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The Propensity of Ethnic-Cultural Minorities to Join the Belgian Armed Forces

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The Propensity of Ethnic-Cultural Minorities to Join the Belgian Armed Forces The Propensity of Ethnic-Cultural Minorities to Join the Belgian Armed Forces Valérian Lecoq & Philippe Manigart As elsewhere in European post-industrial societies, ongoing demographic change is slowly but steadily forcing the Belgian armed forces to consider a more multicultural format (Apt, 2005). Even when taking into account the continuing drastic downsizing of Belgian Defence,1 it may still face serious recruitment problems in the future. One possible solution will be to open its doors more widely to new segments of the population, such as women and ethnic cultural minorities (ECMs), whose share in the military’s personnel strength as of today is still quite modest. Women and ECMs are indeed seriously under- represented : in 2015, women accounted for 7.6% of total force levels while ECMs hardly exceeded 6%, a much lower percentage than among the Belgian population as a whole. Belgium is now a multicultural society. As a result of successive immigration waves, first from Southern Europe (mainly Italy in the 20th century) and later from North- African or Sub-Saharan countries (from the mid-1960s onwards), it presently counts a high percentage of foreign-born citizens and foreigners, mainly located in Brussels (Martiniello & Perrin, 2009, p.224).2 For instance, while in 1880 only 2.6% of the population was born 3 outside Belgium, in 2008, the percentage had climbed to 12.9%. According to OECD and UN data,4 in 2006, a little less than one in five (19.8 %, or 2.05 million) inhabitants were either foreign residents5 or foreign-born Belgians.6 Among the latter, 611,000 (or 5.3% of the total citizenry) originated from European countries (with Italy, France and the Netherlands occupying the top three positions), while 575,000 (5.1%) were non-Europeans (mainly from Morocco and Turkey, two largely Muslim countries). Given their higher 1 Under the current so-called “strategic plan” recently unveiled by the Defence Minister, the size of Belgian Defence will further decrease to 25,000 in 2030, compared to around 30,000 in 2016 and some 80,000 before the ending of the draft in 1994. Sources : for 2016 and 2030 figures : Plan Stratégique de la Défense, 2016 ; for 1990s figures : Manigart, 2003. 2 Brussels, the European Union’s capital, is also host to several international organizations, and has in fact become a cosmopolitan, multicultural city where the use of English has progressively supplanted one of the two national languages, i.e. Dutch. 3 Source : Institut National de Statistique. 4 Cited in Münz, 2007, pp.18-19. 5 The majority of foreign residents live in Brussels (27.5%), in Wallonia (9.2%) and Flanders (5.4%) : see Martiniello & Perrin, 2009, p. 224. 6 Measuring ethnic diversity in Belgium (as in France) is rather difficult. In contrast to other countries (such as Britain, the Netherlands or the United States, for example), in Belgium, ethnicity cannot be mentioned in any official document (census, etc.). Therefore, estimates are apt to vary greatly. For example, according to sociologist Jan Hertogen’s estimation, Belgium’s ethnic-cultural minorities amount to approximately 2.6 million Belgians and foreign residents, or 24% of the total population, i.e. significantly more than the above OECD estimates. Cited in Le Soir, March 1, 2013. Published/ publié in Res Militaris (http://resmilitaris.net), ERGOMAS issue n°5, November 2017 Res Militaris, ERGOMAS issue n°5, November 2017 2 birthrate and the fact that their children became Belgian citizens by birth, these two last groups are the most important for our discussion : compared to some other EU countries (not least Germany), Belgium is aging less rapidly.7 In other words, if they want to be able to meet the recruitment challenges of this demographic transition, the Belgian armed forces – or to use their official name, “Belgian Defence” – will need to become more diverse than they are at present, hence to tap the pool of ethnic-cultural minorities. It is also a fact, on the other hand, that in traditional uniformed organizations (Soeters, 2000), diversity – ethnic or otherwise – has long been regarded as detrimental to operational effectiveness and many continue to see group homogeneity as a necessary prerequisite for building trust and social cohesion. However, as just mentioned, a greater internal diversity is becoming more and more necessary in order to meet recruitment goals. Furthermore, such diversity is not only a necessity : it is also a real asset for the conduct of today’s military operations (Bosman et al., 2007 ; Resteigne et al., 2009 ; Valenius, 2007). Indeed, members of these internally diverse organizations, when operating in diverse theatres of operations, need to have intercultural skills and to be sensitive to cultural differences (Resteigne, 2012). To function effectively, they (especially officers) must possess new skills and capabilities. As several authors have shown (Putnam, 2007 ; Schneider & Barsoux, 1997), if in the short to medium term, increased internal diversity challenges social unity and inhibits what Putnam (2007) calls ‘social capital’, in the medium to long run, successful multicultural societies and internally diverse organizations, while creating new forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities, will benefit in several regards (creativity and faster problem-solving, more rapid economic growth, and, as far as military organizations are concerned, better performance on foreign theatres of operations).8 But for ethnic-cultural minorities to unleash their full potential in their contribution to Belgian Defence, they need to be fully integrated into the organization. This is a two-way process : while acceptance of their presence by the rest of the organization is a must, in return they need to accept its norms, values and traditions (Scoppio, 2009, p.19). Bearing this in mind, it is interesting to see how Belgian Defence members perceive groups that until recently were underrepresented. From two surveys of representative military samples conducted by the Royal Military Academy’s Department of Behavioural Sciences on behalf of the Defence Minister and the Chief of the Defence Staff in 2009 and 2014,9 it appears that opinions have evolved towards a greater acceptance of ethnic- cultural minorities in the armed forces.10 For instance, while in 2009 almost half the 7 In 2050, the median age in Belgium will be 48.7 (vs. 39.1 in 2000); in Germany, it will be 50.9 and in Sweden 51.2; for the EU as a whole, it will be 49. Source: http://www.un.org/esa/population/publications/worldageing1950205, , accessed June 23, 2016. 8 On this topic, see, for instance Miller and Moskos (1995). 9 See Bonneu & Lecoq, 2011 for the 2009 results, and Lecoq, 2015 for the latest results. 10 These surveys were however conducted before the refugee crisis and the Paris (2015) and Brussels (2016) terrorist attacks. It could well be that as a result of these events and the concomitant rise of islamophobia in Western societies, attitudes have changed and become less open and tolerant toward ethnic-cultural minorities. Res Militaris, ERGOMAS issue n°5, November 2017 3 respondents (48%) thought that foreigners did not have their place in the armed forces, in 2015 that proportion had fallen to one in three (32%), a 16 percent difference. This gradual evolution is encouraging because it is important for a military organization to generate a positive attitude towards diversity in its midst, so that minority groups feel more accepted and the perspective of a job in the military becomes more attractive for these groups. Openness to ethnic-cultural diversity in defence organizations, however, is only one facet of the problem ; another significant facet is that young prospects from foreign backgrounds must also be aware of this greater openness and see the armed forces as a desirable career path. It is with this last dimension in mind that, as part of a research project, sponsored by the European Defence Agency and titled “The Impact of Demographic Change on the Recruitment and Retention of Personnel in European Armed 11 Forces” (IDCRR), an online survey was administered in July 2015 among a large sample of 9,142 young unemployed Belgians aged between 18 and 33 years. In the present article, the focus will be on the subsample of ethnic-cultural minorities (n = 477). If there exist studies on ethnic-cultural diversity in European armed forces,12 few studies have been conducted on the attractiveness of a job in the military among ethnic-cultural minorities,13 in part because of the difficulties of specifically sampling this group14 or of getting a sufficient number of respondents from ethnic-cultural groups to be able to carry out meaningful statistical analyses. As explained in the next section, thanks to the interest that the three Belgian regional unemployment agencies showed in our project and their precious help in contacting a large number of unemployed young people living in Belgium, we were able to get a critical mass of young unemployed respondents with the needed profile. This article starts from the observation that ethnic-cultural minorities are currently underrepresented in Belgian Defence. The research question guiding analysis is the following : what is/are the reason(s) for this underrepresentation ? Given the paucity of data on this topic, our analyses will mainly be exploratory. Nonetheless, to guide our statistical investigations, we have developed four hypotheses : Hypothesis 1 : The underrepresentation is simply due to a lack of interest in a job in Belgian Defence on the part of young people from this group. Hypothesis 2 : They have career expectations not really compatible with their perception of Belgian Defence. Hypothesis 3 : Young ECMs do not choose a career in the military because they perceive it as an organization that is not friendly/ open to them.
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