Yanis Darras and Guillaume Dominguez 6:00 p.m., March 3, 2023

Abandoned at the end of the 1990s, military service regularly resurfaces in France, and with it the question of its obligation.

While most of our neighbors have also abandoned the principle, others have maintained it.

And some, like Sweden, are even backtracking and reinstating it in the face of the Russian threat. 

Italy, Germany, Spain, France... At the end of the Cold War, many European countries gradually abandoned their military service.

In France, it was Jacques Chirac, freshly elected, who announced in 1996 the end of compulsory military service.

However, the measure will not come into force until a year later, in October 1997. But not all the countries of the continent have taken this decision.

Thus, a dozen European countries continue to maintain their military service, well supported by recent geopolitical events.

This is notably the case of Greece, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Estonia, Norway, Cyprus and Switzerland.

These countries have thus never abandoned military service, although alternatives sometimes exist.

In Switzerland or Austria, for example, young adults have the choice between doing military service or civic service. 

Contrarian States

But, faced with tensions between Russia and Europe for several years, states have decided to backtrack and restore military service.

This is the case of Ukraine, which reinstated its conscription in 2014, after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbass.

The country will be quickly followed by Lithuania in 2015, and Sweden in 2017. The Scandinavian country, which has been actively working since the 1950s on its global defense policy, has backtracked on the subject, after abandoning conscription a few years earlier.

Objective: that all Swedes, male or female, aged 16 to 70, can defend the Kingdom in the event of war.

Finally, in 2022 Latvia joined the list of countries that have restored compulsory military service. 

And in France ?

In France, the debate on a return to conscription regularly occupies the media space.

According to a CSA poll carried out for

Direct-Matin

 in 2016, nearly 74% of French people declared themselves in favor of a return to military service in the country.

If this does not seem to be on the agenda, the government prefers to set up a civic service (SNU) for high school students aged between 15 and 17 years. 

A device announced by Emmanuel Macron in 2018, during his first wishes to the armies, supposed to "promote the participation and the commitment of each young person in the life of the nation, and to strengthen social cohesion".

From now on, the Ministry of National Education wants the SNU to be gradually made compulsory from September 2024.