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By Fabian Scheidler / Substack
The European Union, Britain and other European NATO members have embarked on a path of massive militarization, which in its speed and ambition is unprecedented since World War II. While most NATO members had previously been unwilling or unable to meet the goal of spending two percent of their GDP for the military, a target set in 2014, they suddenly jumped to a commitment of five per cent per year at the 2025 NATO summit, bowing to Donald Trump’s pressure. Only the Spanish government refused to comply.
What NATO, its member states and major media are not communicating is the fact that five per cent of GDP corresponds to around 50 per cent of national budgets. If states were indeed to implement their commitments, they would have to drastically reduce spending on welfare, including education and healthcare, while simultaneously swelling their national deficits. The Financial Times summed up the agenda in a March 2025 headline: ‘Europe Must Trim its Welfare State to Build a Warfare State’. In other words, the planned militarization is class war from above. Although governments have somewhat watered down their commitments, stating that only 3.5 per cent will go directly to the military while 1.5 per cent is meant to revamp infrastructures for military use, even 35 per cent of national budgets would still be a major blow for what is left of the European welfare model.
Massive cuts to public spending in order to channel the funds into the military-industrial complex are on the agenda in most European countries. The German government is among the most zealous in this respect. Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) pledged to triple the military budget from 52 billion € in 2024 to an unprecedented 153 billion in 2029, while chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) has already announced drastic cuts in unemployment benefits to fill some of the gap. Resistance within the Bundestag is eerily feeble. The Greens have long been among the most ardent advocates of rearmament and in March 2025 they voted in favour of a constitutional amendment that has removed all budget constraints for the military and intelligence services while maintaining austerity for all other types of spending. The right-wing Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which has been leading in some recent polls, is equally devoted to the military build-up and a cutback of the welfare state. While Die LINKE officially opposes this agenda, their representatives in the second federal chamber, the Bundesrat, have voted for the constitutional amendment, causing unrest within the party. For some observers, the lack of parliamentary opposition has brought back sinister memories of the war credits in 1914, which were unanimously approved in the Reichstag – with the votes of the SPD.
In other European countries, however, more resistance has emerged. In the UK, Keir Starmer met fierce opposition to his plans to cut welfare benefits, even within his own Labour Party, and was forced to backtrack. In France, prime minister François Bayrou was toppled by a motion of no confidence over a € 44 billion budget cut plan. In Spain, mass demonstrations against rearmament have put significant pressure on prime minister Sanchez to limit military spending.
While it remains unclear to what extent European governments will be able to push through their ‘all guns, no butter’ agenda, the onslaught on public services and the working class is ongoing and pervasive. Unbound militarization has become the key project of the European Union, which is trying to mend its fractured foundations by forging a military union.
The militarization of German society
In Germany, a wave of militarization that would have been unthinkable a few years ago is sweeping through the country, affecting schools, universities, the media, and public spaces. Tramways are painted in military camouflage. Huge advertisements for the army depict war as a great adventure that strengthens team spirit. The Bundeswehr is aggressively recruiting young people in the streets, at school, and at universities. Even minors under 18 are being recruited, in violation of the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, as organizations such as Terre des Hommes point out. Youth officers are sent into classrooms where they are advertising the army in front of students who are sometimes barely 13 years old. Rather than encouraging debates about the military at school, the army is being given free rein. The administration is also planning to introduce regular civil defense drills in schools, with the explicit intention of preparing the students mentally for war.
In the media, the German public broadcaster ARD has started to promote the army and its preparations for war in its children’s program ‘9 ½’, with recommendations on how to get involved. The program does not ask any critical questions about the army, nor does it mention the fact that deployment to war zones can result in death and trauma. The same is true of the second public broadcaster, which advertises the army as a cute and charitable force of peace in its children’s program ZDFtivi.
Universities are increasingly being forced to cooperate with the military. While a few federal states still prohibit military research in public universities and around 70 universities have voluntarily committed to engage exclusively in civil research, Robert Habeck (The Greens) declared in early 2025, when he was vice chancellor, that we ‘need to rethink the strict separation of military and civilian use and development’ in academia. In Bavaria, the administration has already banned any ‘civil clauses’ in universities, eliminating the option of declining military research. Furthermore, the German Army has developed a comprehensive classified ‘Operation Plan Germany’ to subordinate civil institutions to military objectives.
