Europe wants to show it’s ready for war. Would anyone show up to fight?

Assuming European governments don’t bin their commitments to bigger defence budgets once some kind of peace is agreed to in Ukraine—or Donald Trump leaves the White House—spending on their armed forces will roughly double within a decade. 

A disproportionate slug of the jump from a 2% of GDP spending target to 3.5% will go towards purchasing equipment. But armies are about people, too. Attracting youngsters to a career that involves getting shot at has never been easy; a bit of forceful nagging (known in military jargon as “conscription") is already on the cards in some countries. Even dragooning recalcitrant teens into uniform will not solve a problem that is lurking deep in the continent’s psyche. Europeans are proud of their peaceful ways. If war breaks out there, will anybody be there to fight it?

Polling that asks people how they would behave in case of an invasion ought to send shivers down the spines of Europe’s drill sergeants. Last year a Gallup survey asked citizens in 45 countries how willing they would be to take up arms in case of war. Four of the five places with the least enthusiastic fighters globally were in Europe, including Spain, Germany and notably Italy, where just 14% of respondents said they were up for taking on a foreign foe. 

Given Russia’s snail-paced advances since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, countries over a thousand kilometres away from today’s front lines may not feel the chill wind of the Kremlin. But even in Poland, which shares a border with Ukraine (and with the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad), fewer than half of respondents say they would fight in a war involving their country. 

In a separate poll taken before the invasion, 23% of Lithuanian men said they would rather flee abroad than fend off an attack. Citizens asked to stand up and be counted are giving a resounding shrug instead.

To some Europeans, a citizenry with no appetite for fighting is the reflection of a job well done. The union at the continent’s heart bills itself as a “peace project". The past seven decades have been about ensuring Germany would never take up arms against France and vice versa. 

Meshing economies together within the European Union and even outside it was meant to make invasions impractical at first and unthinkable in time. The bureaucratic pacificism that endures within the EU—“make meetings not war!" would be a fine motto—may have resonated a bit too much with some citizens. Some may have forgotten that those outside the club, like one Vladimir Putin, were not privy to such arrangements. 

Military matters were at most an afterthought. Only in the past year has the bloc appointed a commissioner for defence, while making clear the job is about overseeing the companies making shells and missiles, not the armed forces per se.

To what can the broader population’s lack of appetite to bear arms even in case of war be attributed? Sociologists speak of Europe as a “post-heroic" society, where individualism and aspirations of “self-realisation" trump the supposed patriotic fervour of generations past. T

he continent’s polarised politics have played a part: support for parties of the hard right and left has surged in recent decades, and their voters are notably cooler on the idea of fighting for their country. Older people tend to be less gung-ho about taking up arms, and Europe is an ageing continent. Places with recent histories of dictatorship, such as Spain and Portugal, are also gun-shy. Seeing misfiring American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq (in which Europeans had at best a supporting role) comforted pacifists that theirs was the right way.

Notwithstanding its peace-mongering ways, Europe does not lack men and women in uniform. Despite a scything in the number of troops since 1990, to less than half the previous figure in many countries, the continent still has more soldiers than America, and roughly as many as a share of its overall population. 

Still, some countries like Poland are now talking of bringing some form of conscription back (a few, like Denmark and Greece, never quite got rid of it). Abolishing military service was once hailed as a liberal accomplishment. Now drafting youngsters is seen as a way of promoting the idea that national defence is everybody’s job, not just the role of a few paid soldiers.

The fog of peace

That notion may take a while to take hold. For something strange happens when you ask Europeans about defence matters. 

In surveys carried out by the European Commission, the bloc’s citizens list Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and matters of defence as the biggest threats facing the EU as a whole. Well over half think that fighting within the union’s borders is likely in coming years. 

But asked what issues affect them personally and Europeans forget about Russia altogether, worrying more about inflation, taxes, pensions and climate change than they do about potential invaders. It is not that Europeans don’t see the looming threat. It is that they think it is somebody else’s problem.

The upshot is a continent that gives the impression of being battle-weary without having fought the battle. Already Trumpians have a dim view of Europeans’ fighting verve. J.D. Vance, the American vice-president, in March dismissed the possibility of “some random [European] country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years" credibly deterring Russia by putting boots on the ground in Ukraine. 

It was offensive precisely because it contained elements of truth. Getting Europeans to shell out for more of their own defence has taken decades of Americans nagging. Convincing them to give war a chance might take even longer.

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