Attempts to somehow “democratize” things alarmed the army officer caste, or, counter-intuitively, exalted militarism and nationalism and “dulce et decorum est pro patria morir” since if every young lad has to pull three or even four years in the army while zee Ghermans next door can be much, much more selective in who gets called up, then obligatory military service has to be made, erm, “sexy.” Ditto Finland, I suppose, although it was long a buffer between Sweden and Russia, hence not geographically unimportant.įrance has long had a right-wing–even royalist–professional military at odds with the Republic in its various iterations. So “Switzerland gets it” is due to a militia tradition, along with the fact that it is ruggedly mountainous and, prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, dirt poor and relatively unimportant. Switzerland is the only European nation where the armed forces do not historically derive from a royal entourage of professional mercenaries, gun thugs, and virtuosos of violence and mayhem.
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