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IIRC part of the answer is that they had a successful revolution led by principled people who realized that cultural capital is just as important as power and i
by wwweston 5y ago
IIRC part of the answer is that they had a successful revolution led by principled people who realized that cultural capital is just as important as power and in fact maybe keeping a standing army had problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Figueres_Ferrer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Figueres_Ferrer
https://www.spanishpuravida.com/why-costa-rica-has-no-army/ https://www.spanishpuravida.com/why-costa-rica-has-no-army/
- api 5y agoA standing army creates a ton of problems, but what happens if nobody has a standing army? Seems like someone has to play cop and eat the cost (both social and economic) of doing so.
- mikro2nd 5y agoI think that, "what happens if nobody has a standing army?" is an interesting question. What I don't understand is why you think that "someone has to play cop"...?
- Bayart 5y agoIf you go by historical data, when nobody has a standing army everybody has mercenaries (which leads to instability at scale).
- emidln 5y agoOr someone gets the bright idea of putting together an army and conquering their neighbors (who don't have a standing army and are relying on Mercenaries who keep a good feel on which way the wind is blowing (and who will have the money to pay them in the future)).
- amalcon 5y agoThe neighbors, not being stupid, notice this and build their own standing armies (or at least conscript militias). Which is why historically, the situation where there are no armies or militias is so rare: it's not a Nash equilibrium.
- jjk166 5y agoSo long as you can raise an army at some future point in time should the need arise, this issue seems moot. It's inefficient to maintain a standing army when it is unnecessary.
- HideousKojima 5y ago>So long as you can raise an army at some future point in time should the need arise, this issue seems moot. By the time you could cobble together an army any modern military would have already conquered you, especially if you have super strict civilian firearm laws like Costa Rica that make putting together defensive militias much, much harder.
- jjk166 5y agoBut no one else has a standing army in this scenario so there is no such modern military that can conquer you before you can remilitarize. The moment one country starts militarizing in a world without militaries, you know their intentions and can start remilitarizing to counter. But let's say Costa Rica had a standing army - are they going to stop that modern military from conquering them? Probably not, so why waste money on a half assed defense?
- ctdonath 5y agoGermany, between WWI & WWII, officially has no military to worry about. Was able to create a Europe-conquering army very quickly.
- fastball 5y agoLike many social problems, this is actually a coordination problem, and can be easily boiled down to a tragedy of the commons situation. Everyone would prefer to not have an army, because most of the time you don't need them but they're still expensive to maintain and when you do need them they're even more expensive. But if nobody has an army then the bad actors can form an army and take over everybody else. So everybody needs to have an army unless and until you can get global coordination working to the point where everyone de-militarizes and the moment anyone starts militarizing everyone else does the same and joins together to absolutely crush that violator. You just gotta hope they weren't able to massively militarize in secret. The seems unlikely to ever happen, so until then you have a couple countries that get to live in the sweet spot of not having their own army but still being covered by someone else's.
- groby_b 5y agoThe fascinating thing is that the "well the bad guys could form an army" argument sounds logical, but really isn't. You can't secretly recruit and train several 100,000 people. The closest we've ever come to seeing this happen in real time was probably with German rearmament in the 20s and 30s, and they were telegraphing for decades what they were doing. It does however raise the other problem - if people are willing to stand by and ignore obviously bad actors skirting closer and closer to the line, you'll have at some point a fairly big problem, and it depends on how long you waited. That is the bigger problem of global demilitarization - the fact that non-action in the face of a violation usually plays better to a domestic audience than actually doing something. (This is a pattern that has and will play out repeatedly. That's the actual question that needs answering)
- fastball 5y agoAlas with modern warfare you don't need 100k people in order to curb-stomp the unmilitarized competition. I am certain the US for instance could easily make nukes with no other country knowing about it, and that's with all the people in the US who would scream that from the rooftops if they knew. Or you could get even more creative: make a virus in a lab, develop a vaccine / cure, vaccinate your population, release the virus. We don't even know if COVID-19 came from a Wuhan lab and even if it did it seems incredibly unlikely it was developed as a weapon. Imagine the secrecy that would be involved by a country doing so deliberately. Between nukes / bioweapons / chemical weapons / drones / etc, a country could definitely achieve a huge edge before any other country knew what was happening. It's not 1920 anymore.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- TacticalCoder 5y agoWell sure but then it relies on the US army. Costa Rica is allied with the US and foolish would be the country trying to declare war to Costa Rica because it'd very probably face the full wrath of Uncle Sam's army. I'm not saying setting up an alliance with the country that has the biggest army in the world and then doing without an army is a bad thing... What I'm saying though is that it'd probably be very different for a country without any alliance with the US to decide to have no army.