The Pros and Cons of Military Conscription

The Pros and Cons of Military Conscription

Introduction

In recent decades, the transition to the acquisition of our army on the method of universal conscription to the method of voluntary seems to be no longer open to discussion. The system of military conscription, under the imprint modern nation-state, has been conceptualized as a device that was used as a mechanism for the spread of national feeling in the population and reproduction of ties with the Nation (Henderson, 2012). At the same time, allows unifying, by using force or discipline, the collective of national membership, imposing languages and symbols that reinforce the cohesion of society, ensuring the loyalty of citizens who share traditions, customs and regulations deployed from the state (Berck, 2011).

Following these theoretical considerations, it is possible to argue that military conscription, since its implementation in 1900; it was a mechanism to engage different segments of society with the principles and patriotic values. If so, then it is appropriate to hold that recruitment was a device that reproduced the nation in the territories annexed (Poutvaara, 2011).

Discussion

Governments were created to liberate man from the cruelty of individual conflicts and to give them the security of a permanent group life. Instead, the same man will need to struggle and just replace the conflicts between neighbors by wars between nations, although the danger of destruction remains the same for both the individual and to the nation (Vasquez, 2005). The same occurs with conscription: it destroys all the benefits of the system that duty to defend.

The benefits of this type of society consists in the security that is given to the property and to the work and the joint action of all its members aimed at the general welfare, but conscription destroys all this. Taxes collected for the people and the war preparations consume a lot of production, whose protection should be the primary objective of the army. The fact that, to serve the army, all men are required to interrupt the normal course of their lives is a breach of their right to produce (Sheehan, 2011). The constant threat of a war that could erupt at any time becomes vain and useless all attempts at social reform.

However, the decisive importance of conscription, as a manifestation of the contradictions inherent in the social conception of life is not just that. The main manifestation of this contradiction lies in the fact that under the system of compulsory military service, every citizen to become a member of the army becomes a mainstay of official organization and a participant in all the actions of a government whose integrity not himself admits.

Governments ensure that the army serves primarily to protect the country from attack by external enemies, but this is not true (Poutvaara, 2011). It is necessary, before anything else, against own citizens, and all men who serve in the military become unwittingly complicit in acts of violence that the government inflicts on subjects.

The compulsory military service is the last stage of the violence ...