Concepts of Soldiering between National Norms and International Operations : Results of a Comparative European Research Project (original) (raw)

INTRODUCTION My contribution reflects on the tensions that soldiers from European democracies encounter as they try to come to terms with competing expectations arising from the normative concepts of soldiering in their national societies and from the practical scope of international operations. In the following, I draw on a research project on the ways in which democratic civil-military relations and soldiering are currently conceptualised in twelve European countries, which I have conducted in an international collaboration with three of my colleagues at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt and nine external experts (“The Image of the Democratic Soldier”, 2006-2010, http://www.hsfk.de/Das-Bild-vom-demokratischenSoldaten-Spannungen-z.75.0.html?&L=1). In detailed analyses, we first of all studied the ideal-type that professes the socialisation objective of each country’s military. In a second step, we investigated how these normative concepts are understood in military institution...