"Not Trump, not war, but socialism." On the working class and the militarization of Europe

CONTENT

1. Wholesalers in fear
2. The world is tilting
3. The European Union was never a force for peace
4. Geostrategy and war economics
5. War against the working class
6. With each step, the Union digs deeper into the swamp
7. Mobilizing against militarism and chauvinism
8. Socialism instead of war

1. Wholesalers in fear

"Among young people, the fear surrounding the war has increased dramatically." Onno, vice-chairperson of the youth movement RedFox, is not at ease. "On TikTok there is an avalanche of videos about 'war-prepping’ to be seen.” he says. “'The war is coming,' 'we are already at war,' 'just prepare yourself'; it all makes a big impression."

Lise has a similar feeling. She is a physician at Medicine for the People in Hoboken (Antwerp). "I hear from people who provide family care that all their patients are hoarding, so they have food and drink in case of war.” 

Camille, who works as a union secretary, recently met trade unionists in Germany at the Rosa Luxemburg Conference. "I have heard people who are concerned about the discussions to force the unemployed to join the army, about the increasing advertising of the army on bread bags, about soldiers visiting schools, and about companies being converted to military production. It's going fast, over there in Germany," she says.

One thing is certain: in Europe, wholesalers of fear are tripping over each other's feet. And they are getting free rein on television. Fear sells, and nothing is as good for gun manufacturers as fear. The fear of war is used as leverage to swallow huge war budgets, and at the same time, the dismantling of social security, healthcare and pensions. 

Young people don't want war, nurses don't want war, workers don't want war. But all anyone hears today is the story of people like Mark Rutte, the Secretary-General of NATO, who tells us every day that war may be inevitable, and that we’d better be prepared. Well, it is not an inevitable fatality that war is coming. More than that, our job is to do everything we can to keep the peace, rather than throwing more oil on an overheated fire. 

2. The world is tilting

Everyone has seen it, that front row at Trump's inauguration. One billionaire next to another. It's an oligarchy. They just bought a government, and they're proud of it. They present themselves as the embodiment of history itself. "I was saved by God to make America great," said Donald Trump. Elon Musk sells his Mars mission as the salvation of humanity. 

Back on planet Earth, it is mainly the billionaires who can count on salvation. Nine of them have been given a post in Trump's cabinet. Nine billionaires. One of those men - they are almost all men - will be the new Secretary of the Treasury. His name is Scott Bessent, himself CEO of a hedge fund. The first thing he will do, he says himself, is continue the huge fiscal gift policy for millionaires. It was introduced in December 2017, under Trump I, and was set to expire this year. Bessent is going to continue it, granting his friends millionaires and himself a huge present. Without scruple. Vulture capitalism without scruples.

You see this very same attitude in foreign affairs. In Trump's cabinet, there are a number of figures who see the world as a collection of resources that actually belong to the United States; because of some divine destiny, ‘a manifest destiny’. 

"Panama is ours," "Canada is ours," "the Gulf of Mexico is ours," "Venezuela is ours," "Cuba is ours," "Greenland is ours," that kind of cowboy language. Imperialism without scruples. 

We say: “Hands off Panama,” “Hands off Mexico,” “Hands off Venezuela,” “Hands off Canada,” “Hands off Greenland,” “Hands off Cuba!”

Trump is a convulsion of the past. Trump is a symptom of a superpower that has no intention of giving up its hegemony easily. 

For what is going on? After five hundred years of Western domination, which originated in plunder and slavery, the economic center of gravity of our time is shifting to Asia. That's what's happening. And it happens in shocks. The tectonic plates of this earth are shifting, and on the Richter scale, those shocks are bigger than we have experienced in the last three decades. ‘The world is tilting’, that's the subtitle of my book 'Mutiny’, and that process is ongoing.

Never in its recent history of world power has the United States known a greater ‘challenger’ than China today. Today's China is many times stronger both technologically and economically than what the Soviet Union was ever capable of, and that is quite impressive when you consider how quickly the Chinese have achieved that.

Of course, the United States is still the largest military and financial power in the world, and - depending on the calculations - the largest or second largest economic power in the world. Washington fights with all possible means to maintain its power, and wants to pull the whole world along in a cold war logic against Beijing and against all countries that want to run their own course autonomously.

In this context, the European Union is fighting for its survival. Economically, democratically and politically. The transition to a military economy puts all the tensions within the old continent on edge; tensions between member states, and tensions within the member states themselves whose citizens no longer tolerate the expensive life, lack of democracy and future.

