Sarah Bressan
Research Fellow, GPPi
Five years ago, this author co-wrote a paper that projected a scenario of war and peace in Europe in 2030¹. Like many others at a time of multiple seemingly frozen conflicts, the analysis focused on the grey zone between clearly defined ‘war’ and equally unambiguous ‘peace’. Even without any large-scale war on the battlefield in Europe between 2020 and 2030, people still experienced insecurity and violence in the scenario, albeit below the threshold of ‘war’ as universally defined. If political leaders fail to address increasing societal divisions and violence against marginalised groups, that paper argued, Europeans could live in a ubiquitous state of injustice and insecurity.
Five years and a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine later, analysts of European security are starting to reckon with their focus on the grey zone and on the non-kinetic aspects of hybrid operations below the threshold of war. Ukrainians are confronted with a brutal land war in the trenches, in which they are fighting for the survival of a European democracy. People across Europe are feeling the ripple effects of this sea-change in the security landscape, unexpectedly having to reshuffle national budgets, diversify energy sources, ramp up defence industry production, and rethink their geopolitical strategies.
In what French President Emmanuel Macron called “the beginning of an illiberal moment,”² it seems tempting to argue that Europeans need to return to the basics of traditional geopolitics, relearning the language of ‘strongman’ leaders, and focus on hard power deterrence. However, failures to anticipate and counter the full extent of autocratic aggression have ultimately shown that the traditional state-centric view is misled and the biggest danger to peace remains unchecked political power. The only viable protection against this are strong democratic guardrails. This is why, going forward, Europe needs both firepower and democratic resilience at home and in its neighbourhood.
Zeitenwende Too Late?
Russia’s full-scale invasion has required Europe’s security establishment to confront past failures. These include not listening to Russia’s direct neighbours, which have been exposed to harassment from Moscow and its allies for decades—from cyber-attacks to the weaponisation of migration—and have warned Western European partners to take the Kremlin’s threats more seriously.³
A case in point is Germany, which began changing course on its Russia policy after Chancellor Olaf Scholz described the situation as a Zeitenwende—an epochal break. Expertise in deciphering Moscow’s threats was not missing, but with enough economic interdependence and good will, it was possible to believe that it could stay on good terms with Russia.⁴
More active warnings before 2021 against the immediate threat posed by Russia’s military to Ukraine and the European security order could have helped mobilise defence spending, production, and cooperation earlier and deter Russian aggression. Those who warned that the European security 32 The Yerevan Primer: A World in Transition order following the fall of the Berlin Wall was incomplete, had a point: Putin’s aggression indicates that one side was unhappy with the deal.⁵
However, traditional state-centric geopolitical analyses did not read the problem with Russia right. Instead, among the German chancellor candidates debating foreign policy before the 2020 federal elections, solely the Green Party candidate—current Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock—understood the threat of Russia’s imperialist project, owing to her party’s focus on the most marginalised and directly affected groups within society.⁶ A focus on democracy and human security led her to criticise Germany’s short-sighted energy deals with Russia at the expense of ordinary Ukrainians’ security.⁷ It is no coincidence that a party that believes in a feminist foreign policy sees the continuities between Putin’s chauvinist ideology and his violent oppression of democratic freedom and equality in Ukraine.⁸
While the analytical and political failures of the time are yet to be seriously investigated, the only way forward is one which seriously accounts for the defence against both aspects of hybrid warfare—firepower and grey-zone foreign meddling—that exploit the injustices within democratic societies and weaken Europe’s democracies and their security.
Firepower and Democratic Defences
Undoubtedly, Europe needs to produce ammunition, deliver lethal weapons to Ukraine, and replenish its own stockpiles to help Ukraine win the war on the battlefield and in the trenches. Having mobilised over 6 billion euros under the European Peace Facility for Ukraine, the European Union has shown that it is fit to deliver on security.⁹ Next steps include making the defence of Europe robust against a future in which the United States may either be ruled by a similar return to archaic times as Russia or constrained by power competition in the Indo-Pacific.¹⁰
Furthermore, Europe cannot neglect the risks that loom in the grey zone, including acts of sabotage and assassination within Europe.¹¹ Energy and communication flows in European countries need to be better protected towards a diversification of energy sources and strategies to mitigate critical dependencies.¹² Intelligence and security services across Europe will need to focus on detecting, exposing, and countering authoritarian interference.¹³
Strengthening and protecting European democracies against dangerous meddling from Russia and other authoritarian powers goes beyond physical infrastructure. European countries need to define the limits of legitimate and illegitimate foreign influence to expose and stop the strategies and narratives that authoritarian regimes are using to instigate societal conflict and discontent to delegitimise democratic defences. So far, the EU has a definition for foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), but—in contrast to, for example, Australia—no coherent definition for the broader concept of foreign interference.¹⁴ Similar to strategic dependencies, foreign meddling will need to be better measured, analysed, and persecuted.
Democracy can be exploited when and where it is incomplete and contradicts itself. This is why its ground rules need to be reinvigorated, particularly in online information spaces—by regulating Big Tech companies—and in the peripheries of European countries, where many Europeans vote for anti-democratic parties because they feel the social and economic models that work for elites in big cities do not work for them. Progressive parties all over Europe will need to bridge this divide and provide narratives—or ideological frameworks—that resonate there.
Finally, Europe must also protect its interests by vocally supporting the protection of democracy and freedom elsewhere. This is most urgent in candidate countries for EU accession, from Ukraine to the Western Balkans.¹⁵ Authoritarians have often weaponised the “foreign meddling” discourse against democrats. However, the “real democrats” are not those who abuse the foreign-agent label for laws that dismantle the rule of law, like in Georgia, or those who open Europe’s doors to its enemies, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbàn; the real democrats are those who are ready to defend democratic values against chauvinist warmongers around the globe.¹⁶
The blog was initially published by the Observer Research Foundation, as part of the “The Yerevan Primer: A World in Transition” edited by Kabir Taneja and Natalie Boyse.
Sarah Bressan is a Research Fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi), Berlin.
