Conscription
Military service lingers in countries that are poor or small, but elsewhere it is on the way out
Sep 10th 2011 | from the print edition
Your country needs youPERKY breasts and fluttering eyelashes may no longer help Thailand’s famed ladyboys (pictured) to avoid the draft. The top brass has just requested the removal of the “permanent mental disorder” label that usually bars transsexuals and transvestites from being conscripted. The army is ready. It says “Type 1” men are normal, “Type 2” have surgically enhanced breasts, and “Type 3” have had a full sex change.
Thailand is one of some 70 states, mostly people-rich and cash-poor, that retain conscription. But the subject arouses strong emotions in other countries. After last month’s riots in Britain, tabloid papers and some politicians said restoring conscription would bring alienated and rowdy youngsters into line. Elsewhere, official enthusiasm can be ferocious. In April an Egyptian military court gave Maikel Nabil, a blogger, three years in jail for insulting the military. Among other causes, he campaigned against conscription.
- Swept up and away
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Newly independent South Sudan is a rare example of conscription being introduced (in the hope of supplanting private militias). But the big picture is one of retreat. Even 200 years ago, economists such as Adam Smith and the German Johann von Thünen denounced conscription: the latter blamed it for fuelling Napoleon’s recklessness in Russia. More recently two economists, Panu Poutvaara and Andreas Wagener, said making young people become soldiers was as odd as “forcing all citizens to work as nurses, heart surgeons or teachers.” Their research on members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (a rich-country club) over the 40 years since 1960 concludes that conscription hampers growth.
Making youngsters forfeit part of their productive or educational potential can depress an economy just as heavy government debt or high income taxes do. But people may eventually get some benefit (such as pensions) from sacrificing cash. When the young give up their time, the compensation is harder to quantify. Another study found that Britain’s two-year national service (which ended in 1960) cut later earnings by between 5% and 8%.
Conscription has withered recently, especially in Europe. Germany, Sweden and Serbia have scrapped it within the past year, following Italy, Spain and Poland earlier in the decade. Its heyday, says Christopher Donnelly, a former NATO official now at the Institute for Statecraft and Governance, a think-tank, came when “labour was cheap and when you knew what you were fighting against”. For most rich countries now, warfare is expeditionary and high-tech; lightly trained conscripts are not much use for this.
Universal military duty still makes sense for small countries like Israel that may need to fight all out for national survival. More than 80% of Finns backed it in a recent survey. In neighbouring Estonia (also hard bitten by history) support is well over 90%, says Luukas Ilves, a defence ministry official. He recently finished military service himself (raising eyebrows in Russia, where conscription is only for the hapless: Mr Ilves’s father is Estonia’s president). At the start, he says, “you do a lot of push-ups; an angry drill-sergeant wakes you at 6am; you eat mess-hall food.” But it all helps to integrate Estonia’s Russians and gives conscripts “a sense of proprietorship” about the country.
In societies divided by language, ending conscription means losing such benefits. It can mean other costs too: German charities lament that young men no longer do community service to avoid the army. Research in France, which began phasing out conscription in 1996, suggests that male educational achievement fell: people used to dodge the draft by going to university. A tax on the time of the young, paid in lost earnings or education, may indeed have good side-effects. Whether these are worthwhile, and if military service is the best way to create them, are questions for politicians, not economists.
from the print edition | International
Britain and its war dead
Grief, and its consequences
Sep 8th 2011, 17:43 by Bagehot
FOLLOWING on from my previous blog posting, here is this week's print column:
PUBLIC grief can be hard to express in a holiday town, built around the promise of heedless fun. Yet late last month, the seaside resort of Weymouth put on a remarkable, heartfelt homage to James Wright, a 22-year-old local man killed fighting in Afghanistan. Mourners report, with pride, how the town’s main church was filled to capacity by his family, school friends and neighbours, as well as by his comrades from the Royal Marines. Several hundred more people gathered outside.
