After a decade in the United States, I’ve come to a realization. Had I been born here, I would have wanted to serve in the military. That thought would have shocked my younger self, raised in post-1989 Eastern Europe, where the animating questions were about markets: how to expand them, regulate them, rescue them. Security and sacrifice belonged to the war literature I was assigned in school.
In America, military service occupies a distinct moral space. As an institution, it has its own contradictions and exclusions, yet its civic visibility is unmistakable. The cues are everywhere: the airport announcement inviting active-duty personnel to board first, the “thank you for your service” at a checkout counter, the job applications that ask if you are a veteran, the graduate school fellowships, the banners on lawns each Veterans Day. These gestures are easy to dismiss, yet they make defense visible. The United States makes security feel familiar. America locates it in the lives of my classmates and your neighbors. Military spending circulates as jobs. For years, recruitment ads, still so foreign to me, have promised that you can “be all you can be” [1]. Meanwhile, veterans’ commemorations turn defense into civic pride. In doing so, the U.S. grants its defense budget something Europe has to rebuild: social legitimacy.
Europe has relegated the military to the past—an institution kept at a distance and treated by my generation, until recently, as a chapter sealed in 1945, however curated that memory may be. Since, Europe’s political logic has been economic. Now, defense is once again urgent, but the political culture for it no longer exists. Rearmament talk is a technocratic matter of procurement and alliances, yet it’s high time leaders presented it as a civic duty, too. Why? Public conviction lags, as a third of Europeans [4] would like to see no increases or even reductions in defense spending. Another third of Europeans prefers only “slight” increases. But slight increases will not help Europe [2] stand up to adversaries.
Populists across Europe portray rearmament as the project of elites, accuse governments of dragging our youth into war, and frame defense spending as wasteful at a time of inflation and economic strain. This rhetoric exploits public unease about war escalation and turns technocratic defense policy into populist ammunition, pitting citizens against an establishment accused of risking conflict in their name.
In that narrative, European defense looks like a technocratic effort at best, a bureaucratic imposition at worst. And it has few civic connections to counter that narrative. Western Europe tiptoes around rearmament, anxious it might seem militaristic. Eastern Europe grounds defense on the fear of returning to Soviet-era scarcity—whether of blue jeans or of free speech. But I have a hard time seeing this rhetoric reach the generation born after it. A politics built on fear has limits, especially for those who have not experienced what is being feared; youth today have known only peace and opportunity and cannot imagine the confinement their parents escaped. The Guardian [3] reported in the summer that “more than one in five [young Europeans] – 21% – would favor authoritarian rule”. Europe is trying to mobilize a generation that has not felt its freedoms in jeopardy. This isa difficult foundation for rearmament, as appeals to fear no longer register.
In the United States, military power does not depend on an immediate threat. It rests on a simple belief: that there is a way of life worth affirming, and worth defending with force if necessary. Whatever Europe thinks of how Washington acts on that belief abroad, it gives the armed forces a purpose that does not wait on an adversary to supply it. Until Europe can say what its defense is for, and not only what it is against, rearmament will struggle to inspire.
To be fair, Europe’s discomfort has deep roots. For Europe, the twentieth century taught the most painful lesson imaginable, particularly that militarization can corrode democracy from within. Integration was designed to prevent conflict, thereby making its instruments—armies, borders, patriotic myths—morally suspect. That reflex served the continent well for decades. Today, that reflex paralyzes it. A culture that once over-militarized has now over-corrected.
Skeptics who fear militarism or escalation are right to guard against both. But caution is not a cause and technocracy cannot sustain a commitment that costs something. Rearmament will ask Europeans to accept real trade-offs—in budgets, in political attention, in the stories they tell about themselves, or, in the hardest cases, in service. Those trade-offs only feel bearable when they feel shared. Europe does not yet have a defense-friendly political culture, and budgetary mobilization, itself hard-won, will have to move in lockstep with a civic momentum behind defense. For that, Europeans must rebuild the invisible threads of recognition that make security feel like something Europeans do, not something done to them.
Those threads are built through institutions and habits. That means veterans’ associations that mark what a free society owes to those who defend it, commemorations that normalize service without glorifying war, school curricula that teach defense as a democratic responsibility; and, most of all, a narrative different from fear. A defense-friendly political culture is not built within the halls of government; it is built in the small, repeated gestures by which a society organizes itself. It is also built by whom we see doing the work: engineers, reservists, civil servants, and, most visibly, those in uniform.
The military is where defense becomes most human, and where a society meets the people who carry it. In Europe, one can easily reach adulthood and never meet someone who has served in the armed forces. Service has to be close enough to see and belong to people we know. If we want defense to feel like a shared public good, the military has to open itself up—through visible educational benefits and civil career paths for veterans, and through recruitment that actually reflects the societies being defended. An army that looks like society is one society can trust. That’s when defense becomes a public good rather than just a budget line competing with welfare.
We all talk about rearmament. But what’s visible so far are the euros, not the service.
1. (n.d.). Be All You Can Be | U.S. Army. Retrieved July 9, 2026, from https://www.goarmy.com
2. Burilkov, A., & Wolff, G. B. (2025, February 21). Defending Europe without the US: first estimates of what is needed. Bruegel. Retrieved July 9, 2026, from https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/defending-europe-without-us-first-estimates-what-needed
3. Cole, D. (2025, July 4). Young Europeans losing faith in democracy, poll finds. The Guardian. Retrieved July 9, 2026, from https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jul/04/young-europeans-losing-faith-in-democracy-poll-finds
4. Neubert, K. (2025, October 7). Public support for EU defence spending past its peak, says poll. Euractiv. Retrieved July 9, 2026, from https://www.euractiv.com/news/public-support-for-eu-defence-spending-past-its-peak-says-poll/