L’Unione Europea di fronte alla guerra

This brief tries to outline the challenges the war in Ukraine pose to the European Union and re-definition of a European security order. For years, the Arab Springs, the migration crisis and the focus on the Mediterranean confined the EU’s Eastern neighborhood to a second-order priority. On the one hand, in 2014, the EU undertook crisis management actions in Ukraine; on the other, that same conflict has mostly been forgotten, made invisible or almost “declassified” to hybrid warfare. Since the last year, we have been all immersed in a comprehensive discourse about the return of conventional war – i.e., inter-state armed conflict – on European soil, as well as the return of geopolitics in the foreign and security policy-making of the EU and its member states. This narrative urges us to find new paradigms for interpreting the EU’s overall political project – definitively overcoming the paradigm of “transformative power of Europe”.