30 years of peace gone: Ukraine crisis shakes Europeans

Ulrike Franke is a self-confessed German millennial, a defense analyst who worries about her generation’s allergy to the military, especially as it moves into positions of power. “After 30 years of peace,” she wrote last year in a well-read essay, “German millennials have a hard time adjusting to the world we are living in now. We struggle to think in terms of interests, we struggle with the concept of geopolitical power, and we struggle with military power being an element of geopolitical power.”

Russia’s massive and open military threat to Ukraine, she and others say, is now shaking a sense of complacency among young and old Europeans alike who have never known war, hot or cold. For some, at least, the moment is an awakening as the threat of war grows real.

But just how far Europe is prepared to go in shifting from a world where peace and security were taken for granted remains to be seen. For decades Europeans have paid relatively little in money, lives or resources for their defense — and paid even less attention, sheltering under an American nuclear umbrella left over from the Cold War.

That debate had begun to shift in recent years, even before Russia’s menacing of Ukraine, with talk of a more robust and independent European strategic and defense posture. But the crisis has done as much to expose European weakness on security issues as it has to fortify its sense of unity. Franke, 34, a senior fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, is not convinced that anything short of a major Russian invasion of Ukraine will very much alter public opinion.

“We’re having in Europe and Germany a status quo problem,” she said in an interview. “We’re very comfortable with this version of European security, and most people don’t realize that to defend this status quo we need to act.”

The elite feels the cold wind from Russia, she said, but “on the level of public opinion, people want to be left alone and for nothing to touch them.”

Franke, who is an expert in drone warfare, may be too pessimistic, some believe. Daniela Schwarzer, who ran the German Council on Foreign Relations and now manages Europe and Eurasia for the Open Society Foundations, thinks that “the image of Russia has changed a lot.”

“Even in Germany there is a sober realism that our relations with Russia and our energy policy have to be dealt with in a much more strategic way than generally acknowledged in the past,” she said. But even after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Germany and Europe did very little to diminish their energy dependency on Russia or to prepare for Moscow weaponizing energy supplies. With the new Ukraine crisis, that is quickly changing, she said.

Europeans bordering Russia have always warned about Moscow, but other Europeans farther away now see the point. “There is now the perception that conflict on our continent is possible,” Schwarzer said.

In 2008, when Russian troops went into Georgia, or annexed Crimea, or inserted themselves into the recent conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan, there was little lasting change in perception of Russia.

“But this conflict would have a different dimension, since it so directly opposes the West and Russia, and is seen as proof that the current European security order no longer provides security,” she said.

Peter Ricketts, a former British ambassador to France now in the House of Lords, agrees. This conflict has put “war back into focus again in the trans-Atlantic world,” he said.