The European Union is preparing for war.

At the European Council meeting earlier this month, EU governments agreed to €150 billion in debt issuance for member-state defence and permitted an additional €650 billion in military spending outside of EU borrowing limits.

The announcement follows the ritual of public humiliation to which Donald Trump subjected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in his visit to the White House on 28 February. There — in full view of the international press — Vice President JD Vance demanded Zelenskyy express his gratitude for the US plan to strip $500 billion worth of rare minerals, oil, and gas from Ukraine in exchange for ongoing military support. “We’re going to have all this money in [Ukraine], and I say: I want it back,” Trump declared, to the shock and horror of US allies across the Atlantic.

“We are living in the most momentous and dangerous of times,” said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on 4 March, as she announced her vision to ‘ReArm’ the continent and shift its productive model into ‘war economy mode’. “This is a moment for Europe. And we are ready to step up,” von der Leyen said. “Europe wants peace through strength.”

In von der Leyen’s native Germany, politicians from across the spectrum are so keen on the “war economy” that they are breaking through the country’s constitutional ‘debt break,’ once considered sacrosanct. Last week, Germany’s Christian Democrats, Social Democrats and Greens agreed to unlock up to €1 trillion for investments in the war economy. “Germany is back,” Germany’s conservative leader Friedrich Merz said after securing agreement on Germany’s remilitarisation.

In Britain, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has hiked military spending to 2.5% of GDP and set a course for 3% by next term. Meanwhile, his government slashes support for pensioners, disabled people, and the sick. Starmer bragged of the policy shift as “biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War.”

In France, President Emmanuel Macron is pressing for an extra €3 billion per year for arms, eagerly preparing for sustained nuclear proliferation and deployment of NATO troops to Ukraine. Macron foresees a contingent of “a few thousand troops per country” to be stationed at key sites across the country, fed by new policies of compulsory conscription adopted by neighboring countries like Latvia.

In Poland, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has appealed to import US nuclear weapons to Polish soil — while pledging to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention and the Dublin Convention on anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions. Poland has committed to pour nearly 5% of GDP into its military and launch a major training program for potential new conscripts.

All of these announcements have been made since Donald Trump took office less than two months ago: a breakneck binge of bellicose policymaking unprecedented in the history of the European Union.

Since the financial crisis of 2008, the EU has insisted that it has no money, and enforced the diktat of austerity in any country that dares to say otherwise. Now, the financial floodgates appear to have opened, but they have opened for arms alone — even as Europe’s citizens continue to suffer enduring levels of underemployment, underinvestment, and economic insecurity.

EU policymakers — reeling from Trump’s return to the White House — believe they can kill two birds with one stone. The first is the perceived abandonment of their chief military ally across the Atlantic, and its previous commitments to lead the war effort in Ukraine. The second is the crisis of deindustrialization that imperils Europe’s status as a global economic superpower. The architects of the EU’s “war economy” think they’ve found the skeleton key to address the EU’s overlapping crises.

But military Keynesianism will not reindustrialise Europe — nor make its citizens safer. “War economies” only work when governments employ their citizens in the continuous production of weapons to be used in the course of conflict; without an actual war to give it direction, the EU is simply pledging to transfer scant public funds to US defence contractors. Or worse: Europe’s re-armament will gives its leaders the appropriate incentive to start such a war in order to keep its “war economy” running hot.

Such a risk points to a deeper contradiction in the politics of EU rearmament. The very same politicians who warned of the rise of the far-right in Europe — with a dangerous vision of ethnic supremacy and global domination — are today cheering on the mass production of arms to be put at their disposal. The recipe for disaster is clearly written in Europe’s rightward lurch.

The same contradiction applies to the politics of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The very same politicians who celebrated NATO as the guardian of European security and global democracy are today warning that its dominant power — led by President Donald Trump — is determined to set the world on fire. None of Trump’s belligerence appears to have yielded critical self-reflection among Europe’s NATO leadership, who grinned through a visit to the Oval Office last week during which the US president issued ominous threats to countries like Canada and Greenland.

In 1887, Friedrich Engels found himself tormented by a similar sense of foreboding. Europe, he wrote, was heading towards a “world war […] of an extent and violence hitherto unimagined.” The new weapons of war that Europe had deployed so violently against its colonised peoples, he wrote, would soon turn against the workers protesting in Europe. It was imperative, he said, for working people across the continent to unite behind an agenda of disarmament.

It is difficult not to see parallels. In the age of rearmament, the instruments deployed to police Europe’s periphery — a “Fortress Europe” that has drowned tens of thousands of people in the Mediterranean, imprisoned thousands in a Libya devastated by NATO intervention or gunned dozens down in the Spanish outpost of Melilla — may again be directed against Europe’s citizens. The campaign of repression directed against the opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza may be just the beginning.

The EU, however, appears incapable of reckoning with this record of abuse, intervention, and complicity in crimes against humanity. Instead, as the US slides into disrepute, the EU prefers to claim the mantle of global policeman. "Today, it became clear that the free world needs a new leader,” EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas declared. “It's up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.”

Such a combination of arrogance and belligerence should scare any student of European history. But the sudden rupture of the Atlantic alliance also offers an opening — for new alliances, new institutions, and new power centres that can guard against such reinvigorated ambitions for Europe’s global power.

The task, therefore, is twofold. For the people of Europe, the fight is to turn warfare into welfare, seizing the opportunity of the EU’s new fiscal doctrine to build schools, homes, and hospitals where it currently proposes to produce bombs, tanks, and bullets.

For the rest of us, though, the fight remains to defend the principles of non-alignment that gave rise to the Third World in a similar moment of geopolitical turmoil. As the EU surrenders to a world where “might makes right,” the peoples of the South can assert the collective power of their majority to chart a path to sovereign equality and co-existence.

Ursula von der Leyen pledged to pursue Europe’s “peace through strength.” Our challenge is to invert the terms of her formula: “Strength through peace.”

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Art of the Week

New Unions is an artistic and political campaign by Jonas Staal, initiated upon the recognition that the then-current political, economic, humanitarian, and environmental crisis in Europe will require a vision of new alliances by “assembling representatives of transdemocratic movements and organizations.”

Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. Within this scope he has founded several ongoing projects including the artistic and political organization New World Summit (Est. 2012) and the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (Est. 2021) with writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza.