Mandatory service promotes patriotism and unity

The argument

Mandatory national service gives citizens more pride in their nation, and the argument for it turns on what that pride is made of. Having contributed something to a country is a different relationship from having merely lived in it, and citizens who have contributed become more invested in keeping the country safe and thriving. The first benefit is social. In countries with deep partisan divides, like the US and the UK, people increasingly pass through institutions that sort them by background and politics rather than mixing them. Mandatory national service would help foster cross-partisan relationships, because it puts people who would not otherwise meet into a shared undertaking where the task matters more than the disagreement. Sweden, rated one of the happiest countries in the world, has mandatory national service. The second is a matter of respect. An appreciation of and commitment to the country enhance the respect that citizens have for it, and that respect is crucial for the success of the nation's politics and its economy — both of which depend on people treating shared institutions as worth sustaining rather than as something to be extracted from. Mandatory national service also helps citizens better understand the sacrifice and the process involved in serving their country, which is difficult to appreciate from the outside and easy to disparage. The third is participation. Citizens' engagement through national service in turn promotes voting and increases interaction between government and citizen. Someone who has served has met the state as a working institution rather than as an abstraction, and is more likely to take part in the decisions it makes. Underlying all three is the same mechanism: mandatory national service would help citizens bond and come together over their shared experiences. A country whose citizens have something in common that they actually did, rather than something they merely are, has a firmer basis for unity than one that relies on sentiment alone.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Mandatory service harms the quality of life for citizens and does not promote unity. Racism, sexism, and misogyny would continue to permeate these spaces. Mandatory national service can cause post-traumatic stress and other disorders in those who are forced to serve. These disorders do not promote unity or patriotism in citizens, but harms the views of the nation by the citizens.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Pride is asserted as an effect of compulsion with no mechanism given. Service that is required rather than chosen can produce resentment as readily as investment, and the premise neither distinguishes the two outcomes nor says what would count as evidence for either. [Rejecting P2] The cross-partisan contact the premise relies on is not guaranteed by conscription. Contact between groups reduces hostility under fairly specific conditions — roughly equal standing, shared goals and institutional support — and unequal or resented contact can harden divisions instead. Conscription has also historically been stratified in practice by deferments and exemptions that fell along class lines, which places different groups in different parts of the system rather than alongside each other. [Rejecting P3] Sweden cannot carry the evidential weight placed on it. A country's happiness ranking has many candidate causes, its conscription was suspended for several years before being reintroduced in a form that calls up only a small share of each cohort, and a single case cannot establish that national service is what produced the outcome.