3. The European Union was never a peacekeeping force

Since its inception, the European Union has been trying to sell itself as a force for peace but that’s a garment that does not fit.

Until the 15^th century, Europe is no more than a province in the world, a province not much further ahead in terms of development than other continents. Things change only when European powers transition to a colonial world empire, based on slave trade and the emptying of other continents. The primitive accumulation that capital needed in Europe to give birth to capitalism was created in a sea of blood in the rest of the world.

Until the end of the 19^th century, the British are the leading imperialist power. Other imperialist powers - such as France, Germany, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands and Portugal - frequently clash with each other, but finally decide at the Berlin Colonial Conference (1884-1886) to divide Africa among themselves, as if it were a piece of the pie that belongs to them.

At the dawn of the 20^th century, Germany is also slowly but surely emerging as a superpower. But Germany has virtually no colonies, unlike its rivals. This is a major handicap for the German elite who need colonies as an outlet for finished products on the one hand, and as a supplier of cheap raw materials on the other. The redistribution of the world and the hunt for colonies provide the economic basis for World War I.

After World War I, particularly in Germany, the call to create a larger European internal market grows. Count Coudenhove-Kalegri is the first to propose the transformation of Germany into a Greater German Europe. In 1923, he launches his ‘pan-European concept’. This is by no means a peace project, but an imperialist project tailored to Berlin, with a Europe that would stretch from Petsamo in Finland to Katanga in the Congo. A great German Europe, with a great colonial empire. The Count does not succeed, and in the end Hitler tries to use violence and barbarism to conquer the continent for his own version of ‘New Europe', a ‘Neuropa’. Sixty million dead later, also the fascist project has failed

The nations of Europe, just escaping from the Nazi prison, have no intention of immediately giving up their regained independence to a new kind of European adventure. The decisive impetus for European unification comes from elsewhere. From Washington, in particular. At Bretton Woods, the economic event of the twentieth century, the United States decree that world trade will henceforth be conducted in dollars. The Americans want a European capital and goods market that is completely open to them. "Long live Europe!" cries Washington, and through the Marshall Plan, they solve their own export crisis and tie Europe to American capital.¹

It is Washington that imposes the conditions under which Germany must make its reentry in the world economy. Germany must not be too weak, they think in the United States, otherwise it could fall prey to the Communists. Germany must once again be able to export coal and steel from the Ruhr area and for that purpose the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) is established in 1951. 

The integration of European states is not about preventing war. From the start, it is about a project under the wings of the Pentagon, within the framework of a military strategy against the Soviet Union. The Americans want to make the German army operational again, albeit with American equipment, and within the framework of NATO. The intention was to eventually reclaim the Soviet zone of influence. 

It is hard for the French, British, Dutch, and Belgians to digest the fact that Washington is in the process of putting the Germans back in military uniform already. But the European states must resign themselves to a role as junior partners to the United States. At Bretton Woods (1944) the dollar becomes the world currency, in Indochina French colonialism suffers a heavy defeat (1954), and at the Suez Canal the British and French are humiliated (1956).

From its inception, the idea of European unification has been a colonial one. Four of the six founding members of the European Economic Community (EEC), including France and Belgium, were still colonial states at the time, and the 1957 Treaty of Rome does not contain a single paragraph on decolonization. On the contrary, according to the map of the then EEC, the majority of European territory was in... Africa. 

Yes, Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah was right when he said, "the neocolonialism of the French period is now being merged into the collective neocolonialism of the European Common Market."²

Whether the colonial or neocolonial ambitions of the European powers present themselves as ‘civilization missions’, ‘civil missions’, or ‘geopolitical missions’, the essence has never changed: old imperialist states seeking a new form to preserve their past glory. From 1957 to the present, the ‘Europe of peace’ has waged war from Lumumba's Congo to the genocide in Rwanda, from Libya to the many interventions in sub-Saharan Africa, from Iraq and Afghanistan to the former Yugoslavia. No, the European Union has never been a force for peace.

4. Geo-strategy and war economics

According to Ursula Von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the European Union must become a major ‘geopolitical player’, and chaos and crisis compel the Union to ‘learn to speak the language of power’. 

‘Learning to speak the language of power’, as if European powers have never done so before. Von der Leyen mentioned this to the plenary of the European Parliament in November 2019. That's more than two years before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Since the war in Ukraine, ‘geopolitics’ has been the catchphrase of the European Union, and ‘war economy’ the slogan of the day. 

