And what are you going to do when Putin invades Lithuania? Spell it out, my dear peacemonger, what are you going to do? Are you planning on turning a blind eye then, just as you feign your ignorance now while Ukrainians are perishing in droves? Will you keep pontificating about “peace” at that point? Don’t you have even the slightest bit of shame to keep ignoring the threats of the Russian psychopath? Just remember the bloodbath at Srebrenica! What would it have been like then to yearn for your “peace”? Maybe it’s time that you all grew up a bit, took off your tinted glasses, and started seeing the world for how it really is? I, too, would love your “peace”, for us all to hold hands and sing kumbaya in a circle, all of our ducks in a nice, tidy row, but it does little use to line the road with flowers if Hitler comes driving down it to slaughter half the county. Do you think Trump is going to defend you? Have you gone mad? I’m the first person to wish for peace, but come on, you’ve got to get real.

Thousands of middle-aged men, most of whom spent the majority of their lives behind the keyboard, have suddenly discovered their inner generals, all dedicated to defending the soul of Europe.

I’m not sure quite when it arose, but public debate has been flooded with this sort of geopolitical realism – a holier-than-thou cynicism against any opposition to arms and defense measures, posing as the very culmination of Western rationalism. No sooner does someone express their doubts about the European arms race than an army of patriotic intellectuals appears, regurgitating a uniform arsenal of accusations. Pundit shows, editorial columns, readers’ letters, and social media are all bursting with public intellectuals, such as Žižek and those who imitate him, all enlightening us about the real world. Yep, the time has come even for us bleeding heart liberals to roll up our sleeves and get in the trenches. Thousands of middle-aged men, most of whom spent the majority of their lives behind the keyboard, have suddenly discovered their inner generals, all dedicated to defending the soul of Europe. Suburban fathers, perhaps the very same who in 2010 signed the Mladina political weekly’s public petition to dissolve the Slovenian army, are spelling out for us today, with the realpolitical distance of Henry Kissinger, the intricacies of the “global chess game”. Pssh, peace… what a silly notion… have you not heard of deterrence? Haven’t you read Von Clausewitz? Si vis pacem, para bellum!

The problem with this omnipresent devolution of our media and academia does not lie in the fact that their arguments stand irrefutable. The real problem is quite different: namely that, when all major social issues (economic development, investment, the climate crisis, etc.) are framed within the constructs of a hypothetical civilizational confrontation with Putin, nothing can be properly discussed anymore. Or, rather, they can only be discussed in the stupidest way possible – by constantly trying to determine who among us is acting as s secret agent of one side or the other. In the alchemic cauldron of military threat, all of our society’s diverse interests are fused into one and each of us is then typecast as the representative of a monolithic nation. People who otherwise don’t have the slightest say in state decision-making eagerly begin our sentences authoritatively with “Slovenia should…”

The worst is watching the left slide into debilitatingly endless cycles of logical acrobatics trying to answer the question of “how to stop Putin?” And since there are no smart answers to that question, we come up with stupid ones: Of course Putin would never attack Lithuania, and, even if he did, that would probably be a good thing, because anti-imperialism. Isn’t it clear what we’re doing with such conversations? We are pretending that we are actually deciding upon something, imagining that some just force will step up to the plate, act correctly on our behalf, and establish the new world order. We personally are never to be a part of this equation, as physical combat is not a condition that befits us – our war will continue to be waged from the trenches in between the rows of letters on our keyboard, from the depths of which we implore the ruling classes of the world’s great powers to take action. We call back to life the mythological democratic West, resurrect the Soviet Union from its grave, and, as if begging a retired agent of some special forces unit, try to persuade them to use their powers for “one last mission”. We convince ourselves that, somewhere out on the eastern fronts, someone is currently in the midst of realizing either a liberal or anti-imperialist vision of the world on our behalf. And we’re left scratching our heads every time we find that they, in fact, aren’t.

In doing so, not only do we lose sight of those true social struggles that we really could somehow influence, but we also resort to an infantile comprehension of the world, akin to Marvel’s version of geopolitics, where insane demagogues battle on one side and heroic freedom fighters champion the other. We would do ourselves a great favor if we were to rid ourselves of these caricatures and seek an honest answer as to what this Europe, on which so many people today are counting to save the rest of the world from the evil villains, actually is.

