We need a totally different Europe

First published at Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.

“The fear of war has really been gaining ground among young people.” Onno, vice president of the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PVDA/PTB) youth movement, is worried. “TikTok is overflowing with videos about preparing for war. ‘War is coming’, ‘we’re already at war’, ‘get ready for war’. It provokes a lot of anxiety.”

Lise feels the same. She’s a doctor at Medicine for the People in Antwerp’s Hoboken district. She confides: “People who work in home help tell me that all of their patients are stockpiling food and drink, in case war breaks out.”

Camille is a union secretary. Recently, she networked with other trade unionists in Berlin at a conference organized by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. “I heard people saying that they’re worried because of rumours that the unemployed are going to be forced to join the army, ads for the military are turning up on the bread bags, soldiers are visiting schools, companies are being restructured to produce defence materiel. Things in Germany are changing fast”, she says.

One thing is for sure — in Europe, the wholesale fearmongers are zealously jostling for position. They can be seen on television every day. Fear sells, and there is nothing quite like it for stimulating the weapons industry. Fear of war is being used to push through colossal military budgets, while social security, health care, and pensions get dismantled.

Young people don’t want war; neither do the nurses or the workers. But today, all we get is the rhetoric of characters like Mark Rutte, the NATO Secretary General, constantly telling us that war might be inevitable, and that we had best be ready for it. Yet there is nothing inevitable about war. More than that: we have to do everything we can to preserve peace, rather than pouring petrol onto a fire that’s obviously already burning very hot.

A world in the balance

Everyone could see who was sitting in the front row at Donald Trump’s inauguration. A gang of billionaires. An oligarchy. These people just bought a government, and they are proud of it. They portray themselves as the embodiment of history itself. “God saved me so I could make America great again”, Trump boasted. Elon Musk reckons he is going to save humankind with a mission to Mars.

On Earth, it’s mainly the billionaires who can count on being saved. Nine of them got a post in the Trump administration. Nine billionaires. One of these men — they are almost all men — is the new Secretary of the Treasury: Scott Bessent, a hedge-fund CEO. He says it straight out: he’s going to continue the policy of tax giveaways for millionaires. This first came in in December 2017, during Trump’s first term, and was due to expire this year. Bessent is treating himself and his billionaire friends to a giant present. Without the least scruple. Naked vulture capitalism.

The same mentality is driving the Trump administration when it comes to foreign policy. Some of them see the world as a stockpile of raw materials that ultimately belongs to the US. By virtue of some sort of divine mandate, “manifest destiny”.

“Panama belongs to us”, “Canada belongs to us”, “the Gulf of Mexico belongs to us”, “Venezuela belongs to us”, “Cuba belongs to us”, “Greenland belongs to us” — it’s cowboy rhetoric. It is unscrupulous imperialism and neo-colonialism.

We say: hands off Panama, Mexico, Venezuela, Canada, Greenland, Cuba! Trump is nothing but a spasm of the past, a symptom of a superpower that is not ready to let go of its hegemony.

Because what exactly is happening? After 500 years of Western domination, based on pillage and slavery, the world’s economic centre of gravity is shifting to Asia. This is what is happening — in fits and starts. The tectonic plates are shifting, as it were, and the shocks are bigger than anything we have experienced in the last three decades. “How our world is tilting” is the subtitle of my book, Mutiny. The process is underway.

In their recent history as a world superpower, the US has never had a bigger “rival” than today’s China. Technologically and economically, China is now far stronger than the Soviet Union ever was — which is rather impressive, considering in how little time this result was reached.

Needless to say, the US continues to be the world’s leading military and financial power and, depending on how you figure it, the largest or second-largest economy on the planet. Washington is now fighting with every available means and in every possible way to maintain its position, and wants to pull the whole world into a Cold War logic against Beijing and any country that tries to pursue its own path autonomously.

Against this backdrop, the European Union is struggling to survive in economic, democratic, and political terms. The shift to a war economy is exacerbating all of the tensions pervading the old continent. Tensions between the member states, and internally within those same states, whose citizens can no longer stomach the high cost of living, nor the absence of democracy or viable outlook for the future.

The EU was never a force for peace

Since it was founded, the EU has been trying to pass itself off as a force for peace, but the suit doesn’t fit. Until the fifteenth century, Europe was just another a province of the world, no more developmentally advanced than the other continents. The situation would only change once the European powers began building their colonial world empire, based on the trade in slaves and the pillaging of other continents. The primitive accumulation that European capital needed in order to establish capitalism across the entirety of the planet came out of a bloodbath inflicted on the rest of the world.

