From coal pits to wind turbines, Polish miners rise to the occasion

AFP
July 17, 2026

Miners taking part in wind turbine operation training at the Gorzyca Wind Farm – Copyright AFP Wojtek RADWANSKI

From the top of a wind turbine nearly 100 metres above the ground, Grzegorz Witek, a coal miner, gazes at the horizon.

It’s a far cry from basin depths in Silesia — a historic coal mining region in southern Poland where he still extracts the ore.

Once Poland’s black gold, the sector is now surviving only on life support as the country slowly transitions to cleaner energy sources.

Along with seven other miners, Witek took the hours-long journey to Gorzyca in western Poland to take part in a training programme run by EDF Power Solutions Poland, helping coal miners transition into the wind industry.

Even at the lowest point of a wind turbine, Witek expresses his awe at “the feeling of freedom” compared to the fourteen years he spent at the bottom of a mine.

“Down there it’s always dark, there’s no outside world, no sun,” he tells AFP.

“With wind turbines, we’re moving up to the next level,” he adds.

Before climbing real pylons, participants completed three weeks of training at the Vulcan centre in Szczecin, a Baltic port city in the north-west of the country, learning maintenance and safety skills such as how to evacuate a tower.

While it is a big transition for workers used to navigating the depths of coal basins, instructor Michal Rak says the miners have valuable advantages.

Already accustomed to extreme environments, they are quick to adapt to the wind farm’s conditions.

“After working a kilometre underground, finding themselves hundreds of metres above the ground doesn’t really faze them,” he says.

Aware of the risks, they “don’t take things lightly,” he adds.



– Wind is the future –



For 29-year-old Patryk Paja, who spent three years in the mines, wind is the future.

“The mining sector is dying out in Poland and you have to change something in your life,” he says, harnessed and ready to take the elevator to the top of a turbine.

In the mine where he works, the tunnels run as deep as 1,300 metres below the surface.

“We’re switching to green energy, coal is over,” he adds.

Wind turbines are an increasingly common sight around the training area in Gorzyca and throughout the country, where coal still accounts for over half of Poland’s electricity production, the highest in the European Union.

More than a valuable economic resource, the dark ore has become one of the pillars of Polish identity — with miners long wielding political influence.

But Poland’s energy model is running out of steam.

Mining companies are racking up losses despite government support — which totalled 2.1 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in 2024.

Extracting a tonne of coal now costs nearly twice as much as importing it, and domestic production no longer fully covers the country’s needs.

Coal’s share in electricity production has also fallen — from around 90 percent in 2008 to nearly 50 percent today.

Sun and wind now produce more than 30 percent of electricity, and the government is counting on 50 percent as early as 2030 and up to 69 percent in 2040.

Poland’s first nuclear power plant is expected to go online in 2036.



– Exponential growth –



This transformation goes hand in hand with a steady drop in mining jobs.

The sector, which employed nearly 400,000 people at the end of the communist era, now has a total workforce numbering only 70,000.

Meanwhile, the government is projecting the creation of around 300,000 jobs tied to the energy transition by 2030.

“Recruitment needs in the wind sector will grow exponentially in the coming years,” Alicja Chilinska-Zawadzka, president of EDF Power Solutions Poland, tells AFP.

For the past three years, the French group’s subsidiary has been funding and organising retraining programs.

Around fifty miners have already taken part, and all of them have received job offers.

Interest in the program is also increasing with time.

“During the first round, there were five miners for ten places. In the end, over the years, we’ve had four times as many applicants as slots,” says Mariusz Tomalik, spokesperson for the Mine Restructuring Company (SRK).

With ten years in the mines behind him, 41-year-old Marek Mikolajczyk is glad he took the leap.

After undergoing training, he has been working on wind turbines for a year and a half.

“The work is more pleasant, lighter, and less dangerous,” he says.

What’s more, his new job offers a higher salary, a better atmosphere, and the possibility of travel.

There’s only one drawback: “long separations from the family during assignments,” he says from Kosovo, where he is helping install a wind farm.

Fellow miner Patryk Paja hopes to follow the same path soon.

“I surely won’t make it to retirement in the mine, so I might as well move into a sector with a future,” he says.

“Instead of going down, we’ll be going up,” he adds.

