Europe Today, 1989 and History: ERIS special issue

Emilija Tudzarovska (ET) and Philippe Perchoc (PP): In the early 1990s, the EU struggled to assert its authority in security and defence following the end of the Cold War. This was due to a lack of institutional creativity, driven by a self-referential process of institutional political-economic adaptation formalised by the Maastricht Treaty. The lack of functionality in the security policy highlighted the tension between the EU’s legitimacy as a normative power and its legitimisation as a justification for action. Two key factors contributed to the enhancement of functionality. Firstly, the emergence of a technocratic style of governance, which was found to pose a high risk to the EU’s repositioning within the evolving security architecture. Secondly, the declining role of political parties in institutionalising democracy, particularly since the early 1990s, has also contributed to ongoing tensions between policy delivery and citizens’ expectations, or between functionality and efficiency. 

In present times, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and in the absence of substantial US efforts to collaborate with the EU in ending the war, the EU is still deliberating on disagreements over who is considered a beneficiary of European security initiatives, and how to assure security, defence, and against what and in what way to relate the many organisations that address European security policy. If the lack of institutional creativity hindered the EU’s capacity to act collectively in the 1990s, there is limited optimism that, more than thirty years later, the EU will successfully navigate the national interests of its member states and collectively devise innovative approaches to protect the EU and Europe. In the current climate, there are a number of factors that hinder the streamlining of decision-making processes on the European level. First, there is an increase in heterogeneity within European societies, which has particular significance for the national approach to the EU's geopolitical objectives. This is partly a consequence of history, particularly the two world wars and the rapid rise and fall of colonial empires. 

For example, Germany will continue to play a key role in determining how much can be achieved in coordinating military support for Ukraine, strengthening Ukraine’s defence industry, preparing credible post-war security guarantees, and ensuring that Kyiv has the financial means to both fight and rebuild. This, however, will require a much more creative institutional approach, in conjunction with the other EU member states, and political decisions, in order to address other significant, persistent challenges. These are closely linked to the EU’s decision to prioritise security in enlargement-related decisions, as well as to the allocation of public funds to defence. 

The allocation of public funds poses another threat to the joint commitment to EU foreign and security policy. Negotiations are currently underway for the next multiannual financial framework (MFF), which will provide a large financial support for Ukraine. However, the negotiations can also reveal political tensions, with differing positions between the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, or among EU member states. It is anticipated that the instrument will deliver simultaneously on development, humanitarian, enlargement, geopolitical, and geoeconomic objectives. The central tensions will lie in the shift from objectives to governance and actual implementation. This concerns debates on enlargement financing, migration conditionality, and the growing integration of economic security considerations into external financing, all of which are of interest to the EU member states. The EU’s focus on strengthening defence, the defence industry, intelligence, and strategically important technology, while pushing for improved Common Foreign and Security Policy, with commitments of the EU’s 27 national leaders, will further reflect these tensions, while EU Member States will inevitably negotiate their positions and, moreover, will have to communicate the decisions effectively to their citizens. This constitutes the second constraint. 

There is an ongoing threat from populist parties in both Eastern and Western societies, and strong positions in a few interlinked EU policies: defence, security, and EU enlargement. In Germany, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which doubled its support to 20.8% in the last election and became the second-biggest political force in parliament, is posing a new challenge to Germany’s ability to lead and set a new course for the European project in the security domain, given the migration and populist mobilisation surrounding this issue. The ongoing crisis in France, closely tied to the adoption of the national budget, highlights a key weakness of the French economy, particularly since the introduction of Europe’s monetary union in 1999, when the advantages of flexible exchange rates were abandoned. Furthermore, the long-established French far-right Rassemblement National (previously the Front National) will continue to disrupt French politics. In Italy, the Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s pragmatic approach to communicating with the US President Donald Trump showed its limitations in defence spending, fiscal flexibility, and the limited EU funds for post-pandemic recovery programmes. Pushing towards new NATO defence spending targets could further reduce available funds and possibly pave the way for another painful round of austerity measures. The rising populist backlash in Central European countries such as the Czech Republic and Slovakia in the last elections is an ongoing threat to EU security objectives and to the role the EU aims to play in the evolving geopolitical landscape. 