Honest he is, when European President Charles Michel addresses the annual conference of the European Defense Agency (EDA) in November 2023. I quote: "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 defense. All this without changing the treaties."³ Here ends the quote from the European president. We used the dust of the war in Russia to break all taboos.

European member states currently spend 326 billion euros on weaponry, about 1.9 percent of gross domestic product. Ten years ago, it was 147 billion. A doubling in less than a decade. That is not enough, swears Europe's first-ever defense commissioner, former Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius. He wants the defense industry to expand further with favorable loans from the European Central Bank (ECB) and sovereign wealth funds. When it comes to financing the war machine, there is no shortage of creativity.

Why don't hospitals in Europe get favorable loans from the European Central Bank? Why don't schools in Europe get support from off-budget instruments like the European Peace Facility? The previous European foreign minister, Josep Borrell, answers, "Everyone, including myself, always prefers butter to cannon, but without adequate cannons, we may soon find ourselves without butter as well.”⁴

More guns, that is the European Union's reinvented ‘geostrategy’. 'Geostrategy’, meaning 'the primacy of foreign and security policy’, to which all other domains are henceforth subordinate.

German defense minister Boris Pistorius, of the SPD, speaks bluntly about the need to make Germany ‘war-ready’ again, against the ‘generations spoiled by peace’ as if it were an undeserved privilege to grow up and grow old without the terror of bombing and the fear of war. At breakneck speed, all of society is being militarized. From Rheinmetall advertising in bus stops and soccer stadiums to Bundeswher messages on pizza boxes. In some German Länder, the law stipulates that soldiers must be allowed to teach in the classroom, and schools cannot prohibit it. From now on, the annual ‘veterans day’ is supposed to embed militaristic thinking in everyday life. 

The war is also being prepared practically. The final NATO exercise in 2024, Steadfast Defender, involves 90,000 troops from 32 countries "to demonstrate NATO's ability to conduct and sustain complex multi-domain operations over several months, across thousands of kilometers from the High North to Central and Eastern Europe, and in any conditions."⁵

"As tragic as the war in Ukraine is," writes the German business newspaper Handelsblatt in August 2024, "the defense company Rheinmetall and its CEO Armin Papperger have become rich because of it."⁶ Papperger is featured as a poster boy on the front page under the title ‘The Tank Man’. Not only does the Russian threat sell military equipment, but so does the threat of Trump himself. "The best thing that could happen for Europe was the election of Trump," explains the CEO of the Belgian defense company Syensqo.⁷ While the population is frightened with tips on survival kits, the weapons manufacturers are counting out their profits. 

5. War against the working class

"Generally speaking, spending more on defense means spending less on other priorities," Mark Rutte explained to MEPs. The man who left the Netherlands in political chaos, at the mercy of far-right clown Geert Wilders, is now Secretary General of NATO. And he is on a mission, because he wants all countries to spend 3.5 percent of all their wealth on NATO from now on. 

Rutte also knows where to look for that money. Listen: "On average, European countries easily spend up to a quarter of their national income on pensions, health care and social security. We only need a small fraction of that money to strengthen defense."⁸

That’s how it goes. The boss of NATO is telling MPs that money from pensions, money from health care, and money from social security should go to war. "To make it somewhat tangible, the amount requested corresponds to about all pensions going down by twenty percent," a Belgian economist explained on public television.⁹

It is not just pensions that must give way. Everything, really everything is being sacrificed to take the military turn. The European Union has buried its ‘Green Deal’. The 10 billion euros that were reserved for the Sovereignty Fund, the European answer to the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), are reduced to a paltry one and a half billion. 

Germany, Washington is told, must become the hub for the war to the east, the land through which troops and equipment are transported. Today, the warmongers are demanding that the right to strike on the railways should be curtailed, and that fixed working hours of railroad workers, health care workers and any public services that could be involved in the military effort anywhere should be scrapped. 

Not only are union rights under pressure, so is freedom of speech. The warmongers pose as pacifists, accusing peace activists of being a kind of fifth column of ‘the enemy’. This mechanism is already being used today in a number of countries against anyone who raises their voice against the genocide in Gaza and the criminal complicity of the countries that supply the weapons to do so.

