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Welcome to post-growth Europe – can anyone accept this new political reality?
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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Degrowth
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My question about degrowth( or as I prefer self sufficienct economies), is can you have a strong enough military to defend against the likes of Russia under such an economy?
Quick thoughts on this:
I would not equate degrowth and self-sufficiency. While it's plausible and possibly even necessary to increase self-sufficiency in a successful degrowth scenario, there should still be abundant international trade on important sectors. Degrowth is not a turn away from technology in eg. low-carbon energy production, electrification and bioeconomy.
Ensuring defense capabilities is of course vital, especially in the short term, and can be achieved through prioritization of resource use. Notably, in the long term the turn away from geopolitical competition, weakening the influence of fossil and military-industrial capital, increased self-sufficiency in resource use and increased global solidarity (in eg. trade policy, climate policy, development policy) would all greatly serve to promote peace and the decrease of tensions. This is not to say one should be naive towards governments like Putin's authoritarian Russia.
While this might sound like a lot of things lumped together, for example this research article is helpful in understanding how all these things relate: https://zenodo.org/records/15529759