European Defence as a Mirage: Plenty of Money, Little Strategy

The European Union has decided to speak the language of war. After years of moralising rhetoric and an agenda dominated by climate, gender, and “resilience,” Brussels announced this year setting aside up to €800 billion to rearm the continent, alongside a Defence Readiness Roadmap 2030 that promises to prepare Europe for a high-intensity conflict. However, a new MCC Brussels report, A Twenty-First Century Maginot Line?, authored by Professor Bill Durodié, dismantles this triumphalist narrative and exposes a deeper contradiction: financial ambition does not align with industrial reality, political cohesion, or the social willingness required to sustain a credible defence policy.

The report’s starting point is that Brussels has chosen to announce the “how much” before answering the “what for” and, above all, the “how.” The suspension of fiscal rules, the introduction of new debt instruments, and the reallocation of European funds create the illusion of a qualitative leap. But, as Durodié stresses, “projects, contracts and financing only ever form one element of achieving real security.” Defence is not a spreadsheet—still less a problem solved through joint statements and industrial summits.

This criticism is not new. In The Hollow Flag, published in 2023, the same author already warned of “the gulf between EU security rhetoric and real security”: a structural gap between the discourse of European elites and the absence of a demos willing to sustain it. Far from it being a temporary flaw of the current political cycle, Durodié insists that this is a constitutive feature of the European project itself. “The EU, from its very inception, has served as a technocratic mechanism to bypass the citizens of Europe,” the author recalls, stressing that distrust of the peoples is not a recent deviation but something “hard-baked” into the Union’s functioning.

The new report applies this diagnosis to the field of defence. The Readiness Roadmap relies on large pan-European “flagships”—air and space shields, drone walls—that resemble the logic of old European industrial projects more than the realities of twenty-first-century warfare.

The comparison with the Maginot Line is not merely rhetorical: expensive, rigid, top-down systems designed for the last war, which were easily circumvented by a flexible adversary (often an internal one). Meanwhile, Europe remains dependent on third parties for key elements—from ammunition and drones to intelligence, communications, and space capabilities.

The problem, however, goes beyond industry or technology. The report identifies an even more serious absence: the lack of political and social cohesion. In every major crisis—financial, health-related, or now military—member states tend to go their own way. Defence has not altered this dynamic. Germany, France, or Poland also use the new military push as an industrial policy or as a release valve for the collapse of other sectors, but without a shared vision of strategic ends. As Durodié summarised in his comments to this publication, the EU “can put on a good show when the stakes are low, but whenever there is a serious problem, its members tend to go their own way.”

To this fragmentation is added an even more uncomfortable void: the question of loyalty. The war in Ukraine has shown—according to the report itself—that real security rests on the mobilisation of society, not merely on equipment. Teachers, artists, and workers have become fighters and technology developers because they believe there is something of their own worth defending. The EU, by contrast, has spent decades eroding any notion of belonging, ridiculing national sovereignty, and treating its citizens as “consumers” or “inhabitants.” Now, belatedly, it seeks to appeal to a spirit of sacrifice that it has itself delegitimised. Dying for one’s country is one thing; dying for Brussels is quite another.

“The gulf between the moral posturing of the EU elites and the actual experiences and values of their citizens cannot last,” Durodié warns. Brussels prioritises abstract causes and projects geopolitical insecurity, while Europeans worry about jobs, healthcare, education, and everyday safety. The political result of this disconnect has been the rise of parties labelled “populist,” managed through a cordon sanitaire that excludes social majorities from decision-making. This architecture sits uneasily with the idea of a common defence sustained over time.

The EU wants to behave like a serious geopolitical actor without having resolved its most basic problem: its relationship with its own citizens. Increasing spending, creating new agencies, or launching ten-year plans does not replace democratic legitimacy or collective will. As the author already warned in The Hollow Flag, without the people, there is no security—only empty symbols. Two years on, A Twenty-First Century Maginot Line? confirms that Brussels continues to confuse bureaucracy with strength and money with strategy. And that confusion may yet prove fatal.