The reassessment of recruitment structures and the potential reintroduction of a mandatory national service, understood in a broad sense, which encompasses military and civic components, emerge as a strategic imperative in the face of the rapid degradation of the European geopolitical context.
This is not a nostalgia for past models, but a rational response to the structural deficit of personnel in the Armed Forces and the urgency of rebuilding a mobilized reserve and restoring the civic readiness of nations.
Among the different European countries, the German case has become particularly illustrative of the tensions that permeate this debate. The proposal for a voluntary service framed by compulsory conscription – for now only for men – exposed in a raw way the social and strategic fracture installed in post-Cold War Europe.
Student protests of repudiation, often encouraged by far-left parties that instrumentalize the pacifist cause, exposed a serious deficit in civic education. That young Europeans express sympathy for authoritarian regimes like Putin’s, ignoring the duty to defend democracies, is the most acute symptom of this civic alienation, the lack of intergenerational cohesion and the dramatic ignorance regarding the threats to the liberal order. This disorientation reveals how far we are from understanding the values of freedom, democracy and collective responsibility that sustain the European project.
The central issue of this debate is not just military, but deeply social and political. A professional army, although efficient in specialized missions, does not guarantee the vital link between the Armed Forces and the Nation, nor does it ensure the dissemination of the values of defense and sovereignty. The German model, ambiguous and uneven in its application, became politically controversial without resolving the problem of critical defense mass.
Comparison with other European models offers relevant lessons. Latvia, faced with an immediate existential threat, opted for the full reintroduction of compulsory military service for men. The Danish paradigm, on the other hand, proposes a more coherent and, in the Portuguese case, more inspiring path: a universal mandatory national service, of prolonged duration, which establishes full equality between men and women regarding the duty of defense.
This step towards civic equity is essential, as it transforms mandatory service into a vehicle for strengthening social cohesion, forcing different socioeconomic and gender strata to share the experience and responsibility of national security. Service, whether military or civic, constitutes an indispensable pedagogical tool for instilling a sense of belonging and the intrinsic value of a free society.
Although National Defense continues to be an area of exclusive sovereignty of the Member States, the nature and urgency of the threats require geostrategic coherence on a European scale. Youth mobility, as well as the security management of the Union’s external borders, are cross-cutting issues that require a broad consensus on shared responsibilities and on the very concept of European civic duty.
Persisting in fragmentation is penalizing those who alone assume the burden of collective duty. A European consultation around compulsory national service, in its military and civic dimensions, today represents an imperative of loyalty and strategic solidarity.
Without a European culture of shared duty and defense, common security will remain a strategic fiction.
Strategy, Security and Defense Analyst