Europe and ‘New’ Security: How the EU and Selected Member States Perceive and Reflect on the Current Security Challenges

Past years have, in view of the transformation of ‘inter-national’ (not only) security relations, witnessed a shift of the security paradigm – so called open notion of security has complemented or replaced in the 20th century prevalent military approach. States and other actors have to face these changes what is, however, a complicated and a slow process – it entails moving of some segments of ‘statehood’ to higher (or lower) levels. Global security governance has not yet been successful, more plausible developmenst occur on the regional level – and the EU today is the key representative of regional security players. The article analyses the basic security-political documents of the Union and selected member countries and confronts them with the transformation of the security paradigm. The countries are selected according to various dividing lines (e.g. large versus small, wealthy versus poor, inside versus on the frontier). The documents are analysed by the method of content analysis on basis of pre-selected terms (categories) typical for both security paradigms (e.g. sovereignty, territory, military versus terrorism, civil society, human rights, development, environment). The performed analysis shows if and how the EU and its chosen members reflect in discursive terms the change of the notions of security challenges and if the reflection is influenced by some of the dividing lines. Simultaneously it enables to plan a following, more sophisticated level of analysis.