Among the conditions that allow political authorities to demand people’s allegiance, existential insecurity is crucial. Under existential insecurity, authorities can appeal to threat perceptions and nurture a protective mentality that is easily turned against out-groups, legitimizing discrimination and even prompting genocide in the most extreme case (Gat 2013). Protective mentalities tend to breed national, ethnic, religious, and other divisive identities that make the in-group exclusive. Under existential pressures, divisive identities can absorb people so entirely that they are willing to sacrifice almost everything for their own group’s sake, including their freedoms and even their lives. The stronger an exclusionary group identity grows, the more self-sacrifice the authorities can demand from the individuals. All these patterns are well known from “group-threat theory” (Coenders, Lubbers, and Scheepers 2008).

Against this background, we argue that an obvious – yet understudied – indication of self-sacrificial dispositions in a society is the percentage of people who say that they are willing to risk their lives for their own country in the case of war (Díez-Nicolás 2009; Puranen 2008c, 2009a, 2009b). We also argue that these self-sacrificial dispositions are a core ingredient of an allegiant political culture. Vice versa, a decline in people’s willingness to sacrifice their lives for their country indicates the erosion of allegiance. More than that, we suggest that diminishing willingness to sacrifice human lives in war is a consequence of the rising emancipatory spirit of an assertive political culture.