The European project has long been both committed to neoliberal policy and allergic to democracy, but militarisation in response to US threats brings new strains, argues Chris Bambery

Across Europe, we are being told by Sir Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron that ‘all democratic forces’ must unite against both Russia in Ukraine and the internal enemies of ‘Europe’. Much liberal and left-wing opinion dreams that Europe can pose an alternative to Trump and the USA. That is a pipe dream which flies in the face of reality.

First, Russia is a second-rate power whose economy is comparable to Spain. It has won this war and is not going to agree a ceasefire unless Ukraine is neutral and Russia rules the territory it has occupied. It is very clear there will be no British or French ‘peacekeepers’. Secondly, the European states do not have the armed forces, the arms industries or the intelligence assets that can turn defeat around.

This is not to support Putin in any way, it’s simply to state the truth. Putin is not going to invade Poland, the Baltic States, let alone Western Europe. This is not the Russia of 1815 or 1945. I might add that Europe is not united, with Germany making it clear it will not send ‘peacekeepers’ to Ukraine. It is also important to say support for the war in Europe has slumped as a poll in December found. In Germany, only 28% supported Ukraine until Russia withdrawal, even if this means the war would last longer. Forty-five percent supported a negotiated end to fighting, even if Russia still had control of some parts of Ukraine. In Italy, the percentages were 15 and 55% respectively.

The people in the latter camp are watching with shock and horror as governments which previously said they had no funds are sending millions to Kyiv, even as they implement further welfare cuts. This disconnect will only fuel rising rejection of the established parties of the centre right and centre left and the European Union.

Nature of the EU

During the Brexit referendum, and long before, the debate was incredibly insular, on both sides, detached from what was being discussed elsewhere in Europe. For instance, left Remainers would often reference the speech of the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, given to the Trades Union Congress’s annual conference, in which he outlined a vision of ‘social Europe’. This was the last gasp of an old social-democratic consensus. Delors himself was an architect of the Maastricht Treaty which laid the basis for a thoroughly neoliberal EU.

The EU’s de facto constitution, two international treaties signed in Maastricht in 1992 and Amsterdam in 1997, enshrined neoliberalism across the sub-continent. Margaret Thatcher was a pioneer of this before she got cold feet over further state integration after German unification. Her mantra ‘there is no alternative’ was one accepted by all EU leaders, centre right and centre left.

Voters in France, Ireland and the Netherlands voted to reject these treaties in referendums. The EU’s response was not just to ignore this but to tell them to vote again until they gave the required response. Democracy is something absent from the EU. Yes, there is an elected parliament but it’s toothless. Even at Westminster, hardly the acme of democracy, MPs get to vote for or against the budget. Not in Brussels! The European Commission – unelected and unaccountable – runs the show.

So what is the EU? Susan Watkins notes: ‘… the polity of the European Union is a makeshift, designed in the 1950s to foster an industrial association embracing two large countries, France and Germany, with a population of about fifty million each, and their three small neighbours. It was then expanded, piecemeal fashion, to incorporate nearly thirty states, two-thirds of which adopted a shared currency at the height of the globalisation boom – a project aimed in part at preventing a significantly larger, reunified Germany from dominating the rest.’

The EU’s hybrid constitution includes, among much else, a decision-making European Council (summit meetings of the heads of the 28 governments); a body exercising comprehensive powers, the European Commission, with thirty-odd departments (directorates-general) and its own bureaucracy; a parliament that discusses Commission proposals; and a supreme court to rule on any disputes. The Euro binds Eurozone states to fixed exchange rates whatever the reality of the economy. Italy, for example, regularly devalued the lira in order to make its exports to Germany more competitive. Today, it has lost economic sovereignty.

The 2008 financial crash, the recession which followed and the high costs for bailouts imposed on southern Europe led to a shift from the long-term Franco-German axis which had run the EU to German dominance, albeit compliant to the USA. Germany would prove loyal to the demands of the US ‘international rules-based order’: ‘Washington was willing to go along with German austerity … as long as the chains of debt leading back to Wall Street were guaranteed. In September 2011, the US treasury secretary flew to Poland, gatecrashing a meeting of EU finance ministers to press his agenda. The list included emergency bailout loans, ECB bond purchases, bank funding, quantitative easing, eurobonds and Eurozone equivalents to US bank resolution and deposit insurance mechanisms. The US Treasury line was backed by the German SPD and Greens, the financial press and the world media.’ Susan Watkins concludes: ‘The EU that has emerged from this epic battle is significantly more autocratic, German-dominated and right-wing, while lacking any compensatory charm.’

