The Citizen and the State: When Sacrifice Is No Longer Shared

There are questions which governments prefer not to ask because the asking of them may prove more dangerous than the answering. One of these concerns the meaning of citizenship itself. It is easy enough to speak of citizenship when the subject is voting, taxation, education or the protection afforded by the law. It becomes more difficult when citizenship involves obligation. Rights are described as universal, while duties acquire qualifications, exceptions and footnotes. The citizen is reminded that Britain is a diverse society in which all are equal, but there is considerably less enthusiasm for explaining what equality means when the country is in danger and the state requires something more substantial than a signature on a form.

Britain does not presently have compulsory military service. Its Armed Forces remain professional and voluntary. But the question of national service has returned to political discussion, and the deterioration of Europe's security environment has made questions of mobilisation, reserves and national resilience less theoretical than they once seemed. It is therefore reasonable to ask, before an emergency arises, what compulsory service would mean if a future government decided that it was necessary.

The important question would not simply be whether young people should serve. It would be whether the obligation genuinely applied to the nation as a whole.

For a young British citizen whose family had lived in Britain for generations, there would be little mystery about what a call-up meant. If the Government declared that national defence required compulsory service, he would receive his notice and be told, in the familiar language of duty and sacrifice, that the country needed him. Ministers would invoke the example of previous generations; ceremonies would be arranged; the words honour, service and patriotism would return to the speeches of politicians who had spent years discussing defence largely as an item of expenditure.

All of this might be perfectly legitimate. A country has the right to defend itself, and in an extreme emergency it may have the right to demand extraordinary sacrifices from its citizens. But the citizen would still be entitled to ask a simple question: does the obligation apply to everyone?

That question becomes more important in a country whose population has changed considerably. Britain contains citizens whose families have been here for generations alongside citizens who arrived as adults and later acquired British nationality, as well as the children and grandchildren of more recent immigrants. Many of these people are unquestionably British and have contributed greatly to the country. Some have served in the Armed Forces and other public institutions with distinction. There is no reason why a man born abroad should be incapable of becoming as loyal a Briton as a man born in Birmingham or Canterbury.

But if citizenship is genuine, it cannot mean rights without responsibilities.

This principle cuts both ways. A recently naturalised Muslim is not automatically less British, nor should a Muslim citizen be presumed unwilling to defend the country. Religion is not a sufficient test of loyalty, just as ancestry is not. The proper test is citizenship and conduct. If the state imposes an obligation upon citizens, it must apply that obligation according to a rule which does not change according to the religion, ethnicity or political usefulness of the individual.

That is where the difficulty begins.

Imagine that compulsory national service was introduced and that every eligible citizen of a particular age were required either to serve in the Armed Forces or undertake an equivalent form of national service. The Government would have to define the word "every". Would recently naturalised citizens be included? Would permanent residents be liable? Would religious objections qualify for exemption? If so, would the same standard apply to every religion? Would conscientious objection permit civilian service rather than military service? Would medical exemptions be determined by the same criteria for everybody?

These questions would not be bureaucratic details. They would determine whether national service was actually national.

The greatest danger would be the creation of two classes of citizenship: those who owe and those who receive. The first would be expected to pay taxes, obey the law and, when circumstances demanded it, surrender a portion of their lives and perhaps risk their lives themselves. The second would possess the rights of citizenship while finding that the corresponding obligations were negotiable.

Such an arrangement might be concealed for some time behind administrative language. It would not remain concealed from the people required to serve.

A young man does not necessarily object to sacrifice because he is selfish. He may object because he wants to know whether the sacrifice is shared. If he is told that the country requires him to interrupt his education, abandon his employment or enter military service, he will naturally look around him and ask whether the same country makes the same demand upon other citizens.

That is not an unreasonable question, and it cannot fairly be dismissed as prejudice merely because the comparison happens to involve immigration or religion.

Indeed, the Government itself would have created the question by defining citizenship as equal.

The mistake would be to imagine that people are primarily angered by hardship. They are more often angered by unequal hardship. During the great wars of the twentieth century, Britain endured rationing, bombing, economic privation and enormous military casualties. People accepted conditions that would be almost inconceivable today because, despite the inequalities and injustices of the period, there was a powerful sense that the country was engaged in a common struggle.

The modern state faces a more difficult problem. It has developed an elaborate system of exemptions, protected categories and politically sensitive distinctions. Many of these exist for good reasons. A civilised society should make reasonable provision for disability, genuine conscientious objection and other circumstances in which an obligation cannot fairly be imposed. But exemptions must be based upon principle rather than political convenience.

Otherwise, the law becomes universal in theory and particular in practice.

The citizen who has no influential lobby eventually discovers that universal obligations are often rather more universal for him than for others.