These concerted efforts to create a Warfare State are not least intended to transform the attitudes of the German population, which in its majority has been skeptical of the military, and of foreign involvements in particular, for decades. Since the late 1960s and throughout the 70s and 80s, the rise of peace movements had been able to overcome deep rooted militaristic traditions in Germany. In 1981 at least 300,000 people demonstrated in Bonn against nuclear NATO rearmament. The Green Party, founded one year earlier, played a key role in this movement. Its founding manifesto demanded the immediate ‘dissolution of military blocs, especially NATO and the Warsaw Pact’. At the height of the Cold War, it called for ‘the dismantling of the German arms industry and its conversion to peaceful production’.
However, with its first participation in a federal government in 1998, the party reversed these positions by 180 degrees, pushing for the illegal NATO war against Serbia, which had no UN mandate. Since then, the party has been among the most vocal proponents of NATO expansion and foreign interventions, while its leaders have been co-opted into transatlantic think tanks like the German Marshall Fund and the Atlantik-Brücke.
A similar development can be observed in the SPD, which under Chancellor Willy Brandt and his adviser Egon Bahr had once been a leading force of détente policies. Their efforts decisively contributed to the creation of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 1973 and prepared the ground for the peaceful end of the Cold War and German reunification after 1990. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the dominant faction within the SPD renounced détente policies and even blamed the war in Ukraine on them, in a remarkable distortion of history. While a small minority around the former parliamentary leader Rolf Mützenich still calls for sincere peace negotiations and limits to the military build-up, the hawks have largely taken over the party.
The ‘rules-based international order’ and the Gaza genocide
The project of the Warfare State, and the sacrifices that the population is supposed to make for its creation, is portrayed by political leaders both in Germany and the EU as being without alternative. The argument justifying this position is based on two pillars. The first one is the claim that massive rearmament is required to defend democracy, ‘Western values’, and international law against a despotic rogue state that is willing to dismantle the ‘rules-based international order’. While the Russian invasion was indeed a serious crime and a massive breach of international law, the idea that major Western powers such as the US, Britain, France, and Germany are champions of international law is hardly convincing in the first place, since precisely these countries have engaged in illegal wars of aggression, from Serbia to Iraq and beyond, for decades – not to mention the plethora of equally illegal neocolonial regime change operations, of which the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is but the most recent example. With the complicity of these states in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the myth of the virtuous West fighting for international law has irrevocably collapsed.
Within Europe, German governments have particularly excelled in trampling on international law when it comes to Palestine. After the Israeli onslaught began, the German government increased its arms exports to Israel tenfold, to a total 326 million euros in 2023 alone, making it the world’s second-largest supplier of arms to Israel, behind only the US. In November 2023, when overwhelming evidence of systematic Israeli war crimes had long been available, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) declared that Israel ‘is committed to human rights and international law and acts accordingly’. Even after the International Court of Justice deemed South Africa’s genocide lawsuit against Israel to be ‘plausible’ in January 2024, the German government did not alter its stance. In October 2024, when more than 40,000 Palestinians had already been killed, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock (Greens) went on record in the German Bundestag: ‘If Hamas terrorists hide behind people, behind schools, then […] civilian sites can also lose their protected status […]. Germany stands by this, for us this means the security of Israel.’ With these words, she effectively dismissed the Geneva Conventions, which oblige signatories, including Israel and Germany, to prioritize the protection of civilians over military targets and prohibit collective punishment.
After Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and many renowned genocide scholars, including the Israeli historian Omer Bartov, had declared that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, the German government’s commissioner for combating anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, proclaimed in May 2025: ‘Calling this genocide is anti-Semitic.’[9]
Under Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU), who immediately after his election pledged to invite Benjamin Netanyahu to Berlin despite the arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, Germany has been the main force in the EU blocking all initiatives to sanction Israel for its behavior, for example by suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement. German authorities and institutions have also engaged in suppressing freedom of speech on a scale unprecedented in recent German history, including attempts to prevent the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Territories, Francesca Albanese, from speaking in Berlin.
With this behavior, the German authorities have openly dismissed the United Nations, international law, and basic human rights in order to enable Israel to continue its genocide. Given this track record – which is largely in line with the behavior of the US, Britain, and France – the idea that these countries are committed to defending the UN charter, is simply absurd.
The Russian threat
While the argument that the new arms race is about defending a rules-based international order and the inviolability of borders (which Israel violates on a daily basis) has lost credibility, and with Ukraine’s chances of winning back their territories dwindling, another narrative has emerged to justify the military build-up: the threat of a Russian invasion of NATO countries. In June 2024, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius stated that Germany must become ‘fit for war’ because Russia will be able to invade NATO by 2029.