Up until the end of the nineteenth century, the British were the biggest imperial power. Other imperialist powers like France, Germany, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Portugal clashed regularly but finally decided to divvy up Africa between them at the Berlin Colonial Conference (1884–1886). As if the continent were a pie, that it was their prerogative to cut up into portions.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Germany slowly but surely began to assert itself as a world power. But unlike its rivals, it had practically no colonies. This was a significant handicap for the German elite, who wanted colonies as a market for German manufacturing on the one hand, and for the supply cheap raw materials on the other. The redistribution of the world and the race for colonies furnished the economic basis of World War I.

After that war, the notion of a larger inner-European market began catching on, especially in Germany. Count Coudenhove-Kalergi was the first to propose the transformation of Germany into a Greater German Europe. He launched his “pan-European concept” in 1923. This was not a peace project, but an imperialist scheme tailor-made for Berlin, with an expanded Europe that would stretch from Petsamo, in the north of Finland, to Katanga, in southern Congo. Coudenhove-Kalergi viewed Africa as a source of European wealth, which ought to be exploited and become part of Europe (or Paneurope) — a vast, German Europe, endowed with an immense colonial empire. The Count was unable to fulfil his scheme, and soon Hitler attempted to conquer the European continent through violence and barbarity in order to materialize his own version of a “new Europe”. After claiming some 60 million lives, the fascist project would crumble in turn.

The European nations, having just escaped from the prisons of Nazism, had no intention of immediately giving up their independence again for the sake of a fresh pan-European adventure. The decisive impulse for European unification came from elsewhere — Washington. With the Bretton Woods conference, the major economic event of the twentieth century, the United States decided that global commerce would henceforth take place in dollars. The Americans wanted a totally open European market, for their goods and investment. “Long live Europe!”, cried Washington. Through the Marshall Plan, the US solved its own export crisis, and tied Europe to American capital.

It was also Washington that would impose the conditions for Germany’s return to the world economic stage. Germany ought not to be too weak, the US reckoned, otherwise, it might fall into the hands of the Communists. Germany ought to be able to start exporting coal and steel from the Ruhr region again. The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was created to this end in 1951.

The integration of the European states was never meant to prevent war. It was a project under the aegis of the Pentagon, within the context of a military strategy directed against the Soviet Union. The Americans wanted to bring the German military back into working order, but with US materiel and within the framework of NATO. In the long run, they were aiming to reconquer the Soviet sphere of influence.

For the French, the British, the Dutch, and the Belgians, seeing Washington put the Germans back in uniform was a hard pill to swallow. But the European states were forced to resign themselves to playing the role of “junior” partner to the United States. At Bretton Woods (1944), the dollar became the world’s currency, French colonialism suffered a heavy defeat in Indochina (1954), and the British and French were humiliated during the Suez crisis (1956).

From the beginning, the idea of a unified Europe was a colonial one. Four of the six founding member states of the European Economic Community (EEC), including France and Belgium, still held colonial dependencies at the time, and the 1957 Treaty of Rome contains no mention of decolonization. On the contrary, according to the map of the EEC at the time, the majority of European territory could be found… in Africa.

Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah quite rightly declared: “French neo-colonialism is merging into the collective neo-colonialism of the European Common Market”.

The colonial or neo-colonial ambitions of the European powers are now being presented as “civilizing missions”, “civilian missions”, or “geopolitical missions”, but at bottom nothing has changed: these are still the old imperialist states looking for a new way to preserve their bygone glory. From 1957 to the present day, the “Europe of peace” has continued to wage war, from Lumumba’s Congo to the genocide in Rwanda, from Libya to its numerous interventions in sub-Saharan Africa, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the former Yugoslavia. No, the European Union has never been a force for peace.

Geostrategy and the war economy

Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, declared that the EU ought to become a major “geopolitical actor”. According to her, the chaos and the crises the Union is traversing require that “we learn to speak the language of power”.

“Learn to speak the language of power”? — as if this were something with which the European powers were unfamiliar! Von der Leyen made this statement during the plenary session of the European Parliament in November 2019, more than two years before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Since the war in Ukraine, “geopolitics” has been the EU watchword, with “war economy” the slogan of the day.

European President Charles Michel wasn’t lying when he addressed the annual conference of the European Defence Agency (EDA) in November 2023. “We have broken countless taboos since Russia invaded Ukraine. We have done what would have been unthinkable only a few weeks before: jointly procuring military equipment, using the EU budget to support the increase in our military production, and funding joint research and development in defence.” His Union used the dust of war in Ukraine to break all the taboos.

