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The European governments will not have much difficulty in conscripting young men. There will be lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth, but they can definitely get away with it.
The problem for those governments will be when veterans of war return home. Carrying out violence is a durable skill set, and it is a pretty rare skill set in the west. The United States maintains the equivalent of a full time domestic army in the form of police, and even trains a small amount of them in full on domestic war techniques (SWAT teams).
Meanwhile in Britain they can send female officers to go arrest YouTubers for posting videos of their dog giving Nazi salutes.
Civilization is always held together by people being unwilling to commit coordinated violence. This can be accomplished a few different ways:
Europe has mostly forgotten how to wage war, and how to pacify the men returning home from war. The US has kept the skill set depressingly fresh. Whoever comes home from the war will end up controlling the governments of Europe.
This type of thing might be the best they can hope for: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/featured/battle-of-athens.html But the worst will look more like Russia in 1917.
Edit oops meant to post this in response to @jeroboam below, but still mostly relevant to Ukraine war stuff and Europe getting engaged.
Has anything like this ever happened in the real world? (Starship Troopers describes something like this, but is fiction) The specific case of "demobbed soldiers stage a coup, against a democracy" hasn't had many chances to happen because democracies don't fight on that scale very often, and as far as I aware has never happened.
There are plenty of cases of "successful army stages a coup led by its generals while still under arms" (this is basically all of Roman history after the Marian reforms), but I don't think there has been one against a democracy - Tom Holland in Rubicon argues that the reason why the Roman Republic became vulnerable to coups was because the Marian reforms changed the social composition of the army such that most soldiers were too poor to have a meaningful voice in the Centuriate Assembly (which elected the consuls, and was originally set up with the specific intention of overweighting veteran votes).
I agree the Battle of Athens comes close, but it was an uprising against a blatantly rigged election, with the victory condition being "find and publicly count the hidden ballots". I do not think something like the Battle of Athens happens in a working democracy - not least because under normal circumstances the loyalties of returning veterans would be divided between existing political factions.
Thinking about it, the nearest example is probably the October Revolution in Russia - the Bolshevik's power base was the enlisted soldiers in the Petrograd garrison.
Well, the Beer Hall Putsch didn’t get traction, but it had a pretty direct line to the actual dismantling.
Napoleon deposed the Directory to become Emperor in the first place. The Hundred Days don’t count because it was a constitutional monarchy and hadn’t even managed to dismantle his imperial institutions. I’d also give Napoleon III half credit for couping himself.
There’s also the various post-Bolivar democracies of South America. Paraguay, Colombia, Ecuador. More if you go back to the initial revolutions.
Also the Kapp Putsch, but that got even less traction.
Napoleon was still under arms when he couped the Directory. Napoleon III never served (except briefly leading from the front as Commander-in-Chief), so it wasn't a military coup.
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Most democracies integrate the soldiers into the government so it's not necessary.
US government agencies have preferential hiring of veterans. They have large bureaucratic organizations that hoover up former soldiers.
The other ones end up getting elected.
No where did I suggest they'd need to stage a coup.
FWIW your point seems obvious to me about the US. There have been 14 US presidents since WWII, and 8 of them have military experience.
This seems like a weird way of slicing and dicing the numbers.
No president since HW Bush has had military experience. That's Clinton, Dubya, Obama, Trump, Biden, a combined 36 year run of non-soldiers. Where after Truman left office, every president from Ike to Bush I served, mostly in WWII.
The relevant metric? The USA won WWII, And elected WWII veterans repeatedly. But the USA never elected a Vietnam veteran, despite electing four men who were of age to serve in Vietnam but did not, and despite three decorated Vietnam veterans obtaining major party nominations.
By the same logic, it's likely that GWOT service will not be the golden ticket to the oval office.
I don't think it is winning that matters as much as having a worthy opponent. Charles De Gaulle was pretty popular in France, despite the French getting their buts kicked during the war. Hitler took over Germany after experience in WWI where Germany lost.
War is one of the few areas where governments are stressed with competitive pressures. But not all wars are equal. Trying to stomp out an insurgency is different from fighting another world superpower.
A war between Russia and most of Europe would forge a military class in Europe with an ability to get things done. The current managerial and bureaucratic class that runs Europe at a lazy slow clip would end up being replaced or ousted over time, whatever rules of competition they setup in hopes of giving themselves an advantage they'd still get beaten. The average views of the people in charge would drift much closer to the views of veterans and officers from the conflict.
