The Reshaping of Security, Political Cohesion, and Economy

This volume brings together four independent contributions examining how the European Union can strengthen its resilience, cohesion, and strategic autonomy amid an increasingly volatile geopolitical and economic environment. The first chapter analyses the EU’s exposure to hybrid and unconventional warfare, principally as practised by Russia, and proposes a dedicated Hybrid Deterrence and Response Task Force to close the gap between the Union’s regulatory achievements and its operational deterrence capacity. The second chapter turns to the fragmented state of European arms collaboration, arguing that incremental, legally robust cooperation frameworks – rather than a distant treaty overhaul – offer the most realistic path toward defence integration. The third chapter investigates how the rise of far-right, Eurosceptic parties in Germany and Italy has shaped the political fate of NextGenerationEU, and reflects on the instruments available to an EU that cannot directly regulate domestic party politics. The fourth chapter challenges the prevailing high-tech competitiveness paradigm, using the EU’s energy dependence on Russia as a cautionary case, and proposes a post-growth model of competitiveness grounded in resilience and sufficiency. Read together, the four chapters converge on a shared diagnosis: European integration advances through targeted, sector-specific measures that gradually build capacity, trust, and resilience across the security, defence, political, and economic domains.