coerced into servitude, and the servitude exposes them to high odds of being maimed or killed. Other than at times of existential threat, the extent of conscription is a barometer of a country’s willingness to sanction the use of force. In the decades after World War II, the world saw a steady reduction in the length of compulsory military service. The United States, Canada, and most European countries have eliminated conscription outright, and in the others it functions more as a citizenship-building exercise than as a training ground for warriors.162 Payne has compiled statistics on the length of military conscription between 1970 and 2000 in forty-eight long-established nations, which I have updated for 2010 in figure 5–19. They show that conscription was in decline even before the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s. Only 19 percent of these countries did without conscription in 1970. The proportion rose to 35 percent in 2000 and to 50 percent in 2010, and it will soon exceed 50 percent because at least two other countries (Poland and Serbia) plan to abolish the draft in the early 2010s.163
FIGURE 5–19. Length of military conscription, 48 major long-established nations, 1970–2010
Sources: Graph for 1970–2000 from Payne, 2004, p. 74, based on data from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (London), The Military Balance, various editions. Data for 2010 from the 2010 edition of The Military Balance (International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2010), supplemented when incomplete from The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 2010.
Another indicator of war-friendliness is the size of a nation’s military forces as a proportion of its population, whether enlisted by conscription or by television ads promising volunteers that they can be all that they can be. Payne has shown that the proportion of the population that a nation puts in uniform is the best indicator of its ideological embrace of militarism.164 When the United States demobilized after World War II, it took on a new enemy in the Cold War and never shrank its military back to prewar levels. But figure 5–20 shows that the trend since the mid-1950s has been sharply downward. Europe’s disinvestment of human capital in the military sector began even earlier.
Other large countries, including Australia, Brazil, Canada, and China, also shrank their armed forces during this half-century. After the Cold War ended, the trend went global: from a peak of more than 9 military personnel per 100,000 people in 1988, the average across long-established countries plunged to less than 5.5 in 2001.165 Some of these savings have come from outsourcing noncombat functions like laundry and food services to private contractors, and in the wealthiest countries, from replacing front-line military personnel with robots and drones. But the age of robotic warfare is far in the future, and recent events have shown that the number of available boots on the ground is still a major constraint on the projection of military force. For that matter, the roboticizing of the military is itself a manifestation of the trend we are exploring. Countries have developed these technologies at fantastic expense because the lives of their citizens (and, as we shall see, of foreign citizens) have become dearer.
FIGURE 5–20. Military personnel, United States and Europe, 1950–2000
Sources: Correlates of War National Material Capabilities Dataset (1816–2001); http://www.correlatesofwar.org, Sarkees, 2000. Unweighted averages, every five years. “Europe” includes Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia/USSR, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, U.K., Yugoslavia.
Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.
—UNESCO motto
Another indication that the Long Peace is no accident is a set of sanity checks which confirm that the mentality of leaders and populaces has changed. Each component of the war-friendly mindset—nationalism, territorial ambition, an international culture of honor, popular acceptance of war, and indifference to its human costs—went out of fashion in developed countries in the second half of the 20th century.
The first signal event was the 1948 endorsement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by forty-eight countries. The declaration begins with these articles:Article 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Article 2. Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other