Does the United Kingdom still get to decide whether it goes to war or not? It’s no longer so ridiculous a question. Everyone now seems to approach the subject with a kind of pious resignation. Whether with Ukraine or Palestine or Taiwan; the whole thing appears to be out of our hands, and we can only be carried dutifully along by our own abstract obligations and commitments.
So we are informed that the British ‘may soon be at war’ if Russian arms happen to cross over into certain eastern provinces of Ukraine. Last month, the absence of a plan on the books to mobilise the nation for an entirely hypothetical world conflict caused a minor scandal. Britain is now, according to General Sir Patrick Sanders, also in a ‘pre-war’ state; and is in fact already ‘at war’ with Iran, and should now just act as such.
Something in me declines to be addressed in this way. And all of it seems oddly familiar. The honour of the army. The independence of the generals from party or faction. The peals that we live in a dangerous world that civilians can scarcely understand. The casual contempt for domestic politics in the face of wider ‘strategic considerations’. The primacy of treaties. The primacy of military planning – planning, which soon takes on a life of its own, and so becomes itself a spur to belligerence and mobilisation.
We once had a term for this: militarism. Everyone General Sanders’s age has been taught about the origins of the war of 1914-18 in the same way – of general staffs, systems of alliances and military schedules spinning totally out of control, taking from statesmen any real powers of decision during those fateful weeks in July 1914.
Preventing this from ever happening again meant abolishing the last of these powers. By the end of the century the old sovereign right to wage war – in many ways the essential characteristic of the nation state – had been virtually done away with. Military action, where it was allowed, was outsourced to a frame and edifice of international treaties, laws and obligations.
The result has been a system of military commitments that’s deeper and more binding than the secret pacts of the 1910s ever were. These rose and fell out of diplomatic expediency, but the system of treaties in the 2020s has something like the force of law behind it. Article 5 of NATO absolutely commits British, Canadian and American troops to answer any infringement on the sovereignty of Estonia or Turkey.
International law now demands an armed fealty that would’ve shocked even those living through the fever pitch of militarism a hundred years ago. The German General Staff of 1914, in all its bulimia and hysteria, would never have accepted such a constraint on its actions. Nor indeed would the British cabinet, which hummed and hawed endlessly over whether to come to the defence of Belgium – a country that is 50 miles from the coast of Kent.
And there’s a domestic side to this as well. If the authority of the central government has withered in favour of international law, then this has only increased the prestige of the military: the stately enforcers of this law overseas. To its leaders, the honour, prestige and esprit de corps of the British military has become inextricably bound up with international law, and the ‘commitments’ that it entails.
And so we arrive at that other characteristic of militarism: the escape of the army from civilian control. As central democratic authority has declined, both the military and military priorities have begun to intervene in public life in ways that would’ve seemed downright bizarre just 30 years ago.
Notice it once and you’ll start to see it everywhere. The British armed forces are now, apparently, allowed to refuse orders if a clash with some idea of international law is implicit. In 2022, the Royal Navy rebuffed a request from the Home Secretary to patrol the channel for illegal migrants. The RAF then ruled out the idea of flying them to Ascension Island.
Or see it in how the British are also now expected to settle the military’s personal debts of honour. The country’s centre-Right normally has to at least gesture towards immigration restriction; but all this goes out the window when it comes to the army’s old mercenary colleagues – like Gurkhas and Afghans – and the obligation to settle them among the civilian population after their contracts expire.
Nor do the British now scruple to put military men at the head of public life. The country’s political and media class now almost demands their leadership. Dan Jarvis MP, a virtual cipher, was held out for years as the natural alternative to Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn simply by dint of military experience. The same is true of Ben Wallace, Tom Tugenhadt, Penny Mourdant and Tobias Ellwood – where a vague ‘Forces’ frisson was enough to earn them a ringside seat in national politics.
More than anything else, we see it in the breeziness with which people now talk about conscripting the young in the name of ‘Our Obligations’. Owen and Sassoon could write about the squalor and futility of the Great War, but even in this case one might have plausibly said that the safety of the home islands was in some way at stake. And even then, this society baulked at mandatory service until 1916 – two whole years after hostilities began.
But in the 2020s, pre-emptive conscription is now being seriously discussed for the sake of two eastern oblasts in Ukraine. Forget Flanders, this would be the actual “corner of a foreign field” where young lives are squandered in an obscure cause. It’s a callow and adolescent bloodthirstiness, and in it we can see how strong the idea of the rules-based order and its defence has become – so strong, indeed, that it can now overawe all the anti-war cultural tropes that each of us grew up with.
But there is nothing hard and fast about any of these supposed international commitments, and honouring them has nothing to do with patriotism. The British military, and the pundits who plead its cause, are too willing to trade in these pieties, and, worse still, in the sinister idea that there are deeper obligations that transient and frivolous civilian politicians cannot appreciate. They should be reminded that the British Army has no independent honour, commitments, priorities or obligations of its own; it is a tool in the hands of the British people – and nothing more.
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