Waiting for the barbarians
Failed leaders will continue to try and save themselves by creating enemies. Where they do not exist, they invent them
The European Commissioner for Preparedness and Crisis Management, Hadja Lahbib told us a month ago to prepare a survival kit with enough provisions for 72 hours for an emergency, including war. To the sound of relaxing jazz music, she kindly told us to include ID documents (in waterproof casing), canned food, bottled water, matches, an army knife, cash, medicines and a small radio and not to forget playing cards.
For some time, Scandinavian governments had been advising their citizens on the water, food, medicine and basic security equipment they would need to survive war. In Germany and Poland, families have been urged to adapt their own cellars to war bunkers. German, French and Spanish estate agents specialising in emergency shelters are reporting a high demand for nuclear bunkers (costing from £40,000 to £120,000 each) even though they are basically useless in an atomic blast.
Ninety years ago, Smedley D. Butler, a retired US Marine Corps major general who won the medal of honour twice and is certainly no naive pacifist, wrote the book War is a Racket. He exposes the true motives behind war and the military industrial complex. He argues that war is often driven by profit and serves the interests of a small group of wealthy individuals and corporations.
Prof. Ola Tunander, of the Peace Research Institute of Oslo, 21 years ago published The Secret War Against Sweden: US and British Submarine Deception in the 1980s, where he analyses what happened in 1981 after a Soviet submarine was stranded on the Swedish archipelago.
A series of massive submarine intrusions were reported taking place within Swedish waters. Tunander discovered that most of these ‘intrusions’ were constructed for anti-Soviet propaganda purposes.
Tunander’s revelations make it clear that the US and Britain ran a “secret war” in Swedish waters. Tunander writes: “Classified documents and interviews point to covert Western, rather than Soviet activity. Former US secretary of defence Caspar Weinberger stated that Western ‘testing’ operations were carried out regularly in Swedish waters.
Royal Navy submarine captains have also admitted to top-secret operations. The number of Swedes perceiving the Soviet Union as a direct threat increased from five to 10 per cent in 1980 to 45 per cent in 1983. This Anglo-American “secret war” was aimed at exerting political influence over Sweden.
A similar operation is underway in Europe today. European leaders who prefer war to diplomacy are worried that public surveys like the December YouGov poll in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and the UK found public desire to stand by Ukraine until victory – even if that meant prolonging the war – had slumped in all seven countries over the past 12 months. The majority prefer a negotiated end to the fighting. These leaders also need to persuade people to accept higher military spending.
Bronwen Maddox, director of Chatham House, has said “politicians will have to brace themselves to reclaim money through cuts to sickness benefits, pensions and healthcare”.
Janan Ganesh was blunter: “Europe must trim its welfare state to build a warfare state. There is no way of defending the continent without cuts to social spending.”
German, French and Spanish estate agents are reporting a high demand for nuclear bunkers
Others, like Martin Wolf, are promoting war as a way out of economic stagnation: “… the need to spend significantly more on defence... If done in the right way, it is also an economic opportunity.”
Germany has removed the ‘fiscal brake’ that made it illegal for German governments to borrow beyond a strict limit or raise debt to pay for public spending. Now military deficit spending has priority above everything else. The defence spending target will dwarf the deficit spending available for climate control and for badly needed infrastructure.
The ‘Rearm Europe Plan’ (cosmetically changed to ‘Preparedness’) aims to mobilise up to €800 billion in defence spending. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen says: “We are in an era of rearmament, and Europe is ready to massively boost its defence spending, both to respond to the short-term urgency to act and to support Ukraine, but also to address the long-term need to take on more responsibility for our own European security.”
There will be no extra funding for investment, infrastructure projects or public services. This new military spending is seen as a miracle cure by the EU even though today’s power dynamics depend just as much on economic and technological factors as they do on purely military considerations. China has become a great power because of its impressive economic growth and spectacular technological advancement since the 1980s.
The EU is being short-sighted. Critics have pointed out that one-third of this military budget has come from the already severely underfunded Horizon Europe Research Programme in science and industry, badly needed for innovation and productivity if the EU is not to continue falling behind the US and China.
They have also observed that directing the €150 billion in loans earmarked under Next Generation EU towards joint defence projects will come at the expense of investments in the energy and digital transitions. Similarly, reallocating cohesion funds will undermine efforts to combat territorial inequalities.
In its latest report, the European University Association says that underfunding poses a “serious threat” to European universities. Half of universities and research institutions say insufficient funding is biggest obstacle to better teaching and learning and research.
In his poem ‘Waiting for the barbarians’, CP Cavafy writes about the inhabitants of a city in a crumbling empire who have lost faith in their leaders and institutions and are told to turn their attention to the barbarians who are coming to invade them and conquer them. But the unexpected happens:
“Because night has fallen, and the barbarians haven’t come. And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.”
After all, the threat of the barbarians is not real. It is merely an invented distraction from the rot within the city’s leadership. Failed leaders will continue to try and save themselves by creating enemies. Where they do not exist, they invent them.
Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.