More than two centuries ago, wars began to overflow the battlefields of Europe. Napoleon was among the first to use and suffer the impact of "irregular elements". Today, thanks to information technology, the old guerrilla warfare, coups and sabotage have been transformed into "hybrid threats", that is, constant harassment by the enemy in all areas of a contemporary society.
The latest CIDOB report identifies these threats and the weapons that make them possible, and concludes that they are becoming more numerous and easier to use.
The war in Ukraine has highlighted much of these threats. Economic coercion, the instrumentalization of migrations, the digital sabotage of key infrastructures, disinformation, the manipulation of energy and food supplies are strategies that Russia has used since the first day of the invasion.
Pol Morillas, director of CIDOB, recalled when presenting the report a reflection by Josep Borrell, vice-president of the European Commission in charge of foreign relations and security: "We live in a world in which everything can be a weapon".
The enemy is no longer defeated alone on the battlefield with conventional forces, but "is weakened and delegitimized in front of its own people by exploiting their social and physical vulnerabilities," according to Carme Colomina, co-author of the report. "Many of these vulnerabilities - she adds - already existed before the conflict and the enemy only intensifies them".
Russia was able to take advantage of the usual overreaction of the European Union against clandestine immigrants, causing several incidents on the Belarusian border in November 2021. The invasion of Ukraine was also carried out thinking that it would cause a serious migration crisis in the EU.
Likewise, aggravating social and political differences is easier with the manipulation of the conversation in social networks. Disinformation and mobilization are fundamental objectives of enemy hackers. Techno-authoritarian regimes like Russia and China use them constantly.
This type of confrontation does not take place in the open field but quite the opposite. Traceability of an attack becomes so complicated that gray areas abound. No one is 100% sure who is attacking and why.
In these gray areas, the interests of the states are mixed with those of private companies and criminal gangs. The Israeli company Pegasus, for example, sells its surveillance and espionage technology through mobile phones to several allied governments, but cannot prevent them from using it to reduce the rights of their own citizens.
The line between the defense of the state and the violation of freedoms becomes blurred and, as Pol Morillas acknowledges, this is one of the great challenges posed by hybrid threats.
"The ministries of war -he explains- were replaced by those of defense and these, probably, will end up being replaced by those of security", that is, entities with many powers to be able to interfere in the society they have to protect. The consequence, as is already visible in many governments, is the confrontation between the Ministries of Defense and Foreign Affairs, that is, between the military and civilian power to decide how to act.
At the moment, as Pol Bargués, another of the report's co-authors, points out, the best protection is through prevention. "By the time the hybrid threat is manifest it may already be too late to protect yourself." In this sense, preventive protection involves reducing foreign dependency in strategic sectors. There is talk of acquiring a "strategic autonomy", which is nothing more than reducing exposure to commercial, technological and economic relationships that have made globalization possible.
The challenge for liberal democracies, as Morillas concludes, is that the renunciation of the benefits of globalization be minimal and that recourse to a security solution that implies the violation of civil rights is the last and not the first option.
