Henrik Østergaard Breitenbauch

With this special issue of Defence Studies, we situate defence planning as a constitutive element of defence and strategic studies. Indeed, in addition to the usual “downstream” focus on the use or non-use of force, on policy decision-making in foreign relations, military operations and global external engagement, we argue for the utility of an increased “upstream” focus on what is a major part of everyday defence and security policy practice for military, civilian administrative and political leadership: the forward-looking preparations for the armed forces and other capabilities of tomorrow. In particular, the special issue contributions explore two general dimensions of defence planning: the long-term, historical relationship between defence planning and the state including national variations in civil-military relations, and a concurrent tension between defence planning as an administrative, analytically neutral activity and the politics of its organisation and outcomes. In both of these, defence planning appears as a particular case of general planning, as a lens that enables particular foci on the external world to come about on behalf of the state while also sometimes creating institutionalised biases along the way. In this manner, paraphrasing Émile Durkheim, defence planning emerges as a “strategic fact” with dynamics of its own.

Valget af Donald J. Trump som USA’s 45. præsident skabte uhørt tvivl om dettransatlantiske forhold. Substansen, formen og timingen af Trumps politikudmeldinger varslede en på mange måder radikal omkalfatring af den mest grundlæggende relation i den liberale verdensorden siden Anden Verdenskrig. Ville USA helt holde op med at afstive fundamentet for den nordeuropæiske sikkerhed? For at forstå den eksistentielle betydning af den tvivl som Trump har vakt med sine tilsyneladende improviserede bemærkninger, er det nødvendigt at betragte dybt sedimenterede strukturer i sikkerhedspolitikken. Hverken Skandinavien eller Norden findes nemlig i sig selv. De er geopolitisk eksternt betingede, kulturelt-politiske fællesskaber, som er opstået i en bufferzone mellem skiftende stormagter, hvis magtbalancer har holdt rummet mellem dem åbent og uafklaret.

The ‘greater Nordic space’ between Great Britain, Germany and Russia has overtime varied with the balance of power. The Baltic States e.g. have been in and out of the space, rejoining by regaining sovereignty after the end of the Cold War. Russia’s actions in Ukraine and beyond during 2014 mark the end of the Post-Cold War period and its aspiration to peaceful integration. The small states of the greater Nordic space are now rediscovering their inescapable geopolitical nearness to Russia. Drawing on RSCT and Nordic-Baltic integration literature, thearticle contributes to understanding the Northern European part of the Euro-Russian Regional Security Complex. Theoretically, the article links RSCT and integration logics through the twin concepts of a ‘security region’ (given outside-in as one part of a negatively defined RSC), and a ‘political region’ (created inside-out under the shield provided by the security region). To linkthe two concepts, Heidegger’s idea of Geworfenheit, or thrownness, is employed to capture how the states of the greater Nordic space are always already subject to the dynamics underlying that space and how this condition affects the states’ interpretation of their changing surroundings, including translation into political regionality. Empirically, the article therefore argues that Russia’s new foreign policy has created a greater Nordic space ‘security region’ – supported by the United States – that is paving the way for new integration initiatives to a strengthened ‘political region’ inside the space, possibly as a ‘greater Nordic region’.