As a corollary to rearmament, the war on Ukraine has begun to change the political geography of European order. It has opened a process of what can be termed “re-bordering”, as governments change the ways in which they establish boundaries to the European order. This process is remoulding the logics of inclusion in and exclusion from that order. For many years, the European Union has used strategically creative ambiguity in its boundary drawing and tried to avoid defining the logics of inclusion and exclusion in an absolute fashion. Throughout the 2010s, it denied formal inclusion to Ukraine and other Eastern European states and yet brought them closer to many parts of the EU institutional framework. Conversely, it avoided a complete breach with Russia even as tensions accumulated after the annexation of Crimea.

Since Russia's full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, European powers have begun to draw boundary divisions in a much sharper fashion. The blurring between inclusion and exclusion has given way to what could become a much more definite logic of hard bordering. On one side of this equation, the EU has opened the possibility of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia joining the union, moving them from a grey-zone buffer towards full inclusion in the core European order (examined in Chapter 6). On the other side of the equation, a more absolute divide has opened between the core European order and Russia, and this is integral to the emergent geoliberal Europe.

The step-by-step distancing between EU and other European powers, on the one side, and Russia, on the other side, has been one of the most obvious and exhaustively commented results of the war. The logic of exclusion is not absolute: many in Europe still resist the idea of re-ordering being intrinsically a process against Russia, seeing it rather as a less absolute turn away from Russia that might still be undone. And there are other complex nuances at play too, to do with the lack of exclusionary demarcations internationally, notions of a Russia-led competing order and also the societal dimensions of relations with Russia. Still, with these caveats, it can be said that the intersection between European order and the logic of exclusion towards Russia is now a powerful driver of continental geopolitics.