ReArm Europe, or the myth of a European defence for peace
Within the space of a few weeks, sensational announcements for rearming Europe have multiplied and fine proclamations in favour of peace and international law were made. Behind the scenes, however, the picture is less glorious: between the exacerbation of the global arms race and the defence of our contested hegemony, the militarisation of the EU is also a threat to peace and human security.
On 4 March Ursula von der Leyen presented the REARM Europe plan, on the eve of an emergency European summit conveyed to discuss defence and support for Ukraine. Two weeks later, on 19 March, the Commissioner for Defence Andrius Kubilius unveiled a White Paper on European Defence Readiness, together with a legislative text proposing a Security Action for Europe instrument (SAFE), and a Communication on defence expenditure aiming to give form to the main proposals of the REARM Europe plan. A title which, by the way, is evolving towards ‘Readiness 2030’ after the Spanish Prime Minister Pablo Sanchez complained that ‘REARM’ was a name difficult to sell to his coalition… If you are having trouble following, don’t worry, you are not the only one!
The main measures of the White Paper and ReArm Europe mainly benefit arms dealers
In short, the White Paper is a framework that includes the measures proposed by ReArm Europe, adds few other proposals and tries to bring it all into line with existing measures for the arms industry, such as the European Defence Fund. For those who regularly follow EU militarisation developments, most of the proposals come as no surprise since they had already been mentioned or in the pipeline for some time. They could therefore be summarised as ‘more of the same, only worse’, the ‘novelty’ lying more in their scale than in their nature.
Drastically increase military spending through debt
The most spectacular and widely publicised announcement is the €800 billion of additional military spending over 4 years. In fact most of this astronomical amount depends on the member states’ goodwill, and the Commission proposes two major incentives:
First a €150 billion-worth fund (the SAFE instrument, raised through financial markets), with which the EU would grant loans to requesting member states[1] to finance the joint purchase of military goods to replenish national stocks or to arm Ukraine.
Second, to consider military spending as ‘good debt’ by excluding increases since 2021 from the calculation of national debt under EU fiscal rules[2] for the next 4 years. This could “create a fiscal space” of up to €650 billion with an average increase of 1.5% in national military spending, according to Commission’s estimates.
Before such proposals come into force however, Member States need to agree on the precise modalities, accept a certain degree of control by the Commission, and be prepared to question austerity and to go into debt, only to have to backtrack in four years’ time.
The partly hypothetical nature of these measures does not make them less problematic, when the austerity argument is being used to call social protection into question, or to slash public spending on health or education.
Facilitating the arms trade to the detriment of social rights and the environment
Another set of proposals aims at deregulating in favour of the arms industry, not only defence-specific rules governing procurements or intra-EU transfers, but also general regulations that are presented as obstacles to the military industry’s ability to boost production and sales, and to access private[3] and public finance. The aim is to create a ‘single defence market’ and to facilitate military mobility, i.e. the movement of troops and military equipment across Europe.
This will concern in particular environmental and social rules (authorisation of production site facilities, workers protection, etc.) as well as the criteria governing sustainable finance, based on a greenwashing narrative that presents weapons as a prerequisite to security, sustainability and democracy (Akkerman, 2023). After years of pressure, the European Investment Bank has just dropped almost all its restrictions on the financing of military activities, with the exception of lethal weapons.
The White Paper also plans to continue facilitating the sector’s access to European civilian programmes, this time with the Cohesion fund supporting regional development in its sights.
It should be noted that these measures are in addition to the programmes specifically dedicated to the military industry, whose precursor programmes date back from 2017 (Calvo, 2021): the European Defence Fund (€8 billion), the ASAP (support for production, €500 million) and EDIRPA (support for joint procurement, €310 million) instruments, and the European Defence Industrial Programme (EDIP) still under negotiation (at least €1.5 billion).
‘A strong Europe for peace’? What’s behind the scenes…
Justifications for EU militarisation could be summarised as ‘A strong Europe for peace’ that would deepen the European project, preserve our prosperity and protect us against our enemies with deterrence through force.
There is a lot to say against this simplistic narrative, from the heavy arms industry lobbying on EU policies (Akkerman, 2023), including the Critical Raw Material Act (Petitjean, 2023), to the limitation of the Parliament’s normal oversight role (Calvo, 2021), concerns raised by the Ombudsman about potential conflicts of interest, ethical checks that do not live up to international standards (Akkerman, 2022) or concerns about the type of technologies being developed (Brunet, 2025).
