Between Citizen-Soldiers and Anomic Pacifists: Varieties of Society-Defense Relations in the Visegrad Group

Following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Visegrad Group (V4) began shifting defense policy toward the comprehensive approach involving the state and society alongside the military. Extensively analyzed in security studies, this shift is less discussed in military and society research. Interrogating mixed data through the exploratory concept of “societal relationship with defense,” the paper provides the first comparative analysis of how V4 societies engage with these new defense demands. It argues, first, that the whole-of-society approach is challenged by social trends of declining willingness to defend the state, low defense engagement, and shaky defense consensus. Second, that V4 exhibits significant variance in societal relationship with defense, represented by the “ideal types” of Polish citizen-soldiers, Czech civilian hawks, Slovak anomic pacifists, and Hungarian freedom fighters. Highlighting the importance of studying societal underpinnings of comprehensive defense, the paper also makes a case for a conceptual shift from society-military to society-defense relations.