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Communities of practice, impression management, and great power status: Military observers in the Russo-Japanese War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 September 2020

Kiran Banerjee  and
Joseph MacKay Open the ORCID record for Joseph MacKay [Opens in a new window]
Kiran Banerjee
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada
Joseph MacKay*
Affiliation:
Department of International Relations, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
*
*Corresponding author. Email: joseph.mackay@anu.edu.au
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Abstract

Military attachés and wartime observers have received surprisingly little attention in international relations. Why do states exchange attachés, permitting uniformed foreigners to gather intelligence on their territory and during their wars? To explain, we adopt a broadly practice-theoretic approach, focusing on the individuals who developed the role by living it, showing how they both innovated a distinct military practice and established institutional legitimacy for attachés. We address an early historical case in which the practice proliferated: the Russo-Japanese War, throughout which observers represented multiple European states, on both sides of the conflict. Sometimes termed the first modern war, the conflict saw Japan's entry into the Eurocentric great power system. In this context, embedded attachés had a dual effect. On the one hand, a professional attaché community established itself: we show how local innovation by embedded officers, in the context of this structurally destabilising event, permitted the creation of a new institutional role that might otherwise have been impossible. On the other, the Japanese made use of the attachés as witnesses for Western governments, observing their performance of great power-hood, as they defeated Russia. The argument has implications for understanding both the military attaché system and communities of practice as such.

Keywords

Military AttachésMilitary ObserversCommunities of PracticeGreat PowersStatus
Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of International Security , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , October 2020 , pp. 274 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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References

1 Work on attachés is surprisingly limited. In military history, a lone monograph deals with them systematically. Vagts, Alfred, Military Attaché (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Anderson terms it ‘a somewhat disappointing and opinionated book but the only effort at a comprehensive study of a significant subject’. The latter is still true. An informal survey of military history reference works found only one with an entry, less than a page long. Corvisier, André and Childs, John (eds), A Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War, trans. Turner, Chris (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 51–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Four others include none. Dupuy, Richard Ernest and Dupuy, Trevor N., The Encyclopedia of Military History from 3500 B.C. to the Present, 2nd rev. edn (New York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1986)Google Scholar; Holmes, Richard (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Luttwak, Edward and Koehl, Stuart L., The Dictionary of Modern War (New York, NY: Harpercollins, 1991)Google Scholar; Margiotta, Franklin D. (ed.), Brassey's Encyclopedia of Military History and Biography (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 1994)Google Scholar. John Keegan's Intelligence in War includes no general account. Intelligence In War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al Qaeda (London: Hutchinson, 2003). In IR, Barkawi and Porter appear to be alone in taking them seriously unto themselves. Tarak Barkawi, “‘Defence diplomacy” in North-South relations’, International Journal, 66:3 (2011), pp. 597–612; Porter, Patrick, Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

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15 Vagts, Military Attaché, pp. 33–4.

16 See summary in Witter, ‘Sanctioned spying’, p. 90.

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22 Thayer, Diplomat, p. 123.

23 They are mentioned only to specify receiving nations’ right to approve them in Article 7 of the ‘Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations’ (1961). They go unmentioned in the ‘Vienna Convention on Consular Relations’ (1963).

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31 Witter, ‘Sanctioned spying', p. 90. Some concessions were made to professionalisation. Where pre-Napoleonic military representatives were often aristocrats, by the late nineteenth century most attachés were non-aristocratic professional officers, trained in staff colleges and linked to military chains of command, not political dynasties. Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero', pp. 145–7. Their duties remained loosely defined and largely discretionary.

32 Adler, ‘The spread of security communities'; Adler and Pouliot (eds), International Practices; Wenger, Etienne, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The IR literature on communities of practice has grown rapidly – see, for example, Bicchi, Federica, ‘The EU as a community of practice: Foreign policy communications in the COREU network’, Journal of European Public Policy, 18:8 (2011), pp. 1115–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goff, Patricia M., ‘Public diplomacy at the global level: The Alliance of Civilizations as a community of practice’, Cooperation and Conflict, 50:3 (2015), pp. 402–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Græger, Nina, ‘European security as practice: EU–NATO communities of practice in the making?’, European Security, 25:4 (2016), pp. 478–501CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On related epistemic communities, see Haas, Peter M., ‘Introduction: Epistemic communities and international policy coordination’, International Organization, 46:1 (1992), pp. 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cross, Mai'a K. Davis, ‘Rethinking epistemic communities twenty years later’, Review of International Studies, 39:1 (2013), pp. 137–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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35 Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams, ‘Privatization in practice: Power and capital in the field of global security’, in Adler and Pouliot (eds), International Practices, pp. 310–31.

