Strategic Trends 2015: Introduction

While introducing last year’s volume of Strategic Trends, we diagnosed that ‘beyond a mere decline of Western influence, the chapters of this volume reflect a basic insecurity over the future direction of these geopolitical shifts.’ One year on, and, while editing Strategic Trends 2015, we could not help but conclude that this basic insecurity not only continued, but deepened.

As is tradition in the Strategic Trends series, the CSS staff debated which developments would shape international politics in the coming year and beyond. As a result stand five chapters that are consciously unrelated and are each identified for their own reasons.The chapters introduce and analyze key trends in international affairs –without claiming to have covered every important development in world politics.

Two themes are interwoven in every one of the chapters, in varying degrees and characters: Norms and order. The systemic challenge that Putin’s Russia poses to a liberal EU, described by Jonas Grätz, is one of norms and values. Putin’s propagated revival of orthodoxy and nationalism coupled with his call for ‘new rules’ in the international order on the European continent challenges not just this order but the very basis of the EU’s homogeneity.

The Middle East, the other crisis-ridden region of 2014, seems to be on the verge of a long struggle for a re-establishment, or re-invention, of regional and intra-state order, says Martin Zapfe. The effects of this struggle, and of competing concepts of the state and concepts of ruling within the Middle East, writes Prem Mahadevan, touch Europe directly – not least through a new ‘territorial terrorism’ embodied by IS. Beyond those two geographical regions, two other chapters describe spaces where norms may just be emerging. Space, covered by Michael Haas, and Cyberspace, analyzed by Myriam Dunn Cavelty, represent global commons that will further move to the forefront of international affairs – and with them the question of which norms, if any, should guide those affairs.

Thus, the diagnosed basic insecurity over the future of international affairs deepens, as it evolves from changes within the balance of power to the questioning of the very system in which state power is generated and applied. While far from being an exclusively pessimistic diagnosis, it seems that the doubts the ‘West’ holds over the universality of its values contributes to the general insecurity of these times.

As in previous editions of the Strate­gic Trends series, the chapters refrain from giving policy recommendations, although the analytical standpoint of each author might become clear. We do wish you an enriching read and hope that Strategic Trends 2015 might succeed in stimulating debates and provoking arguments – to overcome the basic insecurity of today, these de­bates are in dire need.