The End of an Era?: East–West Security Arrangements and the EU’s Search for Strategic Autonomy

The European security architecture that emerged after World War II was built largely around Western institutions—especially NATO and, eventually, the EU. Although the European security order was founded on a US-led framework and has remained US-centric, it evolved through extensive East–West arrangements, shaped in part by negotiated agreements and cooperative frameworks with the Soviet Union during the late Cold War, and later continued with Russia, contributing to the broader European security environment. However, there is a subtle, important detail in these East–West arrangements: despite ongoing cooperation and negotiations, Russia continued to challenge the security order by violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of neighboring countries—actions that were to some extent normalized for the sake of sustaining the existing arrangements and due to Western pragmatism. Consequently, Russia’s efforts were arguably not perceived as geopolitical revisionism, as post-Soviet countries were tacitly regarded as being within Russia’s sphere of influence—states managed through the Kremlin’s curator system and possessing limited agency due to Moscow’s influence over their domestic politics. The axis of arrangements initially seemed acceptable to both sides, but it gradually began to erode and ultimately collapsed in 2022. The negotiated framework had a progressively exclusionary impact on the Kremlin, which came to understand that the post-Soviet countries had reached a point of no return regarding any reintegration into Russia’s orbit. The states of the Eastern Neighbourhood had increasingly moved beyond the “post-Soviet” label by distancing themselves politically, economically, and—most painfully for Russia—culturally. They embraced Western modernization projects and elements of the normative principles underpinning the Western modus operandi. For the Kremlin, it therefore became existentially important to reshape the normative and institutional foundations of Europe’s security architecture. The year 2022 became a watershed moment in EU–Russia relations, placing the EU at a crossroads as it redefines its identity through the enlagement process and shifts from a geopolitical coordinator to a geopolitical actor.