“Rearming Europe” is the new watchword of European political elites. A new focus that has even surpassed the old dogmas of public debt limits. In this dossier, we visit a plurality of analyses from various points of the European left about this new arms race. A dossier organised by Carlos Carujo.

Suddenly, European institutional politics gained a focus: the arms race. With Putin and Trump negotiating the spoils of war in Ukraine and with the latter making it clear that the old Atlantic mission of the US did not fit into his new imperialist plans, a sense of disorientation seemed to have taken hold of the continent’s dominant political classes. This was filled when the European Commission put forward a plan to “rearm Europe” in the name of “security” and against a Russian threat presented as imminent. A decision that opened a multi-million-pound exception to the old dogmas of limits on deficit and public investment that have dominated the continental centre ground.

This dossier is about the left-wing responses to this strategic shift in European Union policy towards spending on the arms business. It thus includes diverse views, with different focuses and scopes, which we present as moments in an ongoing debate about the nature of what is being experienced. The articles presented here do not intend to summarise all existing positions, nor does this dossier intend to be a synthesis. Much less was it thought of as a collection of favourable opinions in the same direction. Thus, as in all cases of signed articles, but for this particular reason, it should be emphasised that the ideas expressed in these texts do not necessarily reflect the positions of Esquerda.net.

Furthermore, it is important to emphasise that the aim was not to focus on the specificities of the internal debates of the left in each country, but to visit more general analyses and arguments on the issue. Therefore, for example, the debates within the Spanish left where the government is divided, with the PSOE committing to European armament and its executive partner, Sumar, voting this Thursday in favour of a resolution presented by the Galician Nationalist Bloc deputy, Néstor Rego, against the European plan to increase military spending and for withdrawal from NATO, in which it was accompanied by Bildu and Podemos, with the Republican Left of Catalonia abstaining on the NATO point, are left out.

Equally left out is the controversy raised by the favourable vote, this Friday, of the Die Linke representatives in the Upper Chamber of the German parliament, the Bundesrat, to the constitutional amendments that end the brake on public debt in the case of “defence” and “security” expenditures, that is, in armament policies. This goes against the position taken by the party leadership and the voting direction of its deputies in the Lower Chamber, the Bundestag.

It should be remembered that the Bundesrat indirectly represents the various states of the country and is composed of members appointed by the state governments. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Bremen, Die Linke is part of these governments along with the SPD, and it was these senators who voted, justifying themselves with the consequences in terms of “financial manoeuvring room” for local governance and swearing that they will continue to fight, not against the military investment package but for the extension of the end of the debt brake to social expenditures.

The decision generated revolt among the grassroots (for example, an open letter sent to the senators on the eve of the vote gathered thousands of signatures advocating rejection of the constitutional changes) and its political consequences in a party that had been given as politically dead and made an impressive political comeback in last month’s legislative elections from a grassroots campaign are not yet clear.

The first piece of this dossier is the resolution of the National Bureau of the Left Bloc on international politics, approved today, which sees “Europe in the trap of the Trump-Putin axis and which argues that”US imperialism is still the most aggressive and constitutes a superpower that other imperialist powers seek to combine with the existence of world poles“, a process that”advances, now through conflict, now through cooperation between powers and through transnational capitalist integration“. For the Left Bloc, there are several imperialisms and”none of them will have a progressive role because they all act according to the interests of their capitalist elites“. Therefore,”recognising this reality is vital in the elaboration of an internationalist proposal capable of offering a future to humanity and conceiving a democratic order of peoples.”

Complementing it, a reflection by Luís Fazenda on how to escape the spiral of militarism created “requires a position of rupture with NATO, which is the cancer of belligerence”. For him, the context makes it “much clearer to Europeans that it does not serve them as protection”.

Miguel Urbán, on the other hand, sees in this remilitarisation a “paradigm shift” and a “shock strategy” used “not only to fulfil its long-standing goal of European military integration, but also to strengthen a model of oligarchic and technocratic federalism” and to “promote a European reindustrialisation along military lines”.

Peace culture specialist Ana Villellas prefers to criticise a militarisation that doesn’t even bother to present evidence that it can respond to the threats it enunciates as justifications. In her view, “moving away from the logic of military force and promoting other forms of international relations and a security architecture on the continent based on shared security and international law requires political courage, short and long-term vision, and a lot of chorus work, with the citizens themselves and also with other actors from other continents”.

Daniel Tanuro’s perspective centres on the idea that the Trump-Putin pact aims to divide Europe and impose authoritarian-austerity-reactionary and bellicose regimes in their respective zones of influence. And on how this calls into question the future of democratic and social rights that were born in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries as a result of the workers’ struggle against capitalist exploitation.

