
frustrated expectations from a naive and
narrow view of conversion. Conversion,
defined as the transformation of resource
use from the military to the civilian sector,
is difficult to achieve. On the other hand, it
covers more than just arms industries and
military expenditures. A whole range of
resources are shifted from military to
civilian use when military sectors are down-
sized.
The balance sheet of conversion pre-
sented below is not negative, nor even zero.
It shows a mixed record. Economic regions
and issue areas need to be differentiated. The
listing also demonstrates that much inter-
esting analytical work has been done on con-
version issues. It would be foolish to drop
thinking about conversion, and how actors
can shape it, in view of the empirical as
well as intellectual record of the 1990s.
The concept of conversion, as a set of
phenomena linked to downsizing of military
sectors and framed in the analytical frame-
work of resource re-use, remains useful for
practical and academic purposes. Military
downsizing continues in many parts of the
world, albeit at a slower pace than in the
early 1990s. The lessons of the 1990s can
help to improve the future record of conver-
sion.
journal of
peace
R
ESEARCH
© 1999 Journal of Peace Research,
vol 36, no.2, 1999, pp. 131–140
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi)
[0022-3433(199903)36:2; 131–140; 007403]
* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the
COST A 10 workshop on Cultural Issues of Defence
Restructuring and Conversion organized by the Centre for
Defence Studies of the University of Ljubljana in Bled,
Slovenia, 9-12 July 1998.
131
COUNTER-
POINT
Military Conversion: The Balance Sheet*
MICHAEL BRZOSKA
Bonn International Center for Conversion
at SAGE Publications on December 7, 2012jpr.sagepub.comDownloaded from
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