Military Security in Central and Eastern Europe – from overarching principles to current NATO perspectives

Scientific Journal of the Military University of Land Forces ISSN: 2544-7122 (print), 2545-0719 (online) 2019, Volume 51, Number 3(193), Pages 547-557 DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0013.5009 Original article Military Security in Central and Eastern Europe – from overarching principles to current NATO perspectives Slawomir Wojciechowski Commander of Multinational Corps Northeast (MNCNE), Szczecin, Poland, e-mail: INFORMATIONS ABSTRACT Article history: This year, NATO is celebrating its 70th anniversary and the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty. The Alliance was founded in the early days of the Cold War, but found itself in a new geopolitical situation after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the bipolar world. The organization has been transforming ever since and over time this transformation has included both expansion and adaptation to new circumstances. With the return of Russian neo-imperial ambitions in the recent years, NATO has been given new impetus. Emerging threats and challenges, which are mainly of a military nature, have been addressed by NATO through further recent adaptation processes which were based on the return to the core role of the Alliance, namely collective defense and deterrence. This, in turn, has created a boost of NATO activity on the ground, which means that improvement with regard to interoperability and integration is now in high demand. Submited: 26 March 2019 Accepted: 12 June 2019 Published: 16 September 2019 KEYWORDS * Corresponding author security, NATO, military threat, enhanced Forward Presence, interoperability © 2019 by Author(s). This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Introduction Insecurity and instability increasingly influence, and threaten to further influence, NATO’s eastern boundaries and the area beyond them. The Alliance faces a range of security challenges and threats that originate from state and non-state actors, posing conventional and unconventional threats. The willingness of regional actors to use military action along with the threat or even the use of force in order to attain political goals is a clear and present source of regional instability. NATO has adapted to these developments by enhancing regional deterrence, improving its defence posture, and by seeking a unified effort among all its security partners. National security refers to a nation organized into a country. It can be defined as the ability of a country to ensure: its existence as an institution; the existence of the nation 547 Slawomir Wojciechowski as a community (cultural community); the physical survival of its people; its territorial integrity and political independence (sovereignty); its order and internal stability; the wellness and good living standards for its citizens as well as the conditions for multifaceted development. Thus, a threat to national security may arise from a series of events, facts, states etc. (internal and external), dependent or independent of people. This may lead to the malfunctioning of the above-mentioned abilities of a country, which again may result in the loss of sovereignty and territorial integrity, in full or in part, which will be most detrimental to the country, since both aspects are conditions sine qua non for the safety of its citizens and for its national development. Nowadays, only the state is considered to be the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.1 According to Max Weber, the concept of state could not exist without the social institutions which knew the application of violence against the conditions described as anarchy [From: 1, p. 77-128]. In foreign relations violence is often treated as the last resort to maintain power and regime status quo2 [See: 2, p. 46] against specific challenges such as a foreign enemy. Armed force is thus a unique instrument of the independent state, maintained and authorized for warfare. There is a notion in the body of science that the military plays a crucial role in the maintenance of state power and its sovereignty once it is established. Re-emerging military threats For a number of years, we have observed armed conflicts of different intensity, also in the immediate vicinity of EU borders, combining the features of conventional and interstate warfare, as well as armed intervention and actions below the threshold of war. These conflicts and interventions have significantly influenced the social perception of national security, and they have become a strong incentive for the revision of views on the stability of peace in international relations. The public has become aware that an armed conflict between states or a group of states is probable and that the risk of using force is becoming real again. Thus, the total domination of threats, so far defined as non-military in nature, has come to an end. Despite the changes in the security environment, reminiscent of a return to previous experience, no further return to old practices, simple but incompatible with the mechanisms of development and evolution, is to be expected. Undoubtedly, the spectrum for sensing threats is constantly expanding, highlighting those not yet defined or not yet experienced, especially in relation to the “old” threats perceived as returning ones. It is also becoming more and more difficult to divide and determine the interrelationship and strength of the “impact” of such threats as: 1 In this publication, the definition of violence refers to the intentional application of physical force against a group or community to injure, damage, or destroy, resulting in or having a high likelihood of death, psychological harm or deprivation, submission. 2 In general terms, Hannah Arendt challenges the traditional conception of power and violence where violence is considered as an ultimate manifestation of power. For Arendt, both terms represent different phenomena and, as such, violence falls outside the concept of the political, whereas power is strictly linked to the political sphere. 548 Military Security in Central and Eastern Europe – from overarching principles… 1. Military threats constituting a relatively specific group of threats posed by armed forces. 2. Non-military threats covering a very wide and inaccurate range of threats or even presenting an unlimited set of threats. 3. Internal and external, i.e. global, regional, local threats. It is a very difficult and subjective criterion due to unclear and imprecise boundaries between what is internal and what is external in a mutually dependent globalized world. 4. State and non-state threats, including the convergence of threat sources. On the one hand, we have non-state organizations (in the light of international law) that effectively use organized military means in their classic version. On the other hand, there are national states which deliberately and in a coordinated manner use the means and methods whic (...truncated)