For a Generation That Thought War Was Over

I remember sitting with my Nan in the early 1990s. The Berlin Wall had fallen only a year or two before, in 1989, and the air felt full of promise. History, we were told, had reached a kind of conclusion. Ideological battles were over. Peace, surely, would follow.

I remember repeating that idea to her, something about the end of history and a calmer world to come. She smiled. Not unkindly. Not dismissively. Just knowingly.

“War will always be in Europe,” she said.

At the time, I thought it was the gentle cynicism of an older generation… shaped by memories I did not carry. But not long after, war did return. Former Yugoslavia fractured into violence. And now, decades later, Europe once again finds itself watching a brutal conflict unfold… this time in Ukraine. Or perhaps more honestly, Ukraine caught in the widening tension between Russia and NATO.

I am now 54 years old, and I have lived what can only be described as a blessed life: a life largely untouched by war. My son is seven. I look at him and I pray… not in a grand theological sense, but in the quiet, human way parents do… that conflict will not shape his childhood or define his future. I pray the same for all young people, and especially for young men, so often called upon to carry the physical cost of decisions made far from the front lines.

Not long ago, during a Remembrance Sunday service, I felt it was important that we hear a poem by a Ukrainian poet, War Generation. Words written not from theory, but from proximity to loss.

After the service, a young man approached me. I had seen him pass the church before… offered a smile, an invitation, nothing more. He told me he was a surgeon serving with the Ukrainian military. He said the service had given him hope. He asked for a photograph with me, there in the sanctuary.

I was deeply humbled.

In a few days’ time, he would return to his work… tending to bodies broken by war. The reality of conflict, which can feel abstract when reduced to headlines and maps, was suddenly present, human, and quietly devastating. And it is with that reality in mind that I write this.

There is a quiet shift happening across Europe. Not the kind announced with marching bands or posters on lampposts, but a subtler movement, like furniture being rearranged in the dark.

Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and more starkly since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European governments have been asking questions they hoped were finished with history. Questions about borders. About defense. About what happens when peace can no longer be assumed as the default setting of the continent. For a generation raised on the promise that war in Europe was something “we’d grown out of,” this has been deeply unsettling.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, many European countries dismantled compulsory military service. The Cold War had ended. Professional armies replaced mass conscription. War, we were told, would now be precise, distant, managed, if it happened at all. That confidence has evaporated.

In parts of Europe, governments have begun quietly rebuilding the scaffolding of readiness. Lithuania reintroduced conscription in 2015. Sweden followed in 2017. Latvia in 2024. Croatia will reinstate mandatory service in 2026. Other countries… Norway, Denmark… extended conscription to women. Elsewhere, voluntary military programmes are being expanded or re-invented, particularly in Germany, France, Belgium, and Poland.

This is not uniform. It is not coordinated in a single European voice. But it is a pattern: a recognition that the world has become less predictable, and that reliance on professional forces alone may no longer be enough.

And so, a question naturally rises, almost conversationally, in kitchens, cafés, and congregations: Why not here in the UK? Why, when so many European neighbours are preparing more explicitly, does the United Kingdom continue to insist it has no plans for conscription?

The answer is not that the UK is doing nothing. It is that Britain is preparing differently, and more quietly. Rather than reviving national service, the UK has leaned into the language of resilience. National Security Strategies. Risk Registers. “Whole-of-society” preparedness. Civil contingencies. Voluntary military schemes dressed carefully as opportunities rather than obligations. This is not the rhetoric of mass mobilisation. It is the rhetoric of systems, infrastructure, continuity, and adaptability.

One might say Europe is preparing bodies, while Britain is preparing frameworks.

Some have asked whether schemes like the government’s newly announced military gap-year programme represent a kind of “slight-of-hand conscription.” In strict terms, they do not. The scheme is voluntary, time-limited, and framed around skills and leadership rather than deployment. And yet, symbols matter as much as structures.

When governments begin to speak of defense participation as a formative civic opportunity, especially for the young, it marks a subtle cultural shift. Not compulsion, but conditioning; not a draft, but a gentle re-familiarising of society with the idea that military service may once again sit closer to the centre of public life.

For the UK, conscription has always carried the language of force, of being compelled into something against one’s will. And culturally, we resist that. We are an island nation, shaped by distance and a deep instinctive dislike of being told what we must do. We prefer consent to command, choice to obligation. Until, of course, something happens. And that “until” matters.

