Recent discussions in Britain over the reintroduction of conscription only expose the dangerous void between rulers and ruled, argues Lizzie Finnegan.
The outgoing Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, recently stirred public controversy by proposing that the British armed forces should be significantly expanded by training and equipping a ‘citizen army’ capable of rebuffing a Russian attack on NATO. We are, Sanders argued, a ‘pre-war generation’, risking the same complacency as those living before World War I, and a ‘whole-of-nation’ effort is required to muster a reserve force of 45,000 troops. His comments triggered a public debate on the reintroduction of conscription and ‘national service’ that only exposed the hollowness of the British state.
Opinion polls promptly revealed negligible support for reintroducing conscription. One found that 59 percent of British citizens were opposed, with only 27 percent willing to fight and 47 percent determined to resist by enduring some penalty. Another found that only 17 percent would willingly fight, while nearly twice as many would do ‘anything to avoid it’. Even if the country ‘was under imminent threat of invasion’, only 11 percent would volunteer, 23 would fight if conscripted, and 30 percent would refuse to fight entirely. Government ministers were quick to dismiss Sanders’ comments, saying there were no plans to reintroduce conscription.
This reveals the void between British citizens and their rulers. At the same time it is the nation’s very unwillingness to follow its leaders that is fuelling a foreign policy that is imperilling national security,.
Conscription and Political Authority
Whatever else one might think of it, the successful conscription of troops undeniably reflects substantial political authority. The state makes a claim on the very lives of its citizens – commanding them to fight and potentially die for the nation – and those citizens, however grudgingly, obey. To succeed, those issuing such a command must be seen as representing the interests of a nation to which those citizens self-consciously belong. They must be seen as possessing the authority to make such demands, while those being conscripted must see themselves as obligated to obey.
The greater the number of people being conscripted, the more the state must appear to those being mobilised as one that somehow represents them, and so acts with the authority of the political community as a whole. If the state is simply seen as a malign or alien entity, introducing conscriptions runs the risk of mass resistance or non-compliance. Widespread conscription involving millions of people has only been possible in nation-states where the broad masses of people can plausibly believe that the state – however imperfectly – represents them and the wider political community of which they form part.
Britain’s experience of conscription reflects this. Initially, in 1914, Britain’s liberal elite disdained conscription as an authoritarian practice preferred by their Teutonic enemies, relying instead on the culture of militaristic and imperialist nationalism that they had whipped up to move men to enlist voluntarily. By 1916, disastrous losses pushed them towards conscription. Although conscientious objection was originally punished through death before ‘alternative service’ was introduced, it was never particularly widespread, with only 16,000 registered. Even an establishment dominated by upper-class elites and business magnates could count on the compliance of the wider population. Yet the British state never imposed conscription in Ireland. A proposal to do so in 1918 only exposed Britain’s lack of authority in Ireland by provoking significant opposition and strengthening Sinn Fein who would soon lead the War of Independence. Conscription was immediately reintroduced at the start of World War II for men and extended to single women in 1941. Again, conscientious objection was rare, with only 60,000 refusing to fight, principally on religious grounds.
The political dynamics emerging from the mass mobilisation of citizens into the armed forces have been highly significant. Conscription had involved mass participation in the aims of the state, meaning the ruling class was forced to make compromises when demobilising soldiers. The depravities inflicted on citizen armies in World War I forced even liberal elites to promise greater social, economic and political concessions to their citizens, including expanded public welfare and ‘homes fit for heroes’. Many such promises were not kept but after the Second World War Britain’s leaders had to make concessions by incorporating the industrial working classes into the nation A new pact between capital and labour was forged around the welfare state. As David Edgerton chronicles, this marked Britain’s transformation from a fundamentally transnational, imperial entity into a nation-state, concerned above all with national economic development and welfare, and governed by mass-based political parties making more or less convincing claims to represent the national interest. One does not have to be nostalgic for this era to recognise the role of mass mobilisation and warfare in bringing it about.
Conscription also tends to induce greater democratic restraint in foreign policy – though certainly not true democratic control, even in notionally democratic states. A government forced to rely on the loyalty of citizens to do its fighting must, on average, be more accountable to those citizens than those reliant on a professional or mercenary army. It must actively convince citizens both that they have a duty to fight – and give them reasons for their loyalty – and that the reasons for a specific conflict are public reasons, genuinely representing the national interest, and not simply the private whims of a ruling clique. Failure to do so risks mass resistance, precisely because the masses risk being mobilised into a war that they do not believe in. The Vietnam War is the most obvious example. Dogged Vietnamese resistance and a steady flow of body bags eventually resulted in American citizens losing faith in the elite’s policy of war, which was rendered unsustainable.
