Geoliberal Europe and the Test of War

By Richard Youngs

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed Europe into a new strategic era. The knock-on effects of the war have combined to open a period of reordering across the European continent. European governments and the European Union collectively have begun to fashion policies for this shift, recognizing this to be a pivotal historical moment.

Richard Youngs unpacks the different dynamics that have come to characterize European policies in the wake of the war: the nature of EU integration, geopolitical power, defence priorities, European borders, liberal values, the green transition and economic sovereignty. The book looks to the future and outlines the issues and choices with which European governments still need to grapple. Youngs develops the notion of geoliberalism as a way of addressing these challenges and guiding European governments and the EU into the fragile order taking shape in the shadow of Ukraine’s war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Release date: Apr 16, 2024
• ISBN: 9781788217262

Richard Youngs

Richard Youngs is Senior Fellow at Carnegie Europe and Professor of International Relations, University of Warwick. He is author of fifteen books and co-founder of the European Democracy Hub.

Book preview

© Richard Youngs 2024

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

No reproduction without permission.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2024 by Agenda Publishing

Agenda Publishing Limited

PO Box 185

Newcastle upon Tyne

NE20 2DH

www.agendapub.com

ISBN 978-1-78821-723-1 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-78821-724-8 (paperback)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan

Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Contents

1Introduction

2The road to war

3Reinforcing the European foundations

4Europe rearmed

5Re-bordering I: exclusion

6Re-bordering II: inclusion

7Rediscovering democratic order

8Green transition as European order

9Order and economic security

10 Towards geoliberal Europe

Notes

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

When Russian troops and armoured vehicles entered Ukrainian territory on 24 February 2022, Europe moved into an unpredictable new era that tore apart established certainties and shattered peace and stability. The Russian invasion began an extended war that has cost thousands of lives, laid waste to much of Ukraine and unleashed the biggest movement of people out of their homeland for nearly a century. Since it began, the war has dominated daily media reports, political debate and countless international meetings. The rest of Europe watched in admiration as Ukrainian armed forces and citizens contained the Russian attack. The horrors of Russian violence have shocked and roiled the European continent.

The war is a tragedy for Ukraine, but also represents a transformative challenge for the whole European order. Beyond the atrocities and the shifting day-to-day dynamics of battle, Russia’s conflict in Ukraine has profound implications for European politics and security. Alongside the human suffering and violence, the war invites searching questions about the whole way in which European security, politics and economics are organized. The war is not simply one stand-alone conflict but has structural and continental ramifications. What can be referred to as the European order has been shaken to the core.

At this level, the invasion was as momentous as it was shocking. Even the most knowledgeable and respected of analysts and politicians believed such an invasion to be beyond the realms of possibility. And when the invasion did begin, the same observers almost in unison could see no outcome other than a swift Russian occupation covering most of Ukraine. European governments had to scramble to adapt to Ukraine’s sterner than expected resistance. Moreover, the war is not only game-changing in itself but has also unleashed or deepened many related challenges: the extent to which the war has affected so many areas of international politics, energy policies and economic trends has added further layers of concern across Europe. The outbreak of war and the events that have happened since have opened a Pandora’s box of spill-over troubles.

While analysis has understandably focused on the war itself, this book examines these more structural and longer-term consequences for Europe as a whole. The most pressing policy question for European governments has been whether their support for Ukraine has been sufficient decisively to impact the immediate course of war – and as the conflict continues this question remains disconcertingly open. Yet more systemic dilemmas have also emerged about what kind of European order emerges from the war and how this order sits within an evolving international system. This book asks how far a new European order is emerging due to the war, and it reflects on what kind of form this order should take.

RE-ORDERING

The reach of the war’s outward shockwaves suggests that this represents something more unsettling than one more European crisis. The European continent has had to deal with some intense challenges in the past two decades, from the financial crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic. Coming on top of these, Russia’s war on Ukraine adds a layer of more structural and strategic imperatives. It has opened or intensified systemic changes that speak to the core values and aims that underpin the European order. It invites far-reaching reconsideration of how cooperation and strategic action are organized within Europe and how this European order is situated within the wider global context. This is a moment not just of tragic violence but also of what can be labelled European re-ordering.