The bailouts which followed were accompanied by a programme of fiscal austerity and structural reforms imposed by the ‘Troika’, the European Commission, ECB and IMF, which demanded EU member states place a 3% deficit limit in their constitutions. Such a control would rule out anything approximating to Britain’s 1945 welfare state.

Europe in crisis

During the Brexit referendum, it was if the crucifixion of southern Europe which followed the 2008 financial crash and the subsequent recession had never happened. Bailouts, inadequate as they were, came at the cost of further neoliberal reforms. Unelected ‘technocratic’ governments were imposed on Italy and the vote against such measures in Greece was not just ignored but met with what was effectively a coup by Brussels.

Liberal and left Remainers claimed a Leave vote would translate into anti-migrant racism, ignoring the fact that the EU had insisted Italy scrap a rescue service in the Mediterranean and militarise that border in the sea, forcibly returning migrants to Libya (which Nato conveniently bombed) or letting them drown. Back during the Brexit referendum in the UK, a common argument was that a Leave vote would fuel the far right. Now, in 2024 and 2025 we are seeing the rise of Reform UK, nearly a decade on, but that is part of a process long established across Europe.

Ordinary people are increasingly alienated from the established parties and are turning to alternatives, predominantly on the right but also to the radical left where it poses a credible challenge. The 2024 European elections saw 189 Eurosceptic MEPS elected, 26% of members of the European parliament. These are antimigrant, anti-Muslim parties. Their electoral support is fuelled by the alienation people have for establishment parties but their members are motivated by old-fashioned racism.

Following Brexit, Germany under Angela Merkel and France under Emmanuel Macron saw this as an opportunity to push for greater integration. But in fact, the internal problems within the EU have mounted; between Germany and Italy, Germany and Poland and Germany and Hungary. Italy’s economy has been stagnating for over two decades. The 2020 Next Generation Recovery Plan was supposed to kickstart the Italian economy in particular after the Covid lock-down. Despite €750 million of funding, it sunk without trace, leaving Italy stuck in the doldrums.

Now, far from being the motor force of the European economy, the German economy is stagnant too, in large part as a consequence of the Russo-Ukraine war. Washington forced Germany to stop buying cheap Russian energy and it kept mum when the Americans blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Germany also had to join sanctions against China, previously a key export market, although in fact, China was already manufacturing its own machine tools and luxury cars, Germany’s main exports. German companies like Volkswagen also failed to invest in building electric vehicles and were badly caught out by limits on emissions.

Ramping up austerity and militarism

In 2002, the Social-Democrat government of Gerhard Schröder introduced the Agenda 2010 ‘reform’ programme which cut national health insurance, unemployment benefits and pensions. What Schröder’s advisers grasped was that by drastically lowering the safety net for working people, they were more likely to accept lower wages and worse contracts and conditions.

The German SPD pioneered this and governments across the Western world followed suit. It’s easy to believe here in the UK that the grass is greener on the other side but today a fifth of the German population is at risk of social exclusion. Just over 17.3 million people in Germany were affected by poverty or social exclusion in 2022. This equated to 20.9% of the population. Cuts in public spending have also affected the infrastructure, witness the state of public transport and the roads.

Old fault lines have also re-emerged. There is a sharp contrast a quarter of a century on between West Germany and the former East Germany just as there is between North Western Europe (the core of the EU) and Eastern and Southern Europe. In both Italy and Spain, there are also divisions in terms of poverty and unemployment between north and south. In northern Italy, if you live in a city you earn on average less than €850 a month after taxes, in the south that plummets to less than €554 a month.

One third of the population of Romania, 34.4%, and Bulgaria, 32.2%, are at risk of poverty or social exclusion. That contrasts with just 11.8% in the Czech Republic and 13.3% in Slovenia, which are much more integrated with Germany, Austria and other north-western European states. In this situation, further European integration is off agenda.