The Decay of Political Authority and the Rise of Reckless Foreign Policy
Since Vietnam (and earlier in Britain’s case, where national service was abolished in 1960), ruling elites have been far too cautious to rely on their citizens’ willing participation in war. While over 40 states still practice some form of conscription, even they rely on professionals and mercenaries for actual war-fighting. This gives them considerably more freedom to pursue warmongering policies, unconstrained by reference to public opinion. This transition did not occur in isolation. It was part of a far wider de-democratisation which saw the transformation of welfarist nation-states into neoliberal regulatory states, as policymaking was deliberately insulated from what little popular-democratic control had been established in the early post-war decades.
In the field of foreign policy, this is what has enabled often deeply unpopular ‘forever wars’, as Western states have rampaged through the Middle East, North Africa and beyond in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, trailing death and chaos in their wake. Despite their unpopularity, mass opposition to these wars has never been overwhelming. The dominant attitude has been cynicism and apathy, precisely because no one ever expected to be called up to fight in them. Even anti-war campaigners adopted a posture of passive withdrawal and resignation, as the slogan ‘not in my name’ suggested.
The voiding of post-war democracy has therefore enabled a reckless foreign policy, in which elites pursue their own narrowly conceived, even fantastical purposes – from ‘human rights’ to the defence of the ‘rules-based international order’ – with scant reference to any real national interest.
This is how we end up toying so lightly with the idea of armed conflict against a nuclear-armed power, Russia, while fighting a proxy war in Ukraine. Years of reckless foreign policy decision-making, particularly NATO’s eastward expansion, eventually led Russia to attack first Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014, to avert the conversion of neighbouring states into NATO proxies. Any Western ruler genuinely concerned with the national interest might, at this point, have recognised the dangers inherent in fanning Russian anxieties, and changed course. Instead, Ukraine continued to be integrated into NATO’s security architecture. The result is a disastrous war that is obviously destructive of Ukraine’s own national sovereignty and which Ukraine is losing..
The Ukraine war is a confrontation between adversaries which each lack substantial internal authority. The Russian state’s lack of genuine authority is obvious. It has had to rely on lumpen mercenaries and rabble from its prisons to carry out urban fighting precipitating the 2023 mutiny by the Wagner Group. Sensing his lack of democratic authority, Vladimir Putin has carefully avoided total mobilisation for war, instead relying on smaller-scale drafts which, while considerable, are nonetheless insufficient to subdue Ukraine, a far weaker state. Even then, nearly a million Russians have fled overseas. The idea that Russia could roll its tanks into existing NATO countries was fanciful at the start of the war. Subsequent events have only proven that its authoritarian regime cannot project force very far beyond its borders.
Western citizens are, by and large, rightly sympathetic towards the Ukrainian people and their brutalisation by Russian forces. But that does not entail a wish to go to war with Russia. Ukraine has quickly become yet another forever war, relegated remarkably quickly to the inside pages of newspapers and given fleeting attention by an atomised public, despite the inherent dangers of escalation and even nuclear confrontation. Like Putin, Western elites sense that they lack the authority to command their citizens to fight. They have only ever been willing to fight to the last Ukrainian. The British government’s quick disavowal of any talk of conscription proves the point. General Sanders has, however unwittingly, exposed the hollowness of their own Churchillian posturing.
Many Britons’ unwillingness to fight even if the nation was at imminent risk of invasion – and therefore possible destruction – is a sobering reminder of the political void between our rulers and many ordinary people. This is expressed not only in foreign policy but in many areas of public life, causing large majorities to view politicians as representing no one but themselves, as part of a remote ‘globalist’ elite imposing their will on the rest of society.
This degraded democracy entails real dangers – not least propelling Ukraine forward to carry on fighting against Russia. General Sanders is not alone in prophesying World War III. Britain’s Defence Secretary also speaks of a shift from a ‘post-war to a ‘pre-war world’ and, like Sanders, he blames evil authoritarian states like Russia and China for this. Our rulers are unable to see that today’s cosmopolitan dystopia is, fundamentally, a world of their making. By projecting all the fault onto demonised enemy states, they avoid any reflection on their own responsibility, and there is no domestic force capable of compelling them to think or behave otherwise. There is only a sullen mass of atomised bystanders, rejecting their rulers’ pretensions to authority by insisting that they will not fight. If military leaders can limit the draft to a few tens of thousands, this may well not suffice to prevent our rulers from dragging the rest of us over the cliff. The precondition of forever war is public apathy. To end the forever war, the nation must be roused up to imprint its will on all areas of public life, including foreign policy
The Northern Star 
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