However, there is no indication that Russia has any intention of attacking NATO countries, let alone Germany. Even the annual US intelligence report clearly states that the Kremlin ‘is almost certainly not interested in a direct military conflict with US and NATO forces’.[10] Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces and anything but a Russian stooge, confirmed: ‘Vladimir Putin does not want a direct war with NATO.’ In fact, there are no plausible motives for an attack on NATO, which would plunge Russia into a devastating conflict with the most powerful military alliance in human history. Even if the Russian leadership were utterly insane and suicidal (for which there is no evidence), they would lack the means to undertake such an endeavor. For years, Russia has made only slow advances against an exhausted Ukrainian army. NATO’s military budget is still ten times larger than Russia’s, and European NATO states alone spend more than three times as much and are overwhelmingly superior to Russia militarily.
Given that the Russian threat to NATO is clearly greatly exaggerated, even in the eyes of Western intelligence, the question arises as to why the German government, along with other European leaders, continues to circulate the narrative of an impending invasion. The question becomes even more pertinent given that the EU and its most powerful member states are actively undermining serious peace negotiations, thus increasing the risk of a major confrontation with Russia. The proposal to send NATO troops to Ukraine in the wake of a possible ceasefire, for example, increases the incentives for Russia to continue fighting, since preventing NATO troops from being deployed to Ukraine was a key motive for starting the war in the first place. While the EU should have a clear interest in extinguishing the fire on its doorstep, it continues to pour more oil on it, compromising its own security interests as well as Ukraine’s. What is driving this seemingly irrational behavior?
The geopolitical upheaval and the ‘international division of humanity’
A possible answer to this puzzle is that a leading sector of the political and economic elites in Germany and the EU view the project of rampant militarization as a means to counter the massive upheavals that are threatening their power on a geopolitical, domestic, and economic level. And for this purpose, the maintenance of a major threat, of a terrifying enemy that will not go away quickly, is indispensable. If the Russian threat, in contrast, turned out to be not as serious as it is portrayed, and if Russia could be accommodated with a peace deal that includes Ukrainian neutrality, the complete system of justification for the military build-up would crumble.
To consider this argument more carefully, we need to take a closer look at the historical context. Geopolitically, the West is losing its dominant position in the world-system that it has occupied for centuries, a process that has triggered severe turbulence and fractures within the Western bloc. The US is deploying all possible strategies to regain its once hegemonic position, not hesitating to throw the EU under the bus if necessary. After the Biden administration’s strategy of weakening Russia through the Ukraine war failed, driving Russia in the arms of Beijing, the Trump administration has been desperately trying to pull out of Ukraine in order to pivot to Asia and contain its main rival China. For this reason, the US is attempting to shift the financial burden of the war to Europe.
For European governments, and the German administration in particular, which have been following US instructions to the letter while subordinating their own interests, this U-turn has provoked considerable chaos and confusion. First of all, they had bowed to US pressure to cut all ties with Russia. While this did nothing to end the Ukraine war, it caused severe economic pain, especially to Germany. Brussels and Berlin have also embarked on a hawkish position towards Beijing and are even willing to curtail their economic ties with China to please Washington. But when Trump took office in January 2025, it turned out that the reward for this obedient behavior was just a slap in the face in the form of massive tariffs on European exports, which again are particularly painful for Germany. Ever since, the Europeans find themselves increasingly isolated and surrounded by more or less hostile powers with hardly any reliable partners. To make things worse, the support of countries like Germany for the genocide in Gaza has deeply alienated much of the Global South.
While this could have been a wake-up call for Europe to change course and reposition itself in a new multipolar word, decouple from a declining and increasingly erratic US empire, and act as a moderating force of peace between the great powers, EU leaders have chosen a different path. By pledging to massively increase their military spending, they are trying to appease the US, mend the fractured transatlantic alliance, and keep Washington from imposing further economic burdens. At the same time, European leaders are seeing an opportunity to refurbish their dwindling position in the world-system by military means. In Germany, this project dates back to the times of the War on Terror when German administrations ramped up foreign deployments in order to ‘defend German interests at the Hindu Kush’ and around the world. The Russian invasion has provided an even stronger justification for this endeavor, which allows Germany to bypass some of the historic distrust that other Western nations have harboured towards a German military build-up.
Despite the rivalry and in-fighting among Western nations, the new wave of militarization has at least one common geopolitical denominator: the maintenance of what Vijay Prashad has called the ‘international division of humanity’. The capitalist world-system has been based for centuries on the dominance of white Western nations over the peoples of the Global South through colonization and neocolonial rule. This order is threatened by the rise of the Global South and the BRICS, and Germany, much like other European powers, is not willing to let the ‘darker nations’ have an equal say in world affairs and give up its own privileged position among the top predators of the food chain. Given that the economic leverage and the soft power of Germany are in decline, its leaders seem to believe that they can reverse trends by increased militarization.
