Why does it exclude women? War is not just physical strength, but also logistics, operating vehicles, operating drones, nursing, and so on. All tasks that women are well capable of.
At this moment, changing the constitution is not possible, there is no majority for this. So that pretty much took the option to change the broader parameters out of the discussion entirely.
COVID-19 has proven that if anything, the European Union tends to spread national initiatives among other countries (and Germany is often a leader in EU).
In this specific case, the EU is more likely to be the type of organization that would think about how to create a unified permit
-> as they did with the EU Digital COVID certificate; some sort of "I am in the register of mobilization" / "have a temporary travel authorization".
So, EU might be an enemy that pretends to be your friend there.
> 18 April 1951 – European Coal and Steel Community
> Based on the Schuman plan, six countries sign a treaty to run their coal and steel industries under a common management. In this way, no single country can make the weapons of war to turn against others, as in the past. The six are Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. The European Coal and Steel Community comes into being in 1952.
https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor...
Why wouldn’t a unified permit to prove you registered for mobilization be relevant to what the EU is for?
Defence and the military is a sovereign matter that has nothing to do with the EU... except we are seeing that this is changing without democratic national mandates.
This is the EU describing its own history and beginnings.
I can only repeat that defence is a sovereign matter in which the EU has no power, but there is a trend of changing this by making it happen as "fait accompli", especially since the war in Ukraine, which is used as pretext.
There is a new military Schengen project to make troops and unified military documentation across whole EU.
Obviously there will need to be a registry of personnel there, so these people can be prevented to leave.
On the side you have SIS Schengen, where you can (already) have an active arrest warrant for desertion.
Nothing indicates that European Union is going to fight against such registries. It's even the opposite.
Yes, there is the common security and defence policy, and the Article 42 of Lisbon and all that, but it all still relies on national systems.
In practice, this draft is not a real draft yet. Nobody is actually drafted, so there are almost no practical consequences. If there was an actual draft, I'd expect to see a challenge to this.
Yeah, the law is unjust but spare even this part of the population this unnecessary risk. It's not like they can't join if they want to but why put force on it? So everybody feels miserable? What's the point?
And yeah, ich habe treu und tapfer verteidigt...
However, the matter has been heard in the European Court of Justice in 2002, and the short version is "Community law does not preclude compulsory military service being reserved to men."
For more details, feel free to study the legal opinion behind the ruling: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
It's always weird to me how surprised women are that every single man they know has had to specifically, actually physically ink paper to sign up for the draft. It definitely feels weird/spooky when you do it, given the implications and that despite being compulsory it's not automatically done for you.
To clarify: every young person regardless of gender is legally obliged to go through fitness testing for conscription and if deemed suitable must go through it if selected. I imagine it’s roughly similar in Denmark?
Up until the fall of the USSR ~all men did go through conscription/basic military training. After the fall only the ones that wanted to and were selected did. Now it’s ramping up massively.
I though it was weird that the United States had a requirement for people to physically sign a paper to do it. It looks like only this year they made it automated.
> Beginning on December 18, 2026, the Selective Service System will be required to identify, locate, and register all male (as assigned at birth) U.S. residents 18 to 26 years old on the basis of other existing federal databases. Men will no longer be required to register themselves or be subject to penalties for failing to do so. This was noted to be the most significant change to Selective Service since the self-registration system began in 1980.
Specially article 12a Paragraph 4: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_gg/englisch_gg.h...
Specifically it says:
If, during a state of defence, the need for civilian services in the civilian health system or in stationary military hospitals cannot be met on a voluntary basis, women between the age of eighteen and fifty-five may be called upon to render such services by or pursuant to a law. Under no circumstances may they be required to render service involving the use of arms.
Footnote: But not necessarily felt to be correctly labeled men, ever in life.
This is false, overwhelmingly MALES. For a time, males couldn't leave Ukraine, while females could. Those who go to die on the front in all wars are mostly males. Doesn't mean that females aren't casualties as well, they are.
The intersection of parties wanting to reinstate compulsory military service and parties supporting gender equality doesn't currently have the necessary supermajority to change the constitution. So we get a wishy-washy compromise, as is so often the case in democracies.
Women in the civil service, law enforcement agencies, or those registered in the military and serving under contract may face restrictions on traveling abroad, particularly for non-official purposes.
I thought it was obvious with the second paragraph
Look at $$4. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_12a.html
You could of course require women to register, too. In case of war, they'll be drafted into hospitals. They just don't want to.
In the military context, almost every job must be performed in the field or in the absence of (working) machinery. You still must be capable of carrying the equipment load-out for your role on your back. The inability of women as a class to do this effectively has been a longstanding issue. Everyone is at risk of being thrust into combat situations due to circumstances beyond anyone's control. The "rear echelon" can suddenly find themselves no longer in the rear.
All of which is separate from the question of the use of conscription generally.
In the US there is a separate gender-agnostic authority that allows the US to impress someone into non-military service for (IIRC) 6 months.
I am against all conscription on principle but I know why militaries made the pragmatic choice to selectively target men even if I don’t agree with it. These things have been studied to death, been put into practice by many countries, and the solutions are all quite bad in their own way.
Strict gender-blind standards drives strong gender segregation by role which in practice produced adverse second-order consequences. Also political blowback in a number of countries because the roles most women could qualified for in practice were perceived as lower status. Unequal standards create a whole raft of other social and operational problems.
To put it another way, all of these problems exist even in the absence of conscription.
The registered gender is the one that counts.
The actual answer is because the constitutional instrument that allows conscription (Artikel 12a Grundgesetz) is explicitly limited to men. Therefore women are not subject to conscription in Germany, unless the constitution is changed.
Perhaps if the constitution were written today instead of in 1949 it would include women too.
In addition to the legal point regarding the constitution: A lot less people in those roles you listed, die. The compulsion is necessary for the state to get enough people to go die - or at least, seriously risk their lives - for it on the battlefield.
And the answer is that women are equal to men in all things, except when things get serious, and then all of a sudden biology matters again
How so? Why isn't the question 'Why is anyone being forced at all?' Their question assumes that someone has to be forced, which I fundamentally disagree with, so they should justify that assumption first.
> And the answer is that women are equal to men in all things, except when things get serious, and then all of a sudden biology matters again
Correct. They are equal, so I don't think either men or women should be forced.
It probably makes more sense to ban birth control at the same time men are required to die for the war machine as both would then be playing out their slavery-induced biological role in ensuring survival of the nation. That is if you're down with the whole slavery for war thing.
Fixed that for you.
When things get existential, the jobs favored by men multiply and the jobs favored by women decrease. And nowhere more than in countries and societies which are highly feminist and supportive of women, which seems counterintuitive but isn't.
I’m assuming non military casualties were evenly spread between male and female.
3.7 million served in the Army, which is a fairly high proportion when compared to the age range suitable for military service. Add in the Navy and RAF and you get to nearly six million. Those that didn’t serve were generally needed at home - roles like doctors, miners, police, or were too young or too old to fight.
The British, unlike many European countries, had time to mobilise those forces. Had they lost the Battle of Britain and had Germany commenced a land invasion of Britain then it’s likely the numbers would have been a lot lower.
It wasn't until the scam of 'democracy' fooled people into thinking war was against the actual people of the other country that they not only scammed everyone into having such buy-in and stakes for the war but also to view the other countrymen themselves as the enemy. People started viewing the nation of themselves because their laughable miniscule influence of their vote somehow means the government is of them. (Note this was a resurface of course, there were times in history where war was seen as against a peoples rather than of the elite).
Cold comfort. Just decide to not be of Jewish descent then. Who would have known it's so easy to escape the attention of the Gestapo! /s
Of course, at the beginning of every war, some people genuinely believe that joining and defending the nation they live in is in their best interests, but these numbers quickly drop over time. As history and current events show, states start to use forced conscription in every prolonged war at some point.
1) Women can have children, and after a major war a large section of the population may be killed, and its better to have more women than men, since you can repopulate faster.
2) Women take over a large share of industrial labor during wartime. This was a mistake the Germans made in WW2, because they were so mystified by Nazism. But in the US, women basically took over all the manufacturing jobs that men left when they went to war, and it helped shore up the industrial base and, in the end, helped lead to an allied victory.
In a place like Israel, there are so few people that it doesn't make a massive difference. If half the men get taken out, its not like the 2-3 million remaining women are going to be able or even want to "repopulate" so rapidly (not to mention that Israel has an interesting setup where a small section of the women make up the majority of the births--the ultra-orthodox--and the majority probably aren't having kids anyway).
If you all agree to refuse to fight, you win.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
The key here is to refuse fighting. Nobody becomes a hero by becoming a murderer whose goal is to defend the political power of Stalin, Napoleon, Bush, or whoever.
Factor #2 is no longer true, nowadays more and more stuff is being produced by machines. Moreover women can pick up guns. Drones can be piloted. Lethality is only going to go up.
No one sane would want to go fight in a war where lethality is high. Nor train for something that requires looming, recurring obligations for a good 10-20 years of their life. This is real sacrifce. If you want respect, at some point you have to put skin in the game.
This is Europe. Women won't have more children, they'll just vote to import another 10 million MENA migrants.
>Women take over a large share of industrial labor during wartime.
This is Europe. Women won't take over a large share of industrial labor, they'll just vote to import another 10 million MENA migrants.