In this chapter, I start by providing a brief overview of changes in definitions of threat and conceptualizations of the enemy in Euro-Atlantic security discourses, particularly in response to the 9/11 attacks and, more broadly, to what is widely perceived as a significant threat of international, Islamist terrorism. I then focus more specifically on NATO, examining the ways in which new conceptualizations of threat/enemy have inspired a particular ethos of risk management in the Alliance. That ethos, I suggest, has translated into a specific combination of practices of inclusion and exclusion. The chapter analyses the dynamics of those practices and...

From the attacks on London and Madrid, to the arrest of terrorist cells, to groups of supporters pouring funds and fighters into foreign organizations, Europe appears to have become a central battlefield of global jihad. Nonetheless, the European public continues to display a puzzling sense of indifference or, rather, a fairly low perception of a threat that increasingly comes from within their societies and seems bent on destroying it. As has been argued in a volume on European counterterrorism policies, ‘Europeans are divided as to whether they consider their own cities, civilians and assets targets for future attacks’ (von Hippel...

To a superficial observer, the nuclear issue, which was central to any discussion about European security during the Cold War, seems to have completely disappeared from public view since the early 1990s. For many commentators, this is as it should be. As a ‘senior diplomat’ noted in 1999, nuclear deterrence is an issue that should remain ‘in a box in a corner’ and stay there for the foreseeable future (Smith 2004). But like a rash that refuses to go away, the nuclear issue reappears time and again in the headlines, making it seem unlikely that a European debate over nuclear...

The European Union’s former Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs liked to joke that the best thing that happened to him in his job was Gazprom’s restriction of gas deliveries to the Ukraine in early 2006. It led to fears of shortages across the European Union (EU)¹ and brought to mind the vulnerability of energy supply and infrastructures (Crooks 2007). The repetition of this incident in early 2009, which exposed hundreds of thousands of Europeans to fiercely cold weather, illustrates that increased awareness alone did not produce a more securing approach. It would also seem that the problem is not limited to...

The European Union (EU), and the European Economic Community (EEC) before it, has always been a global economic power. Its economic weight endowed it with the potential to also become a global actor in the realm of diplomacy and defence, but it was not until the Maastricht Treaty created the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) that Europe began to develop its own strategy, and even then very tentatively. This chapter will track, from the policy science point of view, how, during the fifteen-odd years since the entry into force of the Maastrict Treaty in 1993, the EU gradually evolved...

The post–Cold War European Union is in many respects a different entity from the European Communities of the Cold War times. One of the differences is that the European Union now deals with security and defence policy. Security and defence did not figure in the Treaty of Rome of 1957. It was indeed only after the end of the Cold War, in the Maastricht Treaty, that foreign and security policy were added to the Union’s remit. It took several years still before the actual development of European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) started, in practice with the Saint-Malo Summit...

‘In war,’ wrote Sun Tzu some 2,500 years ago, ‘prize victory, not a protracted campaign’ (Sun Tzu 2003: 13). It would seem that we here encounter a diagnosis of the ills of the Atlantic Alliance. NATO as a whole as well as its leader, the United States, is tied up in protracted campaigns far from its home territory: NATO in Afghanistan, the United States in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Yet analysts disagree on what this turn of events portends for the Alliance. One school of thought holds that NATO is a relic of the past bipolar distribution of power and...

In line with neorealist analysis, Moskos, Williams, and Segal have argued that broadly similar threats to transatlantic states have led to a common response to post–Cold War transformation of armed forces (Moskos, Williams, and Segal 2000: 2; Waltz 2000). Perhaps this is unsurprising given the priority they give to the structural level of analysis, the anarchic nature of international relations, and the overlap of international security institutions. Most (though not all) European states are members of the two leading European security institutions, NATO and the European Union. There is a high degree of overlap between these security institutions: of...

Europe has the most dense network of security institutions in the world. Since the Second World War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Western European Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and increasingly the European Union have played a significant security role. Yet, while these institutions contributed to a major shift in the use of force within the region, they did not erase differences about conceptions of force employment among European countries and between European countries and the United States. Why have concepts of military power and force employment remained distinct and varied in Europe, and...

It is often assumed in the media as well as in the specialized literature that the fast-increasing assertiveness of Russia’s foreign policy with regards to Western countries is a recent phenomenon that owes much to the rise of Vladimir Putin’s team ofsilovikiat the Kremlin, including current president Dmitri Medvedev. According to this storyline, it is the present government’s autocratic tendencies that best explain Moscow’s mounting resistance to Western policy in Europe and the rest of the world, from Kosovo to Ukraine through Iran, and now Georgia. While there certainly has been a crackdown on Russia’s fragile democracy in...

EU engagement in the Western Balkans since the end of the Cold War has been significant in military, political, and economic terms. While the 1990s were marked by foreign policy failures, the past decade has witnessed not only the growth of European security institutions but also the application of EU foreign and security policy instruments in the Western Balkans – including the perspective of EU membership. The security environment in the region has changed significantly over the past two decades, and renewed military conflict is no longer an urgent concern. In this more benign security environment the focus remains on...

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is worth analysing the long history of Europe’s involvement with the Middle East peace process (MEPP). The Arab-Israeli conflict in fact, and the subsequent peace process, have been among the most strongly debated issues by EU Member States, not only since the creation of the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) in 1991, but since the establishment of European Political Cooperation (EPC) in 1970, when bipolar rivalry still largely defined the conflict in the Middle East. The peace process has been the subject of innumerable joint declarations and joint actions...

The preceding chapters have analysed a variety of European security issues, focusing on how they have evolved since the fall of the Berlin Wall. These issues range from classical ones in security studies (defence policy, armed forces, nuclear weapons) to emerging challenges such as energy security, transnational terrorism, and organized crime. Building on the notion that security is a shifting concept, our objective was to understand how the evolution of the European security environment since 1989 has been linked to changing social representations of security among people, practitioners, and theorists. In this concluding chapter, we try to gather the book’s...