Meanwhile, even its own economy is being sacrificed on the altar of war. One of the greatest acts of self-destruction of the last three decades - perhaps the greatest - was the decoupling of German and European industry from Russian gas; a landmark victory for Washington that could henceforth tie Europe to extremely expensive and dirty shale gas from the United States. A self-imposed defeat for the European member states where gas and energy prices today are still four times more expensive than over the ocean. On top of that came the fact that the big food, distribution and transportation monopolies abused the dust of war to drive up their prices in search of maximum profit margins. Towering food and energy prices were the result. 

While governments announce one austerity plan after another, there is no limit to military spending. The 32 NATO countries already spend eight times more on defense than Russia, but their military shopping lists remain inexhaustible. And especially very expensive, such as the purchase of American F-35 aircraft, which would bind our country to the US military-industrial complex for years. A tank costs a few million euros. A single shot from the new MELLS defense system costs 100,000 euros. 

A system that spends billions of dollars to satisfy the hunger of the arms industry, while millions of people slide into food banks, have to combine two or three jobs, can no longer afford to care for their parents or children, is rotten to the core.

6. With each step, the Union digs deeper into the swamp

It was once thought that the European Union would come about like, say, Germany had become a nation-state: First a customs union, and then slowly, through conflicts and conflicts of interest, towards political unification. But the European nation-states never succeeded in overcoming their own internal contradictions. The steps toward integration come under external pressure. And meanwhile chaos reigns.

Six years ago, in 2019, a certain optimism still reigned among the ruling class about the possibilities of the European Union and programs such as the Green Deal. Today, commission president Von der Leyen is trying to avoid the collective depression, with pep talk and a general agreement on defense. The eastern axis of Germany-Poland-Baltic States is now fully aligned with the United States and defends a Union that lies at Washington's feet. 

Almost no Eurozone economy is growing at more than one percent a year. The average is barely 0.2 percent. And if Trump raises his import tariffs even further, Europe will be affected as well. "The European Union is very, very bad to us," Trump said during his inauguration, "so they're going to be in for tariffs. It's the only way."¹⁰

The largest economy, Germany, has been in recession for two years and is dragging its feet ahead of new elections in the hope that someone can revive German industry. The second economy, France, is completely deadlocked politically. Macron, with a minority government of his own, has put himself on the chains of Le Pen. The Dutch government is dragging its feet on the whims of Geert Wilders. Italy, the third largest economy in Europe, is led by Meloni, who wants to become close friends with Donald Trump. And in Austria, too, the door seems to be open to the far-right FPÖ. 

Europe has increasingly clung to the chains of NATO and Washington, and the more it does so, the fewer European leaders there are. Where are the European leaders? Where are the state leaders? They are not here, and Europe will not experience another De-Gaulle moment any time soon

France still sees itself as a P-5 state, a permanent member of the Security Council with its own nuclear weapons. But in the meantime, French imperialism has had to bite the sand in the Sahel, Paris is facing a popular outcry from Martinique to Mayotte, and the French have been bluffed in the AUKUS deal, in which the supply of nuclear submarines to Australia ended up going to the United Kingdom. All Paris is left with is a claim to leadership of European Union defense policy. 

But Rheinmetall and the German establishment also want to set themselves up as leaders of the new ‘European geopolitical power’. And so the contradictions between Germany and France remain strong, both on energy, and on military development. Without a new deeper integration, the Union will continue to weaken or fall apart. But there are deep contradictions about every step toward greater integration: about setting up ‘own revenues’ or not, about setting up Eurobonds to spread the debt, about tariffs against Chinese products, about independence from the European defense project, you name it. Trump will not fail to play the member states of the European Union further apart, and Elon Musk has already begun to do so. 

The European Union is fighting its demise, but with each new step it is digging itself deeper into the swamp. This Union is a union of crisis and war, and is not ‘reformable’. We need a totally different Europe.

7. Mobilizing against militarism and chauvinism

Let’s go back in time for a moment. In late July 1914, the leaders of the powerful socialist cooperative movement in Belgium were gathered in the ballroom of the Vooruit in Ghent, which had just opened at the time. The socialist leader Louis Bertrand briefly allowed himself to interrupt the discussions of the cooperative congress by announcing that war had broken out. He proposed to the congress the adoption of a motion asking "that the peoples endeavor to avert the specter of war that would destroy cooperative works."¹¹ The motion passed, and discussion continued on dividends, syrup and vinegar. Not a word about the disaster of war, which would also affect Belgium a few days later.

