A School for the Nation? How Military Service Does Not Build Nations, and How It Might

Abstract

Theodore Roosevelt and his fellow Progressives hoped that universal military training would “Americanize” the mass of newcomers who had recently landed on America’s shores. Leonid Brezhnev similarly believed that widespread service in the Red Army would forge a uniaed Soviet citizenry committed to “the Socialist Motherland,” internationalism, and “the friendship of the peoples.”1 Like many leaders before and after them, Roosevelt and Brezhnev turned to the armed forces and the policy of universal military service at least in part to help build cohesive national communities out of their countries’ multinational jumbles. This view of the military as a key institution for the labeling and transmission of social values has roots stretching back to ancient Greece,2 but the armed forces arst achieved great popularity as a nation builder toward the end of the nineteenth century. At that time, the military was widely hailed across Europe as a “school for the nation,” and its apparent success was emulated as far away as czarist Russia and Meiji Japan. As countries across Africa and Asia won independence in the decades following World War II, they charged their armies with weaving a national fabric rent by communal rifts. Throughout the twentieth century, countries across the ideological spectrum have turned to the armed forces in the quest for national integration.3 A School for the Nation?