ABSTRACT
Military service has been one of the most essential yet contradictory institutions regarding the integration of the individual into the modern national state. Its essential ambiguity stems from its dual character and the inseparable connection between the two conflicting features it exemplifies. On the one hand, military service is a civic duty and an expression of political and civic rights. If we accept Max Weber’s definition of the state as the monopoly of legitimate violence (Weber 1968: 56, 65), this link between military service and citizenship becomes clear: the basic component of the state, that is the monopoly of legitimate violence, is exercised by the sovereign people. Interpretations that stress the democratic impact of universal military service (which have given rise to wide-ranging political debates in continental Europe) thus become conceivable. Compulsory conscription, on the other hand, implies another aspect that is difficult to reconcile with democratic citizenship. While doing military service some of the conscript’s fundamental rights are restricted; military education aims at developing a respect for authority and hierarchical subordination – in other words, the formation of an ‘authoritarian character’ (Adorno 1973) through an institutionalized social discipline. This may certainly be described as ‘a total institution’ since it aims at total control of the conscript’s whole person. In this sense military service resembles a psychiatric asylum, prison or monastery rather than a democratic institution (Auvray 1998).
