Ideals Worth Sacrificing For? The Changing European Political Order in a Warring and Warming World

A series of contemporary predicaments linked to the crisis in the liberal international order challenge the post-Cold War European security order to an unprecedented degree. Global warming confronts a deregulated economic model and is pushing societies both to regulate and to invest to avoid climate disaster. The conflict in Ukraine has returned inter-state, territorial war to Europe, challenging the European emphasis on interdependence by exposing the vulnerability of one-sided dependence on Russian fossil fuels. Illiberal political movements, both in Europe and internationally, are increasingly vocal in their critique of the liberal international order. The election of Donald Trump and the possibility of his, or a like-minded candidate ́s, return to power in 2024 has made Europeans question the future of trans-Atlantic relations. Meanwhile, states in many parts of the Global South vocally demand global justice. This thesis examines how the European security order was and still is impacted by these challenges.
Contrary to the dominant position in the literature on the crisis of the liberal international order, this thesis finds that the predicaments do alter the European security order, but not in an illiberal direction. On the contrary, the war in Ukraine and global warming have, in important ways, reinvigorated support for the European liberal project among decision-makers and citizens across Europe. But to tackle the predicaments, European decision-makers are formulating a more sceptical liberal order. The sceptical order builds on the realization that policies across sectors of the economy must be reconfigured to enable Europe to deal with its political challenges and promote liberal values externally. Turning the sceptical liberal project into action across policy areas is dilemma-ridden for decision-makers as citizens are increasingly asked to accept personal sacrifices to face up to the challenges. If European decision-makers and citizens are unwilling to make such sacrifices, the sacrifices will be outsourced to other parts of the world as well as future generations, which could further undermine the status of Europe globally.
To structure the analysis, each article offers a particular actor perspective on the changing European security order examining the theorists, the soldiers, the decision-makers, the citizens, and the victims. Article 1 (‘The theorists’) unfolds sceptical liberalism as a framework of analysis drawing on pessimistic and bleak liberal theory and applies the framework to analyse the development of EU security policy. Article 2 (‘The theorists’) draws on Hannah Arendt ́s
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political theory to argue that Danish foreign and security policy in the 2000s was not as activist and liberal as the dominant discourse, both among decision-makers and scholars, suggests. Article 3 (‘The soldiers’) analyses how far European and other Western countries have gone to avoid imposing sacrifices on their troops engaged in remote warfare and reflects on the price they pay this way of war, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Iraq. Article 4 (‘The citizens’) presents and analyses an experimental survey to investigate citizens’ willingness to sacrifice for the climate and for Ukraine, finding that linking the crises make citizens anxious but hesitant to act. Article 5 (‘The decision-makers’) investigates how the war in Ukraine has impacted the EU climate, energy and security policies, arguing that decision-makers frame the two crises as equal but tend to neglect their climate ambitions when action demands sacrifices from national citizens. Finally, Article 6 (‘The victims’) conducts an analysis of why the EU, after pressure from developing states, decided to support a fund for the victims of losses and damage caused by anthropogenic climate change at COP27 in 2022.
As a whole, the analyses unravel how the European security order is shifting in a sceptical direction and the dilemma-ridden politics of sacrifice this shift causes. They critically scrutinize the more than three-decades-long period during which this transition has been underway, and its political implications as seen not only from Copenhagen and Brussels, but also from, the Anbar Province in Iraq and Nassau in the Bahamas. The thesis thus provides analytical concepts, historical context, empirical insights, and methodological tools to understand changes in the ideals and practices of the European security order.