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"When the giants’ war ends, the midgets’ starts."
Winston Churchill
.In the 1980s, the end of the opposing stance between East and West resulted in a new global strategic situation. The Central and Eastern European states parted with socialism and centralized government declaring a West-oriented social system. This tendency resulted in wide-ranging disintegration, albeit with integration tendencies. The changes in Central and Eastern Europe radically revised the world’s political appearance and the resulting changes are still determining factors on the continent. With the relatively new, more layered and unstable situation, the security factors, danger sources and risk factors were expanded and received different emphasis. Relegated to secondary position during the Cold War, the other founding elements of security – economic, financial, religious, environmental, public safety, national, ethnic, cultural and migration problems – now moved to the foreground.
Europe and the connecting region’s security is still characterized by comprehensive historical changes, dynamic reconstruction, marketing and political competition, economic, political and military integration, regionalization, localization and nationalization. The world order established at the end of World War II started to lose its dynamics during the changes taking place in the late 1980s. These new global power centers started to form in North America, Europe and Asia. The American and European economic potential played a major role in this process. Paradoxically, the disappearance of three primary security factors (the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) failed to make the West more secure or less vulnerable, and overall security was not enhanced. A few questions arose: what was the reason? How did global security consolidate after the Cold War? And what are the new risk factors to affect Europe’s future?
This chapter’s goals are to briefly identify the motivation for priorities, study the global security challenges and relevant international processes that characterize and influence our daily lives. The topics of this chapter are security challenges, risk factors, their revisions, and how they fundamentally influence permanent values. Their basic importance justifies a continuous examination. We will develop the effects of risk factors in two sub-chapters, from generic toward specific, followed by global and European security dimensions, concluding with a comparison of the two.
Europe and the connecting region’s security is still characterized by comprehensive historical changes, dynamic reconstruction, marketing and political competition, economic, political and military integration, regionalization, localization and nationalization. The world order established at the end of World War II started to lose its dynamics during the changes taking place in the late 1980s. These new global power centers started to form in North America, Europe and Asia. The American and European economic potential played a major role in this process. Paradoxically, the disappearance of three primary security factors (the Soviet Union, Warsaw Pact and the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) failed to make the West more secure or less vulnerable, and overall security was not enhanced. A few questions arose: what was the reason? How did global security consolidate after the Cold War? And what are the new risk factors to affect Europe’s future?
This chapter’s goals are to briefly identify the motivation for priorities, study the global security challenges and relevant international processes that characterize and influence our daily lives. The topics of this chapter are security challenges, risk factors, their revisions, and how they fundamentally influence permanent values. Their basic importance justifies a continuous examination. We will develop the effects of risk factors in two sub-chapters, from generic toward specific, followed by global and European security dimensions, concluding with a comparison of the two.
