Neutral Austria decides to keep military draft

The Austrian flag is pictured at the gate of the Lichtenstein barracks in Allenstein, near Vienna, Austria on January 20, 2013. Opinion polls indicate that Austrians have decided Sunday in a referendum to remain one of the very few countries in Europe with compulsory military service. AFP / DIETER NAGL

VIENNA—Austrians opted by a large margin Sunday to retain military conscription, bucking a European trend since the end of the Cold War of scrapping the draft.

A total of 59.8 percent opted in a referendum to keep a system that sees 22,000 men drafted every year for six months over a volunteer-only army, preliminary results showed.

The result is a blow to the Social Democrats (SPOe) of Chancellor Werner Faymann, which supported scrapping conscription, ahead of elections due in October.

Out of Austria’s nine states only the capital Vienna voted the way Faymann wanted. Final results were not expected until Monday afternoon.

Faymann said afterwards he would respect the result and had “full confidence” in Defence Minister Norbert Darabos, also from the SPOe, after speculation he might quit.

“This was not a referendum today for or against a minister or a government,” Faymann told reporters.

Darabos himself said he was “disappointed, to be honest, that the second-best system won.”

He said, however, he would stay in the job and embark on the “difficult but achievable” task of reforming the military.

Faymann’s coalition partners, the conservative People’s Party (OeVP), backed maintaining the status quo, as did the far-right Freedom Party. The Greens backed the Social Democrats.

Interior Minister Johanna Mikl-Leitner of the OeVP had said the current system “fits Austria like a glove and is the best guarantee for all future challenges.”

This was modern Austria’s first nationwide referendum, and although not binding, the government has vowed to respect the result. Turnout was a surprisingly high 50 percent.

With the Soviet Union’s demise two decades ago removing the need for large armies, many countries in Europe have done away with the draft, including France in 1996 and Germany in 2011.

Darabos said before the referendum that the draft was outdated in an era of “counter-terrorism, cybercrime… (and) failed states”.

In Austria though, some had feared that moving to a professional military would push the country to join NATO, endangering the Alpine nation’s cherished neutrality.

Supporters of the draft say it would be tough to attract enough recruits to keep the size of a professional army at 55,000 troops.

They also argue that creating a professional army would be expensive at a time that the eurozone member is trying to cut spending.

The army chief of staff, General Edmund Entacher, had warned that a professional army would lead “irreversibly to a drop in quality, numbers and ability”.

Austria spends two billion euros ($2.7 billion) per year on its military, or 0.6 percent of gross domestic product — one of the lowest ratios in the EU.

If the draft were scrapped, some have argued, an inevitably reduced force would be less able to help in disaster relief or international peacekeeping missions as it does now in hotspots like Kosovo and Lebanon.

But those who back a change believe that having only well-trained and motivated career soldiers, not raw recruits, would actually improve performance in these areas.

At present, some 14,000 young men opt out of the draft each year and work instead for nine months helping disabled people and the elderly, or in hospitals.

They provide a valuable source of manpower that would have been missed if conscription were scrapped, the OeVP had argued.