"Tanks versus pensions"

The welfare state and the war effort have collided in the European Union. Frightened governments, having lost economic sovereignty, are now embracing the need to strengthen military sovereignty as a response to a world in which Europeans feel increasingly alone.

The fusion of the debate on the sustainability of the welfare state with the geopolitical bid to rearm Europe was openly raised by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte before the European Parliament. Rutte literally spoke of the financial burden of the welfare state to suggest that a small reallocation of these funds could significantly strengthen European military capabilities. Just a few days ago, experts from the Belgian think tank, the Egmont Institute, published a report on how NATO countries finance their defense, entitled Tanks versus pensions, thus reformulating the old "guns versus butter" dilemma.

Meanwhile, Germany has broken its taboo against public debt in order to finance the country's rearmament. Friedrich Merz, the perennial candidate for chancellor, has managed to rally a majority ranging from the Christian Democrats to the Greens, including the Social Democrats, in favor of a debt-financed defense investment agreement, thereby removing the last major obstacle on his path to the chancellorship. However, in Germany, a third of the population is against military aid to Ukraine. With different motives and arguments, everyone from the far right to the far left is wary of this Copernican turn in defense policy, and the gap between the east and west of the country is even wider.

Five years after Covid-19, the pandemic has left us with a more indebted, more digitalized, and more individualistic world. The system hasn't been rethought. There are new fears, new threats, co-opting political discourse. If this global shock didn't translate into more social justice, now the latest sense of acceleration and emergency pushing European politics could directly impact the welfare system and, in turn, the stability of increasingly weak governments. Just look at how British Prime Minister Keir Starmer's administration is sinking in the polls, with Nigel Farage's Reform UK hot on its heels. Discontent and internal pressure within his own party over the announcements of possible cuts have mobilized MPs, charities, and Labour activists against a savings program they believe targets the most vulnerable in society.

Since the Great Recession of 2008, each new crisis has aggravated citizen discontent and deteriorated institutional trust. But political disorientation is especially acute in social democracy.

In recent years, each new election seems like an agonizing debate for the survival of the system. Each minimal result is sold as a message of resistance. But the reality is that we must rethink arguments and responses. But first, we must correctly read the reality that surrounds us and the fears that mobilize our societies.

As Ezra Klein explains in New York TimesThe problem for the Democrats in the United States—a party currently immersed in an internal civil war—begins precisely with the reality of the place where they govern. New York, California, and Chicago are areas that are losing population. People are leaving because the cost of living is too high. It's very expensive to buy a house or raise their children, especially when there are states with lower taxes where they can start over with more opportunities. "You can't be the party of working families when the places you govern are areas where working families can't afford to live," Klein says. And in democratic systems, losing people means losing power. The electoral districts where the Democrats won are, for the most part, losing population and, therefore, seats.

There is an inherent weakness in a world shaped by the power of the powerful. Wage poverty is the fastest-growing poverty rate in the European Union, according to a study by the European Parliament. But while new elites and new cultural influences emerge from the power of the new digital reality, the sense that we live in vulnerable societies, permanently under threat, has imposed reactive and short-term government responses. As Bulgarian thinker Ivan Krastev explains, this European Union, the product of a generation that feared the past and had great hope for the future, is now being transformed from top to bottom—and from its founding principles—by the fears of a generation fearful of the future and the threats posed by the new nostalgic for the past.