Christian Zeller
Dear Hanna,
I understand your arguments. I share your argument that we need a perspective of solidarity for the whole continent of Europe. This perspective includes massive support for the Ukrainian resistance. However, the fact that the countries of Europe and the USA have so far given too little support to Ukraine is not due to military inferiority vis-à-vis Russia but has political and economic reasons. At least some important sectors of capital have always focused on resuming “reasonable economic relations” with Russia.
It is right to demand that the European states must guarantee that Ukraine can defend itself. I assume that the stocks of air defense weapons throughout all states in Europe alone would be enough to protect the people in Ukraine’s major cities.
Nevertheless, the call for a general armament is wrong. We need to consider the global and planetary context. And in this respect, we face huge dilemmas that seem almost insoluble.
Russia’s attack on Ukraine has contributed to the fact that global heating has largely been pushed out of the public debate. Global heating is accelerating and in around five to seven decades will mean that large parts of the populated areas will no longer be permanently habitable. 3 billion people will no longer live in the temperature niche that has prevailed for the last 6,000 years. Imperialist rivalry and the material consumption of armaments will cause greenhouse gas emissions to rise massively. The oncoming wave of armament will make a substantial reduction in global warming unlikely and thus directly jeopardize the physical reproduction of not millions, but billions of people within a few decades.
The earth system is changing abruptly and will leave its mark on all social conflicts.
We cannot approve of a general rearmament of the European imperialist powers. They will use their military strength to assert their claims by force in the context of increased rivalry for scarce and expensive ores, rare earths, agricultural land and even water, whether in Africa, Asia or Europe or elsewhere. Their method of adapting to global warming is the militarization of society and borders and the exclusion of the ever-increasing number of superfluous people. This means that the European powers will also want to use their military strength to assert their colonial ambitions. After all, this is nothing new.
Rearmament will lead to an even more unequal distribution of social resources and the enrichment of the most perverse sectors of capital.
How can we deal with these dilemmas?
1.) The European states must be forced to deliver a maximum of their weapons stocks (especially air defense) including intelligence information to Ukraine.
2.) We must demand the socialization of the arms industry. This industry must gear its production to Ukraine’s current needs. Arms deliveries to other countries, namely Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, must be stopped. Rearmament in the service of neo-colonial and imperialist interests must be rejected. But we have to admit that this differentiation is difficult to make in reality.
3.) We must immediately begin a comprehensive continental discussion on a pan-European security system. Particular attention must be paid to the needs of the potentially threatened Baltic states and Moldova. We must prevent social and ecological security from being undermined. A comprehensive continental understanding of security combines social, ecological and physical security. This is only possible at continental level.
4.) We also need to develop a policy that helps to convince the general population and particularly the working class in Russia (and elsewhere) to break with their rulers. If people perceive European rearmament as being directed against them, this concern will become impossible.
5) We must maintain the perspective of a global break with capitalist rule, a global restructuring and dismantling of the arms industry and finally an eco-socialist upheaval and fill it with as much concrete life as possible in the daily struggles.
Christian Zeller is an activist in the European Network for Solidarity with Ukraine (ENSU). https://ukraine-solidarity.eu/
He is a professor of economic geography and editorial board member of the German-language journal,emancipation — Journal for Ecosocialist Strategy. Zeller is the author of Climate Revolution: Why we need an ecosocialist alternative (in German).