36 Adler, ‘The spread of security communities', p. 201.

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39 Ringmar, Erik, ‘Performing international systems: Two East-Asian alternatives to the Westphalian order’, International Organization, 66:1 (2012), pp. 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Recognition-driven motives likely also shaped states’ decision to send attachés. Doing so was a way to perform sovereignty, or – as in the ambivalent case of British Dominions Canada and Australia – autonomy. We limit ourselves here to the performances observers witnessed, rather than enacted.

40 See, for example, Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. For an example of field analysis in world politics, see Go, Julian, ‘Global fields and imperial forms: Field theory and the British and American empires’, Sociological Theory, 26:3 (2008), pp. 201–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Thus one recent account in social theory mobilises fields as a general theory of social life. Fligstein, Neil and McAdam, Doug, A Theory of Fields (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Because field and practice both belong to the Bourdieusian toolkit, the two are broadly consistent with one another. Ours is a choice of emphasis, not of theoretical exclusion.

42 Similarly, we focus on practices rather than norms because we are concerned foremost with continually adjusted and often preconscious social activity, as against more formal, rigid, or systematic rules. This is consistent with recent developments in scholarship critical of norms talk. Pratt argues scholars should jettison norms as bounded entities, in favour of the ‘normative configuration, defined as an arrangement of ongoing, interacting practices establishing action-specific regulation, value orientation, and avenues of contestation’. Pratt, Simon Frankel, ‘From norms to normative configurations: A pragmatist and relational approach to theorizing normativity in IR’, International Theory, 12:1 (2020), pp. 59–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See similarly Wiener, Antje, ‘Enacting meaning-in-use: Qualitative research on norms and international relations’, Review of International Studies, 35:1 (2009), pp. 175–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More obliquely, a shift away from norms talk may help address concerns about Eurocentrism and the ‘spread’ of Western ideas. See the critique of norms talk in chapters in Epstein, Charlotte (ed.), Against International Relations Norms: Postcolonial Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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52 These constraints are not insurmountable. See discussion of ethnographically oriented historical research in MacKay, Joseph and Levin, Jamie, ‘Hanging out in international politics: Two kinds of explanatory political ethnography for IR’, International Studies Review, 17 (2015), pp. 171–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 See discussion of ‘ego-documents’ in Bueger and Gadinger, International Practice Theory, p. 151.

54 Such Eurocentric readings are often associated with the English School. For their standard articulation of the expansion of international society, see, for example, Bull, Hedley and Watson, Adam (eds), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. See an English School critical reconstruction in Suzuki, Shogo, Civilization and Empire: China and Japan's Encounter with European International Society (London: Routledge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For recent revised English School accounts, see Dunne, Timothy and Reus-Smit, Christian (eds), The Globalization of International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Phillips, Andrew, War, Religion and Empire: The Transformation of International Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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59 Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, p. 445.

60 On the observers’ conclusions, see sources in Porter, Military Orientalism, pp. 229–30, fns 4–7; Ferris, John, ‘Turning Japanese: British observation of the Russo-Japanese War’, in Chapman, John W. M. and Inaba, Chiharu (eds), Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–05: Volume II, The Nichinan Papers (Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental, 2007), pp. 122, 128–9Google Scholar.

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63 For a synoptic overview of operations, see Steinberg, ‘The operational overview’.

64 Inaba and Kowner, ‘The secret factor’, p. 89.

65 Accepted standards of conduct required they be separate: moving observers between sides would produce the appearance of passing information. Vagts, Military Attaché, p. 261.

66 Ignatyev, Lieutenant-General A. A., A Subaltern in Old Russia, trans. Montagu, Ivor (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1944), p. 171Google Scholar.

67 Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese’, pp. 119–20.

68 General Staff (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War, vol. 3; Pershing, John J., My Life before the World War, 1860–1917: A Memoir, ed. Greenwood, John T. (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), p. 229Google Scholar. Russia's welcome of British military observes is all the more striking given that the UK had actively contemplated taking a more direct role in the conflict. Indeed, both the cases of the Anglo-Japanese and Franco-Russian alliance included provisions for military support in the event of a wider conflict.

69 Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero’, pp. 155–6.

70 That elite status likely reflected upper class backgrounds. The Canadian observer was credentialed with little more than an elite boarding school education, a commission, and a letter from the Prime Minister. Directorate of History, ‘Canada's First Military Attaché’ (Ottawa: Canadian Forces Headquarters, 1967), pp. 5–6.

71 Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero’, pp. 154–5.

