A New Strategic Responsibility for the EU: EU-NATO Cooperation against Hybrid Warfare from Russia

The article critically examines the process of the EU as a defence actor, its cooperation with NATO, especially in hybrid warfare, and how the EU needs a new ‘strategic responsibility’, in front of an increasing hybridization of war by Russia. Since the beginning of the European Community in the 1950s, the idea of a ‘defence union’ reemerged regularly in the history of the European continent. Since 1999, the EU has developed common defence and security policies, collaborating with NATO for decades; however, this cooperation is increasingly insufficient. Since the Russian war against Ukraine and the increased use of hybridisation of warfare by Russia, the EU has been forced to rethink the need to ‘defend itself by itself’, even if it is unable to achieve full ‘strategic autonomy’. After describing the EU becoming a security-defence actor in the last decades, this article argues that the EU must look to a new ‘strategic responsibility’ for more efficient common defence and stronger cooperation with NATO, especially in hybrid warfare. Strategic responsibility means that the EU will need to maintain its Atlantic Alliance but increase its part of the responsibility, its engagement not only in its periphery but globally and not only with political and economic means but with military ones. Hybrid warfare is a concept that includes the use of a ‘whole of government’ approach, meaning using all tools of national power to attack a rival in its political, social, economic and military spheres. Russia is increasingly using this towards the West, and so the EU and NATO need to step up their cooperation in order to deter, defend and react to this hybrid warfare. To increase this cooperation, the EU will need to pass a new strategic responsibility.