However let’s focus here on two major reasons why this has little to do with peace: the emphasis on supporting the arms industry and the desire to preserve Western hegemony.
A stronger Europe… or more subsidies for arms manufacturers?
Whatever one may think of the Russian threat, the EU collectively has spent four to six times more on military expenditure than Russia over 20 years, and even two to three times more until recently. Quantitatively, the EU27 is collectively better equipped, sometimes by far, in terms of manpower and military capabilities[4], to which we can add the other European NATO countries. If we were still not in a position to defend ourselves against Russia, it would not take a genius to see that military spending is perhaps not the issue…
The EU itself regularly points that the key weakness lies in the duplication, fragmentation and lack of interoperability between 27 defence actors, not to say about the common command issue. The policies adopted to date do not resolve these difficulties (Calvo, 2021), because this would require member states to trust each other, give up short-term national and industrial interests, as well as share a common vision of what this common defence should look like, starting with the relationship with NATO…
This is demonstrated once again today in the looming debates around the EDIP proposal or the new SAFE instrument, on grants versus loans or the degree of European preference.
In the meantime, the EU continues doing what it does best: support the private sector, in this case pouring tens of billions to arms manufacturers, as the lowest common denominator on which everyone more or less agrees and hopes to benefit from…
Boosting arms exports and exacerbating the global arms race
The policies proposed since 2016 essentially aim at strengthening the global competitiveness of the arms industry (Calvo, 2021), i.e. its capacity to export, and the White Paper makes the picture even clearer: after funding military research and development (EDF), supporting production (ASAP & EDIP) and joint procurement (EDIRPA & EDIP), the EU is now proposing national or European stockpiles and pushing for a pilot European Military Sales Mechanism (EDIP-EDIS) similar to the US Foreign Military Sales, which would facilitate government to government arms sales.[5]
The Commission also encourages joint ventures with Ukrainian arms companies, in order to “profit from Ukraine’s war experience” and “provide cost-efficient defence products to the global market” (European Commission, 2025:12). To note that Ukrainian companies are not subject to the same social and environmental standards as EU countries nor to the same norms about arms export controls.
Arms dealers now claim that they need long-term orders, up to a decade, in order to ramp-up production. Deterrence only, even if it was to be efficient to prevent wars, will not absorb such levels of production, storage capacities are not infinite and expiry dates also exist for many military goods. The other possible outlet is exports outside the EU, which will largely go to authoritarian regimes and countries in crisis and/or conflict situations, as it was the case before the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Centre Delas, 2020).
In other words, EU militarisation is exacerbating the global arms race which in turn fuels violence and poverty, causing the affected populations to flee (Fotiadis, 2021); refugees that Europe wants to turn away with the help of the same industrial players (Akkerman, 2021)! And that’s not the only reason why this militarisation is a threat to peace and human security.
Technological and economic hegemony, for which security and whose prosperity?
The white paper also reiterates the various justifications to EU militarisation, ranging from employment and growth to the need to ‘face the re-emergence of imperialisms’, and insists on the need to stay one step ahead in the technological race and global competitiveness, presenting the arms sector as the new panacea to be able to compete with China and the United States.
Who cares if numerous studies show that the alleged defence sector’s unique contribution to growth, employment and innovation is largely a myth (Holden, 2016 ; Stamegna, 2024), and that from an economic rationality perspective, peace is much cheaper than war?
Probably because it is more about maintaining our access to the energy and new raw materials needed to preserve our hegemony. The EU should become a hard power to protect what is euphemistically called our ‘way of life’, namely our privileges[6]. This hegemonic, even imperialist, narrative was already at play since 2016 (Calvo, 2021) but is now more uninhibited since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: we need only remember Josep Borrell’s explicit speech comparing Europe to a garden that should go the jungle, i.e. the rest of the world, in order not to be invaded…
But what security and prosperity are we talking about, and who will benefit from it?
