Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War explains that it was the rise of Athens that caused fear in the minds of the Spartans – making war inevitable. Fear is a dominant force in international affairs and a rationale for states to pursue (and project) power. In the absence of a centralized authority; hierarchy; world government, or a nightwatchman – the international system is “anarchic” – where it is very hard to decipher the true intentions of states (Kaplan, 2012). This realist fear and uncertainty in decoding the intentions of states lead to the failure of even the most viable peace projects and ambitious liberal security architectures. In the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict, although there were many lurking signs of Putin’s intention to launch a full-scale invasion, none of us could vouch with certainty that the inevitable would happen. The current war in Ukraine is already Europe’s biggest security challenge since WWII. It pits Europe once again as the cockpit of great power conflicts and has the potential of altering and re-shaping the global security order, and particularly the European security architecture. This article aims to provide a brief historical and structural reasons behind the fragility of European security architecture and peace project.
The current European security architecture has its roots in the post WWII reconstruction. After the horrors witnessed in the two World Wars, the Atlantic Charter propagated a rule-based global order, whereby global security became the collective responsibility of all participating states and bolstered by the permanent members (P5) of the UN Security Council. Little did we foresee that this ambitious rule-based global security architecture would eventually fall victim to geopolitical forces as the iron curtain split the European continent into two spheres of influence. The Cold War fed on the “fear of the other” – where both parties respectively created regional defensive alliances and engaged in a self-defeating arms race. While the west created NATO to prevent socialism and the Soviets to hegemonize the continent, the Soviets responded with the Warsaw Pact that included the “buffer territories” of central, south, and eastern Europe, to form a cushion between itself and western Europe.
The end of the Cold War in the 1990s provided a much needed, albeit a short respite, to Europe’s security dilemma. A new era of peace and prosperity was heralded in the continent. As early as 1990, an essay written by John Mearsheimer – Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War, discusses the (possible) optimistic outcomes of the end of the Cold War, where the raison d’etre for NATO and Warsaw Pact come to an end. They cease to behave as defensive regional alliances – signaling the end of European hostility, fear mongering, and bipolarity. However, this was not the outcome – and what played out in the continent was a resumption of political maneuvering based on fear. The hawkish and neoconservative climate in America, that was at its pinnacle in the 1990s, backed the case of strengthening the Atlantic alliance (Atlanticism) whereby the oldest democracies and free markets on both shores of the Atlantic would continue to symbiotically rely on each other – as without America, Europe would turn into an insignificant peninsula at the “tip of Eurasia” and America into an “island off the shores of Eurasia” (Kissinger, 1994). Simply put, the fear of a dominant hegemony in Eurasia endangered American vital interests, as well as the European equilibrium (Kissinger, 1994). The only way to preempt such catastrophe from happening was to unify the Atlantic nations under a common threat and push forward the Atlanticist agenda of expanding democracy and collective security deeper into the continent. Such policies would make America indispensable to the European peace project. And indispensable it became. The Americans were deeply aware of the fractures and inequalities within European powers and profited from their fears and suspicions of each other.
For instance, apropos NATO expansion, Kissinger opined that such measures must be undertaken to discourage the Russians from creating a sphere of influence around its borders. This had many takers particularly in central Europe – given its geopolitical and recent historical realities. Poland joined NATO in 1999, and seven other states joined in 2004. Such accessions made American involvement in European security inevitable. Furthermore, such zealous urgency of the central European states to join NATO gave further impetus to the Atlanticists over those, like France, who propagated the idea of a common and independent EU defense policy to wean the continent from being solely reliant on American security assurances (Zięba, 2019). But herein lay the folly. Such perfunctory maneuvers created an imbalance of power, an asymmetry of sort – whereby it strengthened the security of central Europe but not that of eastern Europe. The rationale behind was as insidious as real. On one hand, you could not have a legitimate and a solid European security architecture without the participation and amalgamation of its biggest power in eastern Europe– Russia. On the other hand, say if Russia was to be fully integrated in such security architecture and peace project, then NATO and the Atlanticist pro-American agenda would be relegated to redundancy.
By not heeding to genuine Russian security concerns and by continuously expanding the borders of NATO under its open-door policy, the liberal Atlanticist agenda created nothing but an asymmetry and imbalance of power in Europe. The prospect of creating a zone of peace and prosperity in Europe through NATO expansion led to a security dilemma – which simply put entails that ‘self-help’ actions taken by one state (or a group of states) to bolsters its own security – even with the best intentions of not causing a threat to other state(s) – leads to a reaction from other state(s). This is almost certain as power in international relations is a zero-sum game. The Russians could reluctantly live with the central European and Baltic states aligned with NATO, but not its immediate sphere of influence – i.e., eastern Europe. And this issue became the tipping point for the Russians when NATO welcomed Georgia and Ukraine’s aspiration for membership at the Bucharest Summit in 2008. For Russia, this was crossing the red line, and the rest is history. The Russian reaction, manifested in the brief Russo-Georgian war in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict is the result of this very structural imbalance that has been created in the European security architecture for the past 30 years.
Is there an escape from this security dilemma for Europe? Can a solid European security architecture be envisaged that would contribute to the continent’s lasting peace? The answer is rather challenging. Mearsheimer’s (fatalistic) position is that the only thing states are certain about is uncertainty (Schmah, 2012), and the only way for states to survive in the uncertainty of the international system is to establish hegemony (offensive realism). This is the only method of pursuing relative security. This has been the Atlanticist approach apropos NATO expansion in Europe for the last 30 years. Since state intentions are not easily decoded, neither the differences between a states offensive and defensive capabilities, Mearsheimer (2001) postulates that in such instances the notion of security dilemma becomes redundant and non-operative, since states for its very survival must ‘initiative those actions that will lead all others into a security paradox manifested in continuous and inescapable security competition’ (Schmah, 2012).
The current conflict in Ukraine is the result of this inescapable security competition and fight for hegemony in Eurasia, where genuine concerns and security dilemma are often ignored. Such hawkish approach is still evident today, despite the current situation in Ukraine, with NATO welcoming Finland and Sweden to join its ranks. Such hegemonic pursuits will only spread fear and uncertainty in the continent over years to come and will prevent any attempts for pursuing cooperative ventures that could bolster peace and stability in the continent. The European peace project, that emerged post-war as a quest for peace now mostly resembles a European war project (see, Leonard, 2022), and the pursuit of achieving lasting peace in the continent is far from over.