The anecdote tells a lot. The Belgian Workers' Party (BWP), then the social democratic party in Belgium, had built itself up as a strong working class party, with a large union force and the experience of three major general strikes under its belt, perhaps the first general strikes in the world. One way the BWP had gained a foothold among the young working class was through the socialist cooperative Vooruit, built around the bakery where one could get cheap and good bread. 

Eventually the preservation of cooperatives became the alpha and omega of the BWP, and even the start of World War I was seen in that light. Anything can happen, as long as our cooperative is not destroyed. It was not the cooperative that was destroyed, but the lives of countless sons of workers and peasants who were ground up in an industrial meat grinder. World War I became the end station of millions of young people who had yet to begin life. 

In the powerful general strike of March 1913, when more than 400,000 strikers took to the streets, virtually nothing was said about chauvinism and militarism nor about the threat of imminent war.

However, this issue was on the agenda of almost all congresses of the Second International, where the BWP was represented. There it was agreed to mobilize the population against militarism, chauvinism and war. The coming world war will be imperialist, argued the delegates of the Second International, it is about the division of the world, it is about conquest and colonies, and ordinary workers and peasants will pay the price. But the leadership of the BWP, meanwhile, had so identified itself with the Belgian state that it voted unreservedly for the war appropriations. 

What’s the use of being the best party on dividends, syrup, and vinegar if it all gets washed away by a destructive war?

The first answer is: it is useful. A party of the working class must be the best representative for the salt and oil of the working class, and as such be recognized by the working class. Whether pensions or wages, working conditions or living conditions, housing or energy prices, child cribs or elder care, the party of the working class must be engaged in class politics.

And that means doing surveys, listening, collecting proposals, taking action, changing things together with the people. And that year after year, in rain and wind. That's the essential work, and you can't skip that work. Nor can you replace it with all kinds of ‘statements’ about the working class, or ‘resolutions’ here or there. You have to do it. It’s the basis, but it is not enough.

8. Socialism instead of war

A fury, ‘a rage’, is raging among the working class, both in Europe and in the United States. People are angry, feeling unheard, not seen, not represented, and they are right. We should not be afraid of the dust flying around, and of the opinions going in all directions in a whirlpool because people have not been given any framework of analysis. 

Marxists should not fear the turbulent times to come, but see the will for radical change and seize it. The forces that have best prepared for the shocks ahead will be best placed to give them direction. That's what Naomi Klein taught us in her Shock Doctrine, and she's right.

We are not mere spectators of what is happening but are right in the middle of a piece of history and must be a driving force to steer the shocks in the right direction. 

I believe we need to build a project with a long-term vision, not just focusing on the coming month or year. A project to develop workers' parties to fight for socialism—a project that exudes confidence. Building a party takes time, tremendous effort, discipline, and the art of strategy and tactics. But it is possible if we are patient, capable of instilling confidence in workers within the party, if we invest in education and unity, and if we dare to speak from the strength of our convictions.

The socio-economic struggle is one thing. However, it is not enough. It is equally important to politicize that struggle and make people aware of the framework in which we live. The contradiction between labor and capital is a systemic contradiction—a contradiction inherent to capitalism itself. In its pursuit of maximum profit, capitalism leads to clashes, crises, and war.

The climate breakdown, the food crisis, the crushing debt crises, economic and military wars, exploitation, and global inequalities are shaking our planet to its core. Capitalism cannot offer a solution to the great challenges ahead. Only socialism can.

People want to be part of the wave of history. More than that: people want and are capable of creating those waves themselves. Not to shift a comma, but to change the world. It comes down to radiating that. The Left must strive to win and truly aim to win. Nobody joins losers.

The societal project of the Trumpists, Bolsonarists, Vox supporters, or other AfD proponents offers nothing to the working class. It is a project of divide and conquer, a project of hate and racism, a project of militarization and authoritarianism tailored to the ruling class. Why would we leave the working class to the far-right Pied Pipers of Hamelin? The working class is our class; that is where we must be—working, organizing, raising awareness, and mobilizing, falling, and getting back up again. Our societal model is one of the emancipation of labor. It is the only positive answer capable of channeling the fury of the working class in a constructive direction.

Everything depends on us—on our ability to seize new opportunities, on our confidence in the capacity of people to mobilize, organize, and seek a socialist perspective.

Thank you.

--

Peter Mertens 

General Secretary of the PVDA-PTB and federal MP of Belgium.