Just three days after Vladimir Putin launched Russia's invasion of Ukraine, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz used the term Zeitenwende before the Bundestag, which could be translated as a turning point in history or a change of era. Geopolitical Europe acquired, since then, a new meaning and a new body. In a matter of months, Germany has broken the last taboo on its military involvement abroad by sending heavy weapons to Kyiv; Denmark has decided to end the exemption that kept it out of the European defense; and Finland and Sweden have presented their candidacy to join NATO, putting an end to some historic neutralities, built in defiance of the confrontational logic of the cold war, and even some of the subsequent European integration processes.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine thus became the unpredictable trigger that has pushed the EU in general, and many of its members in particular, to rethink their own security. Even the old dilemma between Europeanists versus Atlanticists has been altered by the urgency, the mutual need, and the new balances of power illuminated by a process of rearmament and construction of a European defense in which Brussels has gained centrality in the coordination and supervision of the policies and capabilities of the twenty-seven states.
The war has also transformed transatlantic security. With the entry of Sweden and Finland, the borders of the EU and NATO will have gradually converged in Europe until leaving only four community countries – Ireland, Malta, Austria and Cyprus – outside the Alliance. The degree of militarization of the NATO-Russia border will have been exponentially strengthened, stretching uninterrupted from Finland to the Black Sea, with a Western-armed Ukraine in the middle. Europe has become NATO, according to the uncomplicated summary made by Joe Biden at the Atlantic Alliance summit in Madrid.
That is the paradox of this whole process of assuming "responsibilities" to protect "citizens, values, democracies and the European model", as the twenty-seven declared at the Versailles summit in March 2022: a renewed dependence on NATO as a key piece for collective security. The EU has gained in integration, but has lost autonomy.
Despite this, Europeans continue to be aware of the limits of their deterrent capacity in a scenario of armed peace. Strategic influence does not derive automatically from robust weapons (even before the invasion, the EU had raised its military spending to all-time highs), but from the will to act. It is a political option. And the EU, beyond the metaphors of the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Defense Policy and his appeals to the use of the "language of power", knows that its contribution to global security has been built on its economic and regulatory power, about its commitment to a rules-based international order, long eroded and now threatened with dismantlement depending on the outcome of the war in Ukraine.
In the 1990s, in the midst of the disintegration of the USSR, experts spoke of the "peace dividend." With the Cold War dismantled, governments could now afford to reduce military spending and the size of their armies. Subsequent globalization would be responsible for replacing the old sensations of threats with commercial opportunities that connected the world. Although the model had already entered into crisis with the financial meltdown and, later, with the disruptions of the pandemic in global value chains, the invasion of February 24, 2022 accelerated a reverse response. In his book The age of unpeace, Mark Leonard comes to the conclusion that hyperconnectivity has not only fueled the polarization of our societies, but has also made it possible to build a new arsenal of instruments for geopolitical competition between the great global powers. For an EU that is dependent on Russia for energy and commercially on China, “connectivity conflicts” have increased its perception of vulnerability.
In this context, Brussels tries to develop a concept of strategic autonomy that goes far beyond defensive integration, and that is built through initiatives and legislation aimed at reducing the EU's external dependence on key issues such as energy, rare earth or technology.
Geopolitical Europe is made of contradictions, internal dissensions and conflicts of interest. Russia has always been a divisive element among the EU member states in their construction of a common foreign policy. What remains. If before the invasion, Europeans were divided on the need to include Russia in the design of a continental security architecture – the Europe imagined by Emmanuel Macron “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” - today the dividing line separates two possible approaches to peace. European unity cracks when they try to imagine the end of the war.
Twenty years have passed since the anti-Europeanism of the George W. Bush Administration with its hawk, Donald Rumsfeld, sentenced the division of Europe into two blocs in the face of opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Now, the horizon of an entrenched war in the Ukraine reopens a fault line between the old and the new Europe. One front – headed by Paris, Berlin and Rome – wants to preserve its desire for dialogue with Russia and promote a negotiated solution to the war. Before them, the Eastern bloc and the Baltic prioritize military aid and not seek what they call an honorable solution for Vladimir Putin. It is the so-called dilemma of peace versus justice, which reveals the fragility of a European unity that, despite everything, has managed to remain firm until now.
The war in Ukraine has not only materialized the destabilizing power and security threat that Vladimir Putin represents for Europe, but also the deep division with which the world is witnessing this confrontation. The battle of stories about the different responsibilities in the Russian invasion of the Ukraine confirms the definitive loss of Western hegemony when it comes to explaining the world. As Pascal Lamy, former director general of the World Trade Organization, warned, "the China-Russia alliance is, in part, an alliance of narratives." But, above all, the war has accelerated a feeling of loss of global influence that is not new, but that Washington and Brussels still find it difficult to interpret.