Hungary to offer larger-than-planned wind capacity after strong investor interest

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By bne IntelliNews July 20, 2026

Hungary will make nearly 1,000MW of new grid connection capacity available for wind power projects, exceeding its 700MW commitment to the European Union due to stronger-than-expected demand, Economy and Energy Minister Istvan Kapitany announced on Facebook on July 17.

The expansion would mark a major shift after almost a decade of limited wind power development in Hungary. New wind projects effectively stalled after restrictions introduced in 2016 made investment difficult by limiting turbine locations near populated areas.

Regulations were eased in 2024, reducing minimum distance requirements and opening the way for renewed development. However, the change came after the change of government as the government sealed an agreement with the EU in unlocking RRF funds.

Kapitany said the programme to expand wind power and upgrade the grid is designed to create a more balanced electricity system and remove bottlenecks.

The expansion of wind power was needed to create a more balanced electricity system, complementing Hungary’s rapidly growing solar capacity and improving energy security.

The government plans to provide at least 4,000 MW of new wind power connection opportunities by 2030, up from 330 MW at present.

A public consultation will be launched next week, and energy regulator MEKH is expected to prepare a detailed technical and grid assessment by mid-August, according to Kapitany. After that, the first tenders would be announced.

The government is ensuring the required grid capacity, transparent rules and a predictable investment environment," he said, adding that expanding wind power capacities serves Hungary's energy independence, competitiveness and the long-term security of its energy supply.

Albania’s Flamingo Revolution Tests the New Western Order

A major investment project has left Albania caught between diverging US and European interests. The increasingly autonomous protest networks that the West spent decades building in the Balkans are further complicating matters.

By John P. Ruehl

July 17, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Flamingo Revolution Tirana Protest nr14 June 13 2026 47 by Albinfo is licensed under BY 4.0 / wikimedia

After Miami-based firm Affinity Partners secured their first building permit for major developments on Albania’s coast on April 29, outrage in the small Balkan country has steadily grown.

Within weeks, a video of a protestor being beaten and dragged away by private security guards went viral, helping ignite what has become known as Albania’s “Flamingo Revolution.” On July 4, tens of thousands of Albanians marched in the capital, Tirana, with other demonstrations taking place across the country.

The movement is driven by two planned projects: a $1.7 billion luxury resort on Sazan Island and a $4.6 billion development around the Zvërnec Peninsula and Vjosë-Nartë wetlands. Similar developments have triggered protests elsewhere in the Balkans in recent years, often tapping into wider economic and corruption concerns.

The Flamingo Revolution has no single organizer. It draws from a loose network of environmental groups, anti-corruption activists, and ordinary citizens, many connected to civic organizations that Western governments helped build over three decades— but now operate independently of their original sponsors.

The primary financiers of the two projects have especially made these demonstrations notable. Both are being led by Affinity Partners, headed by Jared Kushner, son-in-law of US President Donald Trump and his informal adviser. Since its founding in 2021, the firm has been backed largely by sovereign wealth from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar.

Gulf states have increasingly been investing in large tourism projects over the last several years to diversify beyond hydrocarbons. But sovereign wealth investments are “more frequently also used to extend political reach,” states political economist Karen E. Young. Designed to cement relationships with foreign governments and business elites, Affinity Partners now acts as an informal bridge between Middle Eastern capitals and the White House.

For investors, Albania’s path toward EU membership would dramatically increase the value of planned tourism and other infrastructure developments. Sazan is, meanwhile, located in a strategically important position at the entrance to the Adriatic Sea, and new ports, marinas, and other developments could have dual-use applications for security purposes in a crucial area.

But as relations between Brussels and Washington have deteriorated during Trump’s second term, Albania’s EU ambitions have made the projects increasingly sensitive. On June 17, the European Parliament condemned the 2024 amendments to Albania’s Law on Protected Areas, which cleared the way for the development of these projects, and asked that they be withdrawn. It also called for construction to be suspended in protected areas and compliance with EU nature protection standards. Several EU parliament members also warned that Albania’s accession could be jeopardized if the projects proceed.

The EU has strong reasons to defend its standards in a candidate country. Failing to do so would weaken its credibility and encourage future projects by foreign powers approved through questionable means. Yet Brussels has stopped short of joining calls by many protestors for Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama to resign. Many demonstrators also reject the mainstream opposition, suggesting political instability could remain regardless of who governs the country, complicating the EU’s wider expansion plans in the Balkans.