Perhaps this is why the movement we are seeing now is softer, quieter. Not conscription, but familiarity. Not obligation, but invitation. A gradual re-introduction of the military into cultural life, framed as opportunity, skills, leadership, resilience. It is not hard power, but soft acclimatisation.

And yet history teaches us that soft movements are often followed by sharp moments.

The danger, if there is one, is not that Britain is unaware, but that we are distracted. Cyber-attacks already affect our infrastructure: energy systems, communications, healthcare, finance. These threats do not come only from Russia, but from China and others. They do not arrive with tanks at borders, but quietly, invisibly, through cables and code.

In that sense, the uncomfortable truth may be this: the UK, and NATO more broadly, are already engaged in conflict. Not the kind we recognise from memorials or newsreels, but a diffuse, persistent form of warfare that blurs the line between peace and hostility.

The illusion of safety is sustained by noise: entertainment, outrage cycles, endless distraction… a cultural chorus of “nothing to see here.” But illusions rarely shatter all at once. They thin. They crack. And eventually, something happens that forces eyes wide open.

This is the territory of the Black Swan… the unforeseen event that reveals what was already fragile. And so the deeper question is not whether Britain will ever be forced into readiness, but whether we will recognise the world as it is before circumstances remove our choice.

Because one of the hardest truths to accept is this: safety is not a permanent condition of the world, only a temporary one, sustained by vigilance, relationship, and moral courage.

Whether that distinction will matter in a moment of real crisis is an open question, and a necessary one. Because readiness is not only about soldiers. It is about supply chains, energy grids, food systems, cyber security, medical capacity, local governance, and social cohesion. It is about whether communities fracture under pressure or learn how to hold one another steady.

And here is where the conversation becomes personal. Readiness is not meant to be a posture of fear. If it becomes that, it corrodes the very society it claims to protect.

True readiness, the kind worth cultivating, is closer to resilience than rehearsal for catastrophe. It asks not, “How do we fight?” first, but “How do we endure?” How do we stay human when narratives harden? How do we resist panic, propaganda, and the temptation to turn neighbours into threats?

Europe’s preparations tell us something important: governments no longer believe peace can be taken for granted. Britain’s approach tells us something else: that preparedness can be framed as civic responsibility rather than compulsory sacrifice. The tension between those two approaches is not yet resolved. And perhaps it shouldn’t be… not quickly, not simplistically.

Because the real work ahead may not be about preparing for war, but about learning how not to let the fear of war hollow us out.

And yet, amid all these shifts, the debates about conscription, the quiet reshaping of defence culture, the rise of cyber threats, there is another strand at work that we too easily overlook: the work of diplomats, negotiators, scholars, business leaders, and the many others who sit at tables rather than in trenches.

History reminds us that war and peace are not determined by battalions alone. The Congress of Vienna after 1815, for all its flaws, held Europe together for a century after the Napoleonic Wars. The painstaking negotiations of the United Nations in the aftermath of World War II created a forum where voices could be heard without cannon fire. These are not stories of inevitability, but of collective effort, a reminder that the deal makers matter as much as the soldiers.

Yet we live in a time when technology accelerates faster than our capacity to understand it. Cyber-attacks can disrupt our grids, our hospitals, our lives without a single boot on the ground. Artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and autonomous systems are reshaping power relationships across the world every day. The old edges of authority… nation vs nation, army vs army… are dissolving into something more complex.

In moments like this, I’m reminded of a line from the film True Romance, where Clarence muses: “It’s better to have one and not need it, than to need one and not have it.”

In the film he is talking, quite plainly, about being armed. But the wisdom underneath the bravado is older and broader: the instinct to be ready before the moment demands it, not out of fear, but out of care.

And perhaps there is wisdom in another old maxim… as articulated by Washington when he urged his young nation to be vigilant: “To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.”

He did not say that peace is guaranteed by military might alone. He said preparedness contributes to peace. That subtle distinction matters. Because even as governments, generals, technologists, and economists play their centuries-old games of negotiation and power, there is something more enduring at stake: the kind of society we choose to be. A society that prepares responsibly… not out of fear but out of wisdom… is a society that sustains peace not just in treaties but in everyday life.

And if that means holding fiercely to empathy, compassion, and human connection even while the world grows uncertain… then perhaps that, too, is part of being ready.