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.

A final part of the re-ordering puzzle relates to the war's impact on European conceptions of economic order. Although this is an indirect impact and not so central to the conflict as the matters covered by other chapters, it is still significant in its importance and worthy of examination. The war has reinforced concerns about changes to economic order that have become prominent over the past several years. The fact that it has impacted the economic realm and not just issues related directly to security shows how deep the process of European re-ordering could extend. In effect, two order-related challenges have intensified together: a politico-security one in Europe, and a geoeconomic one within the wider international economic order. While this book is not concerned with economic or trade policy as such, these areas condition the link between the conflict and the core issue of European order.

The war has added dramatically to the priority that European governments attach to economic security. The postwar European order will be one that is rooted in different forms of economic order, interdependence and geoeconomics. The emergence of a geoliberal Europe can be seen in European powers adopting an increasingly political approach to their economic interests and leverage. This shift brings the foundations of economic order more into line with mounting uncertainties that beset geopolitical order. However, at least some European economic policies still tilt towards a narrow or defensive mercantilism that does not serve a systemic and balanced geoliberal approach to postwar re-ordering. The heightened priority now given to economic sovereignty is both an important pillar of geoliberal Europe and a potential challenge to fully strategic geoliberalism.

COMPETITIVE GLOBALISM

In the several years before the war, the EU had already been shifting to a more mercantile external economic strategy – driven in particular by Chinese commercial dominance. The Covid-19 pandemic triggered a raft of initiatives aimed to reduce European dependencies on global supply chains. The significance of the Ukraine war is that it has magnified these prior policy concerns and has become entangled with a much wider range of underlying geoeconomic patterns of re-ordering.

In the decade prior to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the EU had gradually adopted a more controlled and strategically transactional model of economic order. After the financial and economic crisis hit Europe from 2009, the EU more tightly conditioned other powers’ access to European markets.

Russia's full invasion in February 2022 came after more than a decade of actions against Ukraine and other states. In late 2013 and early 2014, the Russian government pushed hard for Ukraine to pull out of its association agreement talks with the European Union. When this triggered a popular revolt that drove Ukraine's Russia-leaning President Yanukovich from office, Russia moved quickly to annex Crimea and then stoked conflict in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine. European powers responded with a suite of measures against Russia, helped Ukraine with new cooperation and supported a peace accord. Tensions between the West and Russia worsened, although many EU member state governments judged that the conflict in Donbas had been contained to a relatively low-level of intensity.

A brief background of this period prior to the full invasion lays the foundations for understanding events since 2022. While European powers adjusted their policies towards the wider Europe region and began to act more geopolitically after the 2014 events, they failed to put in place strategic guardrails that might have prevented the Russian invasion in 2022. The post-2014 crisis did not unleash any significant dynamics of re-ordering, in contrast to the post-2022 fall-out. Indeed, in the 2010s most EU governments approached the crisis through a prism of limiting or heading-off European re-ordering. Their aim was to contain the conflict without major order-changing policy commitments. The green shoots of what this book conceptualizes as geoliberalism appeared but did not flourish in the uneasy eastern stasis of the years before 2022.

LOW-COST ORDER MAINTENANCE

Relations between Western powers and Russia became gradually more strained in the early 2000s for multiple reasons. When Russia launched a military incursion into Georgia in 2008 and consolidated its de facto hold over the breakaway territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia – that it then recognized as independent – the international community engaged diplomatically to prevent war but soon reverted to business as usual. The EU sought to upgrade its formal economic-cooperation partnership with Russia. In 2008, governments declared at a NATO summit that Georgia and Ukraine could join the defence alliance; however, this was pushed through at the behest of the United States and most European governments were not supportive of the idea, ensuring that it made no progress in the years that followed.

The invasion of Ukraine has upended EU energy security and intensified commitments to green transition. European governments and the EU collectively have come to frame ecological transition as a matter of immediate security self-interest. Alongside the main dynamics of securitization and re-bordering, Europe's reshaped order also gives a more prominent place to the green transition – not merely as a stand-alone area of environmental policy but as integral to the continent's politics and geostrategy. It appears that the commitment to energy transition is to be a core pillar of the emerging geoliberal European order.

And yet, for all the intense activity in this area of climate action, the relationship between environmental policies and the postwar European order remains hazy. Governments have not fully followed through on their commitments to green transition. Energy policy is an area where national-interest calculations remain powerful and displace a common pattern of re-ordering. The international environmental spill-over from the Ukraine war has been handmaiden to a more Europe-first, sovereigntist approach to energy and climate interests that raises questions about rules-based green order. While European powers have upgraded their climate and ecological commitments, it is unclear whether these are far-reaching enough to involve structural re-ordering. European governments have taken steps since early 2022 to intensify their climate policies but still need to develop comprehensive green re-ordering.