The Biden administration used the Ukraine war to impose Nato as the decisive force in Europe, thus allowing Britain, Washington’s loyal watchdog, back to the fore. The USA used the war, as I argued at the time, to dash any idea that the EU could operate independently of the USA and its ‘international rules-based order’.

In September 2022, I interviewed Wolfgang Streeck, regarding the effect of the Ukraine war on the EU, in which he stated: ‘In short, without a European international security arrangement that somehow includes Russia, the world is likely to end up in a bipolar confrontation between the United States and China, with Europe a subordinate of the United States (reconstituting the so-called ‘West’) and Russia dependent on China. In this world there won’t be any place for European autonomy or sovereignty, for an independent Europe as a third global force or as a region of its own in the global context.’

Now we have Donald Trump and J.D. Vance humiliating Zelensky in the Oval Office in order to tell the Europeans that the war in Ukraine cannot be won and the US has other priorities. Forget what we are hearing from assorted European leaders that Ukraine can win. If they truly believe that, they are not living in reality. Russia is winning and the longer the fighting continues, the more territory it will gain (it would stop at the Dnieper River because Putin realises occupying western Ukraine would just create another Afghanistan).

Trump’s ‘pivot’ towards China and his dropping of Ukraine seems to leave the European states and its British out-rider with little other choice but to become subordinates of the United States. Some like Poland will jump at the chance; the Brits, despite Starmer’s current rhetoric, will be pulled along as usual; Germany and France will be deeply unhappy.

Grim trajectory

However, with a militarised border with Russia (militarised by the US and Nato) and with Joe Biden’s great achievement in binding Moscow and Beijing together, the logic of a new Cold War divide will be at work. Trump may hope to pull Putin across from China but I doubt that Putin would trust the US on past performance and might wonder who will replace Trump.

Looking into the future, Wolfgang Streeck argues: ‘Western Europe, in whatever political form, would more than ever function as the transatlantic wing of the United States in a new cold or, perhaps, hot war between the two global power blocs, the one declining, hoping to reverse the tide, the other hoping to rise.’ That is not a cheery vision!

As European governments rush to increase military spending at Trump’s demand and as they declare their readiness to step in to finance and arm Ukraine, despite not having weapons industries and economies capable of doing this, the future looks bleak. In an article titled ‘European militarism on steroids is not good, either,’ Almut Rochowanski points out: ‘Nowhere has this new martiality been more pronounced than in Germany, where political leaders and a new crop of “military experts” egg each other on.

‘The latter have been abysmally wrong in their predictions of Ukraine’s certain victory and Russia’s imminent collapse again and again, but nevertheless dominate the country’s much-watched primetime debate shows.’

He goes on to state: ‘Indeed, Europe’s new militarist politics already undermine its democratic institutions and laws. In Germany, the lame-duck parliament is rushing changes to the German constitution to allow new debt for public spending, a dubious move in terms of democratic legitimation. It is also a slap in the face of the German public, who have been told for 15 years that the debt brake written into Germany’s constitution is an immutable law of nature, that spending on schools, bridges, trains running on time or healthcare would drive Germany into ruin.

‘At the March 6 European Council meeting, EU governments agreed a €150 billion loan instrument to facilitate defense spending by member states. This immediately appears to be illegal: the EU’s foundational treaty explicitly forbids spending on anything defense and military.

‘Another €650 billion are supposed to be raised by member states for their weapons purchases, for which they will be exempt from the EU’s strict limits on borrowing. EU citizens, who have seen their welfare states starved and their public assets plundered in the name of fiscal discipline mandated by Brussels, have every reason to feel betrayed.’

The price EU and British citizens will have to pay is as clear as day: more austerity. Austerity and economies which are not going anywhere fast is a recipe for misery. It will also fuel the alienation of European citizens (Brits included) from the political establishment.

Of course, that can benefit the far right but it might to wise to let German voters know the AfD wants to being back conscription and build German nuclear weapons. How popular is that?

But we have also seen that when the radical left gets its act together, it can have an impact, as in the French presidential elections, in the movement in solidarity with Palestine and with the social movements we have seen arising unexpectedly in resistance to neoliberalism. Serbia is the latest instance of this. The success of such movements requires dropping any support for the EU, particularly in the light of its new militarism.