Description
This paper asks: what do military unions mean for understandings of militarism? Competing framings of and investments in military institutions, military personnel, military power and violence, along with different perspectives on the essential terms of the relationship between soldier and liberal state play out in political debates regarding the right to military labour association. This encompasses both the fundamental right to association and also the form it should take (for instance a full union or an alternate form without a right to strike). In this paper I reflect on these debates through lenses provided by critical and feminist understandings of militarism, military power and military violence in conversation with understandings of labour and power from political economy. I focus my discussion on european militaries where there exist strikingly divergent approaches to military labour association (from full rights through to none at all). At their heart debates about military labour association often centre on whether soldiers should be understood within labour terms, as workers (as EUROMIL, the European umbrella organisation of military labour associations has it - “workers in uniform”) or whether they are a ‘special’ category of citizen whose ‘military service’ is unique and elevated from the grubbiness of labour relations as a matter of service, duty, and national honour. These positions are very different in how they view the essential terms of the relationship between soldier, state, and nation yet they both seek to uphold military power, the effectiveness of military institutions and projects of military violence. What does this mean for our understandings of how militarism works in liberal states?
