Warmongering Peace: There Is No Alternative to the Rebirth of Europe Through Militarism

Internationalist Standpoint , 2025

The article analyzes the recent developments surrounding the war in Ukraine and the initiation of peace talks in 2025, while also drawing on Marxist literature on the relationship between capitalism and Marxism. It is structured in four main sections: The European Union of War; European Plans for Securing the Financing of the Military Industry in Financialized Capitalism; Capitalism and Wars; Cannibal Capitalism and Disaster Capitalism: Postwar Reconstruction as a Profitable Investment.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

chapter, "whereas the EU has converged on common positions and actions (e.g. numerous packages of sanctions) against (…) the Russian Federation, it has so far failed to boost integration in security and defence". This Report is an attempt to take stock of the state of Europe's security in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. As it appears that the conflict is going to drag out for several more months or even years, it appears to have become part of a new state of affairs in the Continent, and it is therefore important to Facing War: Rethinking Europe's Security and Defence 10 interesting development is a de facto "Europeanisation" of the European theatre for NATO forces, with the core of NATO's New Force Model being 300,000 European troops in a state of high readiness. According to Biscop, defence efforts of the EU Member States, and of NATO, would not collapse if the EU terminates its defence efforts. Yet, national and NATO decisionmakers should acknowledge that, without the assistance of the EU's instruments, the European defence effort will never be integrated to a significant degree. This is also why the uneasy EU-NATO partnership deserves a standalone chapter, by Nicolò Fasola and Sonia Lucarelli. It is only obvious that Russia's invasion of Ukraine reasserted NATO's significance for European security, putting ideas about the Alliance's obsolescence to rest. So far, the EU and NATO have managed to work jointly (or, at least, in non-contradictory terms), capitalising on the gradual, growing interconnection they have facilitated over the last two decades. According to the authors, the current international context offers a unique opportunity for stepping up this partnership even more, to the benefit of Europe's security and defence. Rather than decoupling, the EU should find its place next to the Western military alliance, as the best place to manage non-military responses to Russia's aggression. In the next chapter, Antonio Missiroli addresses a specific question: how has the EU's cyber security approach changed since Russia's invasion? His response seems to point at the fact that a change has occurred, and that it entails EU-NATO coordination, as no actor can efficiently develop cyber resilience and defence capabilities on their own. Still, Missiroli argues, it is precisely among EU members that more needs to be done-for instance, in the framework of Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), where cyber-relevant projects are few and of limited scope-in order to upgrade the bloc's own collective ability to operate and collaborate credibly with more capable partners.

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021

Chapters by Hans Akkerman, Hans-Juergen Bieling, Yury Gromyko, Iraklis Oikonomou, Claude Serfati

European Security, 2024

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought war back to the European continent and led to considerable change in EU member states’ foreign policies. The consequential degree of EU foreign policy unity, as well as shifts in long-lasting national and collective security and defence taboos, has represented a significant departure from past practices. We use these processes of change as a starting point to set the scene for this special issue and to inform its main research question: in what manner, if at all, has the EU come of age as a foreign and security actor during Russia’s war on Ukraine? This introduction situates the main question of the special issue into the wider scholarly debates on actorness and the EU’s geopolitical ambitions. It conceptually develops the analogy of “coming of age” to examine a prospective maturation process of the EU as a foreign and security actor. In doing so, it not only interrogates what the EU as a mature foreign and security actor would look like, but it also develops the framework, identifies four maturation processes and reflects on necessary caveats for drawing inferences about the state of maturation of the EU as foreign and security actor.

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2022

The paper presents an analysis of the consequences of the war in Ukraine, which began at the end of the winter of 2022, for the European Union as an institutional creation but also for European society as a whole. This war will probably be one that separates historical epochs, and after that we can expect a changed economic and security architecture both in the world and on the Old Continent. One of the main geopolitical and geoeconomic consequences of the war in Ukraine for the world and Europe is reflected in the completion of the process of returning to so-called realpolitics, namely the policies of so-called hard power in international relations. This will probably be followed by the so-called process of "geopolitical lockdown" of different geopolitical areas because the war in Ukraine has accelerated the process of disintegration of a single international diplomatic, security, and economic system. The paper investigates the consequences of this process of returning hard power and splitting the single international system in Europe, the Balkans, and especially in the capacity of the European Union for enlargement. Therefore, the analysis offered in this paper can be useful for further conceptualizing Serbia's strategy in its relationship with the European Union and devising an optimal approach to the European integration process given the possible developments in Europe after the war in Ukraine. The analysis undertaken in this paper can be useful for Serbian public policies because it is not one-sided or ideological, but includes various scenarios for the European future and takes into account their impact on the region and Serbia.

Course Description: The aim of the course is to familiarize students with the interdisciplinary field of critical militarism and militarization studies. Militarism as a critical concept enjoyed high currency in academia during the Cold War era, resulting in a great number of interdisciplinary works. Since then academic interest in militarism and militarization has slowly waned, substituted by theories of security and securitization. One of the reasons for this was the political and intellectual hegemony of liberalism which generally saw violent conflicts as relicts of an old era that will eventually wane with progress. Yet recent resurgence of conflicts and growing militarization not just globally but on the fringes of the ostensibly post-militarist European Union clearly shows that militarism as a concept is more useful than ever to account for the ongoing transformations of citizenship and governance. The course will zoom into several key debates in the field and discuss issues such as the historical and socio-political varieties of militarism, the political functions of militarization, the gendered dynamics of militarism, as well as the current re-militarization of Central Eastern Europe.

ecprnet.eu

Strife Blog and Journal, 2018

Anticipating war is out of fashion, yet the potential destruction and impact on global society of a major war are huge.

