Britain: From Individual Conscience to Social Movement

Abstract

Abstract Britain has relied upon a volunteer army more often than upon compulsory military training and service, but in its experiences with conscription—particularly during the two world wars and the first dozen years of the Cold War—it witnessed a progressive liberalization of conscientious objection. Britain’s experience also had a significant influence upon conscription and conscientious objection in the United States. In essence, conscientious objection is the articulation by an individual of a set of highly internalized attitudes in response to a particular stimulus. Expressions of conscience theoretically can reflect a wide range of stimuli: environmental pollution, gender inequalities, racism, penal policy, and so on. The term “conscientious objection,” however, is more limited in its scope. Conceptually it can be identified with a continuum of war resistance, the characteristics of which can be equated, in the words of one scholar, “with anti-militarist and anti-conscriptionist movements in peace time, with pacifist conscientious objection, with nationalist and socialist resistance and ethical and religious withdrawal from a given state and indeed with revolutionary opposition.”