The Europe that emerges from the shadow of war will look different and will operate in different ways to that which existed before the invasion. This book tries to look beyond the immediate period of crisis management in which European governments have reacted to the war. It is not a blow-by-blow account of the war, but the beginning of a conversation about the conflict’s long-term, structural legacy. The book seeks to discern what deeper patterns of re-ordering are afoot and examines how European governments are tackling such re-ordering. Such a systemic focus has not so far been prominent: in events, dialogues and reports whose titles promise debate about the postwar order, participants and authors mostly admit in practice to focusing on immediate imperatives related to the fighting.¹

The war is an epochal event not only in the obvious sense of bringing conflict back to Europe and the shock of one state so blatantly violating the sovereignty of another. As the war’s consequences have rippled outwards, they have changed Europe’s political geography and reopened debates about the continent’s borders. They have begun to affect the organization of politics and power balances across the European continent. They have additionally cast doubt on many previous strategic assumptions about Europe’s place in the wider world and international system. And, compounding the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, they have thrown European economic models into further disarray. As the Financial Times has noted, the war has changed Europe for good.²

In essence, it appears that a third postwar era is now being born. The first was the period after the Second World War, when the European project of rebuilding peace was set in place. The second was the period after the Cold War, when the values of democracy and cooperative security seemed ascendent and these liberal winds filled European sails with renewed momentum. And now a third kind of readjustment is unfolding in the wake of Russia’s violence in Ukraine. The pending question is what kind of alterations this brings forth as the consequences of war play themselves out over time.

The post-1945 order established the basic norms of European cooperation and collective security. The ravages of two world wars pushed political elites into novel arrangements to lock their economies and societies together to pre-empt future enmity. This period laid down the core premises of the European project. That project embodied a notion of European order rooted in incremental integration that would gradually construct a lattice of deeply intermeshed economies and societies. Initially an economic and technical integration project, it incrementally assumed political significance. It built Western Europe as a confederal order, meaning that European states retained much of their sovereignty while agreeing to share or pool it across many areas of policy. This was essentially a peace project in which war became unthinkable within what was often described as a security community of unprecedent social depth.

The post-1989 order extended this logic to a swathe of Central and Eastern Europe that had been consigned to the Soviet Union sphere after 1945. This new motif was that of Europe whole and free and of reuniting the European family. It reflected a notion of order based in a redrawing of European borders and the geographical reach of collective organizations – the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in particular. It was very prominently centred on liberal political values. The post-1989 years were about nurturing democracy as a foundational value of the newly expanded and energized European project, and indeed fostering a wave of democratization more globally as an integral part of this liberal internationalism.

While this was a new notion of order that repaired the incision of the Iron Curtain, it did not fully include many parts of Europe. As it extended what might be referred to as the core EU-based European order it left Ukraine, other Eastern European states, the Balkans and of course Russia outside. Still, as the main Western European powers designed the post-Cold War architecture, they sought to soften or blur its new dividing lines. While some European states were left outside the EU and NATO, the basic ordering logic was about extending cooperative networks and a logic of collective security beyond the formal divides of the post-1989 continent. The EU, NATO and other regional organizations extended practical cooperation to the excluded states, including Russia to some degree.

The invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022 opens the prospect of Europe moving into a third, different order. The Russian invasion was not a singular moment of dramatic change that appeared from nothing. It crystallized the impact of many changes that had been gathering during previous years and deepened a sense of dramatic rupture. The nature of European order began to shift in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and fomented conflict in eastern Ukraine; yet, at this stage European governments did not question their fundamental approaches to continental ordering. There were other conflicts and sovereignty violations in Europe from the Balkans to the southern Caucasus, but none of these were framed as explicit threats to the established European order as was Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Progressively through the 2010s, the liberal norms of cooperative security, economic globalism and democracy came under strain from many sources; challenges intensified in the EU’s fluctuating relations with the US and China. Compounding these underlying trends, the 2022 invasion was more abrupt in its impact and magnified European strategic challenges to a new level.

