United Militarists of Europe

In an April 2022 New Left Review article, shortly after the Russian-Ukrainian war began, historian Tony Wood made a grim prediction for Europe’s future. He said the Union would increase its militarization, starting with Germany, by cutting social spending. According to the historian, “neoliberal security advocate states will trade commercial growth for more missiles and barbed wire.” Wood also found many parallels with the European belle époque at the gates of World War I. Back then, inter-imperialist tensions fueled the arms race, and, as today, European public opinion had little trouble aligning itself with the nationalism of their governments. In 1914, German socialists voted for war loans, which represented an unprecedented break with internationalism and the struggle for peace. Then came the bloodbath that killed millions of Europeans, the Russian Revolution, and reaction in the form of fascism.

Europe today marked a new success for the European extreme right, this time in Portugal, and the anti-militarist left finds itself in a situation of extreme weakness. Geringonça (Contraption), the agreement of the Portuguese Socialists with the Left Bloc and the Communist Party that allowed the creation of the government of António Costa was first replaced by the disappearance of parties to the left of him with an absolute majority of socialists, now being defeated by the emergence of the extreme right with almost 20% of the vote, which is inevitable for the traditional Portuguese right (Democratic Alliance) to form a government.

The clocks of the extreme right are synchronized in Europe and America. Milei is running Argentina, while the USA waits for Donald Trump to return. Italy is ruled by Meloni, heir to Giorgio Almirante’s party, which has allied itself with the parties of Berlusconi and Salvini. In France, Le Pen is the favorite to replace Macron in the Elysee Palace, while in Germany, the AfD looks in some polls to be the first force in voting intentions. In Spain, the PP already governs with the extreme right in several autonomous communities, and virtually all polls predict that in the event of elections the same formula will be adopted by the government of the fourth largest economy in the eurozone after Germany, France and Italy.

The rise of the European far-right is also taking place in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the development of which is far from what European foreign ministries expected. “To hell with the European Union,” Victoria Nuland told her ambassador to Ukraine in 2014 in a phone conversation overheard by Russian intelligence services and widely circulated on social media. With Euromaidan and the Minsk agreements, the EU paved the way for an indirect war against Russia and probably masochistically used Nuland’s recipe to take the brunt of it. Today, all analysts calculate that, with or without Trump, the United States will focus on the Middle East, giving all the coverage it needs to Israel’s genocide, and leave Europe with the thankless task of funding NATO and the military effort against Russia. While one might expect European leaders to encourage a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine, assuming the reality of two years of war, the president of the French Republic has publicly stated that an even more open war with Russia cannot be ruled out. We are talking about nothing less than a war with a nuclear power on European soil, something that has not been seen in three quarters of a century. And this was said by the same Macron who claimed in December 2019 that NATO is a zombie alliance.

In this context, European elections are approaching, in which the war with Russia, as well as the EU’s timid role in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, may come to the fore. Let’s not forget that this election is also linked to the possible re-election to continue the leadership of European chief executive Ursula von der Leyen. Today, the German leader embodies unwavering European support for Netanyahu and an intransigent assumption of war with Russia.

What about the left? European social democratic circles, despite their modest results in elections everywhere, have aligned themselves with Atlanticist logic and, at best, political appeasement of Israel. In this they were supported by the green political family led by the German Greens, who shamelessly defend NATO and support Israel.

It is for this reason, and also in the height of the obsessive European mobilization in favor of Palestine, that the European Parliament elections in June represent an excellent opportunity for the European anti-militarist left to launch a campaign of mobilization on the old continent to defend peace, as well as a Europe with autonomy from the United States that would promote the pacification of Ukraine, which implies a relationship with Russia that would avoid war and actually put pressure on Israel to stop the genocide. This implies the assumption that the battle of ideas is the first political task to counter the ideological success of the extreme right that have been normalized by European elites, who simply demand that they change their sympathies for Putin to the Atlanticist commitments they have not hesitated to make.

This is why the left must wage an ideological battle uninhibited. Faced with extreme right-wing neoliberals who attack the very existence of taxes or public services and defend institutional racism and war, what is needed is a left-wing Europeanism that defends an alternative to capitalism and war. The European elections are a good reason to do so.