EU member states currently spend 326 billion euro on armaments. This amounts to around 1.9% of gross domestic product. Ten years ago, this figure came to 147 billion. It has doubled in ten years. And according to the first-ever European Commissioner for Defence, former Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, this is not good enough. He wants to expand the defence industry using low-cost loans from the European Central Bank (ECB) and public funds. There is no lack of creativity when it comes to financing the war machine.

Why don’t hospitals in Europe receive low-cost loans from the ECB? Why don’t European schools have access to support from extra-budgetary instruments such as the European Peace Facility? Josep Borrell, former European Minister of Foreign Affairs, has this answer: “Everyone, including myself, always prefers butter to cannon, but without adequate cannons, we may soon find ourselves without butter as well.”

More weapons: this is what the European Union’s revamped “geostrategy” amounts to. “Geostrategy” means “the primacy of foreign and security policy”. From now on, all other policy areas will be subservient.

Germany’s Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), speaks bluntly of the need to make Germany “ready for war” again, to offset the “generations spoiled by peace”. As if growing up and growing old without the terror of bombardment and the fear of war were a privilege… Society as a whole has become militarized at breakneck speed, from Rheinmetall ads on bus stops and in soccer stadiums, to messages from the Bundeswehr printed on pizza boxes. In some of Germany’s federal states, the law stipulates that soldiers must be allowed to teach in the classroom, and that schools cannot forbid this. In Germany, 15 June has been designated as the annual national veterans’ day. This is supposed to better anchor militarism in everyday life.

There are also more practical preparations for war. During NATO’s last training exercise in 2024, “Steadfast Defender”, 90,000 soldiers from 32 countries were deployed “to demonstrate that NATO is capable of conducting and sustaining complex multi-domain operations for several months, over thousands of kilometres and in all conditions, from the far north to Central and Eastern Europe”.

“As tragic as the war in Ukraine may be,” writes the German business newspaper Handelsblatt, “it has been a boon for armaments corporation Rheinmetall and its CEO, Armin Papperger.” Papperger is presented like a front-page star, under the heading “The Tank Man”. It is not just the Russian menace that is helping to sell defence materiel, but the fear provoked by Donald Trump. “The best thing that could have happened to Europe was the election of Trump,” explains the CEO of Belgian defence contractor Syensqo. While governments terrify their populations with advice on how to put together a survival kit, the arms manufacturers count their profits.

War on the working class

“In general, spending more on defence means spending less on other priorities”, Mark Rutte explained to the members of the European Parliament. The same man who left the Netherlands in political chaos and at the mercy of the whims of Geert Wilders, that far-right clown, is now Secretary General of NATO. And he is on a mission: he wants all NATO member states to devote 3.5 percent of their total wealth to the organization.

Rutte also knows where to find this money: “On average, European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health, and social security systems. We need a small fraction of that money to make our defences much stronger, and to preserve our way of life.”

So, this is how it happens. The NATO head comes into the parliament and tells everyone that the money for pensions, the money for health care, and the money for social security ought to be spent on war. “To make things a little bit more tangible, what we are talking about is a reduction of around 20 percent to all pensions”, an economist explained on Belgian public television.

It’s not just pensions, social security, and health care that are set to be cut. Everything, really everything, is to be sacrificed for the sake of this military turn. The EU has buried its “Green Deal”. The 10 billion euro earmarked for the Sovereignty Fund, Europe’s answer to the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), has been reduced to a paltry 1.5 billion.

Germany, they are saying in Washington, has to become the linchpin of the war in the East, the country through which troops and equipment pass. Today, the warmongers are proposing to limit, if necessary, the right to strike on the railroads, and to abolish fixed working hours for train drivers, health care workers, and any other public services that are at all likely to be connected with future military efforts.

Freedom of expression is also under attack. The warmongers are passing themselves off as pacifists. They accuse peace activists of being a kind of fifth column for “the enemy”. Today, this approach is already being used in a range of countries to target anyone who raises their voice to protest the genocide in Gaza and the criminal complicity of the states that are supplying Israel with arms.

Even the domestic economy is to be sacrificed on the altar of war. One of the greatest acts of self-destruction to occur in the last three decades, perhaps the greatest, has been the disconnection of German and European industry from Russian gas. This was a victory for Washington; Europe is now hooked up to extremely expensive and polluting shale gas supplies from the US. A self-imposed defeat for European member states, where gas and energy prices remain four times higher than on the other side of the Atlantic. Furthermore, the major food, distribution, and transport monopolies took advantage of the fog of war to raise their prices, in search of maximum profit margins. Astronomical prices for food and energy have been the result.

