Since the Ukraine crisis exploded into civil conflict and war in 2013, we have known that we live in troubled times. It has become increasingly clear that the peace order in Europe, established at the end of the Cold War in 1989, is unstable. The arrangements made at that time appear to have generated more conflicts than they were able to resolve.
While the European Union claimed at certain points to be a peace project—and internally it has achieved much in that respect—all around the borders of the proposed “ring of friends,“ as the then European Commission President Romano Prodi put it in 2002, it is an ”arc of fire.” In North Africa, states have collapsed and the whole region is challenged once again to find an appropriate balance between security and democracy. The Middle East is the focus of several proxy wars piled upon each other in multiple layers.
