We are in the midst of a renewed drive to war. Trump’s decision to make a 50 percent increase in arms spending turns the rearmament drive into a global arms race. The US arms budget is already larger the those of the next ten largest arms spenders added together. It makes the American military, in Trump’s own words “a dream military”, and when Donald Trump is dreaming the rest of us are having nightmares.
From Venezuela to Iran, from Gaza to Greenland, Trump is throwing around his military might. Conflict in one region quickly spreads to another as we saw with Venezuela, when the US navy boarded a Russian flagged tanker in the North Atlantic, with extensive British assistance.
There is a very determined appeasement of Donald Trump by the European leaders. Just as in the 1930s when European leaders feared Bolshevism and so appeased Hitler, today they fear Putin, with far less reason, and appease Trump. They do so because they cannot identify where the threats to the stability, internal coherence, and the democratic structures of their own states come from.
Part of Trump’s National Security strategy is that the US will back far-right political formations in European states. The purpose is to force states who are reluctant to fall in line with US policy.
Part of this appeasement is massive rearmament and the introduction of conscription – something most of us thought we would never see again in our lifetime. Conscription is back in Germany, France, in Belgium and in the Netherlands, and now there is a scheme being floated here in Britain. At the last general election the Tory party manifesto suggested a conscription programme which is now being enacted by Starmer, albeit in a thin-end-of-the-wedge type way. It’s being proposed as something between an apprenticeship and joining the boy scouts, but that will be escalated and already there are news stories saying full-scale conscription will be back in Britain within 5 years.
In response to these threats, we need a complete overhaul and renewal of the anti-war movement, both in this country and internationally. Specifically, across Europe – in many ways at the heart of the rearmament programme. Not least because within the year UK and French troops may be trying to police an unstable settlement in the Ukraine.
What we can do
There’s a lot of historical, theoretical, and political analysis to explore and keep up with, no mean feat as events are unfolding in record time. But we must also take practical actions. Our participation and co-organisation in the Paris Peace conference last October was the beginning.
StW worked with MPs from La France Insoumise and with French trade unionists to create what turned out to a landmark conference. 4,000 people gathered at La Dôme de Paris, there were very large TU delegations, including a single delegation of 400 French teachers. The follow-up conference is taking place at Central Hall, Westminster on 20 June this year.
We recently held the first planning meeting for the London conference, and there are already impressive moves across Europe to build for it. In May there will a conference in Berlin exclusively devoted to building 20 June, and we were told to expect 400 delegates from France.
The conference in London couldn’t come at a more critical time. At the planning meeting the head of a French teaching union reported constant military intervention in French schools and even at the Sorbonne University, to whip up the patriotic rearmament story and recruit to the French military. Representatives from Die Linke reported that in December there were 100 German cities where school students went on strike against Germany’s conscription programme.
Delegates from Spain (who included a Catalonian independent MP and representatives from Podemos) offered to host a third international peace conference, after the London conference, in Madrid.
Stop the War is well placed to play an important role in the relaunching of this European wide movement. It is hoped it will be on the scale of the European Social Forum, but looks set to have a more serious trade union involvement than in the past.
It is a huge task. It is not cheap to hire Central Hall Westminster. To raise the money and to get the kind of delegations and the composition of the conference that we need we must work with our own TU movement. The RMT are already supporting the conference. The conference resolution will be submitted to the NEU and PCS executives shortly. But it’s not just the union leadership that we need on board. At the base of the movement we need every local StW group and member to get trade councils and union branches to support the conference and to send delegations.
The scale of Trump’s ambition must be met by a similar scale of resistance. We are a movement which has a history of huge achievements: over the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and with the massive Palestine demonstrations. So we are well placed to take the lead – after all, if not us who? If not now when?