Special Report
A permit to leave your own country. Military advertisements between YouTube videos. Recruitment drives from Lisbon to Warsaw. Europe is preparing. But preparing for what, exactly?
If you are a man between 17 and 45 living in Germany, leaving the country for longer than three months now requires the formal approval of the Bundeswehr — Germany's armed forces. Not in wartime. Not during a state of emergency. Right now, in peacetime, on an ordinary Tuesday.
The provision, buried in the Military Service Modernization Act passed by the Bundestag on December 5, 2025 and cleared by the Bundesrat two weeks later, entered force on January 1, 2026. Most of the roughly 20 million men it affects had no idea it existed. It was the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper, reporting on April 3, 2026 — three months after the law was already in effect — that first brought it to public attention. The reaction was immediate and widespread. The topic trended on social media for days.
Under Section 3, Paragraph 2 of the revised Conscription Act, any male German resident — including dual nationals — who plans to be abroad for more than three months must formally request permission from a Bundeswehr Career Centre. This applies to a semester abroad, a long-haul work contract, or an extended backpacking trip. Even those with conscientious objector status are technically subject to the rule. Enforcement mechanisms and penalties for non-compliance remain, by the Defense Ministry's own admission, undefined. The administrative procedures have not yet been finalized. But the law is real, and it is in force.
"In an emergency, we need to know who might be staying abroad for an extended period."
— Bundeswehr spokesperson, April 2026The Ministry's stated rationale is straightforward: to maintain a reliable register of draft-eligible men in case the situation changes. Permission, officials have said, will be "considered granted" as long as military service remains voluntary. But the framing matters enormously. The previous version of this rule applied only during a declared state of tension or national defence — an invocation of Articles 80a or 115a of Germany's Basic Law. The new version makes it permanent. The infrastructure of wartime accountability has been moved into peacetime by quiet legislative amendment.
The Continent Is Recruiting
Germany is not alone. Across Europe, the pattern repeats with variations in local flavor but identical underlying logic.
France, which abolished compulsory military service in 1997 under President Chirac, announced in November 2025 a new voluntary ten-month military service programme for 18- and 19-year-olds, backed by a €2 billion budget. President Macron presented it in late November, emphasizing that volunteers would serve "exclusively on national territory" — a diplomatic signal aimed at anxious parents as much as potential recruits. The programme is expected to begin by mid-2026.
Belgium, which suspended conscription in 1993, announced in late 2025 that it would write to every 17-year-old inviting them to volunteer, offering a monthly salary of around €2,000. The government aims to recruit 500 volunteers in September 2026, scaling to 1,000 annually by 2028. Poland, which scrapped mandatory service in 2009, announced in March 2025 plans for large-scale military training covering up to 400,000 people in 2026. The Netherlands, similarly, is targeting an expansion of its armed forces from 74,000 to 200,000 personnel, with a heavy emphasis on reservists.
Further east, the picture is sharper still. Lithuania reintroduced conscription in 2015. Latvia followed in 2023 with eleven months of compulsory service. Denmark extended mandatory conscription to women in 2025 and is increasing training duration from four to eleven months. Croatia, which abolished conscription in 2008, voted to reinstate it in October 2025; basic military training for all men aged 18 began in January 2026. Finland, which never abandoned its system, is now considering extending service to women and raising the reserve age limit to 65, which would push its wartime troop strength to approximately one million.
"We need a European way to defend and prepare. The effort needs to be not just about spending, but making defense part of the societal model."
— Martin Quencez, German Marshall Fund, December 2025Recruitment advertising has intensified accordingly. Germany's Defence Minister Boris Pistorius set a target of 20,000 volunteers in 2026 — up from 12,286 recruited in 2025. The Bundeswehr's career centers, originally designed as recruitment offices, are now being asked to administer a travel-permit system they were never resourced for. The advertisements appearing between YouTube videos and on Reddit threads are not coincidence; they are the visible tip of a coordinated, continent-wide mobilization effort.
Three Crises Converging
To understand why Europe is doing this, you have to understand three simultaneous developments that have collided in the past four years: a land war on European soil, a fraying security guarantee from Washington, and a Russian strategic posture that has not fundamentally changed since 2022.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was the rupture that ended three decades of post-Cold War complacency. For most Western Europeans, war between nation-states on the continent had seemed like history. It wasn't. Ukraine has now been fighting for four years, absorbing enormous losses while slowing a larger professional military to a grinding attritional campaign. European governments, watching this from close range, drew a clear conclusion: their own militaries were nowhere near ready for the same scenario.