Albania’s EU ambitions now conflict with expanding American commercial and security interests, as well as investment from Gulf states. As divisions have grown in the Western alliance, countries that previously sat comfortably in its orbit have become areas of competition and instability.

The Serbian Precedent

Albania’s protests have also highlighted the growing autonomy of the transnational civil society network that the West spent more than three decades building in the Balkans. NGOs, such as the European Endowment for Democracy, and agencies like USAID helped strengthen local institutions, watchdogs, and media networks to encourage integration with NATO and the EU. When institution-building failed, Western support also extended to protest movements to promote leadership change.

Serbia, another EU candidate, became the first proving ground for the “color revolution” model—widespread public protests seeking revolutionary political change—despite the term becoming more closely associated with former Soviet states. During the 2000 overthrow of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević, USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives explained how it sought to “fund programs and media outlets that could disseminate messages pushing immediate political change.”

After Milošević was toppled, the number of Western NGOs in Serbia rose dramatically in the 2000s, building local civic capacity. A 2015 article in the Law Explorer, however, pointed out how contrary to the beliefs that these nonprofits were “a major progressive force countering the crude nationalism of the general public and leading Serbia on the road to eventual European Union membership. … much of the sector has in fact played a compromised, coopted, and at times destructive role in preparing the ground for and reinforcing neoliberal restructuring.”

Although relations with many Western governments deteriorated after Kosovo’s independence was recognized in 2008, the nonprofit networks remained. They resurfaced during anti-government protests in 2011 in Belgrade, and again in demonstrations against the UAE-backed Belgrade Waterfront redevelopment from 2015, foreshadowing Albania’s current movement. Protests against Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić have meanwhile erupted repeatedly since 2017.

By 2021, these networks were no longer just challenging local governments. Major international resource projects had become targets, and demonstrations against the Anglo-Australian company Rio Tinto’s proposed lithium mine in Serbia forced the development to be suspended in 2022. Its revival in 2024 kick-started demonstrations again. Work on the mine eventually stopped in 2025.

The civic networks the West had built showed they were now capable of organizing large protest movements without Western backing, and increasingly against Western interests. The EU viewed the lithium mine as crucial to reducing dependence on Chinese critical minerals, turning a local environmental dispute into a geopolitical dilemma for the bloc.

In response to the protests against the mine in 2024, former US Ambassador to Serbia, Christopher R. Hill, stated that “Russia seized an opportunity here to try to drive a wedge between Serbia and the West,” while Moscow and Belgrade accused the West of “preparations for mass unrest and an attempted coup,” according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

The competing accusations reflected growing uncertainty over a civil society network that had become increasingly autonomous and capable of sustaining itself through international cooperation. The 2022 Jadar Declaration, which Balkan Green Energy News stated was a show of “international solidarity in the struggle against lithium exploitation and in environmental protection,” was signed by dozens of Serbian groups like Ne damo Jadar alongside international organizations like Extinction Rebellion, and demonstrated this evolution. Serbia also shares the lithium deposits with Bosnia, and activists have begun limited instances of cross-border coordination despite longstanding ethnic divisions.

Affinity Partners already encountered this loose activist network in Serbia in 2025. Its proposal with the UAE’s Eagle Hills to develop a Trump-branded hotel at Belgrade’s General Staff complex—bombed during NATO’s 1999 air campaign—became a focal point for thousands of protestors. As Brussels sought to navigate its widening differences with Washington, the European Parliament criticized the project in a resolution, and Affinity eventually abandoned the deal in December 2025.

A New Albanian Battleground

Attention is now on Albania, where Affinity Partners faces an even larger backlash. Prime Minister Rama has argued that the current protests are not a reflection of political dissent but are a result of a “‘hybrid war’ driven by external influences and digital manipulation” involving state-sponsored actors from countries such as Iran, according to Deutsche Welle. Meanwhile, other Albanian officials have pointed to Russia having links to the protests. Foreign influence cannot be ruled out entirely, with Albania’s hosting of the Iranian opposition group MEK remaining a source of tension with Tehran.

But these countries have reason to fear similar movements at home or among partners. China has little interest in additional regional instability, after a Chinese consortium’s renovation project of Serbia’s Novi Sad railway station, which collapsed in 2024, helped trigger nationwide protests.