Furthermore, the key challenge in the EU’s monetary union lies in the growing clash between technocratic governance and populist rhetoric. There is a strong political and economic interdependence that will further shape the national responses to the EU`s geopolitical objectives. From an economic perspective, the EU must adapt to new forms of global capitalism. In security terms, its dependence on NATO and its capacity for collective decision-making since the 1990s is difficult to overcome in the near future. Politically, it remains fragmented between the core national interests of EU member states and the strategies they use to justify them, with EU foreign policy paradoxically serving as a source of legitimacy for individual member states. In 2026, the war in Ukraine is still ongoing, and EU Member States are continuing to face challenges in achieving a unified approach to European security and defence—one that will reflect their national budget and macroeconomic objectives; one that can satisfy their voters at the upcoming elections, and one that could address the EU’s objective of becoming a new geopolitical actor. All of these factors continue to challenge the EU’s long-term strategy to address the ‘capability- expectations gap’ by legitimising its actions in the eyes of the EU Member States and in the new geopolitical context. Overcoming this gap would require a leadership that takes actions beyond technical approaches and one that reflects the shortcomings of representative democracies in the contemporary context.

ET and PP: The “Big Bang” enlargement took place at the “end of history,” during a period of widespread liberal triumphalism, American unipolarity, and a strong transatlantic relationship, as Scicluna argues in this Special Issue. In the 1990s and 2000s, the EU’s most successful foreign policy instrument, namely enlargement, was put to the test as was its smaller-scale follow-ups (Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, Croatia in 2013). This period saw the Union more than double in size. The “European perspective” of the remaining Western Balkan states was confirmed at the Thessaloniki European Council in 2003. Then, for a period of almost two decades, enlargement disappeared from the EU’s agenda until February 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raised the possibility of another round of expansion, driven by geopolitical urgency and a sense of moral obligation. However, history has never left Europe and the EU. Faced with very real limits to its actorness, the EU avoids decisive political action on enlargement by retreating into proceduralism. It is challenging for it to learn from past lessons. The collapse of communism in Europe and the realisation that genuine European unification was a geopolitical possibility. The current situation is the Russian war in Ukraine and the realisation that a Europe of indeterminate borders and varying degrees of association is a geopolitical liability. Scicluna argues that the impetus for enlargement is driven by a confluence of material and normative factors, and that future expansion is unlikely to occur, owing to divisions within the EU, the difficulties faced by all current candidates, and the unfavourable international context. Material drivers of enlargement centre on the anticipated economic, political, and geopolitical advantages of expanding the EU’s membership. The normative drivers, by contrast, concern perceptions of shared identity and shared values among existing and prospective member states. Each of these arguments can be repurposed as a “brake”, that is, as an argument against the EU’s further expansion. For instance, while enlargement advocates may emphasize the benefits that a larger single market may bring for both new and existing members, sceptics may highlight the economic costs of expansion. Consequently, Ukraine, alongside the other Eastern candidates, appears likely to follow a similar path to the Western Balkans—engaging in an ever more attenuated accession process, while full EU membership remains distant. There are several reasons why accession was less of a pathway and more of a treadmill for these candidates, including: extensive conditionality requirements that had the paradoxical effect of strengthening democratically deficient incumbents, external challenges in the region that reinforced the EU’s preference for stability over transformation, and the EU’s own internal crises. Finally, the enlargement to the Western Balkans has been impeded not only by the shortcomings of the candidates and the region’s challenging international relations, but also by the EU’s internal divisions. 

