On March 4, 2025, the European Commission presented its ReArm Europe plan, calling for an additional €800 billion in military spending by EU countries in the next four years.
Such an increase would mainly happen through increased national debt according to the Commission’s proposed incentives, and in the current context of budgetary austerity this will necessarily lead to further cuts in areas like the welfare state, health and education, but also external aid or environmental and climate policies. Let’s remind that the world's armed forces account for around 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions and would rank fourth if they were a country, without taking into account the environmental impact of the destruction caused by wars and post-conflict reconstruction. A recent study alerts that the rearmament planned by NATO alone could increase GHG emissions by almost 200m tonnes/year.

This ReArm Europe plan does not come out of the blue: the EU has been increasingly subsidizing the arms industry since 2017, first for the research and development of new or enhanced weaponry, then for boosting production capacities starting with ammunition and missiles, and now also subsidizing those member states who would decide to jointly acquire weapons and other military goods. The clearly stated motivation is first to develop the next generation of weaponry, i.e. to prepare the wars of the future. Secondly, it is about boosting the global competitiveness of the arms industry, in other words its ability to export to the global market, including to countries at war and authoritarian regimes.
EU rearmament assistance programmes are already available to Norway and will likely soon be available to other non-EU countries, such as the United Kingdom and Switzerland. The EU is even considering partnerships with Turkey and non-European countries.
And not only has the EU been creating special funds for the arms industry, it is now increasingly using other civilian programmes to fund the arms industry, particularly the European Cohesion Fund for regional development, whose funds could be partly diverted for scaling up or creating new arms production plants.

Moreover, this is happening in a context where military expenditure has significantly increased over the past decade. The EU 27 countries collectively spent 370 billion USD in 2024, this is a 9.4% increase compared with 2023 and a 35% increase compared with 2020.
The EU 27 and European NATO countries still spend together 3 times more than Russia in military expenditure. The EU 27 countries alone have at least as much, and in several areas (much) more military capacity than Russia (troops and conventional weaponry). The likelihood of a Russian attack against an EU or European NATO country is currently very low, but what is to be feared is that the European race to rearmament will act as a self-fulfilling prophecy: this is what is called the security dilemma, i.e. when each country perceives the other, and its rearmament process, as a threat and feels compelled to go a step further in rearmament in a never ending cycle, until the war happens. History has shown us repeatedly that the combination of rivalries between powers and an arms race is the surest path to war.

It is time for European countries and the EU to stop feeding the global arms race and start putting all resources into non-violent means to resolve and prevent conflicts: this means we need to start thinking ‘outside of the box’ and build a common security approach for the European continent.
The Stop ReArm Europe campaign initiating this petition ambitions to help re-build a strong and coordinated European peace movement and calls for citizens’ support.