The local protest networks built over decades with Western support have proven more influential than expected. Since 1995, USAID alone has invested more than $500 million in Albania, according to a 2025 report by the China-CEE Institute, and these civil society networks have proven resilient even after funding cuts. The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network Albania, for example, evolved from USAID funding and has played a prominent role in covering the recent protests in Albania, alongside other USAID-connected organizations involved in the demonstrations.

The EU has supported Albania’s civil society infrastructure through funding programs such as LIFE and environmental organizations like EuroNatur, Birdlife International, and the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, which have supported Albanian environmental groups such as the Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania (PPNEA) and EcoAlbania.

A decade ago, demonstrations like the Flaming Revolution might have attracted more direct backing from formal Western organizations and stronger political support. Today, however, the civil society networks nurtured by Western governments are now partly capable of setting their own agenda, prompting caution from Brussels. Meanwhile, Washington has withdrawn much of the support that once helped sustain them.

Rather than weakening these networks, the withdrawal of unilateral Western support may have accelerated their independence. As scholars Nikolaos Tsifakis and Anastasios Valvis observed in a study of civil society in neighboring Greece, “The diminution of state funding pressed CSOs (civil society organizations) to get reorganized, compete in a more demanding milieu, and increase their autonomy.”

The Regional Alliance to Defend the Nature of the Balkans, for example, is a coalition of more than 30 organizations that includes the Alliance of Ecological Organizations of Serbia and has given its full support to the Albanian activists and local communities. This reveals how protest campaigns are increasingly crossing the ethnic and national divisions that have long shaped Balkan politics, and that the “perspective of integration, one might say, is opening up,” states Aleksandar Matković, a researcher at the Institute for Economic Sciences in Belgrade.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.Email

John P. Ruehl

John P. Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022.

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom or None at All: the Comprador Politics of Fear in Bosnia

By Vuk Bačanović

June 30, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Michal Maňas/Wikimediacommons, licensed via CC BY 4.0

The news that Mehter, a Turkish military band, paraded through Baščaršija — Sarajevo’s old Ottoman-era bazaar and historic city center – and performed in the Bosnian capital should not be met with hysteria or panic about “the Turks,” a reaction that largely comes from Serbian and Croatian circles, but also from secular Bosniak ones. The very description of the event already says enough: this is a military band of Ottoman provenance, associated with the ceremonial traditions of the Janissaries and the sultans – in other words, not exactly a children’s choir called “Little Butterfly” brought in to cheer up the gathered tourists.

Still, it is not entirely incomprehensible that part of the public sees a symbolic problem here. There are memorials to şehids – Muslim martyrs – connected to the Ottoman conquest of Jajce in 1463, a fortified royal town in central Bosnia and the last seat of the medieval Bosnian kingdom. There are also narratives that link those şehids to the army of Mehmed II, known as Mehmed the Conqueror, the Ottoman sultan whose campaign brought an end to the medieval Bosnian state. And there are even preschool institutions such as the “Sultan Fatih Kindergarten” in Novi Travnik, a town in central Bosnia, which appears on official lists of preschool institutions. None of this, however, means that one should launch a moral panic complete with a warning siren for the “return of the Janissaries.”

Intellectual honesty requires us to acknowledge that the culture of a former conqueror or occupier does not have to remain forever what is often superficially – and frequently with disastrous consequences – classified as “occupying culture.” It is indeed that at the moment of military domination, political subjugation, and institutional coercion. Over centuries of local life, however, through family memory, language, architecture, music, religious practice, and everyday customs, it can become part of domestic culture. The postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha would say that culture is not transmitted as a dead package from the imperial center to a passive periphery; rather, it emerges in the in-between spaces, through repetition, translation, mimicry, hybridization, and local reworking.

In other words, once an imperial form is adopted by the native population, it is no longer necessarily a pure marker of foreign rule. It becomes something “almost the same, but not quite” – a new cultural fabric that simultaneously remembers its origin and changes its meaning. The Serbian appropriation of the cross with the so-called ocila – the four fire-steels arranged around a cross in Serbian heraldry – and of the Byzantine double-headed eagle illustrates precisely this process. Imperial symbols, once adopted and recoded dynastically, heraldically, and nationally, cease to be mere remnants of Byzantine rule or cultural influence. They become authentic signs of Serbian statehood, ecclesiastical identity, and collective self-understanding.

