Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). It’s astonishing: all those who are currently debating compulsory military service in Germany and believe that a war-ready army is necessary have clearly not yet realised that a large proportion of young people cannot be included in this.
At the moment, it sounds as if the two parties involved in the mini-coalition want to return to compulsory military service at all costs, even though the issue was largely omitted from the coalition agreement. The reason given, unsurprisingly, is the ‘Russian threat’. But somehow they haven’t really thought about what they might be setting in motion. There are a number of mines on the ground, laid by migration.
While the education debate is now at least occasionally showing signs of realism, because it is not so easy to deal with school classes whose pupils come from a dozen different countries and some of whom do not really speak German, the discussion about conscription pretends that none of this exists and that the issue is irrelevant here.
This is a huge mistake. When conscription still existed, young men often complained that they were losing time compared to women in their studies and careers. This also contributed to the period being shortened again and again. On the other hand, if the would-be warriors in Berlin want conscription that actually produces personnel who can be used in the military, one year would be far too short; two would be about the minimum. However, especially at the age when such service is completed, this is an almost incalculable period of time.
But what would happen between young people if the conditions were extremely different? In large cities in particular, young people with a migrant background are often in the majority, and about half of them are actually foreigners and therefore not affected by any such considerations.
The only group that can be disposed of in this way, as Berlin politicians imagine, is the bio-German minority. With a great deal of caution and very slow preparation, this might still work if it were possible to involve a larger proportion of young people with a migrant background and if it were only a matter of military service, with a credible promise that it would remain purely theoretical.
In reality, however, the aim is not just military service in some barracks, when there is constant talk that the country must become fit for war and that the Russians will be at the door by 2029 at the latest.
Yes, this may well scare the woke section of German youth in particular. But that will only last until the ideas become a little more concrete. And the moment the truth about Ukrainian losses reaches Germany (and it will, in the foreseeable future) and the consequences of this war become as visible as those of the Second World War once were, that will change. Because then even these young people will ask themselves why they should defend this wonderful Europe with its wonderful values when, in the end, they are the ones who will disappear and the others will be left behind.
Actually, no one in Germany has any idea how this experiment would turn out. When conscription was suspended in 2011, the problem did not yet exist in this form. Citizenship law was only amended in 1999 to give children of migrant parents the right to German citizenship, but initially they were still subject to the option requirement, meaning they had to choose between German citizenship and, if applicable, another citizenship when they turned 22. In 2014, this obligation was abolished for anyone who had lived in Germany for at least eight years by the age of 21. The obligation to choose one nationality has now been completely abolished, and dual nationality is accepted as a matter of principle.
In 2011, one third of all children under the age of five had a migrant background; currently, the figure is 41.8 percent nationwide. In the two age groups relevant for possible military service, 15 to 20 and 20 to 25, the proportion with a migrant background is 35.5 and 38.2 percent, respectively. Half of these are foreigners.
Of course, it must also be taken into account that the distribution of the migrant population in Germany is uneven. The larger the city, the higher the proportion of migrants. The average value is therefore only of limited significance; in reality, the country is divided into areas with a much higher proportion and those with a much lower proportion.
Conscription was suspended just in time before it became clear how the individual groups would behave in practice. Legally, the total number of young people is divided into three groups: Germans without a migrant background, those with a migrant background and foreigners.
The first two groups would be affected if conscription were introduced. However, the number of Bundeswehr soldiers with a migrant background has remained very low to date. In 2019, a survey conducted by the German Armed Forces found that 8.9 percent of Bundeswehr personnel reported having a migrant background. The study claimed that this was only slightly below the estimated 12 percent of the total population. The trick, of course, is that only Germans with a migrant background are counted here…
Incidentally, the majority of this 8.9 per cent were Russian Germans. There is no empirical data on young people with a Turkish migrant background, for example. However, one of the incentives for young men to take German citizenship was to avoid Turkish military service. How would they react to compulsory military service in Germany? How, when there is the threat of war in the background? Would they rather go to Turkey?
And it is by no means the case that all these groups with a migrant background love each other. Turks and Kurds, for example. Or the different parts of the former Yugoslavia. Just as the relationship with native German young people is not necessarily all sunshine and roses.
The fact is, it’s complicated enough in schools, and the technique most groups use to keep conflicts under control is to avoid each other as much as possible outside of class. But avoiding each other is not an option in a barracks. In a volunteer army, at least there is the common ground of having chosen to do this job. With compulsory service, even this connecting factor is lost.
