Will the European project survive the Orwellian moment in which it finds itself entangled? The European Union, long asserting itself as the sole guarantor of peace on the continent, now appears ready to deploy its operations in service of war, all in the name of securing peace, of course.
In George Orwell’s seminal novel “1984,” he envisioned a dystopian world where words were twisted by totalitarian regimes, with the motto “War is Peace”[1]. When the EU, once hailed as the embodiment of European peace, prioritises the financing of war through the revival of its defense industry, are we to see this as “Peace is War”?
The European institutions and their representatives seem to have overlooked the fundamental truth that peace should never be taken for granted, despite ample warnings. In 2006, Franck Biancheri, founder of the GEAB, starkly reminded us that “Europe’s history has taught us that dreams and nightmares are the two faces of the same coin. Those absolute slogans, “Europe makes Peace”, where one cannot find any room for doubts, questions, uncertainties, are projecting a completely opposite vision of the future”[2].