Party politics and military deployments: explaining political consensus on Belgian military intervention

ABSTRACT

While a comprehensive body of research provides evidence that politics does not always stop at the water’s edge, the question “when does politics stop at the water’s edge” has remained largely unanswered. This article addresses this gap in the literature by examining the level of agreement in Belgium’s parliament on military deployment decisions. More specifically, the uncontested decisions to participate in the 2011 Libya intervention and the air strikes against the self-proclaimed Islamic State in Iraq are compared with the contested decision to participate in strike operations against IS over Syrian territory. The results of our study indicate that a broad parliamentary consensus will emerge if the domestic political context forces left- and right-leaning parties into negotiating a compromise that takes into account their preferences regarding the scope of the operation and if left-leaning parties have no reason to oppose the operation because it pursues inclusive goals and its international legal justification is not contested.

KEYWORDS:

• Military intervention
• party politics
• parliamentary contestation
• ideology, use of force

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to Ipsos survey data, 78% of the Belgian population supported the military intervention in Libya and 70% supported the air strikes against IS (Ipsos 2011, Ipsos 2014).

2 While some legal scholars argue that operations over Syria are legal for reasons of collective self-defence, others suggest that Article 51 requires an attack from one state on another (Ruys et al. 2019).

3 An anonymised list of the interviews is included in Appendix 1.

4 MPs of the left-leaning CDH also unambiguously supported participation, but with a score of 4.5 on the LRGEN-indicator, this party could be considered a centrist rather than a left-wing party.

5 Although the parliamentary resolution that authorised the deployment was still adopted by a relatively large majority, the deployment decision was clearly more strongly contested than the large majority of military deployments in Belgium and similar parliamentary democracies (Haesebrouck and Van Immerseel 2020, Ostermann et al. 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek.