On March 6, the Special European Council saw 27 leaders of the European Union discuss the Russia threat and promote a strategic vision of disconcerting militarism. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had announced two days earlier that Europe had to spend more and indulge its various arms industries with greater attention than before. The ReArm Europe plan entails various measures intended to free up to EUR 800 billion in defence funding. This will entail something distinctly at odds with the standard EU mantra on balanced budgets: using the escape clause of the Stability and Growth Pact to bypass the Excessive Deficit Procedure.
The detail on this is thin, but von der Leyen claims that EUR 650 billion of ‘fiscal space’ could be created were EU countries to increase defence spending by 1.5 per cent of GDP. A further EUR 150 billion of loans will be made available to member states under Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). This funding is intended for air and missile defence, artillery, missiles, armed drones and anti-drone systems, and cyber security. But this is not all: this initiative is not only intended for European defence but aiding Ukraine and, it follows, prolonging the war.
The five-point agreement that emerged from the summit was approved by 26 of the 27 members. (Hungary, given its more pro-Russian stance, vetoed the leaders’ statement). It spoke to various unconditional positions: mandatory Ukrainian participation in peace talks, and European involvement on matters touching upon its security in any peace arrangement between Russia and Ukraine. ‘Ukraine’s, Europe’s, transatlantic and global security,’ the statement tersely insists, ‘are intertwined’. EU funding in the order of EUR 30.6 billion was also promised for 2025.
The March summit points to a rearming trend that was already taking off even before the return of US President Donald Trump and his variously framed threats of disengagement from Europe’s security arrangements. In 2024, military budgets increased by 11.7 per cent in real terms. A number of European countries had also reached the target of 2 per cent of GDP expenditure agreed by NATO members in 2014.
Across Europe, there is a perverse, almost revived euphoria for making arrangements for future conflict on the pretext that Russia will move beyond its territorial interest in Ukraine. In a non-legislative resolution, 419 Members of the European Parliament encouraged member states to, amongst other matters, inflate defending expenditure by at least 3 per cent of GDP, create a bank for defence, security and resilience and seek a system by which European defence bonds might be used to pre-finance military investments. The resolution argued that Europe was ‘facing the most profound military threat to its territorial integrity since the end of the Cold War’. Not all agreed with the resolution, with 204 voting against it, accompanied by 46 abstentions.
In the process of reaching the final resolution, a number of MEPs from The Left and The Greens/EFA group sought an amendment that failed by 444 votes. ‘The Parliament,’ it read, ‘deplores the choice to use Art. 122 […] for the new EU instrument meant to support members states defence capabilities; expresses deep concern for being excluded from the decisional process’.
Individual states are hopping on the military train. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has made overtures of supplying European states with a nuclear weapons umbrella. In his March 5 address to the nation, Macron explicitly called Russia a ‘threat to France and Europe’. This necessitated opening ‘the strategic debate on the protection of our allies on the European continent by our (nuclear) deterrent.’
'Scouring any sensible critique of these militarist positions, all framed in the context of defence, has become difficult. It is a reminder of how preparations for war become silencing, intoxicating in their effect and dulling of dissent.'
In an address to parliament, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned that, ‘Poland must reach for the most modern capabilities also related to nuclear weapons and modern unconventional weapons.’ Polish President Andrzej Duda has also revived the idea that Poland should have US nuclear weapons positioned in the country as a necessary ‘defensive tactic […] to Russia’s behaviour, relocating nuclear weapons to the NATO area’. This is in addition to a huge buildup of conventional armed forces that will absorb 5 per cent of national income per annum, the highest in the European Union.
In Germany, the Bundestag has passed a constitutional amendment that will authorise a dramatic increase in defence expenditure. This would exempt expenditure on defence and foreign aid to countries ‘attacked in violation of international law’ from borrowing limits otherwise strictly adhered to by German lawmakers. The incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz has described it as ‘nothing less than the first major step towards a new European defence community.’ In another time, such remarks would surely cause pangs of concern, and Merz’s positioning of Germany at the centre of European defence in anticipation of some fantastic future Russian assault will startle keener students of history.
Scouring any sensible critique of these militarist positions, all framed in the context of defence, has become difficult. It is a reminder of how preparations for war become silencing, intoxicating in their effect and dulling of dissent. The Slovenian journalist and author Uroš Lipušcek makes the stingingly accurate observation that, ‘Peace from a position of force produces a so-called forced or negative peace, which sooner or later degrades into war.’
As the war machines of Europe get dusted and refurbished to fight inflated demons and strategic bogeymen, another figure hauntingly accurate in her assessment of those critical events prior to the outbreak of the First World War comes to mind. In The Guns of August, the polished American historian Barbara W. Tuchman suggested a ‘constant among the elements of 1914 – as of any era’, namely ‘the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.’ Making war is the easy business; keeping peace, monstrously more difficult.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University.
Main image: German Chancellor Olaf Scholz with artillery ammunition before the groundbreaking ceremony for a new munitions factory of German defence contractor Rheinmetall in Unterluess, Germany. The war in Ukraine has been a boon to Rheinmetall as Germany seeks to provide Ukraine with munitions, including artillery shells, and also increase its own supply. (Photo by David Hecker/Getty Images)