00:00Joining me now is Senator Helene Conway-Mouret, who's the Vice-Chair of the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee at the French Parliament.
00:08Senator, thank you so much for your time.
00:10First of all, can you give us further details as to what exactly is being proposed regarding the notion of voluntary military service here in France?
00:19Well, the details will be given tomorrow by the President himself, who has asked the General Mondo last week to raise the consciousness, I would say it this way,
00:38and paved the way for his announcement of, indeed, making sure that the whole of France would be concerned if there was a conflict.
00:49And while we have a professional army whose job it is to defend the country, the idea is to support it and draw all the lessons of the war in Ukraine,
01:01when, indeed, we see an entire population backing up the army, going to the front, you know, for some of them,
01:12and actually, you know, being able, three years down the road, to still fight and resist one of the biggest armies, biggest country in the world.
01:23So this is what it is about. And France, in fact, is quite the same as, you know, behaves in the same manner as the other European countries,
01:35which one after the other are reintroducing some kind of military or civil service.
01:42It's not a conscription. They were all stopped in the 1990s because it didn't make sense.
01:49And Europe was convinced that it was going to remain at peace forever.
01:54But now we have real threats and we have to deal with it and prepare maybe for a potential conflict.
02:00So this is what it is about.
02:02And as you point out, it's very much driven by the threat from Moscow.
02:05But I'm curious to know, what will it mean physically for the military as such?
02:09Are you able to give us any details on that front?
02:12Well, it's not, again, a conscription because a conscription means the entire population being asked for a number of months.
02:24Sometimes it's a year to actually train with regard to, you know, being able to engage, be engaged if attacked.
02:36So this is a service that will train a whole lot of people to their skills.
02:44What is being proposed is to have up to 10 months with a payment, with the possibility for the young people who will join on a voluntary basis,
02:57maybe to qualify, to get, you know, certifications in various ways.
03:02And then if the country is attacked to have the army actually defending it and having the population being called upon to support it.
03:13Because an army that is successful is one that can be treated, that has good health support, that gets, you know, supplied with food, with energy, with fuel and so on.
03:29So you need a whole range of skills and people who are capable of making sure that the men in uniforms and women in uniforms are capable of doing their job at the best.
03:45So this is what is going to be proposed.
03:49And, of course, for us, you know, while we are preparing to discuss the budget, there are obviously a lot of questions as to where will these people be trained and regrouped,
04:06because we're talking about thousands of people and where the budget is going to come from, because one of the problems with the universal service that was introduced by Emmanuel Macron,
04:20which is going to be stopped on the 1st of January of next year, it was that the concept may have been good, you know, to bring young people together,
04:29but it was never financed properly, there were never the means to do it, and now it has to be stopped.
04:33So all of these, I mean, it's not good enough just to make an announcement.
04:38I think it will need to be organised properly and certainly that the financial support will be there for it to, you know, be put in place in proper manner.
04:51Are there any other countries that France is looking at in terms of inspiration for such a model?
04:59Yes, I know that our minister was in Sweden, for instance, and travelling around Europe.
05:07I was myself in Berlin last week, on Thursday of the previous week, when the Bundestag actually passed a new legislation for young men and women in Germany to be able to enter this service.
05:27So I'm reluctant to use military service because, in fact, it is not for people to join the army per se.
05:37Some of them after that year may indeed decide to join the army, but it's to have the training that will help them to do their job at best for what part they will actually play if there was a conflict.
05:53And also know, you know, you know, how to support and behave collectively while understanding what's happening and how to react.
06:06I mean, you're talking about it almost as community service as such, aren't you?
06:11Yes, I think there is a part of that because, you know, there was a lot of, I think, misunderstanding, you know, when the term conscription was used.
06:27You're going to say, well, we had it, we stopped it and now we are reintroducing it.
06:32But we are not because, in fact, there is not a need now to have an army beyond the one that we have, which is a professional army with the equipment that, you know, they use,
06:46which we know is not sufficient at the moment, but we will be discussing hopefully a budget that will equip the French forces properly in the future.
06:56But no, we're talking about an entire nation being able to resist.
07:03And sorry for coming back to Ukraine, but this is all about the success of Ukraine's resistance.
07:10It is not just its small army and while it was extremely well trained and maybe prepared indeed to fight, but it's the entire country.
07:22And even today, there are, you know, announcements to call for nurses, for people to go to the front line.
07:32And they do.
07:33And also what we have there, and this is a lesson to be drawn from the conflict, it's the place of women.
07:41For the first time in Ukraine, there are 6,000 women actually on the front line.
07:45And women are actually playing an incredible part because they have jobs that are absolutely useful for the support of the Ukrainian army.
07:56Could you see a point, however, and I know other European nations are also looking to set up something similar,
08:05haven't ruled out the reinstatement of conscription, particularly if indeed the voluntary model falls short of the military needs
08:15or the situation here in Europe gets considerably worse.
08:18So is it a possibility that conscription could still be reinstated?
08:23Well, it could, but that will be the next step.
08:28The first step is to create this consciousness, which has totally disappeared in Europe.
08:34We've been at peace for 70 years.
08:37And do not forget the pacifist movements, anti-militarist movements, anti-nuclear movements, and so on.
08:45And today, if those debates are not present in our society, it's because somehow the European populations with the invasion of Ukraine has realized that peace is not with us forever,
09:02that indeed we have neglected our defense, and while our American ally, for a long time has asked us to get hold of ourselves, to invest in defense,
09:15and to kind of say, you know, since President Obama, that, you know, the Americans will not be with us all the time.
09:22But we have subcontracted somehow our defense to the Americans.
09:27But if the Americans are not around anymore, and in the negotiations that are going on at the moment, we see that, you know,
09:35they're not exactly playing the European side or helping the Ukrainians as such.
09:39It seems to be extremely sensitive to what the Russians are proposing and the type of deals and future that they may have with that country.
09:48And they cannot be blamed.
09:49Well, then we need to, beyond the huge investments that we have to undertake, because we have neglected our defense budgets for a very long time,
10:00to actually invest in our population, invest in the spirit of, yes, people actually deciding to defend their country and being prepared to do so.
10:12So, you know, you're going to have the best equipment in the world if there is nobody to use it.
10:17Well, you know, it just won't happen.
10:21Senator Helene Conway-Mouret, thank you so much for your time.
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