It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, the age of wisdom, and also of madness; the age of belief and disbelief; the age of light and darkness; the spring of hope and the winter of despair. This is how History of Two Cities begins, the novel set in the years of the French Revolution that Charles Dickens published in chapters in the press in 1859. It is known that geniuses, even if they write from their time, concentrate on their past and future texts. That’s why his creations can be read in any present. Also in ours: the best of times, the worst of times.
It has been two years since the war became real again in Europe. Each country does it differently. The Spanish, like everyone else, have paid and are paying an economic bill for this human butchery. But despite the increasingly insistent warning speeches about the growing risk of conflict expansion, we continue to perceive it as something distant. Maps, maps, maps, as Enric Juliana would say.
With our history and with the front at 4,500 kilometers, everything is a long way from us. The fact that in Eastern and Northern Europe things are necessarily lived in a different way certainly does not change our perspective. We continue to see Putin’s threat as something that will at best continue to hurt our pockets. And we accompany their brutality with peaks of emotion in each exercise of counting the dead, like the one that is happening now to coincide with the second anniversary of the start of the slaughter. He is distant even when his hitmen assassinate a deserter from his army in Spanish territory, as has just happened.
What is different is that things have changed – and a lot – above our heads in these last two years. One of them is that militarism has saturated the discourse of European political elites. The issue is dealt with from a technical, economic and strategic angle. Manel Pérez abounded in these same pages a week ago in the article “Who will pay for the rearmament of Europe?” on the eternal dilemma that always raises the allocation of political priorities. Maintenance, improvement and expansion of public services or more ammunition and better drones and tanks?
The unanimous agreement of European leaders that more should be spent on armaments pivots mainly on the material issue of the matter and its geopolitical benefits. More investment to gain a military advantage with which to deter the enemy and, if this is not enough, to be in a position to repel their aggressions. However, one of the things wars continue to teach is that despite technology, fronts and trenches still exist. And that they must be filled with men willing or forced to kill and die for the cause that justifies their recruitment. War, regardless of the role that each one plays in it – aggressor or defender – demands corpses and ruins, not only spending on armaments and research in cutting-edge technology. Even the cold war was like that. Only that in the land of the corpses it developed in playing fields that were far from us Europeans.
The European pro-armament discourse on the rise due to the threat of Putin and the progressive withdrawal of the United States, with or without Trump, has not yet had the turn to address the most pointed dimension of the debate on militarization. And it’s normal. Because this does not concern the chapter on economic priorities or the greater or lesser ability to catch up technologically, but refers to something much more nuclear such as the need to return to the armies and armaments a role with much more prominence among us of everything they represent: willingness to kill and die in defense of moral principles or territorial interests.
Discussions about military spending or the creation of a European army are of an accounting and practical nature only in the first instance. They immediately become moral because they concern the most substantial of our way of being in the world: our values.
The armament and military resizing of democracies requires money, but not only money. Also the shared certainty that the balance between the best and the worst of times is on its way to being irretrievably broken in favor of the latter if we do not hurry. And when we reach this point, a more than reasonable doubt appears: Are we compatible – for better or for worse – with the majority of Europeans today with a greater presence of a tangible warmongering in our lives?