On the margin Europe is generally soft and a little socialist. I think they'd drift more towards hard and fascist. How much they'd drift in that direction would depend on the level of their involvement.
The costs of doing this seem horrific, I'd hope Europe and Russia don't get into a major war. It just seems predictable where things might go if they do, and it seems like the current political class would be bringing about their own future defeats.
Its important to remember that governments throughout history have always been controlled by those who wage war for them. Rome gave land and power to their soldiers. The feudal era was marked with feudal armies raised by lords and reliant on highly trained knights. The era of nationalism has been marked with a shift towards democracy and rule by the people, since it is large armies of men that won conflicts.
The World Wars and the wars since have been marked with the need for massive logistics and manufacturing capabilities. The Political-Managerial-Class has been in charge of and control of those resources, and they've taken political power. There is still a need for a tip of the spear that applies the weight of manufacturing upon the enemy. That tip of the spear has always been ground down into a fine meat paste for the last century. But the men willing to create that meat paste, and order around the unpasted meat are not a permanent class. The creation of that officer group will be what changes Europe, and the type of men that become in charge.
I'd also point out that just because someone is not a Veteran, doesn't mean they aren't representing those interests. Bad-mouthing veterans has been political suicide for as long as I have been alive. I think the Democrats have tended to rely more on military experience in their politicians just so they can field off accusations of "you hate veterans".
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It's certainly not a golden ticket. @cjet79's original claim is that veterans from a hypothetical European-Russian conflict will have outsized political influence in their respective governments. I'm just saying I think we've seen that trend in the US where the political class has a much larger fraction of veterans than ordinary citizens.
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W did have military experience, however one might slice the practicalities of his time in the Texas Air National Guard. You're probably thinking of combat experience here.
No, I'm not thinking of combat experience. Combat would limit us, in that post WWII sample to HW, JFK, and maybe Dwight in the Philippines but I don't remember off hand.
Perhaps we can split the difference and say service in war.
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I think you have to narrow "military" there to "combat": Dubya served in the National Guard but never deployed to Vietnam, which was a source of plenty of drama circa 2004.
I'm not forgetting that drama, I'm taking a position on it: Dubya joined the FANG to avoid service in Vietnam, had a terrible attendance record during his time there, and both his national victories were over decorated Vietnam combat veterans. He's much closer to having not served than having served.
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This sort of presupposes that there's an actual war and European troops sent to Ukraine aren't able to deter Russia further. (Bear in mind that the proposal European countries are discussing is not sending European troops in to fight the Russians - it's to send peacekeepers in afterwards). But let's go with it and assume there's a direct war between NATO - US and Russia (and nobody gets nuked).
By what mechanism? Is your position that cadres of veterans will stage a coup? That seems... incredibly unlikely. As I'm sure you are aware, they have police in Europe. Many European countries have a gendarmerie or equivalent, which the US does not.
In the event of a war between the EU and Russia, the means by which veterans take over European government will be that they will run for office and anyone who isn't a veteran will be so delegitimized in relative term that it will be an easy win.
Generally by the methods available. If there only path to control is a violent coup, then ya. I think it much more likely that they will just have a degree of legitimacy and experience with the bureaucracy of government that will give them an advantage in attaining positions in governance.
They will also be more difficult to intimidate and suppress. There is a large amount of ground to cover before a violent coup takes place. It could just be that some of them are a little crazier and willing to engage in terrorist acts or intimidation acts against the best of their political opponents.
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I think a lot of this presupposes that the peacekeepers actually get involved in the nuts and bolts, nitty-gritty of war. Isn't the whole point of a European aligned peacekeeping force to put a little skin in the game and be a tripwire force? Obviously a large part of that would depend on how stable the truce would be, but if Russia were committed and the Donbass separatists didn't get up to trouble then it's entirely possible a buffer zone would be somewhat peaceful, not Iraq 3.0.
Or do you think that training in violence is provided by military base training alone, no actual combat required?
What do you think happens if the tripwire is tripped? Either European forces have to fight, or the nukes have to fly, or the tripwire is pointless.
What happens is that a few peacekeepers die, all the troops are immediately pulled out as the markets crash (and then recover), and then more sanctions are leveled against Russia. Casualty tolerance in European armies is extraordinarily low for reasons that have little to do with immigration. They’re not going into the trenches.
Yes, this would fall under "the tripwire is pointless".
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