The second pressure is America. Donald Trump's return to the White House in January 2025 renewed fears about the reliability of NATO's Article V guarantee — the clause that commits all members to treat an attack on one as an attack on all. In April 2026, following a crisis over European countries refusing to grant US forces overflight and basing rights during military operations in Iran, Trump told The Telegraph that reconsidering US membership in NATO was "beyond reconsideration," adding that he had "never been swayed by NATO" and considered it a "paper tiger." Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the US might need to "re-examine" the alliance. These were not idle remarks. They represent a structural shift in how Washington talks about its commitment to Europe.
European governments have responded to this as they should: by planning for the scenario in which American support is absent, reduced, or conditional. Poland's Foreign Ministry stated publicly that a US withdrawal from NATO should be treated as "a possible scenario and taken seriously." France and Britain have led efforts to build a "coalition of the willing" for potential peacekeeping in Ukraine. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has committed to making the Bundeswehr "the most powerful conventional military in Europe." None of these are postures; they reflect genuine strategic calculations.
"The French and the British know this and are preparing for war with Russia. The Polish government too."
— EU diplomat, speaking anonymously, April 2026The third factor is Russia itself. NATO officially designated Russia its "most significant and direct threat" following the Ukraine invasion. Since then, member states have reported repeated incidents of hybrid warfare: drone incursions over airports, nuclear power plants, and military bases; suspected sabotage operations; disinformation campaigns. Russia has placed its own economy on a war footing, with defence spending rising sharply as a share of GDP. Analysts point out that if Ukraine were to fall — fully or in part — Russia's border would extend to NATO members directly. The Baltic states, Poland, and Finland would face a different security environment than today.
So: Who Would Start a War?
The short answer that European governments would give is: no one necessarily wants to start one, but conditions are forming in which one could begin without any single actor intending it. This is how most large wars have actually started — not with a mastermind pressing a button, but with miscalculation, deterrence failure, and momentum.
Russia is the primary concern. European defense planners are not worried about an imminent, premeditated invasion of a NATO country. They are worried about a range of scenarios: a ceasefire in Ukraine that gives Russia time to reconstitute its forces; a miscalculation over the Baltic states or Poland; an escalation arising from hybrid operations that triggers a NATO response. They are also worried about windows — periods in which military imbalances create temptations. The NATO alliance spent the post-Cold War years drawing down its forces on the assumption that it would never need them. Russia's military spending did not follow the same trajectory.
The worry about America is different in character. A US that withdraws from NATO, or that remains formally inside the alliance but makes clear it will not invoke Article V automatically, dramatically changes Russian calculations. It is not that Russia would be invited to invade; it is that the costs of adventurism would appear lower. European leaders are trying to close this gap — with spending, with numbers, with infrastructure — before it becomes an invitation.
None of this means war is inevitable. Most experts describe the current moment as a dangerous transition — from a security architecture built for the post-Cold War world to one that has not yet been designed. Germany's travel-permit law, France's voluntary service programme, Poland's universal military training: these are the physical expressions of that transition. They are a continent building capacity it hopes never to use.
What This Feels Like on the Ground
For ordinary Europeans — the young man scrolling past a Bundeswehr advertisement, the family discussing the news over dinner, the grandparents who remember the last time Europe mobilized — the meaning of all this is harder to process than the geopolitics. Families who lived through the Second World War or the Cold War recognize the signals. They have seen recruitment drives and border controls in a different register than those who grew up in the post-1990 peace. Their unease is not irrational.
What is important to understand is the distinction between preparation and initiation. Europe is not preparing to start a war. It is preparing so that, if one were forced upon it, it would not be caught defenseless — as it was, in different ways, in 1914, in 1939, and arguably in 2022 when it had to scramble to support Ukraine from a standing start. The travel-permit requirement is jarring precisely because it makes visible something that was previously theoretical: the state retaining the right to call upon its citizens in extremis.
Germany aims to expand the Bundeswehr from roughly 184,000 soldiers today to between 255,000 and 270,000 by 2035. Defense spending across NATO has risen substantially; members have now agreed to target five percent of GDP on defense and security-related expenditure. These are serious numbers. They reflect a serious assessment.
Your grandparents' concern is not baseless. But it should be understood accurately: what Europe is doing right now is the work of trying to make war less likely by making itself harder to threaten. Whether that strategy succeeds depends on too many variables to predict with confidence. What is certain is that after thirty years of assuming the worst was behind it, Europe has stopped assuming.
Sources: Frankfurter Rundschau, Euronews, IMI Daily, Prism News, The Hill, CNN, Newsweek, EU observer, Christian Science Monitor, Statista, European Newsroom, Time Magazine, GB News.