At last week’s State of the European Union, Ursula von der Leyen declared that the challenges of our time require a “strong European defence.” Behind closed doors in Brussels and across Commission boardrooms, a dangerous consensus is taking shape. Faced with geopolitical instability, ecological collapse, and energy insecurity, European leaders are not turning to diplomacy, sufficiency, or care. They are turning to militarisation.
The numbers are staggering. Global military spending hit a record €2.7 trillion in 2024 – the sharpest increase since the Cold War. EU countries are rapidly following suit. Under NATO pressure, a growing number of Member States are pledging to raise defence budgets to 2% or even up to 5% of GDP. That would mean over €600 billion per year spent on war preparations – more than the total investment gap necessary to meet Europe’s climate and social goals. But the most insidious shift isn’t in the headlines. It’s not the tanks of the fighter jets. It is the quiet militarisation of the green transition itself.
The emerging mining-defence complex
To build electric vehicles and solar panels, Europe needs certain critical raw materials: lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earths. That much is obvious. But what is less visible is that these very same materials are also indispensable for producing drones, missiles, surveillance satellites, and weapons guidance systems. The military sector is quietly becoming a key competitor for the resources meant to power a green future.
Under the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), the EU is signing strategic partnerships with resource-rich countries like Namibia, Chile, and Kazakhstan – offering investment in exchange for privileged access to minerals. These deals are brokered without public consultation, negotiated outside democratic scrutiny, and often ignore the rights of affected communities.
What’s coming next is even more alarming. The proposed Defence Omnibus aims to “simplify” permitting and remove “barriers” to defence industrial investment. In practice, this means fast-tracking mining and military-linked projects by overriding environmental laws designed to ensure transparency, accountability, and ecological due diligence.
The Commission’s logic seems to be that these environmental safeguards were “designed for peacetime.” Now, they must be adapted to meet “emerging security needs.” Let that sink in: protections created to guard people and the planet during peacetime are now seen as expendable in the name of military preparedness.
Undermining the foundations of real security
Civil Society organisations are raising serious concerns. Weakening safeguards like the Water Framework Directive, the Habitats Directive, the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) Directive, the Nature Restoration Law, or the REACH Regulation will not bolster Europe’s resilience. It will sabotage it.
These regulations exist precisely to prevent exactly the environmental and social risk that often derail extractive projects: water contamination, deforestation, chemical exposure, and community resistance. Ignoring these realities does not speed things up in the long run. On the contrary, it invites backlash, delays, and instability.
Many companies acknowledge that strong Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) frameworks – like upfront environmental impact assessments and community consent – make mining projects more viable and less risky. These are not barriers to security. They are prerequisites for it.
Even NATO recognises that environmental degradation and climate change are “conflict multipliers.” Yet the EU now seems poised to use security policy to dismantle the very protections that mitigate those risks. This is not strategic autonomy. It is strategic amnesia.
Europe’s credibility at risk
Europe has long positioned itself as a global leader in environmental and human rights standards. Its participatory governance model, ESG norms, and human rights frameworks have underpinned its diplomatic leverage.
But that credibility is now hanging by a thread. If the Defence Omnibus leads to the erosion of Europe’s own values, it will lose what little moral standing it has left in international negotiations. Resource-rich countries in the Global South are watching closely. They have seen this playbook before.
In South America, the term “extractivismo”, emerged as a powerful critique of development and partnership models rooted in exploitation and broken promises. If the EU trades away its environmental and social safeguards to secure raw materials, it will no longer be seen as a partner committed to sustainable development. It will be seen as yet another predator in the long history of exploitation.
Mining without consent
Across the EU and beyond, communities are pushing back.
In Barroso, Portugal, residents have resisted lithium mining on ecological and cultural grounds. In Finland, Sweden and Norway, Sámi and local communities are fighting to defend their ancestral lands from mineral exploitation. In the Czech Republic, villagers near Cínovec are organising against a project linked to European battery supply chains. In Serbia, the Jadar project sparked the largest environmental protests in a generation.
What unites these struggles is not just resistance to extraction – it is resistance to exclusion. In every case, local voices have been ignored, consultations bypassed, and environmental reviews manipulated.
Now, under the banner of defence readiness, these dynamics may intensify. The Commission is considering using national security clauses to justify removing environmental protections altogether.
What happens when an open-pit mine becomes a matter of state secrecy? When opposing a lithium project is framed as a threat to the defence of Europe? This is not just a policy drift. It is a constitutional shift – one that redefines citizenship, accountability, and public voice.
The carbon cost of militarisation
All of this unfolds against the backdrop of escalating climate breakdown. The military is among the world’s largest institutional polluters, with a global carbon footprint estimated at 5.5 percent of total emissions – more than civil aviation. EU militaries alone emit the equivalent of 14 million cars annually. Yet, military emissions are routinely excluded from climate targets, reporting, and regulation.
To add insult to injury, EU defence budgets are now rising faster than spending on health, education, or climate protection. A 5% GDP target for defence would mean pouring more money into weapons than into meeting the EU’s climate and social goals combined. This is not security. It’s a betrayal of public priorities.
Redefining security: a real strategy for peace
What if Europe took another path? A growing number of policymakers, scholars, and civil society groups are calling for a fundamental redefinition of security. They point to the degrowth movement – now acknowledged in IPCC mitigation pathways – as a viable alternative to militarised, growth-based strategies.
Degrowth is not about collapse. It is a deliberate scaling down of socially unnecessary and ecologically harmful sectors, starting with the arms industry. It means redirecting resources toward sufficiency, care, and public well-being. It is about local resilience, democratic planning, and environmental justice.
This is what real security could look like: not built on extraction, but on equity. Not enforced through militarisation, but cultivated through mutual care. This is the terrain of ecological peacebuilding and positive peace.
A strategic mistake in the making
If it passes in its current form, the Defence Omnibus will mark a historic error. It will institutionalise deregulation. It will legitimise the use of “security” as a pretext to bypass environmental laws and public participation. It will trade away Europe’s democratic and ecological foundations for a fleeting illusion of control. Ramping up in the past did not deter war; it only enlarged its scale of destruction in its self-fulfilling prophecy.
This is not a transition. It is escalation wearing a green mask. We are marching not toward peace, but into a new extractive arms race – faster, deeper, and more destructive.
The question now is not whether Europe is ready for the future. It is whether we are willing to destroy everything we claim to protect in order to get there.
