Conscription as Civic Participation: Republican Citizenship and Civil–Military Relations

Abstract

This article examines contemporary debates on military conscription through the lens of republican political theory. In current discussions, particularly in Germany, questions of recruitment and military service are predominantly framed in liberal terms, focusing on individual autonomy, voluntariness, and the limits of state coercion. The article argues that this framing tends to obscure an important normative dimension of military service in democratic societies. Drawing on republican conceptions of freedom as non-domination and citizenship as a form of shared political responsibility, it explores how conscription can be interpreted as an institutional expression of civic participation in the maintenance of the political order. From this perspective, military recruitment systems are not only organizational arrangements of the armed forces but also institutions that shape the relationship between citizens and collective defence responsibilities. The article shows how different recruitment models influence the societal embeddedness of the military and the extend to which responsibility for defence is distributed across society. By shifting attention from the dichotomy of voluntariness and coercion to questions of civic obligation and democratic self-government, the article contributes to debates in civil–military relations and political theory. Rather than evaluating recruitment systems primarily in terms of state authority or military efficiency, the republican perspective highlights how different institutional arrangements structure the relationship between citizenship and collective defence. The article conceptualizes conscription as one possible institutional expression of republican citizenship and clarifies the distinctive analytical insights that a republican framework brings to contemporary conscription debates