In two previous articles, Online Defense he imagined, in a utopian way, the possibility for the Italian Army to recruit foreign elements to replenish the ranks of an armed force that is increasingly short of personnel. In the same way he analyzed the far more concrete proposal to form a European army suggested by the French president Marcon. The two assumptions - we have already underlined - fall into a typically European inclination dating back to past centuries, when each sovereign had in his army of foreign contingents fighting for him. Some of these remained traditionally, others were hired for a generous fee and with different privileges.
In the armies that fought the Seven Years' War (not to go too far behind) the national elements were in minority compared to the mercenary troops and only Frederick II's Prussia could count on a sort of proto national armed force. The reasons behind this military promiscuity lay in the fact that the arms trade offered a chance - perhaps the only one - of survival for many stragglers and beggars in a Europe of the Old Regime where the gap between wealth and poverty assumed disproportionate proportions. Although going to war meant being able to die, for many it was always better than to get ready to get a loaf of bread and a shelter for the night. The army, at a very hard price, offered both things: so why not risk it?
Today the dilemma that grips the European military world seems to be a chronic lack of soldiers. The Italian army is an excellent example of an increasingly old armed force, but even worse that it tends not to offer career opportunities to those who choose to spend their life in uniform. The VFP model (a surrogate of the naja in voluntary form) represents a springboard to nothing with young soldiers, underpaid, frozen for a year in a profession that does not offer concrete prospects for the future. Why then face a career made of sacrifice, perhaps with the risk of ending up for six months in the Iraqi desert, and then be taken off with a "goodbye and thank you"? Once the military service is finished, you leave the civil world completely naked, where the professionalism of a former corporal - unless this has served in special bodies - is of little use.
In Italy anyone who has the ambition to wear a uniform for life (including that of FFOO) must clash with the specter of "concorsone", an anomaly that for years has sanctioned on one side the failure of many willing and from another career to as many recommended. In the eighties, for example, the temple from which the climb to the stars began was the Ergife, a mega hotel complex located in Rome, where thousands of young people were periodically found trying to embrace the fixed place passing the entrance tests for the police, carabinieri or guard of finance. But what was behind it? The seats were already few and from these you had to deduct those already "booked" by the owners of the recommendation: the gap from which to pass was really tight.
Now things have turned around because in the face of an increasingly narrow offer, we could see a dangerous decrease in demand; the military career - understood as a vocation that should not be a makeshift job - may no longer be attractive due to alternatives presented by the government itself. For those few who still yearn for a future with camouflage, the possibilities are increasingly restricted: the opportunities for growth are, in fact, thwarted by the lack of resources. On the contrary, the citizenship income (the amount paid differs by a few euros compared to the pay of a VFP1), proposed by the new board, could definitively stop the military ambitions of many young people who already know a priori that their employment in the armed forces is without a future.
The publication of the aforementioned articles (immigrants in the army ed European army) has aroused the indignation of some who have called a "blasphemy" the simple hypothesis, even just for fun, a multi-ethnic armed force; yet colonial and post-colonial European armies have engaged foreign soldiers in their service for centuries. Let's just think about what the French army was (even possessing a Foreign Legion), the Spanish or English one in which entire regiments were made up of personnel from overseas domains. During the Second World War, the same Nazi Germany, promulgator of the laws on race in whose ranks only the "pure" were to serve, incorporated into the notorious Waffen SS even those whom the party considered among people. This list also includes Italians who - inebriated by the prospects of colonial power - from the late nineteenth century began to form indigenous departments in Abyssinia, Somalia and Eritrea and then further develop the foreign presence in the Royal Army with the Armed Forces of East Africa Italian. This means that the military institution has always been the most permeable state organism to supranational contamination, arising from war requirements, but equally prestigious.
For some armies this contamination remains - in a minor form - even today, while others are opening up to wider perspectives. On the table of the German defense minister, for example, several proposals lie to enlist in the Bundeswehr foreign personnel with specific skills, but not only. Karl-Heinz Brunner, responsible for the Defense of the Social Democratic Party, explained how the German hypothesis was driven by a worrying decrease in military personnel. There are still many problems to be solved, since it is not enough to promote the idea of a European army if we do not first have to deal with the requirements that one must have to enter it. The possession of citizenship seems to be the crucial point on which the debate within the parliament rotates: grant it before or after military service? Brunner himself specifies how the conferral of citizenship is the conditio sine qua non to serve in the Bundeswehr, otherwise obtaining it would look like a "mercenary" reward.
Europe has one more chance of growth, which differs from mere economic considerations. Any extra banking assessment of this united and sick Europe is traceable in the historical path of the various nations that compose it, where there are much more complex paradigms that highlight the contradictions and the merits of being European. The army and military history are a fundamental ground for comparison to understand some state dynamics, especially those that led to the formation of nations whose legitimation was also based on military power, including colonial power.
(photo: Bundeswehr / US Army)