Military traditions were observed. A Royal Marine firing party offered a three-gun salute, a bugler the Last Post. Elsewhere though, the personal and the informal reigned. A cannon fired from a Victorian fort on Weymouth Bay signalled a minute’s silence throughout the town, organised not by the authorities but by a caretaker at Marine Wright’s former secondary school. Further calls for quiet were broadcast at Morrisons supermarket and at the town’s department store. Along the faded Regency seafront, souvenir stalls halted trading, led by staff at a sweet shop where Marine Wright once worked. Oblivious to the grieving around them, tourists chattered, some—it is said—thinking that the cannon’s boom marked a lifeboat launch. Townsfolk lined the pavements in silence, in places three or four deep. Later, the funeral procession was applauded by those along its route.
In Britain, public sympathy for the military has not been this intense for many years, arguably since the Falklands conflict of 1982. It was headline news in late August when hearses bearing casualties of the Afghan conflict stopped driving down the high street of Wootton Bassett, a market town that for four years has saluted the war dead with tolling bells and flag-bearing veterans. The prime minister, David Cameron, thanked Wootton Bassett on the nation’s behalf, and vowed to monitor whether mourning families felt welcome on a new route to be used by funeral cortèges (chosen after a change of the airbase used for repatriations).
Set against that intense support for the troops, polls consistently show the British opposed to the war in Afghanistan (though only a minority want the troops home immediately, with a larger number hoping for a swift-ish exit that denies the Taliban total victory). A 2011 poll by YouGov found the “cost in human lives” the top reason for opposing the war.
A single column cannot offer a scientific survey of this phenomenon. Nor can it offer adequate memorial to Marine Wright, by all accounts a remarkable athlete, soldier and family man, whose death stunned friends who thought him “invincible”. Instead, hopefully, some broad hints can be drawn from the response of one southern English town to a military death (the 378th in Afghanistan since 2001).
Graham Winter is mayor of Weymouth and the neighbouring isle of Portland, and he taught James Wright at primary school. Mostly, he ascribes the turnout at the marine’s funeral to the young man’s popularity and high profile in a small community. But he also notes a trend of rising attendance at veterans’ events. There were large crowds at a homecoming parade in July for Royal Tank Regiment troops back from Afghanistan. The underlying cause, he suggests, is growing awareness of the dangers faced by troops overseas, rammed home by press reporting. That awareness should not be confused with endorsement of government policies, the mayor says: if asked why troops were in Afghanistan, many “would find it hard to answer”.
On the Esplanade, Hazel Coleman, a sixth-form student with a part-time job at a souvenir shop, observed the minute’s silence for Marine Wright. But she says—not unreasonably—that the war has “gotten more complicated over the years”, so she only “vaguely” knows why troops are still in Afghanistan. To her, the public mood is “about respect, and people dying”.
The Wootton Bassett effect
During interviews in Weymouth, the example of Wootton Bassett comes up a lot. Locals needed no persuasion to organise a minute’s silence, says the school caretaker behind the tribute, Geoff Bright. But, he admits, there was a sense of: “If Wootton Bassett can do it, so can Weymouth, no getting away from it.”
Whatever the model is, it is not Falklands Britain. Trawl through archive copies of the local newspaper, the Dorset Evening Echo, covering the period of that conflict, and a barely-recognisable country swims into view. In 1982 deaths are reported briskly, and upper lips are still stiff. Opening a large Falklands homecoming fete, a naval officer declares tersely: “I wish you could have seen how our chaps behaved under not ideal circumstances.” Returning troops are greeted with a mixture of amateurish cheer, bunting and alcohol: there are endless reports of “champagne welcomes”, an improbable “sherry reception” for commandos, and—in Dorchester—1,000 free pints of beer.
Three decades on, a new tolerance for public emotion has strict limits, however. One of Marine Wright’s former teachers, now retired, caused anger by telling local reporters that, as well as pride, he also felt sorrow at a “futile waste of a young life”. A “totally inappropriate” comment, retorts a serving school colleague.
Yet if the current public mood is patriotic, it is not deferential. Phil Thomas, headmaster of Marine Wright’s old school, senses local communities sending a message to the government: “We are recognising these individuals, they are dying on your behalf, make sure you have your policies right.”
Such talk alarms British military commanders. They yearn for public support for the troops, not sympathy, and fret about a debilitating focus on individual losses. A visit to Weymouth suggests they are too late. Overt grief is part of life now, stoked by a public and media hungry for human interest. Will it make future wars harder to fight? Probably. But there is no going back.
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