THE EUROPEAN – SECURITY AND DEFENCE UNION
In the Spotlight
+++ Security Crises +++
The Union must live up to its aspirations
European security and the management of simultaneous crises Black Sea port of Odessa, Ukraine photo: ©2022 Artur Synenko/Shutterstock
by Gesine Weber, Research Analyst, German Marshall Fund of the United States, Paris
“W
hen your own house is on fire, you don’t send your entire fire brigade to fight a wildfire fifty kilometres from your village.” This metaphor describes brutally well the pressing need to reassess the priorities for European security since the beginning of Russia’s war against Ukraine in February 2022. Had the security policy priorities of the European Union (EU) previously been dominated mostly by the focus on the southern neighbourhood, Russia’s invasion forced the EU to rethink geopolitics on the European continent, and to readjust its action accordingly.
Remarkable deliveries of the EU Indeed, the EU has delivered: within days, the Member States adopted fierce packages of sanctions and activated the European Peace Facility – a tool originally conceptualised to support partner countries in the southern neighbourhood – to support Ukraine with lethal weapons. Furthermore, Member States have pledged to increase their individual defence budgets (as reflected in Germany’s “Zeitenwende”, the historic decision to invest €100bn in defence), stepped up their troop commitments to NATO’s eastern flank, and even approved EU candidate status for Ukraine. Source: https://bit.ly/3Otn06J Source: https://bit.ly/3b6h2Lt
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The EU’s quick and resolute reaction to Russia’s war on Ukraine is remarkable, given that its previous action in its neighbourhood has often been criticised for a lack of coherence, consistency, or just for being “too little, too late”. While Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has forged transatlantic unity and underlined the vital importance of US engagement in Europe for European security, it has also showcased that the EU itself can make a meaningful contribution to this – in other words, that the European fire brigade works if needed.
War in Ukraine – a geopolitical long game While supporting Ukraine against Russia must be the top priority for Europeans at the moment, the ramifications of the war have already become visible in other parts of the world relevant to European security, and are likely to exacerbate over the coming months, particularly in the Global South. With Ukraine and Russia supplying more than a quarter of the world’s wheat, the war has already led to an explosion of prices across the globe, but it is particularly likely to threaten food security in Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Lebanon, which in 2020 represented more than half of the wheat exports from Ukraine.1 Furthermore, the soaring prices for fuel and fertiliser risk further complicating food supply, so that the World Food Programme expects the war to drive food insecurity to a record high.2 The war in Ukraine thereby adds an additional dimension of insecurity to regions in Europe’s south, where the
