At a recent REDS seminar co-hosted by the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and The Europe Center, Andrew Michta, Professor of Strategic Studies at the Hamilton School, delivered a sobering assessment of European security in an era of renewed great power conflict. Framed around the question “Will deterrence hold?”, Michta’s talk examined the structural weaknesses of Europe’s post–Cold War security order, the evolving threat environment posed by authoritarian powers, and the limits of both U.S. and European military preparedness.

Michta argued that Europe has spent the past three decades on what he termed a “vacation from history” — a period marked by disarmament, strategic complacency, and the belief that economic integration could substitute for hard security. The post-1990 unification of Germany, the enlargement of the European Union, and the decline of territorial defense planning reinforced the assumption that major war on the continent was no longer plausible. This mindset, he contended, left Europe strategically unprepared for Russia’s gradual re-militarization and revisionism, culminating in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

A central theme of the talk was the failure of the European Union to develop a credible, EU-centric security architecture. While EU elites pursued visions of a “United States of Europe,” Michta emphasized that political fragmentation, divergent threat perceptions, and regulatory obstacles have undermined collective defense capacity. Events such as Brexit, the 2015 migration crisis, and internal disagreements over Russia have further eroded cohesion. In Ukraine, these weaknesses have translated into a fragmented and often reactive European response.

Michta placed Europe’s challenges within a broader systemic context, highlighting the emergence of what he described as an “axis of dictatorships” linking Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea across the Eurasian landmass. Russia, he argued, is now fully mobilized for war, while China is expanding its military capabilities at unprecedented speed and scale. These dynamics are producing an “expanding battlefield” stretching from Eastern Europe to the Indo-Pacific, raising the prospect of simultaneous regional conflicts. Referencing warnings by NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Michta noted that a two-theater conflict by 2027 can no longer be dismissed as implausible.

The talk also addressed the constraints facing the United States and NATO. Despite unmatched global reach, U.S. forces have been reshaped by two decades of counterterrorism operations, face recruitment shortfalls, and are constrained by an industrial base ill-suited for protracted large-scale combat operations. European NATO members, with a few notable exceptions such as Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states, lack deployable forces and the industrial capacity needed for sustained deterrence.

In conclusion, Michta outlined a more pragmatic path forward centered on what he called NATO’s “Northeast Corridor” — a coalition of states in Northern, Baltic, and Central Europe that share threat perceptions and possess credible military capabilities. With continued U.S. support, particularly in nuclear deterrence, logistics, and long-range fires, this regional core could serve as the alliance’s new center of gravity. Whether deterrence ultimately holds, Michta suggested, will depend on how quickly Europe can translate recognition of risk into concrete military and political action — and on how the war in Ukraine ultimately ends.

In a recent REDS (Rethinking European Security and Development) seminar co-hosted by Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and The Europe Center (TEC), Professor Kim Lane Scheppele offered a clear and urgent account of a growing crisis inside the European Union (EU): the erosion of democracy within some of its own member states. Her central claim was that the EU now faces two different democracy deficits. The first is the traditional, institutional problem — often described as the EU being “too technocratic” and “too distant” from voters. The second, and far more dangerous, is the rise of internal democratic backsliding, where member states that were once consolidated democracies begin to dismantle their own checks and balances.

Scheppele began by explaining the older, familiar form of the democracy deficit. Many key EU institutions — the European Commission, the Council, and the European Court of Justice — are not directly elected. The EU historically justified this by assuming that democratic legitimacy flowed upward from its member states. As long as all national governments were democratically elected and accountable at home, the EU’s supranational structure remained legitimate.

But this assumption has collapsed. Over the past decade, some member states, most notably Hungary, and, until recently, Poland, have shifted away from liberal democracy while still enjoying full voting rights and benefits inside the Union. Scheppele emphasized that the EU’s treaties never anticipated a scenario in which a member might stop being a democracy yet continue to shape EU policies, budgets, and laws.

