THE ABONGO ABROAD: MILITARY INTERNATIONALISM, TRAVEL, TRAINING, AND PEACE IN GHANA AND THE UNITED STATES, 1960-1992 By John Valentine Clune Submitted to the graduate degree program in History and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ________________________________ Chairperson Sheyda F. Jahanbani ________________________________ Anton Rosenthal ________________________________ Elizabeth L. MacGonagle ________________________________ Marie G. Brown ________________________________ Holly T. Goerdel Date Defended: May 1, 2014 The Dissertation Committee for John Valentine Clune certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: THE ABONGO ABROAD: MILITARY INTERNATIONALISM, TRAVEL, TRAINING, AND PEACE IN GHANA AND THE UNITED STATES, 1960-1992 ________________________________ Chairperson Sheyda F. Jahanbani Date Approved: June 17, 2014 ii Abstract This dissertation searches the global commodities of military education and training assistance and international peacekeeping missions between the 1960s and 1980s for the meaning people on both the sending and receiving ends made of the international experience. For Ghanaian soldiers and their families and for American communities around large institutions for military education, training and service abroad paradoxically eroded national identities while creating new global citizens, within limits, as individuals and families developed transnational friendships and reaped social and financial benefits from the exchange. It argues that all participants in the global system of military-sponsored international travel approached the act with different ideas about what the travel signified, what opportunities it presented, and what change it intended to bring about, but all participants believed the travel inspired or revealed a new psychological orientation capable of transcending national boundaries and actualizing a global identity, which I call Military Internationalism. States and national policymakers appealed to such a transnational identity when forming, sustaining, and justifying international military exchanges (including education, training, and peacekeeping). Policymakers in both the United States and Ghana assumed that international travel, especially for military elites or potential elites, could yield corporate transformation and modernization to recipient states’ entire societies, via the military. Those advancements only occurred after individual transformations. Individual actors manifested Military Internationalism when they imagined themselves part of a global community that was sometimes smaller, sometimes larger than their respective nation-states. Around American institutions for military education, the community structures that evolved to welcome, instruct, and socialize visiting military personnel and their families flourished on their unofficial status. American women, especially, thrived in the environment which specifically discounted the role iii of the state while elevating values of hospitality, internationalism, and world peace. Ghanaian families on military-sponsored courses abroad also employed international education to exercise a global social imaginary based on entrepreneurial travel to relieve economic and political stresses in Ghana. Finally, large numbers of Ghanaian soldiers and their spouses integrated the trials and danger of international peacekeeping both for the benefits they provided and with a genuine faith that their service nurtured an authentically better world. iv Acknowledgments As all historians know, large projects like dissertations are community efforts. I thank my graduate committee, including Anton Rosenthal, Elizabeth MacGonagle, Marie Brown, Brent Steele, Holly Goerdel, and especially my primary advisor, Sheyda Jahanbani, for carefully guiding this project in reasonable ways without dampening my enthusiasm. Professors Beverly Mack, Theodore Wilson, Jeffrey Moran, Jennifer Weber, Yacine Daddi Addoun, and Robert Schwaller at the University of Kansas encouraged me as a student more than they know. Librarians Carmen Orth-Alfie and Sara Morris provided rapid assistance whenever I called. Special thanks to Alan Clune and Amanda Schlumpberger for their countless hours editing and clarifying my work. Thanks to the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Department of History, especially Colonel Mark Wells, for sponsoring my graduate fellowship and the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Civilian Institution section for administrative support. I thank the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Directorate of Education, which sponsored my research in Ghana, and Brian Bartee, the U.S. Air Force attaché who coordinated my meeting with his Ghanaian counterpart, Derrick Attachie. Lieutenant Colonel Attachie arranged interviews with former Ghanaian officers, provided transportation to the Ghana Armed Forces Military Academy and Training Schools, the Command and Staff College, and introduced me to the Ghana Armed Forces Director of Public Relations, M’Bawine Atintande. Colonel Atintande provided a workspace and gave me free run of his library while his deputy, Eric Aggrey-Quashie, scoured the Directorate of Public Relations to create the most complete collection of AF News papers and peacekeeping journals ever assembled for my research. At Ghana’s Public Records and Archives Administration, Josiah Okyere’s attentive assistance helped me navigate collections with no finding aid to find v documents to make my time there productive and exhilarating. Thanks to the University of Kansas’ College of Humanities for sponsoring my research at the United Nations archives, and to the United Nations Archives and Record Management Section’s amazingly attentive and patient archival staff. Finally, special thanks to my wife Jessica and children, for giving me a quiet space and a reason to work. It is to them and in honor of the one hundred Ghanaian soldiers who gave their lives as United Nations peacekeepers that I dedicate this work. vi Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 The Case for Ghana ..................................................................................................................... 7 Identities: Transnationalism, Military Internationalism, Modernity, and Diaspora .................. 14 Part I ............................................................................................................................................ 36 Chapter 1: Modernization Ideology and the United States Military Assistance Program .. 36 Introduction: International Military Education in the Decade of Development ....................... 36 Mutual Security Program Reform as Ideological Reform ........................................................ 43 The Modernization of Military Modernization ......................................................................... 52 Modernization Theory Becomes Policy .................................................................................... 70 Military Modernization’s Eclipse.............................................................................................. 82 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 88 Chapter 2: Independence and Internationalism: Ghana’s National Military and American Assistance Policy ......................................................................................................................... 91 Introduction: Three Boxes ......................................................................................................... 91 Training and Education, Integration and Isolation; U.S. Assistance Policy to Ghana before 1966 ........................................................................................................................................... 97 Ghanaian Nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Military Internationalism in the early 1960s ... 107 American Assistance and Ghanaian Internationalism after 1966 ........................................... 122 Ghana’s Return to Military Rule and the Limits of American Military Education ................ 136 The Ghana Armed Forces Staff College and Military Internationalism for Export ................ 148 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................... 156 Chapter 3: “I Think They Would Be Better Off If We Took Them On A Tour Of Disney World:” Continuity and Change in International Military Education and Training ........ 159 Introduction: Momentum or Inertia? ....................................................................................... 159 vii The Informational Program in 1971: Inertia, Ideology, and Military Internationalism .......... 166 Military Internationalism, Human Rights, and the Indestructible International Military Education and Training Program ............................................................................................ 176 The Elastic Rhetoric of International Military Education and Training: The Ghanaian Case 196 Momentum or Inertia in the 1980s .......................................................................................... 204 Conclusion ..............................................................................................................................