In the same way as in the Serbian case of appropriating Byzantine Christian symbolism, the Ottoman legacy of Bosnian Muslims is not, as is often offensively suggested, the political sediment of a failed empire. Rather, it is deeply connected to Islam as a universal religion, one that cannot be reduced exclusively to the Ottoman state, to the policies of this or that sultan, or to the beat of a Janissary drum. The Islam of Bosnian Muslims is not simply the extended arm of a former empire, but a living faith, a local experience, and a cultural world that took shape in Bosnia over centuries.

Here one should also recall the almost laboratory-pure hysteria that erupted in Sarajevo and Serbia when, during the student protests in Serbia, a young man wearing a šajkača  – a traditional Serbian military-style cap, widely associated with Serbian national symbolism – embraced a young woman wearing a hijab. Religious fanatics, party heralds, and factory-calibrated bots on both sides of the Drina River – the river that forms much of the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia – immediately recognized in this most ordinary warm human gesture proof of the end of the world. For one side, she instantly became a “Turk”; for the other, he became a “Chetnik,” as if people did not wear clothes, symbols, religious and cultural signs, but historical criminal indictments on their heads. In that small scene one could see how deeply the public sphere shaped by rigid nationalists in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia remains imprisoned in the most primitive Goebbelsian grammar: take a single sign, tear it out of life, history, family, faith, homeland, and personal experience, and turn it into a wanted poster.

At the same time, however, it is understandable that a certain unease remains among non-Muslims, among Muslims who do not feel any particular closeness to the Ottomans, and among secular people of various backgrounds, when precisely the military-conquest symbols of that tradition are presented as entirely neutral folklore.

Historical memories in Bosnia, in the absence of a shared cultural policy in a decentralized country, are not exactly neatly arranged in a museum display case so that the masses may understand them and place them where they belong. Instead, they wander around like exceptionally honorable village hosts with unresolved property disputes over a boundary line between two fields.

If we accept that the Ottoman-Islamic legacy is not an “occupying remnant” – and it is not – but also part of the identity of one people, why is it still almost unthinkable to have a serious conversation in Sarajevo, a city that aspires to function as the capital of all Bosnia and Herzegovina, about, for example, a Vidovdan procession? Vidovdan, or St. Vitus Day, is one of the central dates in Serbian historical and religious memory, especially because of its association with the Battle of Kosovo of 1389. Or why is it so difficult to discuss restoring street names dedicated to Vuk Karadžić, the nineteenth-century reformer of the Serbian language; Petar II Petrović Njegoš, the Montenegrin prince-bishop and poet; Hajduk Veljko, a Serbian rebel commander from the First Serbian Uprising against the Ottomans; or Miloš Obilić, the legendary hero of the Kosovo cycle?

We are speaking of figures without whom – regardless of the natural controversies attached to them, controversies that exist in every plural society – it is difficult to explain the language, literature, political imagination, and cultural memory of the Serbian people. If Mehter is also part of the cultural heritage of Bosnian Muslims, and there is no reason why it should not be, then Vuk Karadžić cannot be treated as the fourth horseman of the apocalypse with a Cyrillic primer tucked under his arm.

Naturally, in that case Mehter, understood as an exceptionally interesting historical, folkloric, and performance tradition rather than as a desire for “the return of the Turks,” would also have to be welcome in Banja Luka – the largest city in Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serb-majority entity – and in the western, predominantly Croat part of Mostar, the divided Herzegovinian city whose eastern and western halves still carry heavy postwar symbolic meanings.

That, of course, is how things would have to be in a society that truly belongs to itself. But it is not so in a colonized country where comprador elites build their power on the production of apocalyptic scenarios and on reducing culture to a tribal alarm system. Since they are not meaningfully asked about the economy, sovereignty, or real social development, all that remains for them is to perform the role of historical guards at a village checkpoint: they, allegedly, get to decide which cap, which street, and which long-dead poet will receive permission to pass through their miniature customs office of fear.

