Freedom, self-determination and compulsory military service

Military service demands more of the citizen than any other duty to the state. Those who serve do not merely place their time and labour at the country's disposal. In the extreme case, they put their health and their lives at stake. The state cannot demand such a sacrifice on the strength of laws, traditions or patriotic appeals alone. It needs a convincing reason: the defence of one's own freedom.

The Swiss militia army rests on a simple principle: whoever has a say in their country as a free citizen is also prepared to defend its freedom. It is not a detached apparatus of power but the armed citizen who protects the community. He defends his country because it is his country: because he can take part in its political decisions, because power remains limited and because no foreign authority rules over him. In this understanding, military service is not a service to a government but a service to freedom.

General Henri Guisan showed how closely the will to defend and freedom belong together on 25 July 1940. In one of the most threatening hours in Swiss history, he assembled the army's highest-ranking officers on the Rütli meadow. The place was chosen with care. Guisan wanted not only to announce a military strategy but to commit the army leadership to a common will: Switzerland would defend its independence and would not voluntarily submit to a foreign power. The Rütli Report thus became the symbol of the will to resist. The soldiers were to know what they were fighting for: a free, independent country.

But this idea loses its foundation when Switzerland gradually surrenders its self-determination. When it binds itself legally to foreign institutions, adopts foreign law and enters into lasting financial or political dependencies, an unavoidable question arises: what exactly is the Swiss citizen then supposed to defend?

You cannot ask people to risk their lives for the country's independence while that same independence is being given away by political means. You cannot tell them that sovereignty must, if necessary, be protected with weapons while at the negotiating table it becomes a mere bargaining chip.

From a libertarian point of view, however, the contradiction runs even deeper. Even if Switzerland remained completely free and independent, the state must not force anyone into military service. It has no right to dispose of the lives of its citizens. Freedom cannot be defended by taking away from the individual the decision over their own life.

This is not about isolation. Switzerland can cooperate with other states, trade and enter into contractual obligations. Cooperation between free partners is something other than subordination. What matters is whether Swiss citizens can continue to decide for themselves on their law, their institutions and their future.

A militia army suits a free and sovereign state of citizens – provided its citizens serve out of their own conviction. It is, however, less and less suited to a country that increasingly aligns its political decisions with external requirements. If Switzerland becomes a mere administrative area within a higher-level order, the appeal to the will to defend loses its credibility. It would then be more honest to hand national defence over to paid professional soldiers or recruited mercenaries. Whoever fights for wages concludes a contract. Whoever is expected to fight as a citizen, by contrast, needs something of their own that is worth defending – and the freedom to decide on it for themselves.

That is precisely why the question of national defence is inseparable from the question of sovereignty. An army alone does not make a country independent. Independence begins where a people adopts its own laws, represents its own interests and bears responsibility for its own decisions.

Switzerland can count on its citizens' willingness to make sacrifices if it preserves their freedom. It may not lay claim to their lives. Anyone who wants to win citizens over to defending their country owes them a free country – and must respect their own freedom.