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Europa se rearma. La Unión Europea deja atrás su autorepresentación como proyecto supranacional de paz por excelencia y se embarca en la remilitarización del continente. Este artículo toma la reciente aceleración de la militarización europea para comprender sus orígenes y causas estructurales en el sistema-mundo. Adoptando el marco crítico de los marxismos del Sur global (Jha et al., 2020), el artículo interviene en los debates académicos sobre militarismo, securitización, militarización fronteriza, economía política de la seguridad, y teoría del sistema-mundo, señalando sus limitaciones analíticas para entender el fenómeno en su especificidad histórica y sistémica. Más allá de la reciente o puntual cobertura mediática, la remilitarización europea es un proceso que lleva gestándose décadas, no solo en el ámbito militar convencional sino también, y de manera fundamental, a través de la intensificación del control fronterizo. Se plantea que el proceso no puede entenderse sin la articulación de estas dos vías militarizantes: convencional y fronteriza. El artículo analiza el desarrollo histórico de ambas, detallando su imbricación con intereses económicos, sus complejos industriales, y su relación con tendencias del sistema-mundo. Tomando el concepto marxiano de la contradicción centro-periferia y su maduración histórica, el artículo propone que tanto la militarización convencional como la fronteriza emergen como respuesta al largo ascenso del Sur global, ya sea en su expresión geopolítica o en su manifestación social migratoria. Se plantea así una interpretación sistémica que comprenda conjuntamente las dos tendencias, anclando el análisis en procesos globales a menudo excluidos por corrientes tanto dominantes como críticas, y apuntando a la importancia de entender la cuestión migratoria y la cuestión bélica como vinculadas por un análisis de la acumulación a escala mundial (Amin, 2010). La militarización de Europa emerge pues no como simple efecto del auge ideológico de la extrema derecha a ambos lados del atlántico, ni como mero resultado de la cuestión ucraniana o la presión geopolítica rusa, según el relato dominante. Tampoco emerge meramente de las crisis internas al proceso de acumulación en el norte, sean el estancamiento secular y la sobreacumulación, la bajada de las tasas de rentabilidad, o las lubricadas dinámicas de los complejos industriales militar y fronterizo, según ciertos discursos críticos occidentales. Estos procesos son significativos, pero este artículo propone que el factor determinante de la remilitarización de Europa es la creciente capacidad del sur global de determinar el curso de su propio destino.
Europe is rearming. The European Union is moving away from its self-portrayal as the quintessential supranational peace project and embarking on the remilitarization of the continent. Adopting the critical framework of Third World Marxism (Jha, Yeros, and Chambati, 2020), this paper examines the recent acceleration of European militarization to understand its origins and structural causes rooted in the world-system. Beyond recent and anecdotal media coverage, European remilitarization is a process that has been unfolding for decades, not only in the conventional military sphere but also, and fundamentally, through the intensification of border control. It is argued that the process cannot be understood with-out the articulation of these two avenues of militarization: conventional and border-based. The article analyzes the historical development of both, detailing their imbrication with economic interests, their industrial complexes, and their relationship with trends in the world-system.Drawing on the Third World Marxian concept of the “center-periphery contradiction” and its historical maturation, the article proposes that both conventional and border militarization emerge as a response to the “long rise of the global South,” whether in its geopolitical form or in its social expression in mi-gration. It thus proposes a systemic interpretation that comprehends both trends jointly, grounding the analysis in global processes often excluded by both dominant and critical currents, and pointing to the importance of understanding the migrant question and the militarism question as linked through an analysis of accumulation on a world scale (Amin, 2010). The militarization of Europe thus emerges not as a mere effect of the ideological rise of the far right on both sides of the Atlantic, nor as a mere result of Russian geopolitical pressure, as dominant narratives have it. Nor does it, either, emerge mere-ly from the internal crises of the accumulation process in the North—whether secular stagnation and overaccumulation, falling rates of profit, or the lubricated dynamics of the military and border industrial complexes—as certain Western critical discourse construes it. These processes are significant, but this piece argues that the determining factor in Europe’s remilitarization is the growing capacity of the Global South to shape the course of its own destiny.Intervening in contemporary academic debates on militarism, securitization, border militarization, the political economy of security, and world-systems theory, the piece critiques these bodies of scholarship for the analytical limitations they pose to understand the two phenomena in their historical and systemic specificity. Within