Grup Antimilitarista Tortuga and Juan Carlos Rois.

Activist and researcher Juan Carlos Rois, in collaboration with our partners from Grup Antimilitarista Tortuga, has just published his report on Spanish militarism in 2024.

It is a rigorous and extremely lucid analysis, the result of a meticulous compilation of data from official sources, on military spending, arms programmes and Spanish ‘defence’ policy during the year that has just ended. It is essential reading for anyone interested in study, peace activism and denouncing militarism.

Its introduction is reproduced here and the full text can be downloaded at the end of this review.

"We close the year 2024 with the consolidation of the remilitarisation trends in Spanish public policies.

A review of these allows us to draw several conclusions:

  1. First, the deliberate choice of reinforcing militarism by the PSOE-SUMAR government, which has deepened rearmament and remilitarisation policies: military spending, military interference abroad, securitisation of the most diverse spaces and scenarios, militarisation of civilian life, arms sales and the construction of a pre-war climate in line with the militarist options of the US, NATO and the (subaltern) construction of the EU as a new military power.
  2. The second is the de facto consensus among political elites on the militarist tendency undertaken. This consensus does not only include the ‘parties of order’ or ‘of state’, with a more militarist discursive rhetoric (PP, VOX, UPN, PSOE, etc.). It also includes those who tend to cover up their positions in public but give with one hand what they take away with the other (PNV, Coalición Canaria, Junts per-Cat, Partido regionalista de Cantabria), which, for various reasons (weight and influence of their military industries, ideology, opportunism, etc.), support or consent to this new remilitarising cycle. And finally, it extends to the nominal left parties, in this case employing a maximalist rhetoric that is empty of content and alternative concreteness, a mixture of comicality and cynicism.
  3. The increasingly marked transversality of the militarist option to other administrations, as well as to other instances and articulations, such as universities and private corporations, companies, the media, schools, NGOs, organic intellectuals and opinion leaders, etc.
  4. The social perplexity and perplexity of the most viable organisations in our panorama in the face of the fact of war and the pre-war climate imposed by the elites, with the consequent lack of an effective social response. Moreover, the gradual assumption of militarist values by broad layers of society and a large part of social organisations.
  5. La dificultad, en paralelo, de la falta de propuestas creíbles y prácticas de oposición al militarismo capaz de provocar la energía política necesaria para desencadenar u nuevo ciclo de movilización y resistencia a la guerra y de apuesta por la paz con contenidos.

Let's take a look at the main items of this reinforced presence of militarism in the year 2024."

Full article to download in pdf