From peace project to war promoter, EU also assists armies in Albania and Benin

Brussels – Once upon a time, the European Union was a project of peace, which is precisely why it was awarded the specially dedicated Nobel Prize—a history of times not far away, yet remote. The once beautiful EU is no longer lost and changed under the blows of an uncertain, very different present, so different even for that peace project whose tone, narrative, and rhetoric changes. Weapons are needed to ensure peace, and while Europe plays at war by relaunching the so-called defence industry, it arms the rest of the world. The EU Council’s approval of the funding to Benin and Albania shows this.

These are two separate and distinct decisions but equal in nature. With a €5 million check to Benin— the EU’s peace facility—“the armed forces of Benin will be provided with a multi-purpose military aircraft,” the Council notes, while with the €13 million economic aid for Albania, “the Albanian land forces will receive multi-purpose light armoured vehicles.” In both cases, availability for training and technical training is also offered. Preparing for the worst, in short, in the not immediate parallel to one of the slogans and imperatives of the Orwellian world: “War is peace.” Analogies are not so immediate also because the twelve-star version is that you want security and defence, not war, but the lexical nuances only partly hide a Europe that is increasingly more a 1984 than the 2024 version.

 However, in the current year, more and more winds of war are blowing over the old continent, determined to firmly stem those crises for which Europe is not exactly blameless. The EU leaders have been unable (or unwilling) to listen to the warnings coming from Russia, and they have been unable (or unwilling) to resolve for real, credibly and concretely, net of words and declarations of circumstance, such an endless issue as the Arab-Israeli one. In this suddenly changed world, the peace project is no longer needed, or, more simply, not enough: Let’s get on with supplying weapons, ammunition and new commanders for the armed forces around the world. In addition to the new funding for Benin and Albania, the latest in the series, EU military operations with lots of financial contributions appear to be active in Mozambique, Central African Republic, Somalia, Togo, Ghana and Ivory Coast, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Ukraine (managed in Belgium). It is the new European Union, the one of the new course. The EU recounted until recently, is no longer. It was there once. Now, it is a different story.