At the launch of the White Paper for European Defence – Readiness 2030, Ursula von der Leyen declared the era of Europe’s peace dividend “long gone”. Peace, apparently, was a phase that we have now outgrown.

The EU’s centre of gravity has rapidly moved from a focus on trading to armament, as outlined by von der Leyen in early 2025, and this transfer of meaning is not happening through defence memorandums but through nation state treasuries. Consider the following: the European Commission is in the midst of mobilising €800 billion defence spending by 2030; more than 15 member states have activated “escape clauses” to enable an economic breach of fiscal rules to procure weapons; €150 billion of so-called “bomb bonds” has been raised for collective borrowing; a new multilateral bank – the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank – is targeting hundreds of billions of euro, with Belgium, Greece, Romania, Latvia and Ukraine among its founders; Canada has been admitted as a non-EU member state, in a leadership role, on many of these initiatives.

What if Europe is no longer a trading bloc that hopes to enable peace, but a geographic union whose budgets and institutions are being rebuilt around the certainty of war?

In February, Canada became the first non-EU member state admitted to Europe’s joint weapons-procurement fund, with Canadian firms being allowed to supply up to 80 per cent of Europe’s arms contracts, more than twice the cap applied to any other outside country. Further, Europe’s new defence bank is Canadian-led, despite being Luxembourg-based. Put another way, a North American G7 heavyweight, and a founding Nato member, now exists within the EU’s defence architecture.

Gardaí appeal for information after woman’s body discovered in Dublin park

Irish woman named as Spanish police await postmortems on couple found dead in hot........

© The Irish Times