At the end of June we finished the first parts of the book Conversión de la industria militar en Euskal Herria para no fabricar más guerras (Adaptation of the arms industry in the Basque Country so as not to create more wars) La guerra is coming! It explores and investigates why drums have been ringing in Europe since the end of 2023. The analysis, based on numerous research documents, leads us to the surprising conclusion that, since the beginning of this century, the lobby of the European military industry has begun to organise itself in a structured way and, for two decades, has managed to exert a growing influence on European policies. To this end, it has taken advantage of its strategy of infiltrating the political decision-making areas of the European Union until it achieves its objective of making the arms race once again the main leiv motif of the European Union.

In this text we explained that some of the main spokesmen of the European military lobby (Von der Leyen, Borrell or Macron) have collaborated, since the end of 2023, increasing the anguish generated by the possibility of the spread of war in Europe, in order to obtain the necessary atmosphere of society and the acceptance of the essential document of their interest. And they did it. In fact, in 2024 the European Defence Industry Strategy was adopted, which has been supplemented by the European Defence Investment Programme. These projects foresee a series of investments in the arms industry that have subsequently been augmented with the European Investment Bank’s Immediate Action Plan for the Security and Defence Industry or the creation of the post of Defence Commissioner, as proposed by von der Leyen himself in the June elections.

But, as we warned, the military lobby planned to go even further until it achieved its next objectives: to issue a joint debt backed by all Member States, not to take into account defence expenditure when accounting for the deficit, or to include a budget section of EUR 100 billion for the military industry in the next budgets. Well, all this has just been approved within the framework of the European Union Rearmament Plan, in response to the interests of the struggles between the American and European arms lobbies.

We put all this in our book, in which we explained that Trump somehow comes to tell us something like this: “Do you want to give your sodas to the friends of the European Arms Lobby and to my friends, that is to say, the American Industrial Lobby, only bread crumbs? But they are the ones who guarantee that the United States will defend you and fund my election campaign! May Von der Leyen and Borrell defend you!” In this sense, there are hardly any surprises: As the European military lobby continues to exert a growing influence on European policies, they will not only exacerbate the arms race and create a real danger of war, but they will also further reduce the social spending budget of all European countries (and it is already quite small! ).

As we mentioned in our book, we did not have specific data on the military lobby in the Basque Country. But here’s where a few months after its publication appeared Cedarios, trying to boost the sector and convening a debate on the “opportunity” to invest in the sector. We intend to participate in this public debate in other texts at a later date. In any case, we believe that we must consider in advance what the real context is and not what the military lobbies and their war drums want to present to us.

Today we are seeing how the social system is deteriorating: capitalism (what Amaia Pérez Orozco calls this scandalous thing) is in crisis, in the terminal phase. Based on the exploitation of productive labor, the expropriation of reproductive labor and the spoliation of the planet, it continues to seek a permanent accumulation that leads us to throw ourselves into the abyss, in which all the crises generated by capitalism itself are uniting: the brutal crisis of inequality and poorly paid precarious labor; the crisis of care and reproduction; the migratory crisis and racialized violence; the ecological crisis (global warming, disappearance of species and ecosystems, raw materials and fossil energy, the proliferation of authoritarian and militaristic crises).

In this context, the Basque Government has made statements such as: "The arms and military industries will develop enormously in the coming years, (...) we are very fortunate to have industries in the Basque Country that work a lot in this field, I think it is an opportunity for new products". As if that were not enough, the new industrial plan has been entrusted to the consulting company Zabala Innovation, which has direct links in the sector of the military industry. The Basque Government is among those who take advantage of the business opportunities that arise and advocate for an increase in wealth (understood as capital accumulation), regardless of the fact that doing so leads us to the aforementioned abyss.

With all this, the Basque authorities lead us to the abyss, even if the war they use to intimidate us and accept their wishes ends up really exploding. This is what it means to rearm and surround ourselves with arms lobbies, for whom the risk of war is not a problem, but a huge business.

Well, in our view, that is precisely the context to be taken into account before starting the debate. Those of us who are committed to the transformation of reality should stop there when proposing initiatives so that the military lobbies and their drums of war do not rob us of the possibility of having a future. Here is the proposal of the antimilitarists: to dedicate ourselves to the field until the military industry becomes a civil production of social benefit, because in this way we will get the Basque Country to question the productive system and to refuse to manufacture weapons for wars.