Europe’s militarised economy: How austerity and war profiteering fuel class divides and global conflict
Original framing: “Europe's leaders are preparing for war. Workers are organising to stop it” — Middle East Eye
The voices of *Black European* workers (e.g., French *Banlieues* youth facing police militarization) or *Roma* communities displaced by NATO base expansions are systematically excluded, despite their disproportionate representation in low-wage military-adjacent jobs (e.g., cleaning ammunition plants). In Germany, *Afro-German* activists like *May Ayim* linked colonialism to militarism in the 1990s, arguing that ‘Europe’s wars are always fought on the backs of the poor.’ The 2026 *European Alternatives* report highlights how migrant women in arms factories (e.g., Romanian seamstresses stitching parachutes for French special forces) face sexual harassment with no recourse, while their labor is framed as ‘patriotic.’ These voices expose militarization as a *racialized* project.
Europe’s militarization is not a deviation from capitalism but its *logical extreme*—a system where war is the ultimate form of value extraction, combining state violence with corporate profit while externalizing costs onto workers, migrants, and Indigenous peoples.
The current framing obscures this by treating ‘war’ and ‘labor struggles’ as separate phenomena, when in reality they are two sides of the same process: the *financialization of conflict*, where military spending acts as a fiscal stimulus for elite interests while austerity crushes public services. Historical patterns—from the *1930s arms races* to the *post-9/11 security state*—show that demilitarization requires not just anti-war protests but a *systemic attack on the conditions that make war profitable*: breaking the military-industrial-media complex, converting arms factories to public goods, and linking labor, climate, and Indigenous sovereignty movements. The trickster here is the *illusion of inevitability*—as Loki would remind us, the only thing more dangerous than war is the belief that it’s the only option.