Fight for our country? Nee, merci
27 February 2025
Belgium's defence minister has announced a "voluntary conscription" scheme to attract young people to the armed forces. The initiative, which invites all 18-year-olds to serve in the army for a year, aims to address the army's structural staff shortages.
As the EU tries to increase its military might, Belgium is not the only country to discover that simply splurging on defence investment won't do, as one of the biggest obstacles to sufficient defence is a lack of soldiers willing to fight for their country.
Belgium's military has been particularly hampered on both fronts: not only did military spending in the last decades remain mostly below 1% of GDP, the Belgian army is also relatively small, comprising a mere 25,000 soldiers. By comparison, the army of the Netherlands has three times more, while its population is only about 1.5 times larger.
 | Piet Ruig The absence of a martial culture perhaps shouldn't be surprising in a country where "Belgianism" has basically become a pejorative term. Belgium's fraught history of animosity between the French-speaking region of Wallonia and Dutch-speaking Flanders has made expressions of patriotic fervour all but non-existent. This was famously illustrated in 2007, when a prime minister candidate was asked to sing the national anthem and accidentally belted out the French Marseillaise instead of Belgium's Brabançonne. With separatist parties in Flanders reaching peak popularity, a shared sense of nationhood appears further away than ever. Nonetheless, the government's recent efforts to boost recruitment have been remarkably successful. Applications for both the army and the reserves have more than doubled in recent years. Commentators point to Russia's war in Ukraine as a major motivating factor: while Belgians don’t seem to care much for defending their country, they appear increasingly willing to fight for European security. |
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