Military Keynesianism today: an innovative discourse

The term 'military Keynesianism' refers to economic policies in which the government devotes large amounts of spending to the military in order to foster economic growth. In this article, a number of crucial distinctions are made between different forms of military Keynesian policy, providing a more sophisticated picture of the practices of US and EU governments. It is argued that a form of military Keynesianism can be said to be operating even where it is not the primary means for regulating the business cycle. And the particular effects of externalised military Keynesianism, in which the state encourages other countries to purchase arms from domestic manufacturers, are considered. As Keynes s ideas are revived in response to the financial crisis, this article concludes by asking what a genuinely ecological alternative to military Keynesianism would look like.