IR, neo-Weberian approaches to militarism in the 1980s abandoned the anti-imperial-ist, political economy origins of the analysis of militarism, which itself was later confined to a marginal position in the discipline. In that vacuum, securitization theory emerged, developing an early focus on immigration.The theory, however, remained largely theoretical, lacking empirical elaboration, remaining disconnect-ed from political economy, and failing to link securitization with developments in the capital accumula-tion process. A small field of border militarization studies, more empirical in orientation, developed in parallel, highlighting the application of military logics and techniques to border enforcement. Meanwhile, the political economy of security literature emerged, recuperating the critical links with Marxism, reveal-ing the driving role of arms companies, and explaining securitizing and militarizing trends as responses to the needs of European capitalism (particularly military industrial capital, Slijper, 2007).This work, however, suffered from important limitations. First, a Eurocentric account of accumulation that understates its world-systemic character and the input from the South. Second, an economistic undercurrent that overstates the role of economic incentives as driving factors of the process, failing to link them to political projects in the realm of class relations. Combined, these shortcomings produce a near complete displacement of the role of global social forces and the balance of power in the deter-mination of events and trends—an omission related to the abandonment of “imperialism” as organizing conceptual matrix. Adopting the critical framework of Third World Marxism as a project of “epistemic sovereignty” rooted in national liberation struggles and Southern projects of scholarly production (Jha, Yeros, and Chambati, 2020), the piece then briefly revises the world-systems literature on immigration and militarism, sketching out the lacunae that the paper sets out to address. The piece then proposes an alternative historical genealogy of contemporary European militarization, grounding itself on the maturation of the core-periphery contradiction—the increasingly irreconcilable antagonism between Northern capital accumulation and Southern popular auto-centric development (Amin, 1990). The piece centers the “rise of the South” to explain current militarization as an attempt to reassert and shore up a declining imperialist global arrangement. After WW2, decolonization and glob-al socialist advance forced imperial powers to forgo former internecine struggle in favor of a collective strategy to face both South and East. This resulted in a shift in international specialization, replacing the West’s monopoly on industrial production with a new imperial arrangement based on the Five Monopo-lies: technology, finance, natural resources, communication, and armaments (Amin, 2011). Today, the maturation of the core-periphery contradiction is entering a new phase, as the rise of the South in gener-al and of China in particular challenges these Five Monopolies. To maintain its prosperity in this context, the North must secure its privileged access to global resources, its technological edge, its control over circulation—all factors driving core militarization. Europe’s dual militarizing drive, thus, is explained as responding to changes in global class relations. The North cannot dissolve its alliance without accelerat-ing its decline. Hence, US threats of “abandoning” Europe serve as pretext for it to militarize, providing further strategic depth to the Western bloc. European remilitarization is thus an internal restructuring of the imperialist bloc in the face of the South’s secular rise.The piece then details the long-winded process of (conventional) militarization in the EU, highlighting the central role of the European arms industry, the EU-specific military-industrial complex, and the less-er-known concerns of officials driving the process. European militarization is thus shown to arise not simply from “greedy” businesspeople and lobbyists, but as a structural response to three factors: (1) the need to sustain cheap access to world resources to salvage its declining social compact, (2) Europe's in-ability to do so while depending solely on the US, and most importantly, (3) the South’s growing capacity for sovereign control over its resources, territories, and social formations—in large part thanks to China. In this light, the “sleeping beauty” of European defense awakens now to counter this expanding threat. Relating the rise of a parallel border-industrial complex, the piece then traces the roots of border mili-tarization to another dimension of the core-periphery contradiction, immigration to Europe, understood here as a key result of the unequal development imposed on the South. Specifically, peripheral forma-tions’ economic disarticulation produces crises of social reproduction, which translate into increasing numbers of people “outside the workforce”, rendered surplus, producing important pressures to emi-grate. Border fortification thus emerges as another form of the militarized response to the maturation of the core-periphery contradiction. The piece then concludes by analyzing this two-pronged militarization as paradigmatic of an overall trend in the world-economy—the increasing importance of the accumula-tion of waste (Kadri, 2023).
