European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said in a speech on 18 March at a military academy in Copenhagen that “if Europe wants to avoid war, it must prepare for war”. In doing so, she was articulating a consensus that has emerged over the past few years, but has solidified recently as the US has distanced itself from Ukraine and even appeared to side with Russia. The idea is not just that Europeans must collectively increase defence spending and even “move into war-economy mode” in response to the threat posed by Russia, as European leaders have been saying for some time, but also that the EU itself – which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 – must repurpose itself. It would need to go from being a “peace project” to a “war project”.
European integration was never quite the peace project that so-called pro-Europeans claim. When France’s then foreign minister, Robert Schuman, made his famous declaration in 1950 that European integration would make war between France and Germany “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible” – the inception of the EU as a “peace project” – his country was fighting a brutal colonial war in Indochina. Similarly, when the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, a big step in European integration which created the European Economic Community (EEC), France was fighting another brutal colonial war in Algeria. Even in the post-Cold War period, Europeans have been quite willing to deploy military force, from Bosnia to Libya – much more than, say, China. Yet still they continue to imagine that they are uniquely peaceful.
Thus in describing how the EU is changing, or must change, in response to Russian aggression, “pro-Europeans” tend to idealise its history. In so far as the EU actually ever stood for peace, it was a “white peace” – that is, peace between European countries. In fact, the whole point was to stop wars between Europeans in order to increase their collective power relative to the rest of the world.
The European project always had external enemies against which it defined itself. In the 1950s, the EEC was imagined as a Christian civilisational bulwark against a Soviet Union that was not just communist but also imagined as being “Asiatic”. At that time, western-European countries also spent much more on defence as a proportion of GDP. In that sense, mobilising for war against Russia is not as much of a break with the EU’s history as pro-Europeans imagine.
Nevertheless, the new consensus around the idea of transforming the EU into a vehicle for fighting wars is remarkable. The EU always aspired to remake international politics in its own image. It was widely imagined as being a “civilian” or a normative power that would “civilise” international politics – that is, it would turn it into something like domestic politics, as it was already thought to have done between EU member states.
The Spanish social-democrat prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, channelled this vision of the EU as a different kind of power when, at the European Council on 21 March, he dissented from the new consensus behind Von der Leyen’s “ReArm Europe” plan. “I don’t like the term ‘rearm’,” he said. “I think the EU is a political project of soft power. We also have a duty nowadays with hard power. But it’s very important to stress our assets of soft power.”
However, the prevalent thinking now is not so much about how the EU might transform international politics but rather how it must adapt itself to what are seen as its hard realities. Instead of experimenting with alternative forms of power, the focus is on how to increase military capabilities. In response to criticism by Sánchez and the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, Von der Leyen agreed to rename her plan “Readiness 2030”, but its aim remains.
Of course, figures like Von der Leyen do not believe that, even as the EU “prepares for war”, it is abandoning the idea of the peace it always imagined it represented; they believe in rearming in peace’s name. It is striking that European leaders, including Keir Starmer, now routinely repeat the Reaganite slogan “peace through strength”.
In another Orwellian example, the institutional vehicle through which the EU supplies weapons to warring countries, set up in 2021 and used for the first time after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is called the “European peace facility”.
Von der Leyen has also proposed the EU relax its debt rules in order to increase defence spending. These rules have long limited investment in everything from education to defence, and caused conflict between creditor and debtor countries in the eurozone. Germany has in the past resisted loosening them, let alone abandoning them altogether. Now, the incoming German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has agreed an exemption from its own debt rules for defence spending and is open to doing the same at the European level.
Whatever the strategic merits of Von der Leyen’s rearmament plan, it may turn out to be politically disastrous. Academic research shows that austerity strengthens the far right. Now, centrist parties across Europe are planning to hugely increase defence spending even if doing so requires making further cuts in other areas. As a result, centrist parties are increasingly identifying themselves – and the EU itself – with austerity and war while the far right positions itself as standing for welfare and peace.
[See also: Putin’s endgame]
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This article appears in the 26 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Putin’s Endgame