EU’s Ability to Act, 2022

2013

ci, au-delà du concept, une réalité, quelque chose qui, par l'intermédiaire de notre compréhension des choses, libère toute l'action opérante potentiellement contenue dans les choses, l'actualisation de tous les potentiels. Plus qu'un étant, la force devient ainsi toute réalité… Jan Patočka, Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l'histoire In one of his conference lectures of the mid-1970s, the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka talked about twentieth-century Europe's destiny of World Wars as one of the endless unleashing of forces. Patočka offers one of the most insightful analyses of contemporary Europe's intellectual destiny, tightly connected to technological domination and control. His extensive analysis in the field of a phenomenological philosophy of history evolves around the notions of 'crisis', under the influence of the later Husserl, the Janus face of the Western, most prominently European 'supercivilization' and the urgent need for a redefinition of European humanity. A key notion for the latter, introduced by Patočka in many instances in his phenomenological studies, is that of sacrifice. Patočka resists the inauthentic understanding of sacrifice by means of exchange, which according to him still reflects the objectifying tendency inherent in Europe's techno-scientific orientation. He then proposes an authentic sense of sacrifice which is not prone to the criteria of calculability and effectiveness. He also incorporates his critique of European crisis and decline into the wider context of his phenomenological anthropology, which completely transforms Husserl's theme of the Lebenswelt in an ethico-political direction. It is within this larger context that his diagnosis of Europe's crisis also meets his argument for a 'solidarity of the shattered', which can reiterate the most promising chapters of Europe's spiritual history. How is Patočka's philosophical discourse to be related to today's situation of tension and

2014

The first half of the twentieth century was the most violent period in modern European history. War, revolution, civil war and the deliberate displacement or destruction of entire ethnic and cultural communities characterized much of the continent from 1914 to the early 1950s. Thereafter, conflict was frozen in less lethal and more institutionalized forms until the final decade of the century, when the end of the Cold War was followed by the extraordinarily peaceful integration of Europe – a process that continues today. The exception has been the violent implosion of Yugoslavia. This theme presents particular challenges both for a European reading of the recent history of the continent and also for the notion of “contemporary” history. Wars and conflicts were by definition the result of difference and division and they were not, in the main, self-referentially European. Nor did they affect all parts of Europe in the same way, let alone at exactly the same time. What (if anything) m...

2017

The end of the World War Second, did not bring peace and harmony among the peoples of Europe and World as expected. Enmity of the war time created such a deep ditch, which could not be overcome for a short time. What's more, even among the allies-winners of the war, friendship and cooperation did not last too long. Very soon, two-three years aft er the end of the war, Europe was separated by an iron courtain, as Winston Churchill, the British prime minister would call it. The shadow of this division, fi rst of all ideological, became known mostly in South Eastern European countries. This region, for about half of a century was seized by stalinism and democracy. Consequences of this division were not only political. Division produced economic and development consequences, which, in one or many ways, even nowadays, hinder this region in the European and Euro-Atlantic integration proceses.

Geojournal, 2000

At the beginning of the 21st century, Europe is in a great state of change. The post-WW2 political and economic division between east and west has been removed. Democracy and market economy (capitalism) have been spread in an eastern direction, towards Asia. The rule of law is on its way to replace chaos and painful transition times in what was once Eastern Europe. The economic coherence of Europe's western part is going to be strengthened with the introduction of the unifying currency Euro. But, Europe's geopolitical map for the 21st century is still uncertain. The Euro-Atlantic cooperation is impacted by the potency of the US economy and military strength. The European Union's enthusiasm to embrace the newly freed nation-states in the East is fading away. Facing the reality of their economy and judging the advantages and disadvantages of the enlargement, many social groups in the European core worry about the benefits gained in the union of 15. To the ten candidate countries, which have entered negotiations, EU first set the year 2001 as a goal to look ahead to. At present, according to verbal proclamations of responsible politicians, the 'enlargement of the Union towards the east' will not take place before 2004. The painful devolution of the multiethnic Yugoslavia and Cyprus and the never-ending drive towards regional autonomy, combined in places with terrorism (Spain, France, Great Britain), has also put the nation-state, as the best form of the societal and economic 'habitat', in question. Envisioning problems of the future, the world's political geographers have, in May 2000, gathered in Portorož-Portorose (Slovenia) and Gorizia (Italy) and discussed the world political map for the 21st century. The articles in this special issue of GeoJournal are a selection of papers presented at the conference. The conference, entitled 'Political Geography in the 21st Century: Understanding the Place-Looking Ahead', has taken place in a once turbulent part of Mediterranean Europe. In the past 20th century it all began there with the battlefields of Caporetto and Isonzo in 1916 (described in Hemingway's novel 'A Farewell to Arms'), continued with the reality of the Iron Curtain (a term invented by Churchill, with reference to the border near Trieste) in the 1950s, as communist and democratic worlds stood in confrontation against each other in Europe, and has been concluded in the 1990s with the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. The organizers, the Department of Geography of the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) and the Geography Section of

2020