In March 2025, the European Commission unveiled a plan to mobilise up to €800 billion for defence by 2030 and labeled it “Readiness”. Behind the alarmist rhetoric lies the single largest redirection of public resources in a generation: away from the things that actually keep ordinary Europeans safe, and towards the balance sheets of arms manufacturers.
The mechanism deserves scrutiny, because it tells you who this is really for. The centrepiece, the €150 billion SAFE loan instrument, was pushed through under Article 122 of the Treaty, an emergency provision that cuts the European Parliament out of the decision entirely. Alongside it, member states are invited to trigger the “national escape clause” of the very fiscal rules that, for fifteen years, were wielded to justify cuts to pensions, hospitals and schools.
The iron discipline that applied when the spending was aimed at citizens now becomes elastic to benefit the military. Suddenly there is money, or rather the money was always there, just not for our schools, hospitals, or infrastructure.
Consider what €800 billion could buy beyond killing machines. It is enough to insulate Europe’s housing stock, rebuild public health systems hollowed out by a decade of austerity, fund the green transition that climate science demands – and still leave change. Instead it will buy missiles, drones, and the promise of more debt for the public shoulders, to be serviced with further cuts. Every euro committed to this build-up is a euro withdrawn from a future worth defending.
Beyond jingoism, the defenders of rearmament reach for the language of jobs and growth, a kind of military Keynesianism dressed up as industrial strategy. But weapons are among the least productive things a state can produce or buy. A tank used destroys; unused, rusts. The economic multiplier that flows from a hospital, a school or a rail line simply does not flow from an artillery shell. What rearmament reliably produces is shareholder value for Rheinmetall, Leonardo and their transatlantic partners, and a political class newly dependent on the industry it has enriched.
Nor does any of this make us safer. The premise that a continent bristling with more weapons is a continent at peace collapses on contact with history. Arms races do not de-escalate. A Europe that defines its future through military readiness will find itself trapped in the logic of permanent threat, where every neighbour is a danger and every social demand a luxury we cannot afford. Security built on war is no security at all.
There is another path. Real security means common security: diplomacy that takes peace as seriously as generals take war, cooperation rather than confrontation, and public investment that secures a decent life. A continent that feeds, houses, educates and heals its people is genuinely harder to destabilise, far harder than one that has merely stockpiled more steel at the cost of the above. It means refusing the false choice we are offered between a defenceless Europe and a militarised one, and insisting that the people who will pay for this build-up are allowed a say in whether it happens at all.
That refusal has a date and a place. On June 14, peace movements, trade unions and citizens from across the continent will converge on Brussels under a simple banner: Welfare, not Warfare. The demonstration gathers at Brussels-Nord station, the focal point of a decentralised month of action carrying the same demand into cities across Europe: cut military spending, and invest instead in health, education, work, climate and social protection.
DiEM25 is one of the initiators of this campaign because the question it poses is the question of our decade: who is Europe for? If the answer is the people who live here, then €800 billion belongs to them: to their clinics, their classrooms and their children’s future, not to the balance books of the war industry.
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