ET and PP: The emergence of contemporary populism can be traced back to the early 1990s. Julie Smith`s article shows that the initial efforts to reunite Europe through democratic means have been overshadowed by political fragmentation and democratic regression, a phenomenon that is not exclusive to Central and Eastern Europe. There is an East-West cleavage in European politics, a rupture as a legacy of the transformational period in the post-1989 era. Furthermore, democratic consolidation and Europeanisation since the early 1990s have proven less straightforward than many political leaders expected at the time of transition. The 1993 Treaty on European Union (TEU), more commonly known as the Maastricht Treaty, increased the stakes by raising the entry requirements for candidate states and created a degree of frustration, if not outright hostility, in some of the established Member States. The consequences of this decision were significant, extending far beyond the ambitions of its supporters. Despite being concluded in the wake of the transformations of 1989, in many ways, the TEU represented the high point of Cold War European integration, which had created a tightly knit security community built on economic cooperation. Furthermore, the Treaty was contingent on the events of 1989 and their subsequent developments, particularly the significant changes that took place in Germany at the time. The flagship policy on economic and monetary union (EMU) was initially proposed two decades earlier at the Hague Summit of 1969. It was subsequently given greater prominence on the agenda by Commission President Jacques Delors in the mid-1980s as a logical extension of the 1986 Single European Act and the ‘completion of the internal market’. It was expected that the processes of democratisation and Europeanisation would encompass the many societal, economic, and cultural transformations of the time, in both Eastern and Western societies. Nearly four decades after the collapse of Communism and two decades since the first CEE states acceded to the EU, liberal democracy is now contested in Europe—Central, East and West—in ways that would have been inconceivable in the West during the Cold War. The consequences can be seen in the fragmented politics across Europe in the mid-2020s, along with the rise of Euroscepticism and populism. Populist and radical right parties have gained a foothold in several CEE states, but they have also managed to acquire votes, seats, and in some cases power in Western Europe. This suggests a systemic consequence of the EU’s post-1989 architecture, not only concerning the Europeanisation and policy delivery. 

Lenka Rovna showed how European integration has shaped the recompositing of the post-communist political landscape, emphasising the Union’s role as a vital “external anchor” for democratisation and state modernisation, with particular reference to the Czech Republic. She argues that this process involved a profound internalisation of European norms that eventually shifted the EU from a distant foreign policy goal to a pivotal element of domestic political and administrative life. A central element of this transformation was the ideological “meta-debate” between two dominant figures: Václav Havel and Václav Klaus. Havel, a dissident philosopher, viewed Europe as a moral and political ideal rooted in shared democratic values and human rights. In contrast, Klaus adopted a sceptical “Eurorealist” stance, prioritising national sovereignty and viewing the EU primarily as a pragmatic forum for trade liberalisation. This tension between Havel’s idealism and Klaus’s focus on the nation-state often led to the Czech Republic being perceived as a “difficult partner” in negotiations. The successful integration of the eurozone was depended on institutional resilience and on society's ability to internalise European norms beyond mere formal compliance. In the contemporary context, the ability of states to demonstrate societal resilience in the face of external pressures and domestic political dynamics is challenged by the institutionalisation of populist parties in the EU’s decision-making, the technocratic governance, and any new strategy to overcome the consequences of the EU’s post-1989 political-economic architecture will require creative institutional solutions.

ET and PP: Culture indeed is the expression of the supreme values by which European humanity is understood, defined, and identified. In this sense, the identification of the ‘homeland’ of Europe was always closely linked to the implementation of the EU enlargement policy and to security and defence. As French Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux wrote, the end of history in the early 1990s did not quite meet citizens’ expectations, particularly in Western societies. These societies viewed post-communist and post-socialist societies, with all their cultural, political, and economic differences, as unfit for Europe’s “homeland”. The way Europeanisation and democratisation were implemented in post-communist states also contributed to the divide between “the practice of cooperation” and “popular perceptions of continued national autonomy.” Rules and regulations were organised in Brussels rather than being discussed and decided upon in public forums in the applicant states. In this special issue, Eliška Tomalová traces how culture was historically marginalised throughout the EU enlargement process between 1989 and 2004, being treated primarily as a technical or peripheral issue rather than as a core pillar of integration. During this “long decade,” political attention was primarily focused on economic and political transformations, with cultural governance being a secondary concern for both the EU and national political elites. During this period of change, the EU’s “getting connected” approach placed a strong emphasis on technical project management and symbolic identity-building over the pursuit of a consensual, substantive understanding of cultural diversity within the European community as a whole. 

In the current geopolitical climate, the EU must address these international cultural and mnemonic asymmetries, consolidate European identity, acknowledge cultural diversity as one of its core strengths, and redefine its core principles and values by reengaging with its citizens through institutionalised democratic politics. Belonging to Europe must be reinforced by learning more and better about one another, reinventing a shared purpose, and building stronger collective awareness and commitment to European identity amid the new geopolitical manoeuvring by the global actors.