The heart of the talk outlined how Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gradually transformed into what scholars call an “electoral authoritarian” regime — a system that holds elections but systematically tilts the playing field. Scheppele detailed how Orbán’s government captured the Constitutional Court, restricted judicial independence, took control of public media, pressured private media owners, rewrote electoral laws, weakened civil society, and used EU development funds to reward loyalists. Despite this, Hungary still nominates a European Commissioner, sends Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) elected under unfair conditions, and holds veto power in the Council of the EU.

Scheppele explained why the EU’s main disciplinary tool, Article 7 of the Treaty on European Union, proved ineffective. Article 7 is designed to sanction members that violate EU values, but the final step requires the unanimous consent of all other member states. Hungary and Poland protected each other for years, making sanctions impossible.

A major turning point came when the EU created three financial conditionality systems: the Rule-of-Law Conditionality Regulation, the Recovery and Resilience Fund, and the Common Provisions Regulation. Unlike Article 7, these tools allow the EU to freeze funds when a member state violates rule-of-law standards. Scheppele noted that these mechanisms froze €137 billion for Poland and €36 billion for Hungary — pressures that contributed to Poland’s democratic opening in 2023 and helped fuel a new political challenge to Orbán.

Still, problems remain. In late 2023, the European Commission released €10.2 billion to Hungary for geopolitical reasons, despite rule-of-law violations. Scheppele warned that such political bargaining undermines the credibility of the new system.

She ended on a cautiously optimistic note: recent EU court decisions suggest that democracy itself, not just technical legal standards, may soon become an enforceable EU obligation. Yet the ultimate question remains one of political will. The EU now has tools to defend democracy from within — but must decide whether it will use them.

Is Ukraine too corrupt to be a part of the European Union? In a recent Rethinking European Development and Security (REDS) seminar talk co-hosted by CDDRL and The Europe Center, Maria Popova, McGill University Associate Professor of Political Science, assessed how serious the issue of Ukrainian corruption really is. While some observers have claimed that Ukraine’s corruption renders it unprepared for EU accession, Popova’s research suggests otherwise. Contrasting Ukraine to recent EU entrants — Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia — she finds that corruption indices are not very helpful in drawing reliable conclusions.

In all four said countries, corruption is touted as the most salient issue, with strikingly similar scandals occurring across them. Over the last ten years, Ukraine has developed an extensive anti-corruption infrastructure, forming institutions for the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of corruption cases, as well as for asset recovery. These institutions have produced mixed results, and issues of political competition between institutions have tainted their wider reputation, with the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption receiving the most positive feedback. Innovative e-procurement systems like ProZorro have been internationally praised. Ukraine is unique in that its anti-corruption infrastructure came well before attempting EU accession. 

Bulgaria, on the other hand, established its anti-corruption agencies ten years after becoming an EU member. These institutions have since become politically compromised; so much so that anti-corruption reformists recently forced their abolition. 

In Romania, institutions were created around the time of accession and have been successful in holding corrupt oligarchs accountable. Similarly, Croatia’s anti-corruption reforms proceeded during accession negotiations.

Although the four countries adopted similar anti-corruption institutional reforms, today Ukraine tracks as significantly more corrupt than the EU members across measures of regime, public sector, executive, and political corruption, even though it is cleaner than Romania was when it started accession negotiations, more corrupt than Bulgaria was, and equally corrupt as Croatia at its start of negotiations. Why? Popova argued that the indices are fundamentally non-comparative and thus need to be taken with a grain of salt. The score for each country is determined by experts that focus exclusively on that country, who consider variation in corruption over time only. Moreover, the abstract conceptual definition of corruption is applied to their narrow case knowledge and experience and thus reflects local, rather than generalizable conceptualization. 

While index scores correlate with local perceptions, this, too, may just reflect a narrative on the ground. If the local narrative is that the country is highly corrupt, the population will likely perceive it to be, with no sense of its real magnitude. 

When analyzing Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions, Popova finds that Ukraine is better prepared for EU accession than is widely assumed.