***

In 2016, in perhaps its final attempt at pushing its socialistic platform, the Slovenian socialist party the United Left held a conference entitled “Plan B for Europe“. The political climate of the day was positively electric: the debt crisis and the hysteria of austerity measures under German rule in Europe had sent the continent’s south into ruin, the memory of the crushed rebellion in Greece was still ripely fresh, the media were oozing skepticism about the European project. The fervor was so high that Slovenia’s left-liberal political weekly Mladina even flirted with the idea of withdrawing from Europe in its editorial columns. We leftists, who had assembled in the hall of the old electrical power plant, were all eager for radical political solutions. Rising to meet that mood was the critical speech given by our guest Costas Lapavitsas, the grumbling Greek economist, hardened by years of political battles, who had just suffered a defeat with Syriza and who only with difficulty managed to hide his contempt for its delusions about Europe.

His lecture tackled the European situation with a Marxist toolkit. Instead of the usual fare of caricaturing greedy bankers and the corrupt elites, he merely showed us a boring graph showing the growth in salaries compared to inflation among European countries. “Look how salaries have risen over the past 15 years roughly in line with the cost of living. Except in Germany and Austria. Germany’s workers have seen their purchasing power practically frozen over the past 15 years. In collaboration with unions, the country had toppled the social democratic agreement it had with workers and donated the surplus from increases in production almost entirely to the capitalists. This is the true source of the crisis in Europe – it’s not about the economies of the countries in the periphery, but about the defeat of the German working class.”

While those of us in the audience already knew intuitively that bad things tend to happen when the German proletariat is defeated, Lapavitsas showed us the mechanisms that transform those losses into a pan-European crisis. “German capital must do something with its surplus, and so it dumps it onto the periphery in the form of cheap loans, so those countries can use them to buy German products. And thus an imbalance in competitiveness is created: surplus grows in the center, deficit in the periphery. This appears to the outside observer as a debt crisis since the periphery must continue to borrow even more while enjoying increasingly less economic power with which to pay back its loans.”

German capital took advantage of the EU’s mechanisms to impose imperialist policies upon southern Europe, with austerity measures, and privatizations paralyzing its development and plunging millions of citizens into poverty. This was a war waged against southern Europe.

In normal circumstances, the peripheral countries could take their own national measures as a reply to this imbalance – they could correct the skewed competitiveness by devaluing their currencies, investing in domestic companies, seeking new markets, etc. But the EU is no ordinary federation. The transnational apparatuses of capital (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, better known as the Troika) ensure that the democratic will of the union’s citizens does not interfere with the economic decisions adopted by the center. The Troika, headed by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, banned all state-sponsored interventions in local economies and, instead of bailing countries out, ensured their peripheralization remained permanent. German capital took advantage of the EU’s mechanisms to impose imperialist policies upon southern Europe, with austerity measures, and privatizations paralyzing its development and plunging millions of citizens into poverty. This was a war waged against southern Europe with economic ammunition, launched not by Putin or Xi, but by European capitalists themselves.

This economic war resulted not only in the rise of the far right and led not just to Brexit, but also ended up spreading the crisis towards central Europe. Large countries, such as France and Italy, were also subjected to this competitive imbalance, with the effect that the austerity measures also left France in economic ruin and brought fascism back to Italian soil. But Germany itself, in a plot twist of macroeconomic karma, ultimately fell victim to its own fiscal policy – ​​as countries elsewhere around the world began developing their strategic sectors, Germany was saving money, and now its key economic sectors accordingly paled in competitiveness to China and the US. The European project, held together after the Brexit debacle with the furious printing of currency and willy-nilly investments, is thus facing a new crisis.

After the debt crisis, the migrant crisis, Brexit, and COVID, now we’ve been served the Putin and Trump crisis. Military escalations enter here as the completely natural continuation of economic policy – what had been financial imperialism until now is merely continuing under a different guise.