While European governments announce austerity plan after austerity plan, their military spending knows no bounds. The 32 NATO countries already spend eight times more on defence than Russia does, but their military shopping lists seem endless — and incredibly expensive. The purchase of F-35 fighter jets from America, for example, which will tie Belgium to the US military-industrial complex for years to come. A single tank costs millions and millions of euro. One shot with the new MELLS missile system comes with a 100,000-euro price tag.

A system that spends billions to satisfy the hunger of the armaments industry, while millions of people queue up at food banks while they work two or even three jobs, and still can’t afford health care for their parents or children — this is a system that is rotten to the core.

With each new phase, the Union slides a little further into the mire

There was a time when it was assumed that a unified Europe might emerge in the same way that Germany, for example, became a nation state: first as a customs union, then slowly, over the course of conflicts and diverging interests, towards a political union. But the European nation-states have never managed to overcome their internal oppositions. The phases of integration are always subject to outside pressure; in the meantime, chaos reigns.

Six years ago, in 2019, the ruling class still displayed a certain optimism as regards the possibilities offered by the EU and by programmes like the Green Deal. Today, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, is trying to stave off collective depression with encouraging speeches and a comprehensive agreement on defence. The Eastern axis — Germany–Poland–the Baltic States — is totally aligned with the United States, and wants the EU to be subservient to Washington.

There is hardly a single economy in the Eurozone with economic growth of more than 1 percent per year. The average just reaches 0.2 percent. And if Trump raises tariffs again, Europe will also be impacted. “The European Union is very, very bad to us”, Trump declared shortly after his inauguration. “So they’re going to be in for tariffs.”

The biggest European economy, Germany, has been in recession for two years, and dragged itself into elections in the hope that someone would breathe new life into German industry. The second-largest economy, France, is in a total political impasse. Macron, with a minority government, has put himself at the mercy of Le Pen. The Dutch government is lumbered with a country at the mercy of Geert Wilders. Europe’s third largest economy, Italy, is led by Meloni, who wants to become very good friends with Donald Trump. In Austria too, the road seems open for the extreme-right Freedom Party.

Europe is increasingly shackling itself to NATO and Washington. The more it does so, the less European leaders there seem to be. Where are they? Where are the European statespeople? Nowhere. Europe won’t be seeing a new de Gaulle any time soon.

France still considers itself a P5 state, a permanent member of the UN Security Council armed with its own nuclear weapons. But French imperialism has eaten the dust of the Sahel Desert and Paris faces popular outrage from Martinique to Mayotte. The French were also beaten to the punch in the Aukus affair, with Australia’s submarine contracts ultimately being awarded to the UK. All that the “Hexagon” has left are its pretensions to leadership in European Union defence policy.

Rheinmetall and the German establishment also aspire to leadership of the new European “geopolitical power”. This is why the contradictions between Germany and France remain important, with respect both to energy policy and to military expansion. Without a renewed and more concerted effort at integration, the Union will continue to weaken or even fall apart. But with each step towards greater integration, profound divergences emerge: over questions like whether the EU should have its own resources, whether to create Eurobonds to distribute debt, tariffs on Chinese products, European defence independence, and so on. Trump will miss no opportunity to drive the EU member states further apart, and Elon Musk has already set about the task.

The EU is battling against its very demise, but with each new phase, it slides a little further into the mire. This “Union” of crisis and war cannot be reformed; we need a totally different Europe.

Mobilizing against militarism and chauvinism

Let’s step back into the past for a moment. In late July of 1914, the leaders of Belgium’s then-powerful socialist cooperative movement met in the Vooruit festival hall in Ghent, which had just opened. Socialist leader Louis Bertrand interrupted the discussions at the cooperative congress to announce that war had broken out. He proposed that the congress adopt a motion asking “that the peoples strive to avert a looming war that would spell destruction for co-operative efforts”. The motion was adopted, and the congress resumed its agenda: rebates from the cooperatives, syrup, and vinegar. Not a word about the catastrophe of the war, which would hit Belgium a few days later.

The anecdote is revealing. The Belgian Labour Party (POB), Belgium’s social-democratic party at the time, had established itself as a strong party of the working class, with considerable trade union strength, and the experience of three major general strikes under its belt, which were without doubt the first general strikes in the world. The POB had gained a foothold among the young working class thanks in particular to the socialist cooperative Vooruit. The centre of the latter was its bakery, where people could buy cheap, good-quality bread.

