Leaving Brussels by train, the Audi factory is one of the first things you see. Made up of gray, rectangular buildings, the site was long one of Belgium’s biggest car producers. Slick and productive, it was a fitting symbol for the capital of Europe. Early this year, however, it succumbed to the industrial crisis overtaking the continent and was unceremoniously shut down. Spots of graffiti are already visible on its once pristine walls.
In recent months, the story of the Audi factory has become the story of Europe. Both are down on their luck, in danger of being swept away by the century’s new geoeconomic tide. In Brussels, the response to the predicament has been equally in tune with the times — as part of a wider military revamp, ministers claim, the former car factory should be turned into a weapons producer. Such a relaunch, proponents say, would aid Europe’s strategic autonomy and create 3,000 new jobs.
Across Europe, policymakers are converging on the same strategy, hoping to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, increased military spending would make Europe safe from Russia and independent from America, at last securing its superpower status. On the other hand, it would revive Europe’s ailing industrial sector, under pressure from Chinese competitors and rising energy costs. Pumping money into the military, so the argument goes, is the way to fight the twin crises of geopolitical vulnerability and economic malaise.
These hopes are likely to prove delusive. Europe’s militarization push, suffering problems of both scale and efficiency, is unlikely to work on its own terms. But it carries a bigger danger than failure. By focusing on defense at the expense of all else, it risks taking the European Union not forward but backward. Rather than a major advance, breakneck rearmament could well amount to a historic mistake.
Europe’s new approach is usually given an older name: military Keynesianism. Originally, the concept referred to the tendency of midcentury governments to counteract economic downturns through increases in military spending — a combination supposedly first pioneered by the Nazis in the 1930s, then globalized by the Americans in the 1940s. More recently, the term has been applied to President Vladimir Putin’s war economy in Russia.
Yet it is far from clear whether Europe’s current efforts warrant such a description. For one, the continent is simply undergoing a return to military spending levels before 1989. At its peak in the 1960s, for instance, German military expenditure reached just under 5 percent of gross domestic product; Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s target, announced last week, is 3.5 percent. Such a restoration hardly qualifies as a great leap forward — certainly not matching the concept of the “Zeitenwende,” or “turning point,” that has been used to describe the change in approach.
