Chapter Four: Europe

摘要

Risks and threats to European security were in 2014 thrown into sharp relief by events in the region's eastern and southern periphery. To the southeast, the three-year-old civil war in Syria engulfed northern Iraq, with the Sunni jihadist organisation Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) proclaiming in the summer a caliphate spanning parts of both countries. Conditions in Libya, which experienced NATO intervention in 2011, deteriorated further, with the attendant risk of comprehensive state failure. Insecurity and conflict continued on Europe's southern flank, with some member states' armed forces remaining on active, advisory or peacekeeping service in parts of Africa. In the east, Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea in March and continuous action to destabilise eastern Ukraine, including alleged direct Russian military support for separatist militias in the Donbass region, generated a fundamental test for Europe's security architecture with the potential to change the post-Cold War paradigm of European security.