This matters particularly in defence because military service is unlike most other obligations imposed by government. A tax can be increased; a regulation can be endured; a benefit can be withdrawn. Military service can cost a person his life. The moral justification required is therefore much higher.

A government asking a young person to risk death must be able to demonstrate that the danger is genuine, that the objective is necessary, that reasonable alternatives have been considered and that the burden is being distributed fairly. It must also accept responsibility for the decisions that produced the circumstances in which the sacrifice became necessary.

That last point is too easily forgotten.

The people who make decisions about war do not normally experience war in the same manner as the people who fight it. The minister remains in his office, the official remains at his desk and the strategist remains behind a secure perimeter. The soldier goes where he is sent. His family waits at home.

This separation between decision and consequence is one of the permanent weaknesses of political power. Those who possess the authority to commit a country to danger are often those least exposed to its physical consequences, while those who are most exposed have the least influence over the original decision.

That does not mean that war is always unjust. There are circumstances in which war is unavoidable and national defence requires extraordinary sacrifice. But it makes accountability indispensable. The state cannot demand the ultimate obligation from the citizen while treating those who imposed it as though they were merely spectators.

The same principle applies to law.

A citizen will accept considerable restrictions if he believes that the law is impartial. He will tolerate punishment for wrongdoing because he accepts that society cannot function without rules. But confidence begins to disappear when people suspect that the seriousness with which an offence is treated depends upon the identity of the offender or the political sensitivity of the subject.

Comparable conduct should receive comparable treatment.

A person's religion should neither shield him from the law nor make him more vulnerable to it. Lawful political criticism should not become criminal merely because it is offensive to those in authority, while genuinely violent criminality should never be treated lightly because confronting it is politically inconvenient.

The law must be above political fashion.

Once citizens begin to believe otherwise, the damage extends beyond individual cases. They cease to regard institutions as impartial and begin to regard them as instruments of competing political interests. Elections may change the occupants of government offices, but they cannot by themselves restore confidence. Trust is produced by consistent conduct, not by repeated assurances that the public ought to trust.

This is also the proper way to approach immigration and integration. Britain has the right to determine who may enter the country and who may become a citizen. But once citizenship has been granted, the newcomer should be regarded as a member of the national community rather than as a permanent outsider. In return, citizenship should carry genuine responsibilities.

That is not hostility to immigration. It is the opposite. It is to take citizenship seriously.

If a person becomes British, he should not be treated as permanently foreign. But neither should British citizenship become merely a legal instrument for obtaining rights while leaving obligations to other people. The same standard must apply to the established citizen and the recent citizen. The former cannot claim a hereditary monopoly on the country, and the latter cannot reasonably claim that membership involves no responsibilities.

This is why the argument must not be reduced to Muslims versus Christians, immigrants versus natives or one community against another. Such divisions obscure the real issue. There are loyal Muslims and disloyal Muslims, patriotic Christians and unpatriotic Christians, newcomers who contribute greatly to Britain and native-born citizens who contribute very little. Human beings do not become morally identical merely because they share a religion or birthplace.

The state therefore has no legitimate reason to judge loyalty by religious identity.

But neither does it have a legitimate reason to avoid applying a common obligation because it is frightened of offending a particular community.

If national service were ever introduced, the rule should be straightforward: citizenship determines liability, lawful exemptions apply equally, and religious belief does not create a privileged class of obligation.

That would be equality. Anything else would-be political favouritism disguised as tolerance.

There is an uncomfortable irony here. Governments often speak most enthusiastically about shared citizenship when asking people to accept a common identity, yet become remarkably cautious when that identity carries a common burden. They want the language of belonging without always wanting to define the duties that belonging entails.

But a country cannot be held together by rights alone.

Someone must maintain its institutions, pay for its defence, enforce its laws and, in an extreme emergency, protect it physically. The question is not whether citizens should have obligations. Every functioning society imposes obligations. The question is whether those obligations are understood as belonging to everyone.

If they do not, resentment follows.

And resentment is particularly powerful when the price of inequality is measured not in money but in months of a person's life or, in the worst case, in his death.

There is also a distinction which governments would do well to preserve: the distinction between the country and the Government.

A citizen may love Britain while distrusting the people who govern it. He may regard the country's history and institutions as worth preserving while believing that a particular ministry has behaved incompetently or dishonestly. There is nothing contradictory in this. Indeed, the ability to distinguish the nation from its temporary rulers is one of the foundations of political freedom.

Britain is not Whitehall, nor is it Parliament in the abstract. It is not the civil service and it is not whichever party happens to hold office. It is the accumulated inheritance of generations: its towns and villages, language, institutions, liberties, traditions, industries, farms, coastline and communities. Governments administer this inheritance temporarily. They do not own it.

