The introductory chapter establishes the central questions, the rationale and structure of the monograph noting that it is concerned with the impact of unresolved conflict and contestation on the effectiveness of Europe’s human rights protection architecture within the framework of the Council of Europe. It also highlights several limits, such as the European focus and the deliberate decision not to seek to advance any reform proposals for the European Court of Human Rights Article 1 jurisprudence. It also engages, and dismisses, the potential critique of human rights imperialism.

The book concludes with a reflection on the challenge of grey zones as being one of first principles, which represents a risk to the integrity and long-term future of the organisation. It emphasises that the populations in areas of conflict and contestation are the most vulnerable rights holders in Europe, yet the most isolated. The Council of Europe must address this systematic problem as a matter of urgency and with the decisive attention of Member States and both statutory and non-statutory actors.

Chapter 3 considers the concept of shared, or collective, responsibility, a term which developed its own ambiguous ecosystem over the ten-year Interlaken process, but which reduced its meaning to an overly narrow focus on the ECHR control system. I propose that the protection of human rights in grey zones is a matter of first principles, which requires us to consider the object and purpose of the Council of Europe, which itself was established as a direct consequence of war. I argue that systemic and persistent limitations in the functioning of the broader CoE system in areas of conflict must consequently change the nature of the response. I suggest that such situations give rise to an ordre public imperative shared amongst all Member States. I further suggest that public order, when used as a tool for the intra-territorial effectiveness of the ECHR, constitutes a legal norm as it creates an exception to the state’s right to act voluntarily (i.e. it limits the possibility to declare a diminished level of responsibility for a particular region) on one hand, and it generates an imperative to act collectively, on the other.

The preceding chapters have attempted to look beyond the immediate fog of war and reflect upon the longer-term impacts of Ukraine's conflict. The war presents a range of profound questions that flow from these aftershocks. Although it is clear that the conflict is set to have lasting effects on Europe, two years on from Russia's invasion it remains uncertain how much structural re-ordering it will entail and what kinds of change will ultimately prevail. Will the emerging European order ultimately be a more harmonious and values-based one, or the reflection of greater turmoil and nationally centred self-preservation? Will European peace and liberal values ultimately emerge from the tragedy re-empowered? Or does the conflict mark another step in inexorable Western decline and solipsistic fragmentation? Will Russia's influence now be excised from the wider European order, or is it set to become even more disruptive?

These are the kinds of questions that will feature prominently in European affairs in the years to come. European governments are beginning to map out their responses, but do not yet have a clear, long-term plan for the kind of European order best able to advance regional peace and prosperity. It is undoubtedly the case that the conflict has spurred an unprecedented range and depth of policy change; how much deep re-ordering this generates is more difficult to determine. While the war is ongoing and these issues are still very much in flux, however, it is possible to draw reflections that can help guide thinking about the emerging postwar European order.

PARTIAL RE-ORDERING

Much of the debate about European responses to the war has been about very specific and immediate imperatives of supporting Ukraine. However, it has also involved some signs that point towards deeper re-ordering – at least potentially. European governments have come to reconsider some of the core concepts or principles that have nominally been central to their long-standing notions of order. The emergent tenets touch upon some core structural parameters of the way that the European order is organized internally and also how it stands in relation to its immediate borderlands and other powers. The book has ranged widely over different areas of policy and institutional restructuring precisely because this breadth of change shows that the war has had multiple layers of impact, and it is this very multiplicity that amounts to the stirrings of a potential re-ordering that extends beyond modifications to individual policies only.

One of the clearest and most frequently commented effects of the Russian invasion is that European governments have developed stronger defence and security policies. They have reacted to the evident threat coming directly from Russia as well as to a wider sense of risk and uncertainty. The war has triggered a process of European rearmament, after years in which the continent was losing hard power relative to other countries. NATO has returned to the forefront of regional security and the EU has accelerated its complementary contributions to strengthening defence capabilities. Much day-to-day debate has focused on European governments’ military supplies to Ukrainian forces, these expanding as the conflict has continued.

These changes mean that the postwar order is becoming a more securitized one. It will no longer be rooted in a peace project that minimizes military power as was the case during decades of European cooperative identity-building. The fusion of hard, geopolitical power with the maintenance of liberal order is one key element of an emerging geoliberal Europe. Still, there are unresolved questions about the political implications of such securitization and what it implies for European perspectives on postwar re-ordering. For now, European governments have begun a process of rearmament without a template for dovetailing such securitization with other pillars of European order.

DEFENDING EUROPE

In the wake of the war, European governments have poured huge amounts of money into their defence budgets and have cooperated in developing new military technology. Gone are the celebrated days of a non-military, civilian power Europe. The EU has doubled down on defending and protecting its own perimeter. Elements of hard security have crept into key areas of its external actions. Here, NATO has played lead role: a striking result of the war is that this organization has returned to the forefront of European order. A common argument is that continental rearmament is a necessary and overdue step towards European governments giving concrete backing to their new language of power and pursuing a properly robust sovereignty to underpin liberal order in Europe.

The move towards rearming Europe began very tentatively in the two or three years before the war. The economic impact of the eurozone crisis had caused many governments to reduce defence spending dramatically after 2009 and for most of the 2010s European military spending flatlined, while it increased fast in China, Russia and the Middle East.

Alongside their primary focus on security and power politics, European governments have cast the war on Ukraine as a battle for liberal democratic values. The war has heightened concerns over the need to defend democracy and a belated recognition that stronger commitment is needed to halt an advance of authoritarianism. While many threats to democratic norms deepened in the years before 2022, the war has brought support for democracy and re-ordering more closely together as two sides of the same strategic coin. Part of the geoliberal Europe emerging in the war's shadow lies in the geopolitical importance of liberal democracy. Russia's attack so brutally shows the ills of authoritarianism that it has to some extent revitalized European governments’ support for democracy and the demand for such support from democratic reformers.

There are three circles or layers of this enhanced effort to deepen and protect democratic values: inside the European Union, in the countries of the wider European order, and at the global level. In each of these spheres, European governments and the EU have stepped up important elements of their democracy strategies. Yet, some tensions have also sharpened between the security and democracy components of European policies. A serious challenge is that the postwar drive towards securitization and alliance-building in places cuts across governments’ actions in favour of democracy. These security strands of European re-ordering sit uneasily with the promise of renewed liberal power, and they muddy the clarity of a democratic geoliberalism.

DEMOCRACY AND EUROPEAN ORDER

During the crisis-blighted years of the 2010s, the quality of European democracy suffered. National governments and the EU institutions did a poor job in upholding core democratic values. Rather than steadfastly defending democracy, most governments across the continent chipped away at civic space and independent checks and balances. Governments were slow in recognizing the risk that the digital sphere and tech companies represented to democracy. The EU failed to respond in any effective manner to democratic backsliding, most notably in Hungary and Poland, but in other states too. And it failed to offer much concrete support to activists as these sought new forms of democratic renewal across Europe. Many of the EU crisis measures implemented during the eurozone crisis were imposed with little accountability or popular debate and made the democratic malaise worse. Outside the union, the UK's post-Brexit democracy suffered turmoil and illiberal constriction.

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.