If the 2022 invasion is set to take Europe into a different era, then it is vital to understand how far and in exactly which ways it is set to remodel the foundations of European order. Prominent historians suggest the present moment signals an end of the post-1945 order because it ends the era of peace and the unthinkability of invasion, and an end to the post-1989 order because Russia is now more fully and violently challenging the basic settlement drawn up at the Cold War’s close.³ As 1945 and 1989 acted as hinge moments for the project of European cooperation, so the 2022 invasion is set to have a profound impact too. Even if it does not instigate quite the same all-embracing and clear-cut break as either 1945 or 1989, it is set to have a systemic impact and needs to be analysed as a potentially order-altering war and not only as one discreet, stand-alone event.

The question remains open of exactly what form this putative European re-ordering will take. The challenge is to decipher carefully what has and has not changed in the European order as the ramifications of war unfold. This is a postwar era in the sense of coming after the beginning of the Ukraine conflict, and of course recognizing that the war for now continues. This means that longer-term re-ordering is underway even as the immediate crisis of war persists. Much will depend on the ultimate outcome of fighting on the ground; for now, it seems likely that European re-ordering will proceed with violence and instability a new constant, continuing over a long period of time and without quick resolution.

Order is defined as a body of rules, norms and institutions … a stable, structured pattern of relationships among states that involves … emergent norms, rulemaking institutions and international political organizations or regimes.⁴ Orders differ along several dimensions: geographic scope, organizational logic, rules and institutions, hierarchy and leadership, and their balance of coercion and consent. Going beyond the classical geopolitical definition that focuses on the configuration of formal borders, a wider notion of order also includes the territorial organization of values, economic interests and social networks.⁵ European re-ordering occurs to the extent that these institutions and norms begin to change. Changes can vary in degree, and they can be immediate or flow more gradually over a longer post-crisis aftermath. External crisis and re-ordering commonly impact each other, back and forth over an extended period of fluidity. While discussion of European order most often focuses on the single issue of security alliances, this book takes re-ordering to be a deeper, wider and necessarily multi-dimensional process.

Aspects of systemic change come from both direct and indirect impacts of war. A key theme throughout the book is that re-ordering is underway not only as a result of the war’s most immediate effects but also because it has left European governments and citizens feeling generally more vulnerable and fearful of other threats and challenges following in its wake. The war has had its own very direct impacts and also acted as a catalyst for rethinking on a whole series of order-related issues; much of its strategic significance lies in the way it has prompted European recalculations in other policy areas. The book is concerned with the specific issue of the war in Ukraine, but it also shows how this event’s impact is in part mediated through other important influences on European order – economic challenges, the evolving power and strategies of the United States and China, the energy transition and multiple other security concerns.

This prospect of systemic change directs us towards the questions that are of defining significance for Europe’s future:

•If a new European order emerges, will it be rooted in a stronger unity and use of power?

•Will it be an order more strongly secured and protected against outside threats?

•Are the borders of European order set to shift in a decisive manner, with the barrier between inclusion and exclusion in the core order more sharply drawn?

•Are liberal democratic values becoming more or less central to the emerging order?

•How does the most crucial generational challenge of green transition relate to the new European order?

•Is economic integration and openness still seen as core to European order-building?

This book examines each of these questions successively in the chapters that follow. The chapters follow a pattern that unpacks the different elements of Europe’s incipient re-ordering in turn. Looking into each of these arenas of change, the book is able to explore in depth just how decisive a breakpoint the war really represents in European order. It asks whether the European order is emerging more or less robust from the shock of conflict. It examines whether the crisis has brought qualitatively different patterns of order to the fore, around different organizational structures and with different states playing prominent roles. A core theme is whether the frontier of the core European order has moved decisively or is at least set to do so in the future.