And what does the decade-old lecture of a Greek economist have to do with today’s escalating military conflicts? That evening, Lapavitsas outlined the fundamental, self-destructive incongruity of EU: the most affluent countries at the heart of global capital know how to act no other way than imperialistically, a fact that is no less veracious when they are linked through transnational institutions. Those institutions themselves are nothing more than associations of tycoons, whose bureaucratic machinations are set fast on ensuring that the industrialists in the center get to keep exploiting a cheap workforce and enjoying a wildly imbalanced trade relation with the peripheral countries. This naturally is an unsustainable system, kept alive only through more frequent and more intense crises. After the debt crisis, the migrant crisis, Brexit, and COVID, now we’ve been served the Putin and Trump crisis. Military escalations enter here as the completely natural continuation of economic policy – what had been financial imperialism until now is merely continuing under a different guise.

These crises are always accompanied by the same heroic rhetoric about a grand Europe, which must now band together and discover its “civilizational values” and fulfill its “historical obligation”. In 2015, we were supposed to have been united by austerity measures, in 2016 by mitigating the migration waves, in 2019 by the green transition, in 2020 by vaccines, and in 2025 by tanks and missiles… And each time we have found that, though the movements themselves were short-lived, each time they brought new tensions and unmanageable political consequences.

***

The mediasphere of course never dares to discuss the class-based source of all our crises. Liberal commentators never understand imperialism as an integral part of capitalist development but as the psychopathic tendency of one or another leader whose actions run afoul of “European values”. Thus, in their eyes, imperialism is combatted by going to the polls and electing some responsible banker who will rein in nationalistic fervor. And to maintain that fantasy, they must continue to write history anew, inventing the mythological European Union, which was once the gleaming, independent beacon of democracy, all until “populism” reared its ugly head. Clearly, this is utterly twisted logic: so-called populism is the natural result of instability arising from the reign of international capital. The union cannot act unified or rational, and it cannot keep peace.

Liberal commentators never understand imperialism as an integral part of capitalist development but as the psychopathic tendency of one or another leader whose actions run afoul of “European values”.

And that’s why I can only muster up so much interest in listening to sermons on how we must return to “a unified European policy of defense and foreign affairs”… Of course, nobody can manage to pinpoint that time when such a unified policy existed – even at the very zenith of WWII, the imperial powers were engaged in an endless dance of toying with one another, restructuring alliances, and each attempting to barter its way into carving out its own chunk of spoils from the periphery. Is “the world’s only safeguard for peace” truly that failed motley crew of wannabe imperialists who simply sought new hunting grounds to stalk following the Second World War? Is the European security apparatus, that network of spies, arms hustlers, and former Nazis, which the CIA put together to wage its war on communism, really the “last check on authoritarianism”?

The worst rewriting of European history is perhaps found in modern discussions of the war that plagued Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Slovenian commentators constantly rake back to life as a reminder of our moral imperative to aid Ukraine militarily: “Remember Srebrenica! That’s why we can’t abandon the Ukrainians!” Have we perhaps forgotten how the European leaders of the time did nothing to stop the genocide in Srebrenica? How all of that transpired in the presence of European units? Have we forgotten that Slovenia sent to the battle zones huge quantities of weapons that ended up in the hands of soldiers on both sides of the conflict? Have we forgotten how the trafficking of those arms wrote one of the darkest chapters in Slovenian history? How that criminal excursion, which joined political players from left to right, from Janša to Bavčar, with the international weapons-dealing underground and which shaped the country’s political image for decades to come? Have we forgotten that this period thrust into the political spotlight that weapons-trafficking pedophile Nicholas Oman, Slovenia’s version of Jeffrey Epstein, who threw lavish soirees for our elites? Have we forgotten that these arms dealers nearly staged a coup d’état in 1994? Where exactly are the positive lessons we must now apply to Ukraine?

Slovenian freedom fighters did nothing to help stop Milošević, but rather, as they were withdrawing from Yugoslavia, made a deal with him that, in exchange for his non-interference, they too would turn a blind eye to Serbian territorial ambitions.

