Is an Inclusive European Security Architecture Possible?

This article reflects my personal thoughts and is not indicative of the official position of my party Die Linke.

When I wrote this contribution in early November 2024, the newly elected Trump administration was still over two months from taking office. During his campaign, Trump repeatedly spoke of ending the war. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress opposed the Biden administration’s continued financial and military aid to Ukraine. Given this, the incoming Trump administration was expected to push for an end to the war, though its concrete actions remained a matter of speculation. Perhaps the key question was whether the U.S. would unite stakeholders and mediate their conflicts. Most observers doubted a Trump-led administration would take that approach. 

Hindsight is 20/20: The Trump administration has pursued a broad agreement with Russia to end the war while mediating U.S.-Russian interests. Though negotiations are still in early stages, it is clear that Ukraine and other European governments are secondary concerns for the U.S. Their role may grow when implementing the agreement, but a just and lasting peace is far from guaranteed if key actors remain sidelined. While a just peace that is acceptable to those impacted by the war wouldn’t immediately create a sustainable security architecture, it is a necessary step toward one. Moreover, the prospect of a new security framework could encourage a peace beyond short-term deals between major powers.

Left parties in Europe have long criticized the continent’s failure to establish an inclusive security architecture after the Cold War. Nowadays, we are aware that simply calling for an inclusive security architecture is not enough to bring it into existence. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has complicated the situation even further, seemingly destroying any chance at creating an inclusive security architecture. (Not that the preceding two decades had provided particularly good conditions for the project.) On the other hand, failing to articulate a vision for an inclusive security architecture will only prolong the ongoing war: without it, the parties to the conflict cannot predict the costs of losing. 

To put the problem in nutshell, the escalating war in Ukraine is as bad a condition for creating common or cooperative security as can be imagined. Yet we still need the inclusive security perspective, and it has to be situated within today’s context and take popular demands for security seriously — demands that are coming out of a situation of competition, insecurity, and war. This article rethinks the idea of an inclusive security architecture under the given circumstances, which offer little hope for taking huge steps, which would lack sufficient social majorities anyway.

This piece briefly discusses key concepts and argues that handling the different layers of the larger conflict separately would help contain it. This approach, which I call “progressive minimalism,” would be a radical step towards common security, because it does not neglect society’s need for security; rather, it initially focuses on containing the current spiral of escalation. A progressive minimalist perspective can work as a trust-building key to open closed gates.

Finally, I argue that it is important to understand that the issues of security and military and foreign policy do not exist in isolation from the economy. This insight is not very new. Nevertheless, when it comes to the question of security relations within Europe, we must deal with the “security centrism” that tries to explain peace and war almost exclusively through security factors, focusing on the interactions of military alliances. The destabilizing potential of competing economic integration projects has received far less attention. Economic treaties have to be designed more carefully when it comes to their security implications, because the boundaries they create can cause instability when not managed carefully.

A Vision for Order and the Prospect of Peace

The highest degree of security that can be reached is peace. However, in order to reach peace, we must first talk about how to structure the relationship between peace and security. Die Linke’s party manifesto has long featured the goal of a system of collective security in Europe that explicitly includes Russia. However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has meant that it is no longer seen as a potential security partner even by those Germans who do not agree with our government’s rearmament policies. Arguing for a common security architecture in Europe has become a hard task under the current circumstances.

Other reasons outside of the ongoing war have further complicated attempts to propose security and peace architectures. Most existing proposals date from the time of the Cold War or its immediate aftermath. Since then, we saw over a decade of Western hegemony and frequent interventions, weakening the integrity of the UN, followed by two decades of a transition toward a multipolar world order, or maybe a bipolar US-China rivalry. Europe is now home to the world’s largest armed conflict, but in our current world system, the most significant poles of power are now located outside of our continent. Any new proposals must be designed in light of these new realities.

The invasion of Ukraine marks a violation of the UN Charter’s principle of peace. Now that the Charter has been broken, the state system is becoming even more anarchic, and the arms race is accelerating. This has shaken the state system beyond Ukraine: Poland is now spending a higher proportion of its GDP on defense than the US is, while, on the pretext of contributing in solidarity to common Western defense efforts, Germany has become the biggest military power among Europe’s NATO members in budgetary terms. Yes, the principle of sovereignty enshrines a nation’s right to self-defense, but the political logic of progressive forces needs to go beyond the realm of the military; stopping the invasion of Ukraine and ending the arms race in Europe are closely related. As long as we have no political perspective beyond the war, military means cannot end the invasion without further escalation.