In other words, if we want Bosnia and Herzegovina truly to be a shared society, and not a collection of shattered fragments held together by international diktat, ever-scarcer grants, and the occasional ambassadorial bandage, then the same principle must apply to everyone. This is especially true because Bosnia and Herzegovina is, statistically, one of the societies with the lowest number of ethnically and confessionally motivated incidents in the world. Either we will agree that all historical cultures in Bosnia and Herzegovina have the right to public space throughout its entire territory – without triumphalism, humiliation, vulgarity, or the symbolic trampling of others – or we will finally admit that everyone is in fact demanding pluralism only within the limits of their own self-satisfaction. In that case, there is no Bosnia and Herzegovina as a shared society, but only three parallel memorial zones – Bosniak, Serb, and Croat – connected not even by a common electric utility.

That is why the rule would have to be simple: either let a thousand flowers bloom, or let nothing bloom at all. But not in such a way that some get a botanical garden, others a herbarium, and the third are granted permission to exist only if they remain buried deep beneath uncut grass, neither smelling nor blooming, as if they had not grown from that very soil in the first place.

P.S. This text is being written in the middle of the hot summer of an election campaign, at a moment when the hooligan service of Sarajevo and East Sarajevo – East Sarajevo being the Serb-majority city administratively adjacent to Sarajevo, in Republika Srpska – is, according to a duly stamped purchase order from campaign headquarters, burning Serbian tricolors, snatching flags with lilies – the golden fleur-de-lis associated with the medieval Bosnian Kotromanić dynasty and later with the wartime flag of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina – drawing crosses with the Serbian ocila on them, and then bragging about this epic achievement on social media. The intellectual level is roughly that of sixth grade, during school recess, among children in urgent need of supervision.

And all of this is happening in two cities where people live, work, shop, fall in love, quarrel, seek medical treatment, and move back and forth every day in the tens of thousands without any apocalypse whatsoever, while the electoral shamans on the sidelines desperately try to explain to them that, for campaign purposes, it would be desirable if they could hate one another just a little more.Email

Vuk Bačanović

Vuk Bačanović is a Sarajevo-based historian and a long-time journalist and editor. He is the author of numerous scholarly and journalistic articles. He generally advocates a historical-anthropological approach to the study of the past, particularly the phenomenon of ethnic identities. He is currently a doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, and serves as an editor of the Podgorica-based political portal Žurnal.me.

NATO 3.0: Alliance or Military-Industrial Investment Fund?

Biljana Vankovska

July 3, 2026

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NATO defense ministers conference at NATO HQ in Brussels. Photo: U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison, Dept. of Defense.

These are difficult times for anyone who has consistently criticised NATO. From the era of ‘defending the Free World’ against communism, through the age of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and the ‘Global War on Terror,’ to today’s supposedly existential struggle against almost the entire non-Western world, the Alliance has repeatedly reinvented the narratives that justify its existence. The language changes; the underlying logic does not. NATO remains indispensable, and every new enemy (whether discovered, exaggerated, or actively produced) becomes further proof of its necessity.

For decades, critics coming from anti-militarist, anti-hegemonic or left perspectives had to work hard to deconstruct this mythology against the combined efforts of political elites, mainstream media, academic institutions and security experts. The intellectual task itself was never particularly difficult. The contradictions, hypocrisies and devastating consequences of NATO’s interventions have remained visible long after the bombs stopped falling. What required courage was speaking against the prevailing consensus.

Ironically, today the Alliance’s own leaders have become its most effective truth-tellers. Donald Trump has repeatedly stripped away the moral language that traditionally surrounded NATO. Mark Rutte, the Alliance’s Secretary General, has become equally candid, while Germany’s Chancellor and France’s President increasingly speak with remarkable openness about Europe’s military future. Yet the privilege of telling the truth about what NATO has become belongs only to those in power. As the repression of protest movements ahead of the Ankara summit demonstrates, citizens may know the truth about this military giant—but they are not expected to organise against it.

