Europe has stumbled into a new growth paradigm with a reliance on the permanent threat of war
At the launch of the White Paper for European Defence – Readiness 2030, Ursula von der Leyen declared the era of Europe’s peace dividend “long gone”. Peace, apparently, was a phase that we have now outgrown.
The EU’s centre of gravity has rapidly moved from a focus on trading to armament, as outlined by von der Leyen in early 2025, and this transfer of meaning is not happening through defence memorandums but through nation state treasuries. Consider the following: the European Commission is in the midst of mobilising €800 billion defence spending by 2030; more than 15 member states have activated “escape clauses” to enable an economic breach of fiscal rules to procure weapons; €150 billion of so-called “bomb bonds” has been raised for collective borrowing; a new multilateral bank – the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank – is targeting hundreds of billions of euro, with Belgium, Greece, Romania, Latvia and Ukraine among its founders; Canada has been admitted as a non-EU member state, in a leadership role, on many of these initiatives.
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