War in the Head: Against the Militarization of Thought Davide Borrelli

by Davide Borrelli, Professor of the Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the “Suor Orsola Benincasa” University of Naples; published on June 26, 2026, on www.zenodo.org under a copyleft license.

Abstract

Today, Europe seems to speak only the language of rearmament; it has “war in its head”. Diplomacy has fallen silent, politics is fading, and military urgency now shapes public discourse. This book denounces the “bellicisation” of our society—the infiltration of the logic of war into our collective imagination and mindset—revealing how it has reshaped perceptions, relationships, and political life. Through a socio-cultural analysis, it unpacks the normalisation of war as the default response to global crises, showing how militarised language and narratives distort reality and weaken critical consciousness. Europe, once conceived as a project of peace, is increasingly transforming itself into a fortress—not only in material terms but also in the symbolic realm. In an age marked by growing desensitisation to the threat of conflict and by the celebration of "resilience" as a military virtue, this book issues a radical appeal: to disarm our language in order to rebuild an anthropology of coexistence. Against the intellectual endorsement of "warrior virtues" as the foundation of social cohesion, it argues for an urgent rethinking of the future grounded in the gentleness of the just, openness to others, and the absolute rejection of war.

Table of Contents

Preface
Toward a Governmentality of War
Fortress Europe
Ourselves as Enemies
A Missed Opportunity, a Possibility Worth Rediscovering
The Care of Peace
From Person to Role: War as a Machine of Symbolic Annihilation
Normalizing War to Govern Instability
The Traps of Deterrence
The Banalization of War and the New “Spirits” of Europe
The Weaponisation of Discourse: A Cultural Analysis
The End of a Certain Illusion? Bellicisation and the Myth of Western Civilization
War of Words Against Outsiders
The University of Peace and the Art of Human Relations: The Lesson of Virginia Woolf
The University of War
The New Military School
Resilience: From Economic to Military Virtue
Arm Yourself and March: The Intellectuals Who Stay Behind
The Power of the Neutral: For a Politics of Equiproximity
The Color of Wheat: For a Pedagogy of Peace
What Peace is Made Of: From Tolerance to Desire
The Quiet Ethics of the Just
Critique and Clinic: Disarming Discourse, Caring for the World
Merchant’s Ears:Wilful Deafness in the Age of Bellicist Realism
The Planetary Agenda: Overcoming the Severing and the Anthropocentric Matrix
Bibliographic References

Preface

He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology. […]
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.
(Jorge Luis Borges, The Just, 1981)

Hence if it should be required Blood at all costs
Go offer yours If you enjoy it
(Ivano Fossati, The Deserter, 1992)

Until we think we have the monopoly of “good,”
Until we speak of our civilization as the only civilization,
Ignoring others, we are not on the right path
(Tiziano Terzani, Letters Against War, 2002)

“I caught the war in my head. It’s trapped inside my head”. With these words, the controversial and visionary novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1934, p. 3) described the lasting effects of combat, recalling the moment he was severely wounded in the ear as a young cavalryman during the First World War.

Judging by Europe’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s campaign in Gaza—which many have described as genocidal—and, more recently, the escalation across the Middle East, the Old Continent seems to have lost the ability to imagine solutions outside military logic. Specifically, Europe has relied almost exclusively on military support to Ukraine, long tolerated in Gaza what it publicly claimed to condemn, and, when confronted with Israeli and U.S. attack on Iran, appeared far more concerned with economic fallout than with upholding international law. At times, European leaders have even adopted a Pontius Pilate stance, washing their hands of this aggression and refusing either to endorse or condemn it.

If Céline described war as an obsession lodged within the individual mind, today one could argue that Europe itself has “caught the war in its head”. To borrow a vivid expression from the Neapolitan dialect, our political community now seems to be suffering from a genuine guerra ’n capa syndrome^[1]—that is, a “war in the head”.

This book argues that Europe is undergoing discursive and psychopolitical bellicisation, a process in which war is no longer merely a possible event but the organising horizon of thought. In this framework, “war in the head” does not refer purely to an individual’s psychological state but to a broader transformation whereby political and institutional life, as well as everyday common sense, are increasingly reorganised around the anticipation and normalisation of conflict.

The obsession with war is also reflected in seemingly marginal symbolic choices, which turn out to be emblematic of the cultural climate we are experiencing. Consider, for example, the statement issued by the President of the Piedmont Region, who, on the eve of Liberation Day in Italy (25 April 2025), paid tribute to the Alpini (mountain infantry) who died in Russia in the Second World War, claiming that they sacrificed themselves “for our freedom”. To say the least, it is a surprising assertion, as it recasts an aggressive military campaign launched by Mussolini and Hitler as a heroic defense of democratic values. This is precisely what happens when a society have a guerra ’n capa.

