It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, the age of wisdom, and also of madness; the time of beliefs and disbelief; the era of light and darkness; the spring of hope and the winter of despair. This is how A Tale 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 the past and the future in their texts. That is why his creations can be read in any present. Also in ours: the best of times, the worst of times.
Two years ago the war became real again in Europe. Each country digests it in a different way. We Spaniards, like everyone else, have paid and pay an economic bill for this human carnage. But despite the increasingly insistent warning speeches about the growing risk of expansion of the conflict, we continue to perceive it as something distant. Maps, maps, maps, as Enric Juliana would say.
With our history and with the front 4,500 kilometers away, everything is very far away from us. That in Eastern and Northern Europe things are necessarily experienced differently does not certainly change our perspective. We continue to see Putin's threat as something that will at most continue to hurt our pockets. And we accompany his brutality with peaks of emotion at each accounting exercise for the dead, like the one now coinciding with the second anniversary of the beginning of the massacre. It is even distant when his hitmen murder a deserter from his army in Spanish territory, as has just happened.
A different thing is that things have changed – a lot – above our heads in the last two years. One of them is that militarism has permeated the discourse of European political elites. The issue is treated from a technical, economic and strategic angle. Manel Pérez elaborated on these same pages a week ago in the article “Who will pay for the rearmament of Europe?” about the eternal dilemma that the assignment of political priorities always poses. 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 weapons pivots mainly on the material issue of the matter and its geopolitical benefits. Greater investment to gain military advantage with which to deter the enemy and, if this is not enough, be in a position to repel their aggressions. However, one of the things that wars continue to teach is that despite technology, fronts and trenches continue to exist. And each 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 person plays in it – aggressor or defender – demands corpses and ruins, not only spending on weapons and research in cutting-edge technology. Even the cold war was like that. Except that in the field of cold cuts it took place on playing fields that were far away from us Europeans.
The European pro-arms discourse, which is on the rise due to the threat of Putin and the progressive American withdrawal, with or without Trump, has not yet had its turn to address the thorniest dimension of the debate on militarization. And it's normal. Because this does not concern the chapter of economic priorities or the greater or lesser capacity to catch up technologically, but rather refers to something much more nuclear such as the need to give armies and weapons back a role with much more prominence among us than everything they represent: willingness to kill and die in the defense of moral principles or territorial interests.
Discussions on 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 part of our way of being in the world: our values. The arms and military resizing of democracies requires money, but not only money. Also the shared certainty that the balance between the best and worst of times is on the way to being irreparably broken in favor of the second if we do not remedy it. And at this point is where a more than reasonable doubt appears: Are the majority of Europeans today compatible – for better or worse – with a greater presence of tangible warmongering in our lives?