In the end, preserving the co-operatives had become the alpha and omega of the POB. Even the outbreak of war was seen in the same light: it didn’t matter what happened, so long as the cooperatives weren’t destroyed. But it wasn’t the cooperatives that would be destroyed, but the lives of countless sons of workers and peasants, crushed in the great slaughter. The war was the final destination for millions of young people who had their whole lives ahead of them.

During the major general strike of March 1913, when more than 400,000 strikers took to the streets, almost nothing was said about chauvinism, war credits, or the imminent threat of war.

Still, the question had been on the agenda of almost every congress of the Second International, to which the POB sent representatives. It had been decided to mobilize the population against militarism, chauvinism, and war. The coming world war was going to be an imperialist war, the Second International delegates had affirmed. It would be a war over the carving up of the planet, a war of conquest and colonization. Workers and peasants would inevitably pay the cost. But meanwhile, the POB’s leadership had so identified itself with the Belgian state that they voted unreservedly in favour of war credits.

What good is it having the best policies on cooperative rebates, syrup, and vinegar, if everything gets swept away in the devastating tides of war?

The question contains the answer: the good. A party of the working class should be the best fighter for the good of the working class, and the working class should be able to see that it is pursuing that task. Whether that comes down to pensions or salaries, working conditions, living conditions, housing or energy prices, kindergartens or aged care, the party of the working class should concentrate on class politics.

Which means: doing surveys, listening, gathering proposals, taking action, changing things, with people. And continuing to do that work year after year, through thick and thin. The work is essential and indispensable. We can’t be satisfied with “declarations” about the working class, or “resolutions” here and there. The work has to be done. It is the foundation. But it’s not the whole story, either.

Socialism over war

The working class, both in Europe and the US, is furious, enraged. People are angry, they feel they are not being listened to, they feel invisible, they feel unrepresented. And rightly so. There is no need to be afraid of the dust that is being kicked up, or the whirlwinds of opinion blowing in all directions because people lack a framework for analysis.

Marxists should not fear the troubled times ahead. They must recognize the desire for radical change, and seize the opportunity. The forces that are best prepared for the shocks will be the ones best able to steer them. This is what Naomi Klein teaches us in her book The Shock Doctrine, and she is right.

We are not spectators to what’s going on, we are living through a piece of history and need to be a driving force to tilt the shocks in the right direction.

We ought to be building a project with a long-term vision, not just looking months ahead, or into the next year. A project that aims to promote workers’ parties, in order to fight for socialism; a project built on self-confidence. Building a party takes time, effort, discipline, and the art of strategy and tactics. But it is possible, if we are patient, if we know how to give confidence to party workers, if we work on education and unification, and if we dare to express ourselves with the strength of our conviction.

Waging the socio-economic struggle is one thing. But it is not enough. We also need to politicize this struggle, and make people aware of the situation in which we live. The opposition between labour and capital is a systemic opposition, a contradiction internal to capitalism itself. In its thirst for maximum profit, capitalism leads to conflict, crisis, and war.

Our planet is being shaken by the degradation of the climate, a food crisis, a debt crisis, wars both economic and military, by exploitation and global disequilibrium. Capitalism is unable to propose a solution to the enormous challenges we face. Only socialism is up to the task.

People want to be part of this historical wave. Even more: they want to, and can, make these waves themselves. Not to change the position of a comma in a text, but to change the world. To do this, we need to shine. The Left has to want to fight to win, and really want to win. Nobody sides with losers.

The Trumpist social project, the project of the Bolsonaroists, the adherents of Vox, the partisans of the Alternative für Deutschland — this project has nothing to offer the working class. They just want to sow division, the better to rule; theirs is a hateful, racist project, of militarization and authoritarianism, made to measure for the benefit of the ruling class. Why would we ever abandon the working class to the siren song of the far right? The working class is our class; it is where we belong, where we must work and organize, raise awareness and mobilize, fall and rise again. Our model of society is the emancipation of work. This is the only positive response that can give constructive direction to the anger of the working class.

Everything depends on us. On our capacity to grasp the new opportunities. On our faith in the capacity of people to mobilize themselves, organize themselves, and to find a socialist perspective.

Peter Mertens is General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium and a member of the Belgian Chamber of Representatives. His most recent book is Mutiny: How Our World Is Tilting. This article is based on a speech given by Mertens at the Sixth International Conference for World Balance in Cuba. Translated by Samuel Langer for Gegensatz Translation Collective.