The Conscription Comeback and the Social Contract
In this week’s Europe Dispatch, Minna Ålander looks at the question of obligatory military service and what the existing conscription systems – and their social acceptability – look like in the Nordic
Hello Everyone,
The question of (re)introducing conscription is currently a hot topic in Europe. While I come from a country with an unbroken tradition of obligatory military service for male citizens (voluntary for women), I tend to be rather sceptical about the idea that conscription would solve the problem of growing European troop numbers. In some cases it is the best system for the intended purpose, such as in Finland, but in other countries it could add more problems than it would solve. Next week, I will look into the related question of willingness to defend – unless a number of new wars have broken out and mess up my plans. The likelihood for that to happen does not seem all too low, as things are accelerating at a pace that makes it hard to keep up with everything (Israel’s attack on Iran was huge but almost felt like “just a Friday morning” at this rate. And who still remembers that there was something with India and Pakistan not too long ago?).
Yours,
Minna
The Conscription Comeback and the Social Contract
Western Europe is currently trying to catch up on the military buildup that was, amazingly, still largely neglected over the past three years of Russia’s war. How come defence production capacity was not ramped up immediately after, if not before, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is a question that boggles pretty much everyone’s mind in the analytical community.
The truth is that although the perception of Ukraine, and with it Ukraine’s place, decisively shifted in Europe as a result of the war, the Russian threat never reached all of Europe. It took Trump’s comeback to jolt Western Europe into action. For northeastern Europeans, Russia has historically been the main threat and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine immediately activated that threat perception, but for Western Europe the threat remained more distant and in some ways also more abstract or improbable. However, the transatlantic partnership has been the cornerstone of Western European security since NATO’s founding in 1949. The threat that Trump poses to the alliance’s existence is perceived as acutely in Western Europe as the Russian threat is in Europe’s northeast. So now we are finally all more or less on the same page.
Growing Europe’s small professional militaries back to a size sufficient for taking full responsibility for European defence is, however, a difficult task. The hardest – and slowest – part of it is growing troop numbers. Several smaller European countries have decided to solve the problem by reintroducing conscription. The conscription comeback has mainly taken place in the Nordic-Baltic area, where all the eight countries have some form of a conscription system in place: Finland, Estonia and Norway kept up their conscription systems after the Cold War, while Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden paused conscription and Iceland does not have a military. Denmark (population 6 million) kept the male conscription in place but reduced the duration to only four months and the number of conscripts annually to 4200. In comparison, Lithuania (population just below 3 million) reintroduced conscription in 2015 and trains annually about the same number of conscripts. Norway’s annual number of conscripts has also been relatively low after the Cold War, currently at around 9000. Sweden (population 10.5 million), which brought back conscription in 2017 after having paused it in 2010, currently has the capacity to train about 8000 conscripts per year. Latvia only reinstituted the “national defence service” that encourages voluntary draft in 2023. Only Finland (population 5.5 million) has maintained a significant reserve (up to 870 000) and trains about 22 000 conscripts annually.
In countries with small population, conscription is often the best way to ensure that the military has access to sufficient human resources. At the same time, in a reserve-based system like Finland’s, with only small standing forces, the reservists are not missing from the workforce in peacetime. A reserve-based system is therefore a more cost-efficient way to maintain a large wartime troop strength than a professional military (although the real costs of a conscription system are somewhat difficult to measure). But more importantly, in the Nordic countries that have a conscription tradition, the military service is part of a social contract. The state’s end of the contract is to guarantee the defence of territorial integrity, while the citizens’ contribution to the contract is their military service. When Norway made the military service obligatory for both genders in 2015 (as the first NATO country to do so), the Norwegian government explicitly referred to conscription as “an important principle in the social contract between citizens and the state”.
A social contract with obligatory military service is based on an approach that sees the population as a resource. In order to make the citizens’ part of the deal acceptable to them, the state must ensure that the military service is not a horrible experience and find ways to motivate citizens to contribute to national defence. This has an impact even on the command culture, where the conscripts and reservists are trusted with important roles and tasks – after all, they make up a significant part of the overall force.
The conscription debate has emerged also in Western Europe, particularly in Germany. However, (re)introducing conscription into a social contract where the population is seen as a potential problem to be managed, rather than as a resource, is not easy. Bringing back conscription is also not the silver bullet it is often portrayed as – if conscription was reinstated in Germany today, the initial numbers would be so small that seeing results would take years. Transforming a military system that is made for a professional force’s needs into one that has the human resources, knowhow and facilities to train conscripts is not done overnight. The Swedish and Norwegian examples show what a long process increasing the numbers is: Sweden aims to grow the number of conscripts trained annually to 12 000 and Norway to 13 600 – by 2035 and 2036, respectively.
Every European country has to find a way to increase their military forces in a way that is feasible economically and fits within the existing social contract. There is no one size fits all solution and making sure that measures do not stretch social acceptance too thin is vital.
Excellent primer on a topic I was completely unaware of. Much more complex than I would have thought. Thank you!
Countries with small population may not really have a choice. But there are serious downsides to conscription. A really long conscription (for a few years) is not economically and politically feasible in a democratic society, at least absent universally recognized acute external threat (like, say, in South Korea). And short conscription (several months to a year) does not provide time for really serious training (at best, at all times a large proportion of the force is not yet fully trained). In this sense the US model of 4-year contracts is much more effective, as it means that some three quarters of the force at any time are more experienced than any conscript in Europe. Then there's an issue of motivation. All members of the US military are there because they actually want to be there, at least for the time being. Many (if not most) conscripts would rather be elsewhere.