For some time now, the European Union has fallen prey to a fatal intoxication with bellicism. The threat of a Russian attack, real or perceived, now monopolizes public debate and dictates an increasing share of political decisions. Yet, while rushing to firmly condemn Putin, Europe has remained largely passive in the face of the massacres in Gaza. This is evident in the EU’s inability to reach the necessary consensus to suspend the EU–Israel Association Agreement (2000), due to vetoes, primarily from Germany and Italy.

But Europe also has war in its head, as it seems to be seeking to revitalize its sluggish economy by shifting investment from civilian infrastructure to military spending and, in particular, by redirecting Cohesion Funds (designed to reduce regional disparities among Member States) towards the arms industry, only then to submit to Trump’s dictates and resign itself to financing the US defence industry within the framework of the PURL initiative (Prioritised Ukraine Requirements List), promoted by NATO.

Finally, it has war in its head mainly because it seeks to normalise it, to make it appear as an acceptable option among others. It does so, for example, by promoting, through educational programs, the formation of a culture of belligerence, namely, a mentality that justifies the use of force as a plausible response to current challenges, pushing public opinion and institutions to consider war as a normal part of the current geopolitical order and of the security mechanisms of the Member States. It is no longer merely a matter of a military response, but of a profound transformation of our way of being and thinking. With regard to such policies, which aim to mithridatize us—to make us gradually accustomed to war—it is only painful to see how far we have moved away from the very spirit of UNESCO, and how that spirit has been overturned, as stated in its founding declaration: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”.

Undoubtedly, we live in a world marked by deep international tensions, some of which we Europeans have, to a certain extent, contributed to creating through self-interest, political shortsightedness, or sheer passivity. Even if we accept that the Russian threat is real and that European anxieties are justified, it remains crucial to scrutinize the ways in which this sense of alarm is internalized and translated into political, cultural, symbolic, and discursive forms. Moreover, another reason why “war in the head” may be said to characterize our present condition is that the obsession with war becomes a fixed idea that dominates public consciousness and leaves little room for alternative concerns. It claims absolute priority and demands exclusive attention, relegating every other issue to the background.

In Neapolitan dialect, a guerra ‘n capa is also used to describe a state of profound inner discord—a conflict, indeed a war, between opposing impulses, between a thought and its opposite. One might see this contradiction, for instance, in the widespread expectation that Russia was on the verge of military collapse because of its perceived inferiority and then, suddenly, in open defiance of the principle of non-contradiction, the frantic rush to rearm for fear of an imminent Russian invasion. A proposition cannot be both true and false merely because political convenience requires it.

A comparable cognitive dissonance is evident in Europe’s response to Israel’s massacre of Palestinian civilians. While European governments profess their commitment to human rights and, in some cases, even declare their support for the recognition of the State of Palestine, they continue supplying Israel with weapons and offer political and legal cover. After all, Israel is doing Europe’s “dirty work,” as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz candidly acknowledged. Such paradoxes reveal a more fundamental tension, one that is emblematic of the war in the head. The dominant logic of war clashes with the idealized image we cultivate of ourselves and with the very values on which we claim to base our democratic and civic identity.

This condition is a psychopolitical pathology. It is also the tangible symptom of a modernity that has become emotionally “explosive” (Illouz 2024): many of its core institutions are increasingly in tension with one another, generating profound contradictions within individuals themselves. The anxiety, frustration, and collective fear that result are both reflected and amplified at the political level, feeding a vicious cycle that distorts political judgment and social priorities, ultimately transforming political and diplomatic questions into military ones. The paranoid fixation on rearmament stems from a profound tension between two opposing dispositions: on the one hand, an emerging governmentality of war; on the other, Europe’s long-standing purported culture of dialogue and peace.

In this sense, a guerra ’n capa functions as a kind of mise en abyme: an expression so dense with meaning that it produces a conceptual vertigo, confronting us with the possibility that the real war in the head is becoming our own. It reflects back the image of a continent marked by deep tensions, suspended between what it fears, what it claims to defend itself against, and what it is—perhaps without ever having consciously or democratically chosen it—increasingly becoming.

It is precisely on this slippage—silent, inexorable, and continuous, like the classical metaphor of the boiling frog—that this book seeks to open up critical reflection. The object of this book is not to determine whether war or rearmament is ethically justified or strategically effective. Rather, it is to interrogate the forms of subjectivity, political rationality, and governmental practices that are produced when war comes to structure our way of seeing the world.

