The crisis of European Security System: Causes and Consequences

Abstract

This article analyzes changes and processes within the European security environment. As a result of Russian aggression against Ukraine, European security as a system of arranged relations was unbalanced, and during the Russian-Ukrainian war of 2022-2026, it entered a state of multiphase crisis.

The critical escalation of contradictions between the leading participants in the European security system resulted in the breakdown of traditional ties and a revision of the terms and principles of international relations between states participating in multilateral interactions within the OSCE area. The “Ukrainian crisis” has had a significant impact on political processes and contributed to the overall destabilization of the global international system.

The purpose of this study is to identify the stages of the crisis of European security as a model of relations established between 1990 and 2022, and to elucidate the state of European security in terms of the possibility or impossibility of restoring its structural format. Identifying political and structural changes at different stages of the European security crisis allows to assert that the first significant challenge to the European security model, built on a combination of all-European commitments and cooperation principles and the synchronized expansion of NATO and the EU, was the US-NATO military operation in Yugoslavia (1999). The aggravation of contradictions between European and Euro-Atlantic institutions and Russia was accompanied by claims by the Moscow leadership to recognize Russia’s special, preferential interests in the post-Soviet space.

The unfolding of direct Russian aggression against Ukraine demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the European security model enshrined in a series of CSCE/OSCE documents and multilateral decisions adopted between 1975 and 1999. The sluggish response of most transatlantic states to the escalating crisis in Russian-Ukrainian relations contributed to the fragmentation of the OSCE area into local zones with different security regimes. The subsequent polarization within Western alliances and associations demonstrated the inadequacy of existing security mechanisms for the new conditions. The European security model tested between 1990 and 2022 has crossed a line before which the crisis could have been considered adaptive. Structural changes across the ‘Wider Europe’ area determine the inevitability of new forms of organizing interactions between the main actors in the Transatlantic region and Northern Eurasia, including the United States, Russia, and the “European troika” of Great Britain, France, and Germany.