European Defence as a Mirage: Plenty of Money, Little Strategy

The European Union has decided to speak the language of war. After years of moralising rhetoric and an agenda dominated by climate, gender, and “resilience,” Brussels announced this year setting aside up to €800 billion to rearm the continent, alongside a Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 that promises to prepare Europe for a high-intensity conflict. However, a new MCC Brussels report, A Twenty-First Century Maginot Line?, authored by Professor Bill Durodié, dismantles this triumphalist narrative and exposes a deeper contradiction: financial ambition does not align with industrial reality, political cohesion, or the social willingness required to sustain a credible defence policy.

The report’s starting point is that Brussels has chosen to announce the “how much” before answering the “what for” and, above all, the “how.” The suspension of fiscal rules, the introduction of new debt instruments, and the reallocation of European funds create the illusion of a qualitative leap. But, as Durodié stresses, “projects, contracts and financing only ever form one element of achieving real security.” Defence is not a spreadsheet—still less a problem solved through joint statements and industrial summits.

This criticism is not new. In The Hollow Flag, published in 2023, the same author already warned of “the gulf between EU security rhetoric and real security”: a structural gap between the discourse of European elites and the absence of a demos willing to sustain it. Far from it being a temporary flaw of the current political cycle, Durodié insists that this is a constitutive feature of the European project itself. “The EU, from its very inception, has served as a technocratic mechanism to bypass the citizens of Europe,” the author recalls, stressing that distrust of the peoples is not a recent deviation but something “hard-baked” into the Union’s functioning.

The new report applies this diagnosis to the field of defence. The Readiness Roadmap relies on large pan-European “flagships”—air and space shields, drone walls—that resemble the logic of old European industrial projects more than the realities of twenty-first-century warfare.