And then there is the third group, the foreigners, who can thumb their noses at the other two – and certainly will. Studies on vocational training careers show that foreign passport holders, most of whom are first-generation migrants, have better prospects for training places than German passport holders with a migrant background, who are often second or third-generation migrants. This then exacerbates internal conflicts within the only seemingly homogeneous group of migrants, because some would be conscripted because of their German citizenship and others would not.
The suspension of compulsory military service has kindly ensured that the loyalty of the new Germans to this state has never really been put to the test. But in terms of society, compulsory military service only works if everyone is actually covered. However, this is not possible under the current legal structure because the proportion of those who are either not affected or who could avoid civilian service through dual citizenship is too high. And this problem is getting worse every year, even if no further millions of immigrants arrive.
As an organisation, the Bundeswehr has exactly zero experience in dealing with a larger proportion of migrants. The performance of the school system in this area, which has been trying to deal with the problem for a generation now, does not really give cause for optimism. Not to mention that the aim of military training is to practise violence. An excellent idea in a society that is currently piling up unresolved internal conflicts.
Of course, there is also the tiny question of what exactly is to be defended. Economic development is clearly going downhill, and the mini-cabinet is already announcing that the broad masses will have to prepare for losses in their standard of living. These losses have already characterised the last few decades, but are now likely to accelerate significantly.
All surveys on willingness to do military service (or even to actually go to war, as the Berlin bubble imagines) show that those who most loudly want to see ‘Western values’ defended are precisely those who would prefer to leave that to others, such as the supporters of the Green Party. So who is supposed to implement NATO’s fantasies and fend off the evil Russians somewhere on the Polish border? And what reason would Maximilian and Leon have to risk their lives when they know the truth about the Ukrainian war’s chances of survival and that, even if the myth of the dangerous Russian were true and they prevented evil Ivan from taking over the country at the cost of their lives, they would then leave it to Ali and Mohammed?
Of course, one could now refer to history and argue that an army is also a means of reuniting this now disparate age cohort. However, this would require conditions that even the representatives of the MiniKo would not dare to articulate, at least not yet. This would require another change to citizenship law, so that German citizenship would no longer be granted at birth, but only to adults after they have completed military service. The problem posed by the proportion of foreigners in this context would then also require a tightening of residence laws, making it impossible for young people who grew up in Germany to remain in the country if they do not …
This is completely inconceivable. None of the EU countries with a large migrant population has any experience of how compulsory military service would work under these conditions. Germany was actually a latecomer to abolishing compulsory military service; France and the United Kingdom abolished it in the early 2000s. No one wanted to know how the large number of migrants would affect it.
It is also unknown how military training could even be carried out under these conditions. The United States, which has long had large numbers of migrants with very different, sometimes appalling educational backgrounds in its armed forces, has a professional army that attracts people with the promise of citizenship. Even there, there is no experience of whether conscription would work. Historically, the only army that has absorbed such cultural differences is the Soviet army. However, it originated in a society that was on the rise, not in decline, had a strong unifying ideology and was engaged in an existential defence during the Second World War. None of this would be the case in any of the Western countries.
This leaves only the methods of the 19th century or earlier for such a motley army to function. It is always the task of the personnel carrying out basic training to provide an enemy image that welds the soldiers together. But the greater the differences, the greater the pressure must be. In a fragmented society like today’s Germany, the very idea of the extent of violence that would be necessary to force the conscripts thus gathered into a unit is daunting. Yelling and three dozen strange rules are no longer enough. That would be a throwback to the corporal punishment with which Frederick I once formed the Prussian army.
Of course, there is also the dire scenario that the German economy collapses so badly that joining the army would be a way to escape poverty. That could work. But then, although the number of soldiers would be guaranteed, there would be nothing left for them to defend; in an emergency, we would end up with the Ukrainian model, with blocking troops shooting at anyone trying to flee the front.
Whichever way you look at it, it is a social experiment with a highly uncertain outcome, and all the options put forward so far only prove that defence politicians who hatch such plans are completely clueless about migration issues and have not given any thought to what this would mean for their area of responsibility. They actually believe that the question of whether young women should also be registered is the most difficult one. However, a closer look at the actual social structure quickly reveals that all the ramparts that Russophobes like Roderich Kiesewetter and Boris Pistorius want to erect are built on sand.