When and how the war will end depends greatly on a vision for a security order. The political left cannot remain silent on the question of a security order in Europe just because the issue is unpopular and hard to solve. It is hard to solve because there is war in Europe, and the war itself is prolonged because nobody wants to lose it. Even the parties to the conflict themselves have few definite goals because their leaders have refrained from developing concrete ideas for a post-war order other than vague principles. A vision for a post-war order, or at least proposed elements of an order, would considerably lower the risk for actors to make sacrifices in order to end the war.

Finally, a vision for a civil order would help to contain the right-wing forces that are answering popular demands for security by fetishizing the nation and the military, peddling narratives in which a national myth replaces rational argument and humanity itself. Still, normative calls for humanity are not enough. The left has often been criticized for not delivering practical architectures of security.

Collective Security versus Common/Cooperative Security

The popular understanding of collective security is widely shaped by the Cold War experiences of the Warsaw Treaty Organization and NATO, which promised their members security from one another. Nevertheless, lasting peace cannot be reached by only bringing actors who already share the same political interests into alliances. Building common security is not primarily about bringing together actors that share similar values and interests; that is building alliances. Common security has a much more difficult goal: it requires bringing together states that are competing against each other, that define themselves as rivals, or which have dissimilar social orders.

In the late stages of the Cold War, even high-ranking military planners sought to rethink conventional understandings of security in order to avoid the devastating consequences of a potential failure of nuclear deterrence. The risk of direct confrontation between military alliances during the Cold War led both sides to the insight that the collective security provided by military alliances still contains a significant driver of insecurity — the security dilemma. In a classical security dilemma, security for you means insecurity for the other(s). Why should they trust that your military capabilities are for defense and not for attack?

To avoid confrontation and continued escalation, both sides must evaluate their interests and how their policies appear to the other side. However, this is not enough. So long as security is primarily defined in military terms, the desire for peace and the quest for security will always be in tension: military alliances will maximize their deterrence capabilities to achieve security for their members. Nuclear deterrence capability makes war less likely, but it only contributes to real security so long as it does not fail. Nobody can promise that the tension between security and total destruction can be managed in the long run — particularly not in an order which is much more complex and unstable than the old bipolar order.

How then can you trust that the other side will not exploit your weakness when you begin to disarm on your own? Any evaluations of common security have necessarily to emerge from this starting point, otherwise they will not convince sceptics. In the late Cold War, the idea of “mutual defense dominance” emerged. Mutual defense dominance is defined as a situation where both sides can credibly deflect an attack but are not capable of launching a successful offensive. The closer we come to such a situation, the more credible common security seems. However, our continent’s transition towards common security has to start in a situation of insecurity, an arms race, and open war. Furthermore, a lack of trust among all sides implies that only small steps are possible at the moment.

Past Achievements, Lost Achievements, and Potential Achievements: “Progressive Minimalism”

What I term a “progressive minimalism” can be a radical step forward towards common security because it moves forward without taking too many risks at once. Such minimalism is not without historical precedent. During the Cold War, East-West confrontation took place on many levels: the local, the regional, the global, the economic, the military, the ideological, etc. One of the reasons why the Cold War did not fully escalate was that the competing camps were able to keep these levels of competition separate, enabling them to co-exist.

Different aspects of military and security issues were also handled separately. While still competing in many regional wars (Vietnam, Afghanistan etc.), the hostile alliances and their leading superpowers managed to keep them separate from the issue of strategic warfare and nuclear deterrence in particular. That was largely a consequence from the Cuban Missile Crisis, which allowed (strategic) arms control to be established from the 1960s onwards. Despite this, none of the leading actors gave up their reliance on the principle of nuclear deterrence. However, they discussed which kinds of weapons and in what quantities were necessary for upholding deterrence and established monitoring protocols. That was never enough, but it was a necessary precondition for reining in the arms race and building more mutual trust.

Throughout the end of the Cold War, the unipolar decade, and the years of the emerging multipolar order, we have seen old arms control agreements expiring or being terminated. We are now in the dangerous situation of an ongoing war with no strategic arms control. Meanwhile, strategic warfare means nothing less than war using weapons of (nuclear) mass destruction with a global or at least continental reach.

The most important actors in the field of strategic warfare are still the US and Russia, while China’s importance in this field is rapidly growing. This should not lead the European left to deny our own responsibility: missiles were deployed in Germany during the Cold War, and nuclear weapons are still deployed as part of Germany’s nuclear sharing arrangement with the US. Following an agreement with the US last summer, Germany will receive new medium-range missiles. This will not add to our security: it would make us a potential target in the case of escalation. Moreover, it is an obstacle for cooperative security. Cooperative security is not a naïve or purely normatively founded conception. It is strongly based on incentives. Even the 1983 NATO Double-Track Decision, which was part of the arms race, contained an incentivizing logic: “We will cancel our deployment of medium-range missiles if you withdraw yours.” Nowadays, nuclear weapons deployment plans lack even this incentive. The only sane position is to oppose them.