The Ankara Summit has not even begun, yet its conclusions are already known. The phrase ‘historic summit’ has become so overused that it has almost lost its meaning. Some observers expect the ‘Europeanisation’ of NATO, with European allies assuming greater responsibility for financing and leading the Alliance. But this remains largely rhetorical. Europe cannot replace the United States as the Alliance’s military backbone. It can, however, willingly tighten the noose around its own neck—and perhaps around the world’s. While Atlanticists remain preoccupied with the Washington-Brusselsrelationship and whether Trump truly intends to reduce America’s commitment, a more significant transformation is taking place within Europe itself. New military coalitions are emerging inside NATO. The Baltic states and Poland increasingly pursue their own security agenda, driven by historical grievances and profound Russophobia. Sweden and Finland, once symbols of neutrality, have rapidly embraced militarisation, with Helsinki now evenpermitting the deployment of nuclear weapons on its territory (American weapons, naturally, making these states ever more deeply integrated into Washington’s strategic architecture). Similar regional military configurationsare quietly taking shape in the Balkans, where Croatia, Albania, Bulgaria and Kosovo increasingly speak of strengthening their own defence cooperation: NATO within NATO.

What truly distinguishes NATO 3.0, however, is not merely its willingness to name Russia and China explicitly as strategic adversaries or to proclaim its global ambitions. Rutte himself has explained that NATO is indispensable because it enables the United States to project power globally through Europe. Europe, in other words, functions as both a platform and force multiplier for American global strategy (as shown by the Epic Fury operation).

More revealing still is the language in which NATO now describes itself.Rutte proudly speaks of a ‘defence industrial revolution.’ The expression is revealing. Just as the First Industrial Revolution transformed production through factories and mechanisation, NATO 3.0 seeks to reorganise military production on an entirely new scale, not primarily for defence, but for permanent profitability. Behind the rhetoric of ‘collective security,’ ‘strategic autonomy,’ and ‘deterrence’ lies a far simpler reality: NATO increasingly functions as a mechanism for transferring unprecedented amounts of public money into private corporate hands.

Hence NATO 3.0 represents yet another mutation: an alliance whose principal historical mission increasingly appears to be the permanent militarisation of Western economies, and most probably, a new war with Russia.

The timing is remarkable. For decades, governments insisted that public finances required austerity. Hospitals, universities, pensions and social welfare supposedly had to accept painful budget discipline. Suddenly, none of these fiscal constraints apply to military expenditure. Deficits that were politically impossible for healthcare or education have become entirely acceptable for weapons procurement. Defence spending is no longer presented as a burden but as an investment strategy and an excellent possibility for job openings (they don’t mention the expanded graveyards that usually go along with warfare).

This raises further profound questions. If cloud computing, artificial intelligence, satellite communications and autonomous weapons are increasingly developed by private technology corporations, who ultimately controls national security? If governments become structurally dependent upon commercial providers, where does democratic accountability remain? When military procurement begins to resemble venture-capital investment, who actually benefits from permanent insecurity? These questions receive surprisingly little attention.

Instead, we hear only the language of emergency. Europe must rearm immediately. Industrial production must accelerate. Procurement rules must be simplified. Military investment cannot wait. Yet history teaches us that emergencies rarely remain temporary. Exceptional measures gradually become permanent forms of governance. Under conditions of continuous perceived threat, extraordinary military spending begins to appear normal, while demands for investment in education, healthcare or social justice suddenly become fiscally irresponsible.

Security colonises politics. What emerges before our eyes is a model in which war itself becomes increasingly privatised. Private defence contractors, technology firms, logistics companies and AI developers become indispensable actors within the military ecosystem. Even warfare itself becomes increasingly remote. Artificial intelligence, autonomous systems and digital infrastructures allow military operations to be outsourced, automated and commercialised in unprecedented ways. War does not necessarily require mass mobilisation; it requires investment portfolios.

For small member states that expected welfare instead of warfare, the implications are particularly sobering. Increasing defence budgets is presented as solidarity with the Alliance, but in reality, it often resembles compulsory participation in a vast military-industrial investment scheme. Citizens finance weapons they neither produce nor control, purchasing protection against threats that are frequently amplified by the very geopolitical logic that sustains the system.

NATO has never been merely a military alliance within the UN-based international order. It has always been an expression of the Western strategic worldview. Today it is becoming something even more complex: a system where security policy, industrial policy, technological power, and capital accumulation increasingly merge. The Ankara summit will not only discuss defence and deterrence; it will reveal how deeply the future of capitalism, technology and organised violence has become intertwined. It will be yet another chapter in the political economy of permanent mobilization for warfare.

Biljana Vankovska is a professor of peace studies and head of Global Change Center, Skopje, Macedonia.