An Innovative Way to Conceptualize European Security

European Security has always been based on “threats” drawing on the security paradigm of the Cold War era and the foundations of the Atlantic Alliance. The 21st century, with the proliferation of a range of non-state actors, that present both threats and opportunities to the E.U. and its neighborhood, demands new theoretical perspectives in order to explain chaos, disorder and complexity that the E.U. experiences inside and outside its community at the micro and macro levels. In this paper, I analyze the need to view “chaos,” “disorder” and “complexity” as an opportunity to advance a progressive foreign policy and security agenda that would promote a more comprehensive NATO agenda as well. My paper is mainly theoretical: I explain the systems of the E.U. and NATO as “complex adaptive systems,” drawing mainly on Complexity Theory and Chaos Theory as well as on James Rosenau’s Turbulence Theory in order to describe a novel way with which international organizations that are not ultimately the sum of their parts-members (non-linearity) can adjust rapidly to change, uncertainty and turbulence in the global (dis)order. The unorthodox security challenges that are created by the new reality of a multi-centric, complex international system in this era of turbulence demand new conceptual models in order to tackle and incorporate complex phenomena at the micro and macro levels. The decline of the liberal international order, the rise of emergent powers (and the dawn of a possible new Cold War era between the West, Russia, China and their satellites) that openly challenge the economic and military primacy of the West, the possible new nuclear races, an unstable European and global economic order and the rise of non-state actors with the power to challenge state sovereignty and authority lacking however legitimacy, demand the formation of a European security agenda that understands the global system as a superstructure that constantly transforms and bifurcates to substructures due to the interactions and interdependence of multiple micro and macro actors the agency of which creates processes that foster turbulence and change. If the E.U. wants to advance to a decisive global power, it needs to adopt new transformative ways of viewing its own structure as well as the global structures: it is the only way to create a “holistic” security agenda that accommodates change and disorder and transforms threats to opportunities in this era of high turbulence and chaos.