Economic decay and remilitarization
On the economic and domestic level, Germany has become, like many other Western countries, a society in decline. One child in five lives in poverty. Much infrastructure is in desperate shape, some of it crumbling, including schools and bridges. German rail, once a model for many countries, has become a symbol of mismanagement and decay. Investment in education and healthcare is lagging behind and income and wealth inequality has risen sharply since the mid-1990s, remaining high for over a decade now.
This situation is the result of decades of austerity and privatization, which was promoted by social democrats, greens, conservatives and liberals alike. Additionally, since the Nord Stream pipelines were bombed and sanctions against Russia imposed, energy prices have soared, putting a significant burden on German industries. For the last two years, Germany has undergone a severe recession, the longest economic downturn in the history of the Federal Republic. This only became known after the Federal Statistical Office had to admit in July 2025 that it had previously circulated false, sugar-coated data. To make things worse, the German car industry, once a powerhouse of the economy, has quickly lost traction, especially in competition with China. US tariffs are further undermining the position of the former export champion.
This dire economic situation has far-reaching social and political consequences. With economic contraction, the contradiction between the interests of capital and labor becomes more pronounced and capitalists adopt, as Nancy Fraser puts it, cannibalistic methods to ensure the continued growth of their profits. Speculation in housing is driving rents ever higher, making life in major cities unaffordable for many. At the same time, spending for public services and infrastructure is being cut back even more drastically.
All this adds to the frustration of a large part of the population that is losing faith not only in this or that particular administration, but in the political system as a whole. Surveys show that only 21 per cent of Germans still trust the government, while the figure for political parties is just 13 per cent. Moreover, the social and economic decline is perceived as part of a sheer endless chain of bad news and disasters to which politics not only has no answers, but which it actually exacerbates. With further calamities through wars, climate chaos, and unchained AI looming, the grand narrative that things are getting better, at least in the long term, is becoming less convincing by the day. The central promise of continuous progress that has held the Western world together across political camps for centuries is falling apart before our very eyes, in Germany as in most other Western nations. To the extent that capitalist modernity is no longer able to fulfill its central promises, ideological and political cohesion is becoming increasingly fragile and centrifugal forces are on the rise.
The military build-up can provide useful solutions to this mayhem from the point of view of the dominant political and economic forces, which are trying to maintain their power, privileges, and wealth in the systemic crisis. First of all, nurturing the military-industrial complex could be seen as a form of military Keynesianism to boost national industries and restart growth. However, it is doubtful that such a project will work on a macroeconomic level. While German arms producers are indeed booming – Rheinmetall alone is expecting additional orders worth 300 to 400 billion euros, the company’s stock value has increased fifteenfold in recent years – nevertheless, much of the weaponry that the German government intends to buy will be produced in the US, including F-35 jets, Boeing Chinook helicopters, and Arrow 3 antiballistic missile systems.
If the program was indeed about restarting the national economy by creating domestic demand the question arises as to why German governments, as in other Western countries, have been and still are so unwilling to spend more money on education, healthcare, and other public services, which would create domestic demand much more effectively. The March 2025 constitutional amendment gets to the heart of this paradox: While maintaining austerity for society at large, it has enabled limitless spending and borrowing for the military and the deep state.
Polycrisis and the permanent state of exception
Noam Chomsky once remarked that the dismantling of the welfare state in favor of the military-industrial complex is an old project dating back to the times of the New Deal. According to Chomsky, social benefits whet people’s appetite for more self-determination and democratic rights and thus stand in the way of authoritarian rule. Military spending, by contrast, generates high profits without the dangerous gift of social rights. Neoliberal forces in the EU have been pushing to curtail public welfare and to increase military spending for decades. Keeping the Russian threat alive is a great help in legitimizing this project.
The full answer, however, might reach even deeper. With ideological coherence in the West crumbling, the War State can provide a sense of direction and unity among the governing elites. Moreover, the threat of an overwhelming enemy, whether real or fictitious, allows the imposition of a state of exception on society as a whole. ‘Sovereign is who decides on the state of exception’, wrote Carl Schmitt, the right-wing German state theorist as early as 1922. In the face of an escalating polycrisis, the state of exception is an option of introducing authoritarian rule and eliminating dissent without having to formally abandon the institutions of a representative democracy. If the world is, as we are told, in the middle of an existential battle between good and evil, then there is no space for deliberation, and dissent becomes treason.
