The entire left spectrum is unprepared for the challenge of defending democratic and social achievements in Europe against external and internal threats from authoritarian states and forces. The question of the character of armies and military service is increasingly at the centre of debate — a question that socialists have barely engaged with over the past thirty years.
After the collapse of the bureaucratic dictatorships in the USSR and Eastern Europe in 1990, military spending fell across Europe. Armies were scaled down but all the more efficiently geared towards deployments abroad. Some states abolished conscription. For capital, large armies became too expensive and inefficient. In recent years this development has gone into reverse.
Militarisation and conscription
Russia launched its war against Ukraine in 2014. On 24 February 2022, the Putin dictatorship began its full-scale invasion against the Ukrainian population. The Ukrainians, however, are offering far stronger resistance than expected. Russia seeks to break that resistance and continues its assault. European governments are citing the Russian war in Ukraine, together with Russian threats against the Baltic states and Moldova, as justification for driving forward a gigantic wave of rearmament — one they had, in any case, already begun before the invasion.
In December 2025, Germany introduced a compulsory registration requirement designed, if necessary, to facilitate the reintroduction of mandatory military service. Die Linke (The Left) and many small left organisations oppose the reintroduction of conscription. School strikes have broken out across the country. That young people who have grown up without conscription should reject it and take to the streets is as natural and understandable as opposition to rearmament in general.
But the arguments against reintroducing conscription deserve critical scrutiny. Some ground their opposition in a pacifist outlook; others argue that they have no wish to defend this bourgeois state. Many offer a simply individualist rationale, without considering the democratic rights and the social situation that still exist — in their own country and, for example, in Ukraine. The question of security is rarely placed in a European context, and the debate is correspondingly not conducted from a solidaristic transnational perspective. It is obvious that people in Ukraine are under attack every day. If we acknowledge that people in the Baltic states and Moldova can also be threatened, and that Russia and other authoritarian states and organisations threaten our societies through various forms of hybrid warfare, then we are obliged to think through some further implications.
Opposition to conscription amounts to acceptance of a professional army. From the history of the labour movement, we have learnt that this position is problematic. The army remains an instrument of capital’s rule even after the abolition of conscription. With the recruitment of contract and career soldiers and the attendant professionalisation, armies have in fact strengthened their authoritarian character as instruments of domination.
An army trained and commanded by a professional officer caste is less permeated by the contradictions of social life. It is therefore far more readily deployable as an instrument of order and repression against social movements, and as a tool of imperialist adventures elsewhere in the world.
Notably, it is precisely those EU states with the longest tradition of overseas military deployments that either have no conscription or abolished it from the late 1990s onwards, replacing it with more authoritarian and efficient professional armies. These include Germany (abolished 2011; registration requirement from 2026), France (abolished 1996), Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal. For different reasons, neutral Ireland, tiny Luxembourg, and Malta also have no conscription. The central and eastern European states — Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary — likewise abolished conscription after the collapse of the bureaucratic dictatorships. Conscription, by contrast, exists in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Croatia (from 2026), Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, Sweden (selectively), and Cyprus. States outside the EU confirm the pattern. Norway has a service obligation that has been gender-neutral since 2015. Together with Finland, Switzerland probably has the most comprehensive and broadly supported form of conscription in Europe, including annual refresher courses. Switzerland introduced civilian alternative service only in 1992. Britain abolished conscription in 1960; its army deployments in Northern Ireland and elsewhere have been and continue to be carried out by a purely professional army. Professional armies have historically always proven reliable pillars of capital’s rule — the ultimate guarantee of bourgeois power.
When socialist organisations reject conscription and accept a professional army as the lesser evil, they in effect abandon any perspective on the comprehensive democratisation of society and the transformation of power relations — including over the economy and the armed forces. They thereby also abandon the perspective of a seizure of power by the working classes. In the final analysis, capital and the bourgeoisie will rely on the instrument of the professional army and do everything possible to keep it in their hands.
A conscript army, by virtue of its composition and its embeddedness in social life, makes it at least potentially possible to win many soldiers — as wage-earners in uniform — for the interests of the working class. The comprehensive conscription system in Switzerland demonstrates, however, that this specific form of bourgeois army carries enormous ideological weight in integrating the population into the existing order.
Emancipatory military policy — is it possible?
Our concern is not the defence of the “fatherland” but the defence of democratic and social rights and achievements against external attack by authoritarian states and against internal attack by reactionary and fascist forces. This was also the position of revolutionary socialists in the countries threatened by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. This defence by the broad population must be integrated into a strategy of social emancipation. Defence must not simply be refused on individualist grounds; it must be democratically organised and must encompass the local, regional, national, and continental dimensions.
It is urgently necessary for revolutionary eco-socialists to develop their own military policy. We must not delegate the defence of won democratic and social rights to an army — least of all to a professional army. Nor can we assume that armies can simply be abolished, not even by governments with a radical socio-ecological reform programme.
Both for the defence of democratic and social achievements and from the offensive perspective of a working-class seizure of power, it makes sense to train citizens who are simultaneously drone pilots, developers, manufacturers, and users of various types of drones and infantry robots. Training, team cohesion, the acquisition of soft skills, and knowledge-sharing require repeated gatherings over short periods. This kind of new defence service would bear no resemblance to what generations of conscripts experienced in the 1960s to 1990s — marching drills and parades. Trade union rights for soldiers, democratic participation and self-management, and permanent innovation would have to be the pedagogical driving forces of this new form of military service.
A conscript army offers incomparably better preconditions for bringing about an anti-capitalist rupture and an ecosocialist transition than a standing, ideologically consolidated, reactionary professional army. Socialists and feminists should therefore consider how they can develop a political practice for the self-organisation of soldiers within armies. The democratic soldiers’ movements of the 1970s and early 1980s in several European armies can provide impetus here. These movements brought the spirit of social rebellion and resistance into the armed forces. Soldiers’ committees also disrupted the Swiss army from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. They assisted active soldiers in producing their own newspapers, offered legal assistance against abusive orders and repression, and generated broader public attention. In a number of countries, soldiers’ committees and soldiers’ unions succeeded in improving conditions and winning at least minimal democratic rights. More importantly, the soldiers involved learnt — under intense repression — to resist and organise, sometimes clandestinely. They gained invaluable experience of working with people from other milieus, life situations, classes, and regions whom they would otherwise never have met. [1]
These experiences have unfortunately been forgotten. The rapidly changing global situation — the new dimensions of insecurity brought by climate catastrophe, the rise of authoritarian powers and fascist movements, wars, hybrid warfare, and massive social uncertainty — as well as the rearmament drive and tendencies towards the militarisation of society compel us to think about how we can begin to organise people inside armies, and how we can develop a comprehensive understanding of ecological, social, and physical-military security.
Notes
[1] I have myself pursued this classic anti-militarist orientation and had corresponding experiences in the Swiss army in the 1980s. A more extensive engagement with the challenge of ecological, social, and military security has been published in emanzipation — Zeitschrift für ökosozialistische Strategie.
Christian Zeller teaches economic geography at the University of Salzburg in Austria and publishes on globally unequal development, the growing importance of finance capital, the valorisation of nature, and economic democracy. He is committed to a transnational ecosocialist movement from below and is a member of the editorial board of emanzipation — Zeitschrift für ökosozialistische Strategie.
The German original of this article first appeared on sozialismus.ch. This English translation (by Adam Novak) first appeared on the website of Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières.
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 licence (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).
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Except where noted otherwise, original writing and translations produced by the Left Renewal Blog Collective are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Republished and translated material remains subject to the licence and terms of its original publication.