US President Donald Trump arrives to pose with NATO country leaders for a family photo the Nato Summit at the Hague, Netherlands. Photo Ben Stansall/PA Wire

Luke James, Brussels

On Remembrance Day in 2018, amid the fallout from the Brexit referendum two years earlier, a Welsh veteran of World War Two made an impassioned plea to rethink the vote to leave the EU.

“My main reason for everything is keeping Europe together for peace in the world, and that’s the way to do it,” 93-year-old Sidney Daw said in a video for the Wales for Europe campaign.

The EU is often described as the “greatest peace project in history” by its advocates and indeed the first two words of its foundational text, the Schuman declaration issued by the French foreign minister in 1950, are “world peace.”

But a report published last week by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) claims “the EU, which was once a peace project, is becoming a war project.”

Ukraine 

The Brussels-based think-tank says the process began in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and that Donald Trump’s second term of US President has “accelerated” the change by ending the post-war order in which “Europeans were reluctant to invest in their military capabilities and content to rely on American protection and economic interdependence.”

Its analysis came in the week Trump visited the Netherlands for a NATO summit at which most European leaders agreed to his proposal to increase the target for defence spending from 2% to 5% of national GDP.

Spain’s socialist Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, was the only open refusenik, saying the target is “incompatible with the welfare state” and would imply major cuts to public service.

He secured a carve out for Spain, which joined Nato after a 1986 referendum in which only the Basque Country, Catalonia and the Canary Islands voted against membership, but Trump has threatened to make them pay through trade tariffs.

Doubts

The rest of Europe’s prime ministers were left to try and work out how they were going to meet the commitment. Italy and Belgium were among countries which signed-up despite ministers having expressed doubts about whether they could meet the target.

In Italy, where the public is strongly opposed to increased national defence spending, defence minister Guido Crosetto said “we do not want other key investments, such as those on public health or social spending, to be affected.” In Belgium, Foreign Minister Prévot called the target “excessive” and a respected economist warned meeting it would cost every household 6,000 Euro.

The inability to meet the targets through national budgets means countries are turning to the European Union for support. The 16.4 billion Euro spent on defence by the EU between 2021 and 2027 is likely to be increased significantly in the next long-term budget set to be announced by the Commission this summer.

But most controversial has been the use of Cohesion funds. Before Brexit, Wales was a major beneficiary of Cohesion funding, which contributed to projects like the South Wales Metro as part of its aim to reduce regional and social inequalities within the EU.

The Commission has already told member states it can use cohesion funds for defence projects, such as the modernisation of arms manufacturing sites as part of its Act in Support of Ammunition Production.

‘New priorities’

Raffaele Fitto, a member of the far-right Brothers of Italy who is the European Commissioner for Cohesion and Reforms, has said the new long-term budget is also an opportunity to ensure that “new priorities are put inside the cohesion policy” and said they should not be considered “untouchable.”

The President of Europe’s Committee of the Regions, Kata Tüttő, has warned though that would be a “catastrophic mistake.” “The debate should not be about reallocating existing funds but about securing new resources to safeguard Europe’s security in all its dimensions,” she said.

While the ECFR’s polling shows broad support for increased military spending in the face of growing global instability, national politicians see there is little appetite to achieve that through cuts to public services and social spending.

That puts the emphasis on the EU to use its financial firepower in a way that, at least according to the ECFR, is fundamentally moving it away from its founding mission as a peace project born from the ashes of the second world war. The kind of EU which Sidney Daw and others of his generation admired.

“Europe is a peace project,” insisted Commission vice-president Kaja Kallas ahead of the Nato summit. “We all agree on that.”

But the former Prime Minister of Estonia, one of five EU countries which border Russia, added: “We are living in dangerous times. And in order to have peace, you need to prepare for this.”

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