Against the hegemonic narrative that presents rearmament as inevitable and seeks to confine us within a horizon defined by permanent tension, we recall the seminal work of the pioneer of peace research, Johan Galtung, There are Alternatives!. Its central message is a powerful reminder that even in conflicts that appear irredeemably deadlocked, there always remains the possibility—and, we would argue, the necessity—of imagining different paths. This fundamental claim by the Norwegian scholar stands in stark contrast to the governing philosophy of our time, epitomized by Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative.” Whether applied to economic rationality or to the emerging rationality of war, the effect is the same: the foreclosure of political imagination in the name of necessity. At the height of the Cold War, Galtung pointed out that conflicts presented as inevitable often masked the geopolitical strategies of the superpowers, which deliberately fostered proxy wars and wars of attrition in order to weaken their rivals. In a remarkably prescient reflection, Galtung (1984) suggested that great powers may have a strategic interest in preventing certain conflicts from being resolved. Rather than confronting one another directly, they can externalize the costs and risks of geopolitical rivalry by sustaining or even fostering conflicts among smaller allied states, thereby transforming them into proxy arenas of confrontation. One may consider the war in Ukraine as an updated version of this “Cold Pawn” strategy. Rather than merely externalizing the costs of geopolitical rivalry by sharing them with European allies, the conflict also appears to have created opportunities for the United States to derive significant economic and strategic advantages from a prolonged military emergency. Unlike the large-scale military interventions that Washington undertook directly in the previous two decades, which ultimately proved financially burdensome and increasingly unsustainable, this model shifts a substantial share of both economic and political costs onto its allies while preserving many of the strategic benefits. The military challenge posed to Russia—which the heavily indebted United States is now seeking to shift onto Europe’s shoulders—represents, for Washington, a unique opportunity for the recentralization of capital, economic recovery, and the rebalancing of its balance of payments (Brancaccio, Giammetti and Lucarelli 2022). From this perspective, Europe’s zealous fascination with rearmament inevitably recalls the imprudent attitude of someone who, out of love for the rope with which they are destined to hang themselves, embraces their own destruction. The United States benefits economically from selling the arsenal required to turn Ukraine into an impregnable “steel porcupine” (to use Ursula von der Leyen’s expression). The tangible risk of having war in our heads is that we may soon be forced to carry its economic burden in our stomachs. The contemptuous way in which Trump feels entitled to treat European leaders—including the selfstyled “bridge-builder” Giorgia Meloni—stems not only from his imperial conception of international relations, but also from the submissive posture that Europe repeatedly adopts toward US strategic interests. In this respect, Kant’s warning remains strikingly relevant: “One who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him” (1797).

Our concern is not with the economic and geopolitical background of the Russian–Ukrainian conflict, but with the cultural and communicative process through which influential opinion leaders and public intellectuals have progressively weaponized public discourse and, with it, common sense. In our view, this is the defining feature of the ongoing cultural transformation: our own war in the head. We are not talking about war as a concrete armed conflict, nor about its horrors and devastation. Nor do we intend to address the geopolitical question of whether European rearmament might serve as a first embryo of a European political consciousness. On the contrary, we argue that if Europeans are to move towards a genuine and effective political union, this project must be grounded in a set of shared institutions among Member States, such as a common foreign policy, common debt, a unified fiscal framework, and harmonized healthcare and welfare systems. Only on such a foundation could an integrated and interoperable European defence system acquire genuine political meaning. Lacking these common European infrastructures, Europe risks moving directly from a market union to a military union, from welfare to warfare, without ever becoming a true political community.

However, it is not these purely political issues that our book seeks to address. Ours is a mediological and cultural analysis rather than a geopolitical one (see Bennato, Farci and Fiorentino 2023): It focuses on the role of opinion leaders rather than on specific governmental decisions, and on the discourses that shape common sense rather than concrete policies or military programmes. We aim specifically to denounce the rearmament of words and minds rather than that of missiles and drones. In other words, we seek to analyse and criticise what we define as the “discursive weaponisation of society”: a transformation that is actively and persistently pursued in the ways we think and act, so that they come to support, sustain, and legitimate an armed configuration of society culminating in a form of mental warfare. A meaningful example is Mark Rutte’s first statement as NATO Secretary General on 15 January 2025. He argued that although NATO’s military readiness has increased, it remains insufficient to face the threats anticipated over the next four to five years: “To prevent war, we need to prepare for it. It’s time to shift to a wartime mindset, and this means we need to strengthen our defences even more by spending more on defence and producing more and better defence capabilities”. In Rutte’s view, an urgent shift to a wartime mindset is required—that is, the adoption of a pedagogy of militarisation, supported by authoritative thinkers and organic intellectuals who actively promote and implement it. This provides a compelling illustration of what we call the “bellicisation of society”, a term we use to indicate not merely the militarisation of institutions, but a deeper cultural and cognitive reorientation toward the normalisation and anticipation of war as a structuring horizon of social life. We will return later to the role and responsibility of intellectuals. For now, it is more appropriate to examine the reasons behind the war fever that has come to pervade the Old Continent.

[1] In the Neapolitan dialect, the expression “’a guerra ’n capa” (literally, “the war in one’s head”) denotes a state of profound psychological turmoil characterized by internal conflict, where opposing impulses and contradictory thoughts compete for dominance, leaving the individual unable to reach a stable decision. By extension, the phrase implies an obsessive, compulsive fixation on a specific problem, idea, or goal. To “have a war in one’s head” (tener ’a guerra ’n capa) thus evokes a mind persistently besieged by intrusive thoughts that absorb attention and generate a lasting state of mental agitation and inner distress.

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