GEOLIBERAL EUROPE

This book details policy responses to these emerging trends. It examines the new dynamics that are giving form to the emergent postwar era and how European governments are positioning themselves to shape these changes. It focuses on responses adopted by the European Union – both its individual member states and its collective initiatives pursued through EU institutions. This is because the EU has long been pivotal to the way that European order has been structured and politically anchored. The book also examines collective security efforts within NATO and the policies of some European powers outside the EU – the UK, in particular, as an influential player in the Ukraine conflict and its strategic aftermath. Reflecting this, the text expressly talks about the collective policies of the EU and its member states but also where appropriate the actions of European governments separate from the union as such. The book additionally foregrounds the vitally important perspectives from Ukraine and other states in the Eastern European region most affected by the conflict.

European governments and the EU collectively have begun to fashion policies for the era of re-ordering. The chapters that follow show how the war on Ukraine has prompted European governments to rethink both their internal and foreign policies. European leaders commonly claim that the war has led to a refounding of the European integration project. Many insist that the EU has rediscovered the European project’s original and idealistic spirit. As war has returned to the European continent, the EU has stepped forward with new resolve, purpose and moral clarity. Politicians across the continent talk of a new beginning, as European governments have committed to deeper cooperation and unity.

In these ways, the war on Ukraine and the shockwaves it has sent through so many areas of policy have indeed given birth to a different Europe. And it is true that to a certain extent, the conflict has re-energized European governments’ commitments to work together, to defend the values of peace, rules-based stability and open politics. Europe has rallied against the unchained hostility of an external aggressor. The contours of a reshaped European order are forming, and efforts are afoot to set this order on deeper and more steadfast foundations. As war seems set to constitute the basic condition of that order for some time ahead, a Europe under siege has stiffened its sinews against a more hostile world.

The book steps back from day-to-day events and tries to extract an overarching analytical framework from these constantly fluctuating policy shifts. It suggests that the changes can be encapsulated in the concept of geoliberalism. That is, rolled together, these policy responses and the varied elements of the postwar political context suggest the outlines of what might be labelled a geoliberal Europe.

Geoliberalism is defined as a modified and more instrumental liberalism harnessed with direct strategic intent, mixed with many less-than-fully-liberal policies. It is conceptualized as a juxtaposition of geopolitical and liberal dynamics that entails the principles of European rules-anchored cooperation being moulded to very concrete and defensive strategic aims. It reshapes liberal forms of European cooperation towards different principles of self-interest. The book suggests how in an analytical and descriptive sense this concept captures Europe’s embryonic re-ordering. (See text box below for definitional detail and how geoliberalism is used throughout the book).

European governments and the EU institutions have been feeling their way to new concepts of power, self-interest, security, sovereignty and cooperation since the invasion of Ukraine. Many of the concerns they seek to address are not entirely new, but the war has dramatically intensified the urgency and depth of rethinking needed to restore peace and stability in Europe. Among governments and EU diplomats a general acknowledgement has taken hold that this is a historic turning point and that many of the guiding assumptions of the post-1989 order have fallen – or at least seem to apply today in drastically weakened form. The change is complex as some re-ordering appears to double-down on pre-existing aims while some of it more fundamentally questions pre-war order preferences.

The baseline puzzle is that the war has triggered two quite different but equally compelling narratives: one about the need for geopolitical assertiveness, old-style security and power politics; the other about restoring and reinvigorating liberal notions of European order. While there is much tension between these two accounts, the book detects ways in which the geopolitical and liberal stands of European responses to the war might be meshing together – in a fusion that could be the template that comes to define the new European order. Conceptually, the war and its multiple knock-on challenges raise questions over both the standard liberal and realpolitik frameworks. Neither of these frameworks seem fully aligned to the new geopolitical context, pointing towards some kind of synthesis between the two in Europe’s tentative re-ordering.

This synthesis can be described as geoliberal in the sense that European policy changes seek to sharpen the strategic robustness and pointedness of the