The militarization of society: conscription and national armies in the process of citizen creation

SUAVI AYDIN

§ Conscription and the 'army of the masses' are relatively new historical phenomena. Appearing in Europe for the first time as an important tool in the processes of citizen creation in nation-states, this phenomenon hit other countries' agenda towards the end of the eighteenth century, progressively establishing the system whereby each male of a certain age group gets conscripted. In this respect, the system made possible both the establishment of giant armies and the popularization of 'national consciousness' to a large mass of people via a large uneducated segment of society.

Conscription and the army of the masses were at the same time necessitated by a new kind of war – total war – that came about owing to the technological transformation underpinning the industrial society and the bourgeois society's desire for economical-political expansion. Total war also meant that the masses assumed to form the nation were to become soldiers as a whole. This state of conscription does not only pose a quantitative issue, but also manifests as a phenomenon that encompasses all stages of human life and involves the recruitment of groups that were previously not expected to serve in the military – such as women and children – or causes them to be directly affected by the conditions of war. Thus a new process had begun whereby a nation in its entirety became the actor of war and the state devoted all its attention to mobilizing these masses with feelings of patriotism and keeping them ready for war.

From this point of view, the creation of nation-states, the recognition of the citizen as the legitimator of sovereignty and the conscription-based army of the masses that makes soldiers out of all are different facets of the same reality. After the French Revolution, when all individual citizens who lived on a politically determined piece of land – that is, 'the people' – were accepted as the direct source of sovereignty, military service, or, rather, the right to carry weapons, ceased being a privilege of the nobility and military rank ceased being a status bought with money. The right to carry weapons was granted to all citizens, thus establishing the people's army The military success of Napoleon, which left its mark on the first two decades of the nineteenth century in Europe, owes much to this new military concept and to the definition of the members of this military as missionaries who spread the revolution with a kind of 'national consciousness'. Thus soldiers had replaced the heavenly missionaries who strived to spread the religious ideal worldwide, turning into secular missionaries spreading the revolution worldwide.

After Napoleon's dream of a world empire collapsed, military service was defined in accordance with the ideology of Napoleon's army, as a narrower type of guardianship designed to protect and preserve the nation-state, as a mission devoted to this new but worldly sanctity for the interests of this state. The generalization of this mission in doctrine as a duty that embraces all citizens presumed to form the nation is only natural. Within this framework, the granting to all citizens of the right to carry weapons and the right to fight has turned military service into a right as well as a sacred duty for all citizens.

In pre-revolutionary aristocratic France the right to be a soldier as well as military ranks were bought and were not available to ordinary people. The revolution and the following Napoleonic era reversed this formulation and included military service within the collective rights and duties of citizens. Since this right and duty does not promise any individual or direct benefit, as it did in the Middle Ages, it requires an ideology. Naturally, the ideology of a territorial nation-state will be nationalism and its base will primarily consist of the concept of 'homeland'. As William McNeill pointed out:

[t]he French revolutionaries broke away from ... ancient patterns, however, by summoning all Frenchmen to the defence of the patrie in 1793. During the next twenty years innumerable French victories demonstrated the new power that mass armies could command in an age of incipient industrialism ...

From this point on, the construction of a framework in which...