Not only did Slovenians largely decline to applaud the arms race but, back in 1990, when tensions were flaring between us and Belgrade and the country was at the twilight of war, the overwhelming majority of calls at the time were for societal demilitarization. In those years, when war was waging at our doorstep, the peace movement persistently resisted the defense minister’s ambitions, compulsory conscription was abolished, and opposition to NATO’s military interventions was firmly established. A better understanding of the neighboring conflict did not bestow any “geopolitical realism” in people, but it did anchor into people’s consciousness that arms races benefit nobody but those already in power – that those arms are not “our weapons”. It is at the very least cynical that today’s liberal pundits use the fall of Yugoslavia as an example of a “good arms race”. Here we find another of our analysts’ faded memories: Slovenian freedom fighters did nothing to help stop Milošević, but rather, as they were withdrawing from Yugoslavia, made a deal with him that, in exchange for his non-interference, they too would turn a blind eye to Serbian territorial ambitions. Let’s be clear: the interests of Slovenian elites were in many ways partly to blame for the outbreak of war in the Balkans and the European Union was incapable of implementing a unified, integrated foreign policy, as the countries from the imperialist center were each bent on pursuing their own interests. The way they act today towards the war hawk Vučić is identical.

If anything, our experience in the Balkans has taught us precisely what we will do if Putin attacks Lithuania: not a single solitary thing. Just like we didn’t do a single thing as Bosnia was being carved up for spoils. We will watch on impotently as a clique of political hustlers and dealers help themselves to a huge pile of public money and use it to reshape the country in their ideal image: we are suffering the same thing as we speak, as agents of the “defense community” rise to take over key positions in the state holding company (such an example is right-wing instigator and lobbyist Damir Črnčec). We will watch on impotently as these new-age military profiteers hack out chunks of the budget to buy themselves stocks and luxury apartments.

***

As the left loses sight of the class struggle right before our eyes, we begin dreaming of mythological international forces that will jump to our aid and ensure peace and democracy. Lapavitsas’s speech showed us how crippling this delusion is for Europe’s peripheral countries: “We must not trick ourselves into thinking that it is possible to use the EU’s transnational institutions for good.” That’s what his party colleagues in Syriza naively believed when they returned from Brussels with a package of disastrous austerity measures. “There is no such thing as a good European Union!” This is all the more true when it comes to common European defense. We peace advocates must move past our calls for European leaders to “wake up” and abandon their weapons, just as in 2015 we should have moved past our calls for the European Central Bank to abandon its practice of collecting foreign debt. None of that has a chance of happening. We need to take matters into our own hands and equip ourselves to wage battle against our own political structures.

Instead of preparing for imperialistic war, it’s necessary to steel ourselves for the class struggle. Only from the EU’s disintegration can there grow new international relations rooted in solidarity.

The necessary tasks outlined by the Greek economist for resolving the crisis of 2015 apply in equal measure today, as the economic war enters its phase of massacre. Keeping the peace thus means going back to the drawing board to reimagine how to achieve autonomy, how to redraw our attitudes towards production, how to restructure our financial institutions, how to preserve our natural environments, and a heap of other paradigm shifts. Instead of stockpiling food and batteries to survive the first 72 hours in our bunkers, as the European Commissioners advise us (although they’ve never told us what exactly we should expect to happen after that 72 hours), we should focus on instilling policies that guarantee food and energy security for the entire population. Instead of calculating the number of casualties a given country can afford, we should focus on building up our capacities for public capacities. Instead of arming French and German tycoons to confront Russia in a military conflict, we need to address ways of decoupling from the flow of capital that drags surpluses from the periphery and reallocates them to the center. Instead of preparing for imperialistic war, it’s necessary to steel ourselves for the class struggle. Only from the EU’s disintegration can there grow new international relations rooted in solidarity.

Let the geopolitical realists, those who have no influence over the business deals going on in their own backyards, discus “what we’re going to do in Lithuania”. This in truth is no realism but a fairytale escape into a wonderland where residents sit passively at their screens, idly ordering the capitalists what to do with the weapons our taxes paid for. When they again get the urge to mock those who wish to keep peace, we’ll remind them that they are the ones who are actually engaged in pacifism – they are unwilling to lift a finger in the class struggle against the authorities here and now, but they would gladly send the working class out to perish on the eastern fronts. They dream of righteous rulers who will aim their weapons at transforming societies on the other side of the world. The rest of us know that the real enemy is lurking on domestic soil.

—

Translated from Slovenian by Josh Rocchio.