In the same vein, Franco Turigliatto believes that in times of resurgence of the Roman Empire slogan “if you want peace, prepare for war”, unity of “a Europe different from the capitalist and imperialist one” is needed “more than ever”, which “is only possible through the activity and unity of the working classes”.

For his part, Jean-Luc Mélenchon ironises by posing the question: does the post-Trump era consist of obeying his demands? This is because, he reveals, what was announced as European military spending by von der Leyen is actually exactly the amount demanded by Trump for an increase in European military spending. He also notes that the situation in both the US and Europe is one of “transition to a war economy” with the aim of “inaugurating an era of expansion and accumulation without risks for the world’s floating capital and for the enormous reserve of available savings” and “reconstituting industrial production capacity”.

The idea that we are facing a war economy is countered with numbers by Adam Tooze’s analysis. Through the graphs he brings us, we follow the history of military spending in Europe and the US throughout contemporary history. Data with which he intends to illustrate the conclusion that “it will do us no good if we aggravate our anxiety by superimposing on current reality ghosts and visions of an era whose history of military violence was even darker than ours”.

Also from an economic point of view, Thomas Piketty strives to dismantle another aspect he considers a myth: the idea of Europe’s decline that would need to tighten its belt and cut social spending to focus on military spending. The French economist shows that Europe “has been recording solid balance of payments surpluses for years” and that “more than a cure for austerity, what it really needs is a cure for investment”. An investment that should primarily be in human well-being, sustainable development and collective infrastructure.

Yet another economist, Michael Roberts, is dedicated to dismantling one of the versions that, even on the left, ends up being convinced by the “rearmament” project. This is the idea that a European military Keynesianism is coming that would improve the living conditions of the working class by reindustrialising the continent. He shows that, contrary to what its supporters say, not only was it not military Keynesianism that took the US economy out of the Great Depression, but that it does not work as its supporters think. And, moreover and above all, this is, at bottom, “against the interests of workers and humanity”.

Between economics and politics, Yanis Varoufakis advocates a European institutional restructuring in the face of a system in which “no one has democratic legitimacy to decide anything”. Concluding that “in the absence of institutions to implement military Keynesianism, the only way in which Europe can rearm today is to divert funds from its crumbling social and physical infrastructure” which “will almost certainly lead the EU into an even deeper economic decline”.

Outside the EU, the British are also witnessing an arms race. MP and former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn denounces the measures of the government of the party that expelled him from membership. He uses Yemen for this, where in addition to direct attacks, weapons manufactured by the British are killing civilians. And he advocates for an “adult approach to foreign policy” that “would analyse the underlying causes of war and mitigate them” instead of “choosing to accelerate the cycle of insecurity and war” and supporting “those who profit from destruction”.

From the same geographical point, Chris Bambery considers that the price Europeans will have to pay is clear: “more austerity” and “economies that are going nowhere fast”, which will increase the rejection of centrist governments that said until now there was no money for social policies and may benefit the far right. In his reading, it is evident that “Putin is not going to invade Poland, the Baltic States, much less Western Europe”.

From a Ukrainian point of view, Hanna Perekhoda disagrees with this consideration and enters into direct polemic with Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. Like some other positions from the Nordic and Eastern left, the historian takes the Russian threat very seriously: “while France, Spain, Italy or Germany may not face an immediate military threat, for Poland, the Baltic States and the Nordic countries, the danger is direct”, she assesses, since Russia is one of the world’s greatest military powers “that has violated all major international agreements in the last decade”, “bombs Ukrainian cities daily” and “surpasses all European countries in military spending”.

Her criticism centres on the fact that she finds the position of some leftists who would seek only to selfishly preserve their social model, ignoring “security threats” and refusing to see Europe as a common project, to be “isolationist”. On the contrary, she defends “a defence strategy in which security is not financed through cuts in social programmes, but through increased taxes on the ultra-rich”.

Christian Zeller responds to her directly by saying that we cannot in any way approve the arming of European imperialist powers that will use the power to assert their claims by force in the context of growing rivalry for scarce and expensive minerals, rare earths, agricultural land and even water, whether in Africa, Asia or Europe or elsewhere.

He argues that “imperialist rivalry and the material consumption of armaments will cause a massive increase in greenhouse gas emissions” and that this “rearmament” will lead to an even more unequal distribution of resources and to the enrichment of the most perverse sectors of capital.

Translated for ESSF by Adam Novak

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for PERMANENT ARMS ECONOMY