For that reason, they should be cautious about consuming it and then asking the next generation to pay for the consequences.

A government which neglects defence for years cannot suddenly invoke patriotism when the strategic situation deteriorates. A government which allows military capacity to decline cannot treat mobilisation as though it were an event unrelated to previous political choices. The citizen may reasonably ask why the state is now demanding sacrifices which earlier governments failed to prepare for.

The answer cannot simply be that circumstances have changed. Circumstances always change. Government exists partly to anticipate them.

The same principle applies to social cohesion. A country cannot indefinitely divide people into competing categories of privilege and obligation and then expect them to behave as though they share a common fate. The more the state emphasises difference in ordinary political life, the more difficult it becomes to demand unity when danger arrives.

Unity cannot be manufactured at the moment it is required. It must exist beforehand.

That is why the real test of any future national service scheme would not be the efficiency of the recruitment system or the size of the force produced. It would be whether ordinary citizens regarded the arrangement as fair. A smaller force accepted as legitimate would be stronger than a larger force created by a system that large numbers of citizens regarded as discriminatory.

Before the first notice was ever issued, the Government would have to answer a question which is deceptively simple but impossible to evade: what, precisely, does citizenship mean? It would have to establish who was liable for national service, what obligations citizenship carried, and which exemptions were legitimate. More importantly, it would have to ensure that those exemptions were available on the same terms to everyone. The fact that a person had arrived in Britain recently, followed a particular religion, or possessed sufficient political influence to make the Government nervous could not be allowed to determine whether the obligation applied to him.

For once the rules began to change according to such considerations, the country would no longer have a common national obligation. It would have something considerably less respectable: a system of negotiated obligations in which the burden fell most heavily upon those least able to resist it. The principle would remain written in the law, but its application would depend upon who was standing before the Government and how much political pressure could be brought to bear on his behalf. That is not equality before the law. It is privilege disguised as administration, and it is precisely the sort of distinction by which a free society can gradually teach its citizens that the law is universal only until somebody important objects.

The alternative is neither difficult nor unreasonable. A person who becomes British becomes British. He is entitled to the protection of the country and to participate fully in its civic life. In return, he accepts the responsibilities imposed upon citizens. The same principle applies to the citizen whose family has been here for ten generations.

Neither should be presumed loyal merely because of identity. Neither should be presumed disloyal because of identity.

Both should be judged by the same law.

This is not an argument for forcing everyone into military uniform. It is an argument for making citizenship meaningful. National service, if ever considered, should be debated honestly as a matter of common obligation rather than introduced through the back door of political expediency.

The state should also remember that there is a difference between demanding sacrifice and deserving it.

A citizen is more likely to defend a country in which he believes the law is fair, the institutions are competent and the burdens are shared. He is less likely to sacrifice willingly for an establishment which appears to regard him merely as a source of taxation, manpower and obedience.

Patriotism cannot be summoned by ministerial announcement. It is accumulated over time. It grows from the belief that the country is worth preserving and that the people who govern it understand that they are custodians rather than owners.

If Britain ever reaches the point where its young citizens must once again be called upon to serve, the Government will therefore owe them more than speeches about honour. It will owe them a clear explanation of the danger, a credible purpose, competent leadership and, above all, equality of obligation.

• The son of an old British family must not be treated as a hereditary source of manpower.
• The recently naturalised citizen must not be treated as permanently exempt.
• The Muslim citizen must not be treated as inherently suspect.
• The Christian citizen must not be treated as inherently loyal.

The rule must be the same because the citizenship is the same.

That is the only arrangement capable of preserving the idea of a common country.

For when a government asks its citizens to give a year of their lives, or perhaps something much greater, the citizen is entitled to ask what is being given in return. He is entitled to ask whether the law is equal, whether the burden is shared and whether those making the decision accept responsibility for it.

These are not questions of cowardice. They are questions of citizenship.

And perhaps that is the point which modern politics has forgotten. Citizenship is neither a privilege without responsibility nor a duty without rights. It is a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the political community.

The state protects the citizen; The citizen sustains the state and when danger comes, each owes something to the other. But neither can reasonably expect the bargain to work if one side continually alters its obligations while the other is expected to honour them without question.

If Britain ever calls upon its young people to serve, the call must therefore be genuinely national. It must not fall by default upon those whose families have been British longest, nor be softened or avoided because politicians fear asking difficult questions of newer citizens or particular religious communities.

The country must decide what it means by citizenship and then have the courage to apply that definition consistently.

Otherwise, the word "duty" becomes little more than a command issued from a comfortable office to somebody standing much closer to danger.

And when that happens, the citizen will still be entitled to love his country.

He will simply begin to wonder whether those who govern it have earned the right to ask him to die for it.

By John Shenton

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