In Ukraine today “farmers, labourers and the working classes are paying a disproportionate price in this conflict” as the neo-liberal agenda continues deregulating labour laws and reducing social protection.[7] In Europe, sooner or later “national budgets would need to be cut elsewhere to accommodate rising defense costs” the Commission had to acknowledge, something that will again disproportionately affect the working classes given the dominant neo-liberal economic narrative. And the Greek would agree: while the country “has consistently exceeded NATO’s 2% GDP defense spending target” for long, it also “had one of the highest risks of poverty and social exclusion in the EU” in 2024…
To add on, military spending also has an influence on greenhouse gas emissions (Buxton, 2022) and if the world’s militaries combined were a country, they would have the fourth largest national carbon footprint in the world, estimated to be at least 5.5% of global GHG.[8] Yet hundreds of billions could be diverted to the military while commitments to limit the rise in temperatures or to help those most exposed to climate change are not being honoured. And we could go on with similar examples…
If you prepare war, you will get… just war
We are told over again that we have to face a ‘return’ of imperialism and that Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine is the greatest danger threatening international law and its values. As said before, imperialism did not go away with the collapse of the Soviet Union. As for International Law, one wonders what puts it most at risk: a dictator violating it once again as he has done for the past 20 years, or the double standard widely practised by those who proclaim themselves its most ardent defenders, to the point of turning a blind eye on a likely genocide in Gaza perpetrated by a ‘like-minded partner’?
Europe is indeed at a turning point: either stick to the law of the strongest and prepare for future wars in order to maintain Western hegemony a little longer, until it is replaced by another imperialism, or finally truly align our actions with our proclaimed values and International Law (which by the way includes supporting Ukraine one way or another against an illegal and unjustified invasion), to contribute to a different and fairer world order. There is no way to do both as these two paths are intrinsically incompatible.
Laëtitia Sédou is EU project officer for the European Network Against Arms Trade (ENAAT).
References
Akkerman M. (2021), Financing border wars – The border industry, its financiers and human rights, Transnational Institute, Amsterdam
Akkerman M., Brunet P., Rodriguez Alvarez J., Ní Bhriain N. & others (2022), Fanning the flames, how the EU is fuelling a new arms race, European Network against Arms trade & Transnational Institute, Amsterdam
Akkerman M., Meulewaeter, C. (2023), From war lobby to war economy, How the arms industry shapes European policies, European Network against Arms trade, Brussels
Brunet P. (2025), The European Defence Fund: the opaque use of public funds, Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau & European Network against Arms trade, Barcelona
Buxton N. & others (2022), Climate Collateral How military spending accelerates climate breakdown, Transnational Institute, Amsterdam
Calvo Rufanges J. and others (2020), Arms trade, conflicts and human rights. Analysis of European arms exports to countries in armed conflict and human rights violations, Centre Delàs d’Estudis per la Pau, ECP and IDHC, Barcelona
Calvo Rufanges J. & others (2021), A militarised Union – Understanding and confonting the militarisation of the European Union, Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung Brussels Office & European Network against Arms trade, Brussels
European Commission (2025), Joint White Paper for European Defence Readiness 2030, European Commission, Brussels
Fotiadis A., Ní Bhriain N. (2021), Smoking Guns – How European arms exports are forcing millions from their homes, Transnational Institute, Amsterdam
Holden P. & Al. (2016) ‘Indefensible – Seven myths that sustain the global arms trade’, Zed Books, London
Petitjean O., Verheecke L. (2023), Blood on the Green Deal, How the EU is boosting the mining and defence industries in the name of climate action, Corporate Europe Observatory and Observatoire des multinationales, Paris/Brussels
Stamegna M., Bonaiuti C., Maranzano P., Pianta M. (2024),The Economic Impact of Arms Spending in Germany, Italy, and Spain, in Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, volume 30 issue 4 (last accessed: 30 March 2025)
[1]Other countries or their industry could be involved in the schemes: Ukraine or Norway, but also ‘like-minded partners’ with whom security and defence partnership agreement are signed: South Korea, Japan and Canada, possibly UK and even Turkey in the future
[2]The European Stability and Growth Pact prohibits national debt to exceed 3% of GDP
[3]Basically, your savings: for example the Belgian bank Belfius made the move while the idea was finally abandoned for the popular french Livret A
[4]The only -notable- exception is air and missile defence, however not considered as an existential vulnerability
[5]government-to-government agreements make it possible to avoid negotiations with manufacturers and applications for export licences
[6]‘Privilege’ here should be understood in line with the concept of ‘white privilege’: not all white people / Westerners are privileged per se, but their situation would be far worse if they were not white / not Westerners
[7]The euobserber article is based on interviews with different Ukrainian grass-root movements, such as the Social Movement strongly engaged in supporting soldiers in the front, and the labour lawyer Vitaliy Dudin
[8]Estimates do not include the impact of war fighting (fires, damages to infrastructure and ecosystems, reconstruction…), meaning that the ‘military carbon footprint’ might be far higher.