It's become a hotly debated question: would you serve your country?
In Germany, for instance, tens of thousands of high-school students have been striking against a military service reform since December 2025. The law includes a clause allowing the government to reinstate conscription if recruitment targets are missed due to a lack of volunteers.
Nordic societies, meanwhile, have quite a different take on conscription and rearmament – including, surprisingly, its left-wing parties.
“When the conservative government ended conscription in 2010, we as the Swedish Left party voted to keep the draft,” Jonas Sjöstedt, who led the party until 2020 and is now one of its members of the European Parliament, told The European Correspondent.
In 2017, the government led by the social democrats reintroduced the draft in Sweden, which is now supported across the political spectrum. “We have more kids wanting to do military service than the military wants,” Sjöstedt said.
Of the roughly 100,000 18-year-olds screened for service annually, only about 5% of the recruits deemed as the most motivated are actually selected. Every second Swede of fighting age (both women and men) is willing to fight in case of war – well above countries like the UK and Germany.
Why is that? “People see what’s happening in Ukraine and are emotionally upset. It’s about defending Swedish people’s right to self-determination. Defence is like an insurance for your house,” Sjöstedt said.
But these abstract reasons only go so far. The Nordics use an all-of-society approach to their defence.
“Security policy starts with creating a society where everybody feels they have something to defend,” said Li Andersson, a Finnish member of the European Parliament who also served as education minister and led the Finnish left party. The country has a draft for all men, with roughly one million Finns having been through a minimum of 165 days of service each.
Concretely, that means building and strengthening welfare systems. “If we only spend on defence and cut funds from everything else, we won’t have safer societies,” Andersson told TEC. “Instead, you need labour market and educational policies that give young people hope for a better future.”
What arguably also helps increase readiness in Finland is the historical memory of war against the Soviet Union during World War II, which still sits deep, and the fact that until joining in April 2023, it couldn't rely on NATO's security umbrella.
Combined, these factors make Finland’s military one of the best-prepared in Europe: it has a wartime strength of about 280,000 troops from a 900,000-strong reserve, in a country of only 5.6 million. Four in five people said they'd personally take part in national defence in case of an attack – higher than in most other European countries.
“If you don’t have strong social cohesion and the capability of building that trust in the future among people, and then try to push for compulsory military service, that sounds difficult to me,” Andersson said.
Germany is trying anyway: even as its defence budget climbs toward 3.5% of GDP, its centrist government has replaced basic income support with a stricter, more heavily sanctioned welfare benefit. Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared that the country “can no longer afford the welfare state,” and agreed cuts of some €19 billion to public health insurance.
The same logic that makes welfare a matter of security policy also shapes what the armed forces themselves should look like – a conscript army may be only as legitimate as the society it's drawn from and claims to defend.
“We have to fight the dark side of militarism. It shouldn’t be a nationalistic project, but reflect the modern Sweden that we have,” Sjöstedt said.
“Crucially, no one should be forced to carry weapons,” he continued. If the military is going to belong to the whole of society, it has to look like the whole of society, and be a place where everyone can serve.
Concretely, this means zero tolerance for sexism, inclusion regardless of gender, and deeply embedding the military in society, according to him. “Military leadership walks at Pride, and people don’t really see it as pinkwashing, because they actually mean it,” said Sjöstedt.
If a draft is compulsory, it should be compulsory for everyone – then it can become an equaliser for society, according to Andersson. “You cannot just opt out of it because you're rich or powerful,” he said. “When my brother did his military service, he did it with the son of the president.”
“We have to take Russia’s fascist threat against our way of life seriously. To be able to fight back, we need stronger militaries, yes. But I would also do a huge cost-of-living programme, address the housing crisis, and enable big investment to cut fossil fuel dependency. It’s the link between all of these actions that is needed for real security,” Andersson concluded.