The state of exception also enables massive upward redistribution, funnelling trillions of dollars into the hands of the billionaire class without much democratic oversight. Special budgets such as the German ‘Sondervermögen’ (off-budget funds) and sweeping ad-hoc legislation are typical of this shock strategy. In fact, it can be argued that Western capitalism, which has been in a crisis of accumulation for decades, can only be kept afloat with these massive injections of public money.1 This is all the more true of a stagnating and even shrinking German economy.
Moreover, the latent or manifest state of war is a perfect means of distracting an increasingly skeptical population from considering the systemic root causes of the deepening polycrisis. Whether it is inequality or climate chaos, the logic of war calls on us to put these issues aside in order to defend Western civilization against the Saurons and Voldemorts of the barbaric East. This playbook is reminiscent of the War on Terror, which was, apart from being a disaster for the world, very successful in shifting the focus away from social and ecological issues, while scapegoating Muslims and migrants.
Today, as then, war seems to be the only remaining option for a body politic that has no answers for anything, whether it is mass poverty, climate chaos, popular anger, or geopolitical challenges. While it is often said that politics is about the solution of problems, the War State project is about distracting from all real problems by hypnotizing the public and focusing its attention on an external threat.
Self-destruction or common security?
The consequences of the War State project are devastating on all levels. Above all, the security situation of the EU in general and Germany in particular is going to significantly deteriorate if the path of rearmament and confrontation is pursued and meaningful diplomacy sabotaged. One of the most important lessons from the first Cold War is that the risk of nuclear war does not result predominantly from one side pushing the red button out of the blue, but from misunderstandings and perceived imminent threats, which significantly increase when dialogue is suspended and sables are rattled at the borders. Germany, which has announced it will allow new US medium-range missiles to be stationed on its territory, would be among the first countries to be wiped out in the event of a conflagration.
Furthermore, by denying the new geopolitical realities and trying to maintain its privileged position in the word-system through rearmament, Germany will only increase its isolation on the world stage. The War State project will also exacerbate the social crisis by diverting funds away from much-needed investments in public services, a policy that in turn will lead to more political instability. The far right would benefit even more, while the EU could risk breaking apart under the burden of conflicting interests and public anger.
For Germany and its allies, there is only one reasonable way out of this spiral of self-destruction: to accept the fact that they are not calling the shots any more, that a multipolar order is inevitable and indeed already a reality. If Germany was able to accept this fact it could play a constructive role in mediating between the great powers. Indeed, it has an impressive tradition of détente that it could invoke. In the 1970s and early 1980s, German politicians such as Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr were key in the development of the concept of ‘common security’. As former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, put it in his foreword to the landmark 1982 Olof Palme Report: ‘No nation can achieve real security alone. […] Because security in the nuclear age is synonymous with common security.’2 In other words, cooperation with geopolitical adversaries is a prerequisite for survival. In this approach, the key to peace lies in respecting the security interests of all actors. Not only Israelis, Ukrainians, Germans, and Americans are entitled to respect for their security interests, but also Palestinians, Russians, Iranians, Chinese, and Colombians. While the German administration, along with much of the West, is today opposed to the very concept it once helped to create, the vast majority of the Global South wants a multipolar order based on common security, not confrontation. Germany has to decide what side of history it wants to be on.
Welfare, not warfare
The convergence of movements around the issue of peace will play a key role in determining whether the race to the abyss can be stopped. The attacks on welfare in order to finance the arms build-up have already incited mass popular resistance in countries like Britain, Spain, France, and Italy. While the German peace movements are still historically weak due to internal splits, a series of major demonstrations this autumn, both on the issues of Gaza and Ukraine, might indicate a turning point. Stopping the military build-up and the new bloc confrontation is a key issue for the left in Europe, as all possible progressive achievements in terms of workers’ rights, democracy, and environmental justice would be wiped out if EU leaders get their way with the War State agenda. After all, it’s about welfare, not warfare, today more than ever.
You can find more work by Fabian Scheidler at http://www.fabianscheidler.com/. You can find his book The End of the Megamachine. A Brief History of a Failing Civilization here.
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Fabian Scheidler
Fabian Scheidler is the author of the book “The End of the Megamachine. A Brief History of a Failing Civilization,” which was translated into several languages (www.end-of-the-
megamachine.com). His most recent book is “The Stuff We Are Made Of. Rethinking Nature and Society”. Fabian Scheidler has written as a free lance journalist for the Berliner Zeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau, Wiener Zeitung, Taz, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, Jacobin, The Progressive, Radio France and others. In 2009, he received the Otto Brenner Media Prize for critical journalism.