72 Vagts, Military Attaché, p. 262.

73 Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero’, p. 156.

74 On informal sociability in diplomatic settings, see Deepak Nair, ‘Sociability in international politics: Golf and ASEAN's Cold War diplomacy’, International Political Sociology (2019).

75 Pershing, My Life before the World War, 1860–1917, p. 229.

76 Reichmann, Carl, ‘Report of Capt. Carl Reichmann, Seventeenth Infantry, Observer with the Russian Forces’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), vol. 1, p. 102Google Scholar.

77 Much the same is true of Schuyler. Walter S. Schuyler, ‘Report of Lieut. Col. Walter S. Schuyler, General Staff, Observer with the Russian Army’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, pp. 101–02. Reichmann also reported all arriving observers were to call on those of other nationalities already present: ‘This prompt call is semi-official and semi-social, is de rigeur, and should not be shirked.’ Reichmann, ‘Report of Capt. Carl Reichmann’, p. 175.

78 General Staff (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War.

79 Some states sent attachés to signal their membership in the international system. Canada sent its first ever military observer, H. C. Thacker, with the British, to Japanese forces. Directorate of History, ‘Canada's First Military Attaché’. Canadian officials debated how his deployment signalled ambiguous status as a dominion of the British Empire. See Hitsman, J. MacKay and Morton, Desmond, ‘Canada's first military attaché: Capt. H. C. Thacker in the Russo-Japanese War’, Military Affairs, 34:3 (1970), pp. 82–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Australian observer, John Charles Hoad, seems also to have been sent for largely political reasons. Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese’, p. 120; Kowner (ed.), Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5, p. 148.

80 E. Agar, ‘Russian and Japanese field defences’, in General Staff (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War, p. 633; for example, Joseph E. Kuhn, ‘Report on Russo-Japanese War’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, pp. 124, 143, 217, 221.

81 Agar, ‘Russian and Japanese field defences’, p. 635; for example, Valery Havard, ‘Report of Col. Valery Havard, Assistant Surgeon-General, U.S.A., Observer with the Russian Forces in Manchuria’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, p. 32; William V. Judson, ‘Report of Capt. William V. Judson, Corps of Engineers, Observer with the Russian Forces in Manchuria’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, p. 173.

82 The extent of information sharing was such that William Judson claimed that ‘Military attaches are less dangerous only than war correspondents. Many of them will be ill disposed for one reason or another. Some will try to “make records” in getting out information, and some may even try covertly to furnish information to the press.’ Judson, ‘Report of Capt. William V. Judson', p. 162. See discussion of squabbles in Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese’, p. 120.

83 Schuyler, ‘Report of Lieut. Col. Walter S. Schuyler', p. 105. He went on to describe the other attachés’ kit in detail: notebooks, map cases, dispatch boxes, measurement tools, and so on (pp. 105–06).

84 Judson, ‘Report of Capt. William V. Judson'.

85 Vagts, Military Attaché, p. 262.

86 Ignatyev, A Subaltern in Old Russia, p. 173.

87 Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero', p. 156. Though, see Waters, Home's successor, who claimed he merely took ill and returned home. Waters would later succeed Gerard, who died of pneumonia in 1905, before the war's end. Waters, W. H. H., ‘Secret and Confidential’: The Experiences of a Military Attaché (London: John Murray, 1926), pp. 287, 298Google Scholar.

88 They also differed from civilian diplomatic communities in being entirely male. In European diplomacy, the role of spouses, traditionally wives, was central. On gender and diplomacy, see chapters in Cassidy, Jennifer A. (ed.), Gender and Diplomacy (London: Routledge, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Hamilton, Ian, A Staff Officer's Scrap-Book (London: Edward Arnold, 1905), p. 28Google Scholar.

90 Ibid., pp. 153–9.

91 Pershing, My Life before the World War, 1860–1917, p. 226.

92 C. M. Crawford, ‘Diary of the Officers attached to the Third Japanese Army from 29 July 1904 to the Fall of the Fortress’, in General Staff (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War, p. 395.

93 Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese', p. 121.

94 See extended discussion in Porter, Military Orientalism.

95 Quoted in Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero', p. 152.

96 Quoted in Hitsman and Morton, ‘Canada's first military attaché', p. 83. Not bound by the rule to observe one side only, some journalists decamped to the Russians. Reporters were not much liked by the observers. The American observer Judson noted that ‘In my opinion the only safe way to deal with this question is to give out information through some official channel, at the capital of the country, on a sufficiently liberal scale to satiate public curiosity … [A]ny determination to prevent correspondents from accompanying the field army would be so unpopular as to be impracticable.’ Judson, ‘Report of Capt. William V. Judson', p. 162.