Western soft power went into decline years ago. In 2011, the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, warned the US Congress that her country was immersed in "an information war" and they were losing it. Clinton was referring to the global presence of RT (Russia Today), the television project that China had launched in 2009 (CCTV, China Central Television), and the power shown by Al Jazeera in its coverage of the Arab Springs. The global south had its own narrative of transformations that challenged traditional power structures.
This confrontation has now reached another level. If at the end of 2021 Ian Bremmer was already analyzing how the great digital powers were transforming the global order into a "technopolar moment" that surpassed the logic of the states, today we see how Ukraine has also become the first war front where they measure their forces the two great global digitization trends and their platforms: the techno-authoritarianism of Russia and China, and the American model of Silicon Valley and its technological giants acting as private actors and instruments of conflict.
Despite this scenario of digital bipolarity, we are far from a dual conflict, of monolithic blocks. The troubled international system, which the current confrontation allows us to intuit, has little of the Cold War. The old concepts have fallen short for us to interpret hyperconnectivity and the new geoeconomic dynamics that emerge from the costs of globalization and from a new desire for strategic autonomy in key sectors. The war in Ukraine has a different impact on the urgency and priorities of the Washington-Brussels-Beijing triangle.
Despite arms shipments for the Ukrainian military, defiant rhetoric against Vladimir Putin, and an existential resurrection for NATO, the United States remains haunted by its own loss of control of global hegemony to China, not just because of Beijing's assertiveness. in the Asian continent but also for its ability to influence all of Latin America. The Biden Administration sees the war in Ukraine as one more scenario in the global confrontation it is having with Xi Jinping. China is, in the eyes of Washington, the true superpower that rivals the United States on a global level, while Putin's Russia is a giant in decline, dangerous for its destabilizing power and its increasing dependence on Beijing.
In the same way, Xi Jinping has managed China's temperate support for Vladimir Putin based on his internal interests and the global rivalry he maintains with the US. What is at stake is not only the military and territorial challenge – be it in the Ukraine or Taiwan – but also the capacity for economic coercion, and in this context of rivalry it is necessary to understand the US restrictions on technology exports to China. The EU must avoid getting caught up in this strategic confrontation between a rising power (China) and a falling power (USA) which, despite their antagonism, operate in overlapping and interconnected geopolitical spaces.
The war in Ukraine has also accelerated the erosion of the already adversarial relationship between the EU and China. Since 2019, Brussels considers the Asian giant not only as an "economic competitor", but also as a "systemic rival" that promotes an alternative global order. The duality of relations between Beijing and Brussels has oscillated for years between the capture of bilateral investment and the need to keep China committed to global governance in low hours. Today, the EU is China's main trading partner, and vice versa.
Even if the center of gravity of global geopolitics has shifted to the Indo-Pacific, for the EU Russia remains an anguished giant, clinging to its list of historical grievances and nostalgic for the old imperial power, threatening continental security. As Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes point out in their book The Light That Goes Out, Putin's Russia “resembles Germany after the World War. From World War I”, and with each military setback suffered on the war front in eastern Ukraine, the degree of unpredictability of the Kremlin leader increases. Months after the start of a war that was supposed to end in days or weeks, Russia's invasion of Ukraine has turned into a disastrous quagmire, threatening Putin's power but also Chinese stability.
Although the Western version – the account of this challenge to the rules-based international order espoused by the EU and the US – puts Russia and China in the same bag, the reality is more nuanced. Beyond the struggle to consolidate spaces of power, build alternatives to the liberal order and challenge US hegemony, the strategies of Moscow and Beijing are different. For years, Vladimir Putin's Russia has built its capacity for foreign influence in the geopolitical crevices of the conflicts and wars that destabilize a large part of the African continent and the Middle East: in Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic or Mali. For Putin, destabilization is an end in itself. Instead, China needs stability to extend its New Silk Road, the purchase of political will by building infrastructure, and access to contracts for the extraction and exploitation of natural resources.
That is why the global impact of the war in Ukraine transcends bipolarity. It is a centrifugal force that has tightened global agendas and accelerated decolonization trends. We are in full reaction to a vulnerability that is global. And, for the first time in many years of concatenated crises, the EU is testing different responses, despite its many dependencies; trying to build its own role, as a commercial and regulatory power, in a multipolar system where the United States and China set the pace of the bifurcation.
Carme Colomina is a senior researcher at CIDOB, Barcelona Center for International Affairs.
