Martial law in Poland: The dynamics of military involvement in politics

This work looks at the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981 as a case study of the dynamics leading to the involvement of the military in political decision making. It examines the usefulness of several competing theories of civil-military relations and creates a synthesis of these theories. This synthesis is then used to inform a longitudinal case study of military involvement in the Polish political system from 1948 to 1981 based on archival research, opinion poll data, interviews, and newly declassified documents. The work was originally conceived as an application of Latin American theories of civil-military relations to the imposition of martial law in Poland. Specifically, the author was interested in O'Donnell's theory of Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism, which argues that the importation of technology creates both an organized working class and a technocratic bureaucracy. Mobilization of the working class against the existing economic structure can cause the bureaucracy to form a coup alliance against the government and the popular sector. Unfortunately, O'Donnell's hypothesis breaks down under conditions of a vertically structured economy. The work as completed attempts instead to explain the military's motives for martial law by combining Timothy Colton's framework for civil-military relations in the Soviet Union with Alfred Stepan's concept of New Professionalism. To a large extent, this work hinges on the argument that the military in Poland had an identity and interests separate from the Polish United Workers' Party: even if one accepts William Odom's argument that the army was a bureaucratic arm of the party, different arms of bureaucracy have different interests. Based on the identification of the military as a somewhat independent institution in Polish government and society and an examination of the attitudes of the professional cadre towards the Solidarity movement in the months preceding the imposition of martial law, the author argues that martial law was not a political act, but rather a professional defensive measure.