One of the most relevant insights that we can take from the old debates on common security is the concept of “relative security.” Relative security means that when both sides increase their weaponry in similar numbers, neither of them becomes safer. And, conversely, when both reduce their arsenals, neither lose security in relative terms. The insight that security is relative can help to create low-stakes on-ramps to arms control because it incorporates the logic behind the idea of deterrence. These on-ramps to disarmament are best suited for weapons systems which are potentially very dangerous, hard to control, and prone to error. Medium and short-range nuclear weapons are good examples of what to put under control first.

Progressive minimalism is not about feeling ashamed because our efforts seem insufficiently radical. Progressive minimalism can work as a key to open closed gates. Reestablishing arms control arrangements or at least monitoring protocols could play a crucial role in communicating the state of our own armed forces as well as incentivizing other parties to commit to structural non-aggression. It would make an appropriate first step because there is no reason to wait: from a practical perspective, we can adopt such policies at any time without threatening our capabilities for defense. Similar steps were taken during the Cold War in a context of sharp confrontation and ongoing proxy wars.

Does this mean a lack of empathy with the fate of the people living in Ukraine? No, because the strategic arms race does not contribute towards ending the invasion of Ukraine. The ruling forces of Russia even used the question of strategic warfare as argument in support of their invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, I am skeptical of their arguments, because we cannot talk about security without talking about whose interests are placed within the discourse of security.

Peace and War beyond “Security Centrism”

When it comes to relations between Russia and NATO and all the other nations on the European continent, we spend a lot of time discussing the military dimension of foreign policy and security. This “security centrism” tries to explain peace and war almost exclusively through security factors. Depending on their respective political camp, “security centrists” attribute the war in Ukraine to NATO’s eastward expansion or, conversely, right-wing Russian leaders’ aggressive foreign policy. Analysts have long debated if NATO’s expansion to the east since the end of the Cold War has been undermining Russia’s nuclear deterrence. However, Russia’s second-strike capabilities are mainly located on submarines and mobile platforms and little impacted by that.

In contrast, little analysis has focused on how the extension of the EU as an economic body and Russia’s quest to modernize its extractivist growth model were interacting as variables of escalation. While the EU was interested in Ukraine as a closely connected periphery, Russia’s industrial innovation and value chains were still deeply integrated with Ukraine. In an attempt to modernize its economy beyond a reliance on extracting raw materials (a project which has recurrently failed), the Russian leadership proposed the Eurasian Union to extend its supply chains, grow the domestic market for manufactured goods, gain experience in exporting, and bring in revenue with which to modernize its industry. Ukraine (not the Central Asian states) would have been its most important member. One could call this a form of imperialism on behalf of a former world power that has failed to find a way to modernize its own economic structure without intervening in its neighbor’s affairs. In this context, the European Union–Ukraine Association Agreement meant the practical failure of the Eurasian Union thanks to new economic boundaries between Russia and Ukraine. The EU was insufficiently sensitive to this opposing interest when it drew up the agreement, which lead to new economic borders in Eastern Europe. Russia’s far-right leadership reacted in 2014 by annexing Crimea and supporting the violent secession of the Donbass, but those could never compensate for the failure of the Eurasian Union.

A prudent foreign policy would take into account the need for an inclusive and just economic order to avoid war. It would also work towards such an order. This is a task not only for Russia’s leadership, but also for the EU. The EU’s political leverage is greatest when it comes to designing economic relations — internally and externally. European policymakers openly term this a tool of soft power. The dividing impact of economic integration models and their borders must be taken as seriously as the dividing implications of classical military pacts. The best design for security architecture will be nothing more than a piece of paper so long as it is based on an order in which the management of the (geo-)economy tends to destabilize security or even lead to war.

No state has the right to modernize its economy or stabilize its growth at the expense of others. This lesson must be learned for the future. Smaller and medium-sized actors must be given latitude to choose their paths of development; this is the meaning of sovereignty. In economic terms, neither Russia nor the EU gave Ukraine enough room for maneuver to negotiate its economic integration model on behalf of its complex domestic interests — thus deepening the existing societal rifts within Ukraine. This also prepared the stage for the devastating developments since 2014. It looks like there will be no lasting security architecture unless different projects of regional economic integration show political restraint. Economic treaties must be designed more carefully when it comes to their security implications, because the boundaries they create can cause instability when not managed carefully.

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