The death of Europe? Continental fates after Ukraine

Abstract

The unravelling of the post‐Cold War security order in Europe was both cause and consequence of the crisis in Ukraine. The crisis was a symptom of the three‐fold failure to achieve the aspirations to create a ‘Europe whole and free’ enunciated by the Charter of Paris in 1990, the drift in the European Union's behaviour from normative to geopolitical concerns, and the failure to institutionalize some form of pan‐continental unity. The structural failure to create a framework for normative and geopolitical pluralism on the continent meant that Russia was excluded from the new European order. No mode of reconciliation was found between the Brussels‐centred wider Europe and various ideas for greater European continental unification. Russia's relations with the EU became increasingly tense in the context of the Eastern Partnership and the Association Agreement with Ukraine. The EU and the Atlantic alliance moved towards a more hermetic and universal form of Atlanticism. Although there remain profound differences between the EU and its trans‐Atlantic partner and tensions between member states, the new Atlanticism threatens to subvert the EU's own normative principles. At the same time, Russia moved from a relatively complaisant approach to Atlanticism towards a more critical neo‐revisionism, although it does not challenge the legal or normative intellectual foundations of international order. This raises the question of whether we can speak of the ‘death of Europe’ as a project intended to transcend the logic of conflict on the continent.

Russia and Carl Schmitt: the hybridity of resistance in the globalised world

“…By supporting regime change in Ukraine and its integration with the EU, the West is thought to be meddling in Russia's "legitimate interests". Accordingly, through the political and military enlargements of the EU and NATO, the West has been trying to weaken its sovereignty by expanding its influence closer to Russia's borders (Rajan and Rumer, 2015;Sakwa, 2015a).…”

“…According to Fischer (2012) and Sakwa (2015b), the EU expansion is an imperialist move to overtake Russia's sphere of influence through entrenching liberal values. Hence, the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov (cited in Fischer, 2012: 39) asked: "We are accused of trying to have spheres of influence.…”

“…The evolution of Russia's version of state dissidence is exemplified by the clandestine Russian attempt to destabilize the Ukrainian government (Trenin, 2014). Having annexed Crimea in March 2014, Russia has given indirect support (for example, supply of armaments) to the militant insurgencies in Donetsk and Luhansk (Sakwa, 2015a;Snetkov and Lanteigne, 2015). Russia also deployed around 30,000 troops along the Ukrainian border, sparking fears of future invasion (Tsygankov, 2015).…”

“…A number of studies have already analysed the threats that Russia poses to the established international order (Karatnycky and Motyl, 2009;Herpen, 2014;Jahn, 2015;Sakwa, 2015a;Shevtsova, 2015;Laruelle, 2016). Many of them have proposed some useful solutions to prevent further escalation of the conflict (Motyl, 2014;Wilson, 2014;Alexandrova-Arbatova, 2015;Crosston, 2015;Tsygankov, 2015;Veebel, 2015;Haukkala, 2016).…”

One Europe or None

“…The Russo-Georgian war of 2008 was the first major sign that armed conflict between European states had not been banished from the continent, but it was only the precursor to the even graver crisis over Ukraine in 2014. We can justifiably talk of the 'death of Europe', in the sense that the aspirations 3 8 for a new united continent voiced at the end of the Cold War were confounded, and continental Europe as the subject of its own history was once again lost as it became the playground for competing global ambitions (Sakwa, 2015c). There is a vigorous debate over what to call this new era of confrontation following the cold peace, but ultimately whether we call it a 'New Cold War' or something else is less important than recognising the great failure of our generation to create a sustainable and enduring peace order in Europe.…”