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Europeanists in Combat Boots

Three years of war in Ukraine. Perhaps with a truce in sight, albeit in the heated climate of the European shock over the Atlantic crisis and the American about-face. Trump wants to make a deal with Putin without regard for Kyiv and the EU; doubts are spreading as to whether America can be trusted anymore. Friedrich Merz, the next head of the German government, has been heard uttering words that would previously have been unthinkable for an Atlanticist like him: We must become independent from the United States; Berlin must agree with London and Paris on the nuclear protection of Europe. It is uncertain whether NATO, in its present form, will be suitable for this “epochal break”, or whether new European structures will be needed.

Perhaps the objective is a Europeanised NATO, a centre of gravity in the Old Continent that can contain or compensate for American oscillations and the unpredictable behaviour of its bully-in-chief president. In any case, at the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine we said that the Europeans, caught off guard, would try to parry the blow by reopening the battle for European defence. Re-arming Ukraine to re-arm Europe is already a reality: the EU’s military expenditure in these past three years has increased by half, from about €200 billion to more than €300 billion, 2% of European GDP. Now, however, the Atlantic crisis is speeding things up. The plan is to get to 3%, which will bring military spending close to €500 billion, but this expenditure will be ineffective if it is divided into a thousand rivulets and is not centralised with joint headquarters and collective purchasing plans. For this reason, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, and Great Britain have started to meet: the Five Plus One group, alongside other kinds of groupings, bypasses the slowness of 27 member States and brings the British back into the game after the unfortunate outcome of Brexit. Pushing London back towards the EU is perhaps the first unintended consequence of the new American nationalism.

Time will tell. Washington has always sought to curb Europe’s strategic autonomy and will play its cards so as to divide it; Moscow will react to a missile and nuclear rearmament of the Union. China, an unavoidable force in the crisis of the old order, will also have its say on the new balance of terror. In any case, Europeanism has put on its combat boots. Internationalist opposition to European imperialism is facing a new challenge.

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