Militarization versus democracy
It is evident that we are entering a spiral of militarization in crescendo A very dangerous approach that imposes itself on democratic debate, with disastrous effects for the populations suffering from war, whose opinions have not been directly asked, and the extension to other contexts and populations that, without being consulted, enter the area of militarization and war, as is now happening with Iran.
How would the Palestinians have voted on the Hamas attack on Israel if they had been informed of the terrible consequences they had suffered? The action was decided without the consent of those affected. However, to what extent was it conceivable and foreseeable to "inform" them of the Israeli government's desire to eliminate the Palestinian people under the guise of "self-defense," with a total lack of proportionality in the response that has resulted in a systematic plan of ethnic cleansing?
Does the Israeli population agree with sacrificing its hostages to Hamas, while its government decides on a genocidal war against children, women, and innocent citizens? In the first part of the question, there are probably a large number of Israelis who disagreed, as can be seen in the mobilizations in favor of negotiating the return of the hostages. In contrast, surveys of Israeli citizens show majority support for the destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza. The non-recognition and demonization of Palestinians in Israel has turned theimago majority view of the Palestinian as equivalent to terrorist, which is a precondition for legitimizing his elimination.
Do the people of Russia and Ukraine agree with the continuation of the war? Such a formulation abstractly induces the supposed negative response from both sides. However, the reality is quite complex. Democracy requires conditions of stability and trust, which have been dismantled. Let's see, the war would have been avoided if the 1994 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) Agreements, the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Russia and Ukraine signed in 1997, or the NATO-Russia Founding Act signed in question by NATO's expansion to incorporate Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1999, and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, and Slovakia in 2004, had been respected. In 2002, President GW Bush unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ball Missile Treaty. A dynamic that raised Russian alarm bells, expressed by Putin at the 2008 Munich Security Conference when he openly opposed the proposal to incorporate Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, protests ignored by the country's expansionist arms policies and internal interference in the Maida Crimea coup in 2014 and the war in Ukraine in 2022, after Ukraine signed and breached the Minsk I and Minsk II Agreements and the US withdrew in 2019 from the Medium-Range Nuclear Missile Deployment Treaty...
At this point, without including US budgets, the combined military budgets of NATO states average close to 2% of GDP and are more than four times larger than Russia's. The only real challenge is to increase military budgets by such an amount without taking into account social and climate spending.
All of this is a desideratum that only serves to consolidate authoritarian, anti-democratic political options in power, and it is also reflected in the political landscape of European states.
The priority for Europe is to rescue democracy from this militaristic narrative that leads us nowhere but to war. We must free ourselves from the vassalage of the United States and the interests of its military complex, define a genuine European security strategy, and recover the spirit of the 1994 Conference on Security and Cooperation.
