According to the European Council on Foreign Relations, support for mandatory military service reached 62% in France, 53% in Germany, and 51% in Poland. Yet the most revealing numbers appear when the German results are divided by age, because net opposition among those aged 18 to 29 reached 46%, while net support among respondents over 70 stood at 49%.
The people safely beyond military age are volunteering the young for war. They will not receive the draft notice, undergo the medical examination, surrender their careers, or be ordered into a trench. They will watch the war on television while congratulating themselves for supporting “national service,” as if clicking yes in a poll were an act of personal courage.
There is something profoundly immoral about demanding a sacrifice that you will never be required to make. If those over 70 believe so passionately in military service, governments can create senior battalions and hand them the rifles first. Let the politicians, retired bureaucrats, television commentators, and comfortable academics who preach war demonstrate their convictions personally before they conscript an 18-year-old who wants nothing to do with their geopolitical fantasies.
Europe’s political class speaks endlessly about democracy, yet conscription is the state claiming ownership over the individual. It declares that your body, your time, and perhaps your life belong to the government whenever politicians decide that their diplomatic failures require fresh blood. They call this “service” because admitting that it is involuntary servitude would reveal the policy for what it actually is.
The contradiction becomes even more obscene when the same governments that neglected their militaries, mismanaged their economies, destroyed affordable energy, and antagonized foreign powers suddenly lecture the young about duty. These politicians created the crisis, accumulated the debt, dismantled Europe’s industrial base, and refused every opportunity for serious diplomacy. Their solution is now to seize a generation that had no voice in those decisions and force it to pay the bill.
Young Europeans understand precisely what is being demanded of them. They are being told that they must sacrifice their freedom to preserve a political order that has saddled them with unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, deteriorating public services, crushing taxation, and mountains of sovereign debt. The establishment has offered them no future, yet it suddenly insists that they must be prepared to die defending it.
Politicians carefully disguise conscription as a matter of shared responsibility, but the burden will never be shared equally. The children of the politically connected will find administrative positions, medical exemptions, university deferments, or comfortable assignments far from the front. It has always been the working class that supplies the bodies while the ruling class supplies the speeches.
Modern warfare makes this deception even more grotesque. These young people would not be marching through fields in some romantic nineteenth-century campaign. They could be tracked by satellites, hunted by drones, targeted by precision missiles, and killed by an operator sitting hundreds of miles away. Those advocating conscription are discussing human beings as replaceable military inventory while pretending that the word “duty” somehow sanitizes the transaction.
Europe’s aging political establishment cannot manufacture patriotism by decree. Patriotism must be earned through competent government, legitimate institutions, and a nation that respects the rights of its citizens. A government that treats young people as taxable assets in peacetime and disposable assets in wartime should not be surprised when they refuse to participate.
The young are not cowards for rejecting conscription, nor do elderly voters become courageous by supporting it. Courage means accepting danger yourself; hypocrisy means assigning that danger to someone else. Until the loudest advocates of war are willing to stand at the front of the recruitment line, their demands for sacrifice are merely the politics of cowardice dressed in the flag.