In July 2020, the Bundestag Commissioner for the Armed Forces, Eva Högl (SPD), called the suspension of conscription a “huge mistake”. Meanwhile, geopolitical events have confirmed how right she was. What is overlooked in today’s debate about conscription, however, is that the aim was not only to ensure the Federal Republic’s ability to defend itself, but also – and above all – to draw domestic political lessons from the failure of the Weimar Republic.
Conscription was introduced in 1956 as part of Germany’s rearmament. The rationale behind it were, above all, lessons from the mistakes of the Weimar Republic. Because of the Treaty of Versailles, they had to renounce conscription.
If the contracting parties had originally intended to cut militarism underfoot in 1919, it quickly turned out that it was precisely the voluntary nature of the service that posed a danger to the young Weimar democracy, because the Reichswehr became a “state within a state ’, in which primarily anti-republic conservative-nationalist forces gathered.
The military service law of 1956 wanted to prevent such a politically and regionally constricted “state within a state”, in that the entire breadth of society from all regions of the Federal Republic was to be united when serving at arms, as Defense Minister Theodor Blank made clear during the deliberations in the Bundestag:
“A professional army is always in danger of becoming a state within a state. Despite all the goodwill of the political and military leadership and parliamentary control, the military life of its own, if it is not loosened up by the constant influx of conscripts, can lead to the soldiers being isolated. The direct contact with the whole people, which alone brings about the military integration of the army into the overall state order, will only exist to the desirable and necessary extent if all men are obliged to serve in this army.”
In addition to preventing “Weimar conditions”, conscription had another constitutional goal: its generality was intended to ensure that every member of parliament was responsible for the weal and woe of the soldiers in his home constituency with his voters.
This was primarily to prevent another war of aggression from Germany in the sense of Article 26 of the Basic Law. Because in a conscript army, the main victims of such a war would have been the sons, neighbors and young constituency residents of those members of the Bundestag who would have to decide on the deployment.
But not only a war of aggression is prevented by conscription in a democratic state: the representation of soldiers in the Bundestag, which is secured by general conscription, also ensures that MPs who want to save on Bundeswehr equipment have to justify themselves to the entire population if a Soldier no longer returns home thanks to spared flak jacket.
The fact that the Bundeswehr has been removed from public discourse and the attention of parliamentarians due to the abolition of conscription has meant that an increasingly poorly equipped army has been sent on more and more missions abroad. As paradoxical as it may sound: conscription was a tool of pacifism, with which hasty and senseless deployment decisions were democratically prevented and equipment that did justice to the basic rights of the soldiers could be ensured.
In 2009, around 49 percent of the soldiers deployed by the Bundeswehr abroad came from East Germany, although the new federal states only account for 17 percent of the total population. More than a third of the Bundeswehr soldiers who died in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2009 came from East Germany. This means that the majority of West German MPs did not have to justify fallen soldiers and their inadequate equipment to their voters.
Conscripts alone cannot ensure Germany’s ability to defend itself. However, they ensure that public discourse and politics do not lose sight of the Bundeswehr’s equipment again. The reintroduction of compulsory service is a suitable and necessary means for this.
Finally, conscription strengthened social cohesion and reduced prejudices. It meant that school leavers from every region, with every level of education and every social background were forced to interact with each other and to put themselves in the other person’s world. Today’s filter bubbles, in which, for example, East Germans are generally regarded as right-wing or migrants as criminals, could not thrive in a heterogeneous group.
The constitutional advantages of conscription therefore lie primarily in its importance for maintaining peace, democracy and social cohesion. It is also a protective umbrella for soldiers’ fundamental rights by providing them with equipment that protects their lives on deployment.
Whether purely male compulsory military service within the meaning of Article 12a of the Basic Law is still up-to-date is a different discussion, but one that has to be conducted all the more today because women from all walks of life and regions are also included in a Bundeswehr, which is intended to represent a cross-section of society have to have their place.
Moritz von Rochow is a research associate at the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law at the Christian Albrechts University in Kiel.
