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Radio Free Europe (05 June2023)

Rikard Jozwiak

Last week, I spent three days in the Slovak capital attending GLOBSEC's annual Bratislava forum -- arguably the biggest think-tank event in Central Europe -- where politicians, officials, academics, and journalists were discussing the future of Europe from early breakfast to late-night cocktails. With Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, there are a lot of voices in Brussels and elsewhere claiming that the political center of the continent is slowly but surely shifting eastward.

Partly, this is because the European Union and NATO are now seriously looking at a future with expanded membership eastward. But also, perhaps, because most of the Central and Eastern Europeans were proven right about Russia and the Kremlin's intentions to undermine the continent's security and political architecture -- something that caught a perhaps complacent Western Europe off guard, despite warnings such as the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the annexation of Crimea six years later.

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