30 03/22

III European Seminar | Security of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. Political and legal aspects

On 30-31 March 2022, another meeting organised by the Institute De Republica will be held as part of a series of European seminars. This time the main theme will be security in Europe.

III European Seminar | Security of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe. Political and legal aspects

Since the Russian-Georgian war (2008), and especially since the Russian occupation of Donbass and Crimea (2014), the security of the entire Central and Eastern European region, but also of Europe as a whole, has come under great question. At a time when the geopolitical centre of gravity was shifting year by year towards the Indo-Pacific, the eastern periphery of the Old Continent increasingly appeared to Moscow as a space of “orphaned nations” over which a protectorate should be re-established. The war in Ukraine, which has lasted intermittently for over seven years, is the best symbol of this. The topic of national security in the individual states of the Central and Eastern European region has been, and still is, taken up depending on the perception of threat, especially from Russia. The Three Seas Initiative (Trójmorze) and the largely correlated political and military cooperation format known as the Bucharest Nine (NATO’s so-called Eastern Flank), in which Poland and Romania, the two largest and militarily strongest countries in the region, have a special role to play, are undoubtedly an expression of the will to work together in order to increase defence capabilities and deter the enemy. At the same time, the geopolitical game regarding Ukraine has been going on for many years, revealing certain inconsistencies and “cracks” appearing across various formats of international cooperation (European Union, Three Seas Initiative, OSCE).

The aim of the seminar is to discuss three thematic areas. Firstly, the speakers will reflect on the transformations of the security paradigm or rather paradigms in connection with the changing ways and techniques of conducting actions against the interests and security of individual states. A symbol of these transformations is the concept of hybrid warfare, which due to its notorious misuse has lost its power to explain reality. Secondly, the invited guests will analyse the hitherto achievements of the cooperation in the Three Seas format, but above all the challenges that appear on the horizon in relation to the conflict in Ukraine, the hostile actions of the Belarusian authorities towards Poland, and the increasing involvement of Russia in the Balkans. Thirdly, participants will focus on the origins, manifestations and geopolitical consequences of the conflict in and over Ukraine.

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The European Seminars of the Institute De Republica are cyclical meetings to discuss issues related to currently observed legal, social and economic problems occurring on the European continent. The first seminar, held in 2021, concerned the idea of the European Union and its future.