АРМИЯ   ЖИЗНИ                LIFE   ARMY

  I live in a small Dutch apartment on the third floor, looking out over a line of almost identical red roofs. My mornings follow a simple, almost automatic ritual: switch on the coffee machine, open the window to let in the damp air from the canal, and scroll through the news on my phone. A few years ago, the first screen was mostly about weather, COVID, elections, sometimes football. Now, almost every morning starts with the same word that used to belong to history books: war.

I am not a politician, not a security expert, not a military analyst. I work in an ordinary office, the kind you can find in almost any European city: online meetings, reports, endless email and coffee in the kitchen with colleagues. My life looks very similar to the lives of millions of people in Europe: taxes, rent, trying to plan a holiday, trying to protect a little bit of “personal time”. And yet more and more I feel how decisions taken far away — in Brussels, Berlin, Washington, Moscow — are quietly moving into my everyday life. A question that once sounded abstract has become almost domestic: are we really being prepared for a new big war?

In recent years I have often heard Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán say that “Europe is being dragged into war”. For some he is the man breaking European unity; for others he is the only one who dares to say out loud what many families are afraid of. I am not his supporter, and I am not his advocate. But when he warns that the EU’s decisions on Ukraine could lead to a much larger conflict, I can no longer just shrug it off. In the same days I open the news and read about new military aid packages, rising defence budgets, plans for rearmament and the need to “be ready for the worst”. All of this starts to sound less like distant politics and more like the background noise of my own life.

I am not sitting at the negotiating table in Brussels and I am not the one calculating billion‑euro budgets. But I can see some of the consequences right where I live, in my quiet Dutch reality. This year our municipality talked again about saving money on local projects: in one place they cut cultural programmes, in another they postponed repairs, elsewhere they debated which expenses should be labelled “non‑essential”. In those same weeks, European‑wide news talked about something else — how much more we should spend on defence so that “Europe finally starts to take itself seriously”.

My downstairs neighbour — a man about my age who works in logistics — recently complained that his utility bills were going up again. As usual, we joked that even a warm shower is becoming a luxury. Then he added, without smiling: “Well, there’s a war next door. I guess this is how it’s going to be. The money has to come from somewhere.” My nephew told me that his school had a session on civil defence. He spoke about it as something quite real, not as a dusty topic from the past.

Taken one by one, these are small details. But together they create a feeling that we are slowly being trained to accept that war is no longer just old footage in black and white, and no longer just news from another country. It is being slowly reintroduced as a possible part of our own lives.

Sometimes I think Europe looks like a person who pretends to live as usual but is constantly tense inside. Polls now put wars and international tensions among people’s top concerns, alongside the cost of living and the economy. For me these are not just dry percentages. I can see how the conversations around me are changing. Some years ago we mostly talked about housing prices, climate, transport, jobs. Now, almost automatically, words like “mobilisation”, “NATO summit” or “if the war spreads” slip into the same conversations. What used to sound like the plot of a political thriller now appears in everyday small talk.

In this atmosphere, Orbán’s words find an audience. He argues that massive funding for Ukraine could “ruin Europe” and that long‑term financial commitments may drag the whole EU into direct confrontation with Russia. His critics reply that without support for Ukraine, war will come even closer, and European security will collapse; what he calls “being dragged into war” they call “defending European values” and helping a country that was attacked.

If you step back from party loyalties, you can see a shared root. Both Orbán and his opponents speak to us in the language of fear and threat. They simply place the emphasis in different places. Orbán paints catastrophe if we stay on the current course; his opponents paint catastrophe if we stop. For people like me that usually leaves one role: that of the spectator. We are told that the stakes are incredibly high, but the actual choices are made without us. We are free to choose which version of fear we prefer listening to. We are not asked to vote line by line on budgets that will shape our future.

When we hear about defence spending, it is almost always in percentages of GDP and billions of euros. It sounds abstract, almost unreal. But behind those numbers very concrete things are happening. Analysts point out that in recent years defence spending in the EU has risen noticeably and is now above 2% of the Union’s combined GDP. Forecasts suggest that in the coming years many member states will raise their military budgets even further, and that part of this increase will be financed through new debt and by shifting money from other areas.

What does this mean for someone like me? It does not mean that tomorrow half of my salary will be taken away. But it does mean that some of the money that could have gone into schools, hospitals, public transport or tax relief is being redirected towards tanks, air defence systems and ammunition stockpiles. And it means that the debts taken on in the name of “defending Europe” will sit on our public finances for a long time, shaping future choices.

I cannot honestly say that all of this is “unnecessary”. I understand why, with a war close to our borders, governments want to strengthen their armies. But I miss a different conversation — an honest one about the price. Not only in billions, but in what exactly we are ready to give up in our peaceful lives.

War does not begin only when the first missiles fall. It also begins when a society gets used to living in permanent “readiness for the worst”. We have already grown used to the fact that news about military exercises and weapons deliveries are part of the daily agenda. We have grown used to speeches about the “inevitable need” to raise defence spending further. We have started to see the word “peace” used more often with irony or scepticism, as if it belonged to naïve slogans, while “weapons” and “deterrence” sound mature and realistic.

At some point, preparation for a possible war turns into a new normal. That is when a quiet but fundamental question appears: where is the limit? How far are we prepared to reshape our economies, our education systems, our information space according to this logic of preparedness? And who has the moral right to say, “from here on, the price is too high”?

For myself, I often think in terms of something I call a “conquest machine”. It is not only about armies or weapons. It is a way of organising society around a single goal: not to lose in competition with others. Within this logic, almost everything becomes secondary to a few simple principles: more strength, more control, fewer doubts.

In today’s Europe, we hear a lot about how we must “be stronger”, “speak with one voice”, “protect our way of life” and “not be naïve”. There is truth in this. We do live in an unstable and dangerous world. But if you listen carefully, you can also hear how the logic of protection can slowly slide into the logic of conquest — when the main aim is no longer the lives and dignity of people, but the abstract power of a system.

When I think about all this, I try not to fall into panic or cynicism. I know the world will not become safe just because I write a column. I know that among those taking decisions there are people who genuinely try to prevent the worst rather than bring it closer. Still, I feel it is important to at least formulate a few simple questions that we, ordinary Europeans, rarely ask ourselves out loud:

Are we ready to treat rising military spending as the new normal for decades — and if so, what exactly are we ready to postpone or reduce in our peaceful lives to pay for it?
Are we ready to leave decisions about war and peace entirely to those who talk to us mainly through the language of fear — even when that fear seems justified?
Do we ourselves have a personal line beyond which we would say: “No, this course is no longer acceptable for our country and for Europe”?

I do not offer easy answers. I do not believe in the myth that one leader will “save Europe” and another will surely destroy it. But I do believe that now, when the word “war” has returned to Europe’s everyday vocabulary, we no longer have the right to live as if it were just another news story.

The way I try to look at it is simple: everything that genuinely widens the space for human life — time, freedom, trust, dignity — works for life. Everything that systematically narrows that space under the banner of security and strength works for the conquest machine.

When I look at today’s Europe, I see both. I see people who help refugees, support each other, build local initiatives. And I see structures that demand more and more resources and obedience in the name of being ready for the worst‑case scenario. I do not know how this story will end. But I want us to have more than just the right to be afraid and to pay the bills. I want us to keep the right to ask questions — not only of Orbán or Brussels, but also of ourselves.

Maybe the first step is to admit that we already live not only in the “European Union of peace and prosperity”, but also in a Europe learning to live in the shadow of a possible war. And then to decide, each in our own way, how far we are willing to go down that road without losing ourselves — not as cogs in a big machine, but as human beings.