One suspects the modern European state has finally achieved what generations of utopians only dreamed of: a polity so thoroughly denationalised that it can no longer risk asking its own citizens to defend it. The proposition is delicious in its absurdity. For decades the official line has been that Britain (and much of the Continent) is no longer a nation in the old, inconvenient sense, but a sort of luxurious international departure lounge where the indigenous population are merely the longer-stay guests, expected to keep the carpets clean and the Wi-Fi working while newcomers settle in for the better life. Then, when a foreign power begins rattling its sabre a little too loudly, the same authorities suddenly remember the language of blood and soil and start murmuring about “doing one’s duty.”
It will not happen. The state will never dare try conscription, and one rather hopes any half-hearted attempt would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions before the first reluctant recruit had finished lacing his boots. The moment the call-up papers fluttered through letterboxes, the carefully constructed post-national fiction would evaporate overnight. Those who arrived more recently would, with admirable practicality, recall urgent family obligations in the lands of their origin. Flights would be booked, WhatsApp groups would hum with sudden nostalgia, and the “New Brits” would discover that home, after all, still held certain charms. Meanwhile the longer-resident population – those awkward, unfashionable natives who had been told for thirty years that they no longer owned the place – would find themselves, by pure bureaucratic accident, revealed as the only people left who might actually have to stay and fight. The propaganda of the preceding generation would be undone more efficiently than any opposition pamphlet could manage. One almost feels a twinge of pity for the speechwriters.
A serious war, of course, would impose still greater inconveniences. Borders would have to be controlled with something approaching competence. The open-door hospitality that has been the moral centrepiece of recent policy would become a strategic liability. Welfare systems designed for perpetual expansion would face the unromantic necessity of prioritising those who might be required to risk their necks. None of this appeals to the governing class, whose principal talent lies in the management of appearances rather than the management of reality. The cost, in both political capital and ideological consistency, would far outweigh the fleeting satisfaction of another round of virtue-signalling speeches about solidarity with distant causes.
Ukraine will therefore be quietly demoted in the hierarchy of official concerns. The language will soften, the photo opportunities will grow scarcer, and the whole business will be allowed to drift into the category of problems that are important but not urgent – until the next financial upheaval arrives to sweep the present arrangement aside. This is not cynicism so much as pattern recognition. States that have spent decades dissolving the emotional bonds that once made conscription thinkable are unlikely to rediscover those bonds the moment the artillery grows louder.
There is, however, a certain dry optimism to be extracted from the mess. Across Europe the electorate appears increasingly primed to reject those who keep insisting that distant conflicts require the indefinite sacrifice of domestic cohesion. Voters have noticed that the same voices loudest for escalation are often the ones most reluctant to acknowledge the social and fiscal consequences of their preferred demographic experiment. An attempt at conscription – even a tentative one – would accelerate that realisation. It would force a clarity that polite discourse has long avoided. The resulting backlash would not be elegant, but it might prove decisive. Politicians who have treated national identity as an embarrassing relic may yet discover that electorates retain a residual attachment to the idea of a country worth neither invading nor abandoning.
One does not need to romanticise the past to observe that a polity which cannot, without contradiction, ask its people to defend it has already answered a rather fundamental question about its own future. The hope, modest but persistent, is that any further attempts to square this particular circle will simply make the circle more visible – and that the voters, when next given the chance, will politely but firmly show the circle-drawers the door.