97 Peyton C. March, ‘Reports of Capt. Peyton C. March, General Staff, Observer with the Japanese Army’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, p. 55.

98 For example, Agar, ‘Russian and Japanese field defences', p. 633.

99 Kuhn, ‘Report on Russo-Japanese War’, p. 35. See similarly Edward J. McClernand, ‘Report of Lieut. Col. Edward J. M'Clernand, First Cavalry, Observer with the Japanese Forces in Manchuria’, in War Department (ed.), Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, p. 82.

100 McClernand, ‘Report of Lieut. Col. Edward J. M'Clernand’, p. 94.

101 Troubridge, quoted in Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese', p. 129. On ‘military orientalism’, see Porter, Military Orientalism.

102 MacDonald, quoted in Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese', p. 129.

103 Porter, Military Orientalism, p. 93.

104 Before the war, foreign attachés were ‘carefully “shepherded”’ in Tokyo. Colonel Charles Ross, An Outline of the Russo-Japanese War 1904, 1905 (London: Macmillan, 1912), p. 83.

105 Thus, Dostoyevsky could write, in 1881, that ‘In Europe we were only poor recipients of charity and slaves, but we come to Asia as masters. In Europe we were Tatars, but in Asia we are also Europeans. Our mission, our civilizing mission in Asia will entice our spirit and draw us thither once the movement has gained momentum.’ Quoted in Kappeler, Andreas, The Russian Empire: A Multi-Ethnic History, trans. Clayton, Alfred (Harlow: Longman, 2001), pp. 207–08Google Scholar.

106 Ignatyev, A Subaltern in Old Russia, pp. 171–2.

107 Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero', p. 156.

108 March, ‘Reports of Capt. Peyton C. March', p. 7.

109 Ibid., p. 14.

110 W. H. H. Waters, ‘General Report on the experiences of the Russo-Japanese War’, in General Staff (ed.), The Russo-Japanese War, pp. 133–4.

111 Historical Section of the German General Staff, The Russo-Japanese War, p. 370, fn. 1.

112 Kuropotkin appears to have taken no interest in the observers, mentioning neither them nor Ignatyev in his memoir of the war – despite having been an observer himself in his youth, with the French, in Algeria. Kuropatkin, A. N., The Russian Army and the Japanese War, ed. Swinton, E. D., trans. Lindsay, A. B. (New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1909), pp. 102–03Google Scholar.

113 Oliver Griffin, ‘Perceptions of Russia in German military leadership during the war’, in Kowner (ed.), Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, 1904–5, pp. 352–5.

114 The Japanese Army was based on the German model, and the Germans saw the war as a test of it against Russia – a view that assumed a good deal of relative Japanese competence and effectiveness. Jones, ‘Military observers, Eurocentrism and World War Zero', p. 169.

115 Griffin, ‘Perceptions of Russia in German military leadership during the war’, p. 358.

116 Reichmann, ‘Report of Capt. Carl Reichmann’, p. 174. Havard, also American, nonetheless offers a detailed and largely appreciative account of Russian military food and mess practices. Havard, ‘Report of Col. Valery Havard’, pp. 23–8.

117 Ferris, ‘Turning Japanese’, p. 122.

118 Hamilton quoted in ibid., p. 131.

119 Hamilton nonetheless allowed that ‘They have however one very fine military quality. They are not easily discouraged or demoralized.’ Ibid.

120 Kuhn, ‘Report on Russo-Japanese War’, p. 35.

121 Thus Porter finds British perceptions were orientalist, ‘but not in the sense that they depicted the Japanese in a derogatory way … Their receptiveness to Japanese examples enabled them to rise above dismissive and racist attitudes.’ Porter, Military Orientalism, p. 109.

122 See discussion in Porter in ibid., pp. 229–30, fns 4–7.

123 Adler, ‘The spread of security communities’, p. 196.

124 Okakura Tenshin, quoted in Suzuki, Civilization and Empire, p. 175. The war was also a prominent focus of attention for Japanese pacifists. Wilson, ‘The Russo-Japanese War and Japan’, p. 161.

125 MacMillan, Margaret, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York, NY: Random House, 2001), pp. 316–21Google Scholar.

126 Zarakol, After Defeat.

127 The case thus tracks with much recent work in practice scholarship, in refusing a strict disjunction between stability and change. This is not about order, but about ordering: about treating the production of stability and change as deeply related rather than divergent processes. See Adler, World Ordering; Bueger and Gadinger, International Practice Theory, pp. 100–06.