GREEN TRIGGER

The war in Ukraine has had a dramatic impact on European climate action and ecological policies. It has injected new momentum behind the transition to a low carbon economy and other environmental objectives. The war is not the major factor driving climate action, of course, but it has pushed European governments and the EU institutions into a new era of green politics. The war has allowed EU institutions and governments to frame the green agenda as a more obvious necessity for strategic self-benefit. It has unblocked green commitments and accelerated many elements of energy transition. It opens the prospect of a green European order – that is, a situation in which ecological policy is integral to the way that postwar order is organized. Yet, the jury is still out on whether this green momentum is strong enough to reshape the basic parameters of European order in the same way that post-1945 reconstruction drove the founding of a new European project.

Developing out of this long lead into the 2022 war, a first strand of postwar adjustment has come from European powers’ efforts to strengthen the basic structural foundations upon which European order is built. These are the bedrock changes from which more specific policy changes have begun to flow – and that are examined in subsequent chapters. To some degree, the Ukraine invasion has tightened unity between European states and the chastening alarm of war has injected new meaning and urgency into governments’ cooperation. Despite this, however, European governments have still to commit to far-reaching, qualitative reform of the core EU integration model.

As in previous eras, a major external challenge has pushed European leaders to call for more cooperation and for the European integration project to move towards completion. Governments and EU institutions have also adopted a narrative that reinforcing the European order requires the assertive use of power. These ambitions represent the baseline of a geoliberal Europe, and yet have not been followed through in any comprehensive manner. If anything, the war has led to more varied and looser forms of European cooperation. The postwar European order is set to be rooted in a combination of more EU institutionalized unity, on the one hand, and nationally centred strategic flexibility, on the other hand. The tangible impact of governments’ new power-based narrative is also still difficult to pin down. The war on Ukraine has awoken efforts to reinforce the foundations of European order, although these efforts are yet to reach any decisive fruition.

IMPETUS

From the moment of Russia's full invasion of Ukraine, European leaders stressed that the EU needed to function as a more united and fully integrated political entity. They insisted that only in this way could the union deal effectively with the fraught geopolitical context and protect itself from external threats. In line with a long history of and extensive writing on war being a driver of polity formation, the Ukraine conflict has prompted a new era of rhetorical commitment to deepen cooperation between European governments. In the period since Russia's invasion, European governments have agreed measures to strengthen their cooperation, many of which had been blocked or were languishing in EU institutional black holes before the war.

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.

The flipside to the logic of exclusion is a new logic of inclusion. Processes have begun to move the geographical space of the European project outwards. Russia's war on Ukraine has opened the possibility of a reshaped geography of European politics. The conflict has prompted the EU to advance the prospect of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia becoming members. Separately, an embryonic European Political Community has been created that additionally includes the UK, Turkey and other non-EU states; although this format does not yet have a guaranteed future it could end up resembling something akin to a loose concert of European powers. These steps point towards a territorial redesign of European order.

For now, this redesign is a possibility, not a certain outcome. The ultimate extent of geographical reordering remains unclear. Many sceptics feel that the offer of membership to Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia is low-cost symbolism, unlikely ever to reach fruition. If further enlargement does not advance as the main institutional basis for a wider and more inclusive European order, debates will centre on how far a looser diplomatic concert might fulfil this function. The re-ordering of 1989 shifted the European project's border decisively to the East; the Ukraine war has opened the likelihood of it moving further outwards, although this is still to materialize in definitive form.

NEW FRONTIERS

Russia's invasion has catalysed a revived process of EU enlargement and opened debates about NATO membership too; Figure 6.1 shows the new situation regarding EU applicant states. Most European governments were implacably opposed to any widening of Euro-Atlantic borders before the war started. Indeed, in the years prior to the invasion, “re-bordering” debates were not about inclusion but the inverse process of rebuilding frontiers, reflecting an inward-looking concern with identity protection in response to populism.1 Governments’ change of heart on this question captures just how far-reaching an impact the war may have at the level of system-ordering.

NATO has moved to include Finland and Sweden as new members and the alliance's members stress that they are positively minded to invite in Ukraine after the war ends. As yet, they have held back from making a formal offer to Ukraine, whose government applied to join NATO in September 2022. Some eastern EU member states quickly expressed firm support for the application and by mid-2023 the UK and French governments were also moving in favour.