I’ll reveal a bit about the mobilization potential of the EU.
Or, how human capital is used at different stages of socio-economic development.
A capitalist appropriates part of the surplus labor of their employees, which forms the added value of the final product.
This is the essence of the bourgeois use of human capital.
The process of distributing national income through social mechanisms is established by law and social contract (which can be informal as well).
At the same time, during feudalism, a feudal lord could appropriate not only part of their subjects’ labor but, if necessary, their very lives.
As Baudrillard wrote in Symbolic Exchange, echoing Hegel:
“The master appropriates another’s death, while retaining the right to risk his own life.”
Feudalism generally regarded labor as “the deferred death of a conditional prisoner of war.”
Today, such an exchange between society and the ruling elites is possible only in the form of neo-feudalism, because no social contract is capable of establishing it.
For example, our Constitution states that a person’s “life, health, and dignity” are the highest values, protected by the state, and any encroachment on these categories is unacceptable (and cannot be “put on pause”).
Therefore, such an exchange (life for an abstract idea) is only possible on the basis of a total state ideology accepted by society, or a strong religious factor.
Now, let’s return to Europe.
Its mobilization potential in the 20th century was based either on state ideology (fascism) or on the national-state factor (nationalism).
But today Europe has moved away from strong state ideologies and replaced them with a system of common values. The religious factor has been completely neutralized.
The “nation-state” format has become an anachronism, just as monarchy became an anachronism in the 20th century.
However, clusters like Europe recently had a way out in the form of technological advantage, which emerged at the end of the 20th century, i.e., at the stage of the decline of the nation-state concept (today, in Europe’s understanding, the nation-state is not even an anachronism, but something “primitive”).
NATO won not in the trenches but in the air, as in Yugoslavia. That is, through technology, not the “human factor.”
This is entirely logical.
The EU is a free society. Organic technological development is possible only within a free society. Freedom is a conscious necessity.
This means that mobilization in Europe can only be voluntary.
In other words, Europe can defeat its enemies technologically, but not in the trenches.
If Europe were to adopt forced mobilization practices, it would lose both freedom and democracy.
Because it’s impossible to imagine a voter who would vote for forced mobilization.
Thus, the ability to “fight in the trenches” will only appear in the EU after democracy and freedom are abandoned.
But this is possible only on the basis of a strong ideological factor—such as neo-fascism, or a new religion.
Both options are unfeasible in Europe.
And even if they were implemented, by losing freedom and democracy, the West would also lose the freedom of innovative creativity, and therefore technological advantage: it could “fight in the trenches” but would “lose the sky.”
Technology is creativity. Creativity is freedom.
Of course, there are examples where strong mobilization potential combined with technological development.
For example, the USSR. But in that case, it ended in both ideological collapse and overheating of administrative technological development.
So far, there is only one successful example of readiness to “fight in the sky” and “fight in the trenches”: China. It has both technology and mobilization potential and ideology.
But China still lacks the most important thing—practical experience. And the main criterion of truth is practice.
The last “mobilization war” in the West was the U.S. Vietnam War.
It ended with a generational rebellion, the hippie movement, and anti-war activism. The West did not experiment in this regard again.
And only an attempt to break this consensus led to protests in Germany.
