Democratise the armies, make them voluntary.

If somehow people in Europe became anarchists and got a backbone overnight, this rearmament would be necessary as well, with Russia and the USA on the loom. It would come from different political scales, but economically Europe needs an answer either way. The Cold War divide was not good for European autonomy and its perversion will neither.

My first impression:

Funny how 15 years ago there wasn’t €800 billion to help common citizens in the face of global recession. Instead we all had to go on an austerity course that allowed everything that helped the average citizen to decay, if it wasn’t outright cut. And now all these mainstream parties are running terrified of the far-right that seized on the fertile ground they left with these actions. But when it comes time to dump more money into massive industries, then there’s always more to be found.

Even in Germany the Holy Grail of politics that has kneecapped any effort to widen social services or address climate breakdown can finally be done away with. In order to dump money into the armaments industry, which (speaking non-ideologically and purely from a practical perspective) at least in the German case is massively putting the cart before the horse. The Bundeswehr is a joke, and has been for at least 15 years. They’ve been trying to reform it, which it needs before anyone throws money at it.

As far as wanting to feel safer, well I would contest the idea that dumping money into weapons actually makes people safer. We have seen such periods of military spending before in history, and they usually don’t make the world safer. Rather they make politicians feel more confident that, since they have a thousand hammers, everything must be a nail.

I hate that calls for peace have become hijacked by far-right parties that are only interested in either business with a kleptocratic irredentist authorianism in Russia or want to mirror that polis in their own countries. We need to work out a new perspective that doesn’t fall into blind militarism while also avoiding becoming targets for neo-imperialist forces. I don’t know what such a movement would look like practically, but perhaps we can take inspiration from anti-imperial movements of the 19th and 20th centuries.

As a former officer candidate, I feel like I’m well acquainted with at least the basics of defense.

Guns, tanks and missiles are essentially diplomacy by non-peaceful means. They go hand in hand. The EU has been a diplomatic and economic joke since its formation. Brexit in the last few years has done irreparable damage to the Union, which it desperately wants to pretend didn’t happen, but in all reality, without the UK, it’s nothing more than a joke. NATO is similarly a joke, as well as the UN and pretty much any other diplomatic structure ran by European countries. America’s revival of Manifest Destiny has shattered any real chance of Five Eyes or NATO being worth anything at all, despite the massive wins in breaking the historical neutrality of Sweden, Finland and warming relations with others. The UK is a self-serving wildcard and won’t help. The EU stands alone, militarily supported by the US to a comical degree. I seriously doubt if a EU Army division showed up on a front line facing a line of Russians, they would last longer than a week. They’re the doughboys. They have no serious experience.

Economically, the EU is a mess. Nordstream, not having Norway as part of the Union, reliance on Russian and OPEC oil… yeah. What the fuck has the EU done except shoot themselves in the face for the past few decades? Trade wars between the US, China and others will leave the EU economy looking somewhat like Greece in 2000 if not worse.

So then, I ask, what will money do? Fuck all. The EU has no prestige, no military might or experience, no economic leverage, no energy independence and generally is just irrelevant on the whole. EU nationalists desperately want to portray their ramshackle union as something that it isn’t, rather than accept the realities of the situation and work towards shoring up their weaknesses. Funnily enough, the only real way to shore up their weakness is trample over member states’ independence to build a proper federated state to have any chance of establishing the reforms necessary. This is obviously incredibly unpopular policy, and rather than actually do any of that, politicians would rather throw money at a problem like defense spending as an attempt to establish independence from Russia, the US, or anyone else.

You asked for an anarchist opinion on what the EU/Germany should do. I think it would behoove the Union to immediately start working on either federalizing and making autarkic policy to decouple from failing democracies. In lieu of that, they should reach out to their former colonies and commonwealth and engage with them on an equal level. China’s belt and road initiative, but actually fucking good. Spend money on actually implementing non-fossil fuel energy. Build battery factories, build chip factories.

They won’t do that though. They’ll just pay money to the MIC cause that’s “what the US did”

They’re all fascist garbage. USA and Russia are obviously trash empires. People somehow think Europe is better but it’s still a white supremacist empire based on colonialism, exploitation, etc.

The fact that all of these terrible groups are wasting endless resources on murdering people should not be supported or celebrated. While I do think that it would be better for Europe to defend itself rather than be dominated by USA, Russia, etal, it’s still a huge loss for humanity. The perpetrator is still the state, capitalism, imperialism, etc. - a system cooperatively maintained by every state and the violent global system of statehood. The same people and classes will profit regardless of their state’s nationalist branding. That’s the actual enemy.

I don’t think an EU army is necessarily a bad thing. By itself it isn’t worse than a national army (low bar, I know), but disagreements between nations will make it hard to use for foreign intervention purposes and deep integration will make it hard for parts of it to be used against other parts of it.

And once you think about an EU army it becomes quite clear that cost savings possible by cooperating that way are much better that burning lots of borrowed money on multiple national white elephants like currently often the case.