•When neutrality dies: Europe’s dangerous return to militarism
•The normalisation of war in a declining Europe
•Europe’s strategic awakening—or strategic delusion?
Europe is preparing for war. I don’t want to be here when it happens.
I no longer feel at home in Europe.
This is not a fleeting dissatisfaction or a momentary sense of alienation. It is the cumulative weight of years spent navigating systems that feel increasingly rigid, impersonal, and hostile to difference. Europe is cold—not only in climate, but in temperament. Surveys by Eurobarometer have repeatedly shown declining public trust in institutions across much of the continent, and that erosion is visible in daily life. There is a pervasive emotional distance, a sense that many people are merely enduring rather than living, stripped of optimism, solidarity, or empathy.
I have withdrawn socially, not out of bitterness, but out of fatigue. Everything feels adversarial. Conflicts escalate quickly into legal threats. Bureaucracy substitutes for justice. Racism is rarely explicit; it is procedural, sanitized, and carefully justified as “neutral enforcement” or “institutional norms.” Reports by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights have documented precisely this phenomenon—discrimination that is systemic rather than overt. At this stage of my life, I no longer have the energy to overperform simply to exist within systems that were never built with people like me in mind.
And now, layered onto this social and moral exhaustion, Europe is preparing for war.
Empires always reach this point. Historians of empire—from Rome to Britain—have noted the same pattern: internal contradictions deepen, external dominance weakens, and the tools once used abroad are redirected inward. Europe’s historical debts—colonialism, slavery, resource extraction, and wars reframed as “stability operations”—have not vanished. They have accumulated. When reckoning arrives, it rarely announces itself gently.
What is most disturbing is how quietly this moment is being normalized.
Across Europe, governments have resumed civil defense campaigns. According to national emergency agencies in multiple EU states, citizens are now being advised on how to store food and water, where to seek shelter, and how to function during prolonged disruptions to infrastructure. These are not academic exercises. They are practical instructions for survival.
Sweden offers one of the clearest illustrations of how dramatically the continent has shifted.
For more than 200 years, Sweden maintained a policy of military neutrality—a fact regularly cited by Swedish foreign ministries themselves as central to the country’s identity. It avoided direct involvement in both World Wars and cultivated a reputation as a mediator and humanitarian actor. That posture has now been decisively abandoned.
Since joining NATO in 2024, Sweden has committed to meeting the alliance’s defense-spending benchmark of at least 2 percent of GDP, in line with NATO estimates. Conscription, reintroduced in 2017 according to Sweden’s Ministry of Defence, has expanded in scale and scope and now applies to both men and women. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency has confirmed that Cold War–era shelters are being reassessed and that new guidance has been issued to households on how to prepare for armed conflict.
Public messaging from Swedish authorities now openly acknowledges the possibility of war on Swedish territory.
This is framed as realism. As responsibility. As preparedness.
But it is also an admission: Europe no longer believes it can prevent war—only mitigate its effects.
European leaders speak constantly about Russia. Increasingly, China is folded into the same narrative. The implication is that Europe is responding defensively to unavoidable external threats. Yet the most immediate destabilizing force facing Europe today does not originate in Moscow or Beijing.
It originates in Washington.
The United States, under an increasingly erratic presidency, has openly threatened a NATO ally over Greenland, an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark. Statements by senior U.S. officials, widely reported by international media, have combined economic coercion—through tariffs—with strategic pressure, signaling that alliance solidarity may be conditional rather than guaranteed.
This is not a trivial development. NATO’s credibility rests on the assumption that Article 5 is automatic, not negotiable. As multiple European security think tanks have warned, once alliance commitments appear transactional, deterrence weakens across the board.
Russia and China understand this. They do not need to provoke Europe directly. According to assessments by several European foreign-policy institutes, a divided transatlantic alliance serves their strategic interests without requiring escalation. Whether the current U.S. posture is driven by domestic political volatility, personal ambition, or undisclosed leverage is almost beside the point. The outcome is the same: instability without strategy.
Europe’s response has been telling.
Defense spending across the European Union has surged since 2022. According to EU Commission data, member states are collectively spending hundreds of billions more on defense than they did just a few years ago. Germany alone announced a €100 billion special defense fund, explicitly described by its own government as a historic “turning point” in security policy. Similar language appears in national defense reviews from France, Poland, and the Nordic states.
War is no longer unthinkable. It is budgeted.
What is unsettling is how seamlessly this militarization has been integrated into everyday governance. The language of war has been domesticated—embedded in white papers, preparedness campaigns, and public-service announcements. Civilian suffering is acknowledged abstractly, then set aside in favor of logistics and deterrence metrics.
This is not resilience. It is acclimatization.
Europe today feels brittle: heavily armed, procedurally confident, and spiritually depleted. It speaks eloquently about values while quietly preparing to suspend them under pressure. It insists it has learned from history, even as it reenacts familiar patterns identified by its own historians—fear-driven policy, alliance dependency, and moral outsourcing.
I have lived long enough to recognize the scent of decline.
When this ends—and history suggests it will—I do not want to be standing here pretending it was unforeseeable. I do not want to perform surprise when decades of strategic complacency, moral contradiction, and imperial aftershocks produce exactly the outcomes scholars have warned about for years.
If the worst comes, let me be elsewhere. Let me be in Africa, far from the self-inflicted infernos of faltering empires, when the mushroom clouds rise over European cities.
This is not nihilism. It is recognition.
And recognition tells me that I no longer belong here.
•This adapted and expanded write up was originally written by Kio Amachree.
