PRIO’s First European Security Week: Five Fault Lines That Could Redraw the Continent

The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) has been quietly studying European conflict since 1959. It took until now — until a war on the continent’s eastern edge, a populist authoritarian wobbling in Budapest, and a fishing nation reconsidering its place in the European project — for PRIO to launch something as ambitious as a dedicated European Security Week. That timing is not coincidental. It is diagnostic.

The inaugural PRIO European Security Week clusters five interconnected themes that, taken together, read like a stress test for the entire post-Cold War European order. The European Political Community’s fragile experiment in flexible diplomacy. The legal chaos engulfing EU merger policy. Iceland’s unexpected return to the EU accession debate. And the slow, grinding political demise of Viktor Orbán — a man who built his career on being immovable. Each theme stands alone. Together, they reveal a continent improvising its way through an era it wasn’t fully built to handle.

From Prague to Budapest: How the European Political Community Became Europe’s Most Unlikely Diplomatic Asset

When Emmanuel Macron floated the idea of a revived European Political Community in May 2022 — three months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began — most serious observers gave it a year before it became another forgotten Brussels acronym. They were wrong. The EPC held its first summit in Prague in October 2022. By the sixth summit in Budapest in November 2024, it had become the broadest pan-European forum in existence: 47 countries, spanning EU member states, the UK, Ukraine, Turkey, Georgia, and the Western Balkans. No treaty. No permanent secretariat. No binding decisions. And somehow — it keeps showing up.

PRIO’s first European Security Week places the EPC at the center of its agenda for a reason. The institute’s researchers have argued, with genuine intellectual force, that the EPC fills a structural gap that neither NATO nor the EU can fill on their own. NATO is a military alliance with a clear membership threshold. The EU is a regulatory and political union with an accession process that takes decades. The EPC is neither — and that’s exactly its value. It gives non-EU NATO allies a seat at the table. It gives EU candidate states like Ukraine and Moldova a venue for political engagement that isn’t contingent on meeting Chapter 23 benchmarks. It even, improbably, keeps Turkey in the room.

The honest critique of the EPC is serious: without enforcement mechanisms, it risks becoming a very expensive photo opportunity. Charles Michel, former European Council President, and Ursula von der Leyen, reappointed Commission President in 2024, have both defended the EPC as a trust-building mechanism — the argument being that you can’t bolt on enforcement mechanisms to a forum that countries haven’t yet agreed to take seriously. That’s a reasonable position. It’s also a convenient one for leaders who prefer consensus to accountability. PRIO’s researchers are right to push on this tension rather than let it sit comfortably unexamined.

For context on how the EU’s external relationships are being reshaped simultaneously, the Europe in the Shadow of Beijing analysis of what the Trump–Xi summit means for the EU captures exactly the kind of external pressure that makes the EPC’s flexibility look less like a design flaw and more like a survival feature.

Teresa Ribera’s Merger Problem and the Five Sectors Where Brussels Is Losing Business Confidence Right Now

The second major thread running through PRIO’s European Security Week is less obviously a “security” issue — until you realize that economic sovereignty and industrial consolidation are increasingly treated as security questions in Brussels. Europe’s dealmakers are alarmed. Private equity firms, industrial conglomerates, and M&A lawyers working the EU market are increasingly using a single word to describe the regulatory environment under Teresa Ribera, the Executive Vice President appointed to lead DG COMP in November 2024: unpredictable.

The structural tension is real and it’s not going away. The EU wants to build “European champions” — large integrated companies capable of competing with American tech giants and Chinese state-backed manufacturers. The European Chips Act, the defense industrial strategy, and the push for a Capital Markets Union all point in this direction. But the EU’s own competition law, built on principles of market contestability and consumer welfare, actively restrains the mergers that would create those champions. You cannot simultaneously demand consolidation and police it with the same intensity. Something has to give.

The sectors where the confusion is most acute:

• Telecommunications: Cross-border telecom mergers have faced repeated regulatory hurdles, hampering the network investment required for 5G and 6G infrastructure at European scale
• Defense: The push for a European Defense Industrial Strategy requires consolidation among defense primes, but antitrust review timelines create uncertainty that delays capital allocation
• Technology: Non-EU tech giants face asymmetric scrutiny under the Digital Markets Act while European competitors struggle to reach the scale needed to challenge them
• Energy: The green transition requires massive capital pooling, yet energy sector mergers face both competition review and geopolitical sensitivity
• Financial services: Banking union remains incomplete, partly because cross-border bank mergers face a regulatory patchwork that makes the math rarely work

Ribera’s team has signaled awareness of this tension. But signals are not reform. The Commission faces calls from business groups and member state governments — particularly Germany and France — to revise merger notification thresholds and issue clearer guidance on how industrial policy goals interact with competition law. PRIO’s European Security Week treats this not as a dry regulatory debate but as a question with genuine strategic consequences: a fragmented European industrial base is a security vulnerability, not just an economic inefficiency.

Macron, Magyar, Orbán, and Von der Leyen: The Four Figures Whose Decisions Will Define Europe’s Next Three Years

PRIO has assembled a week structured around themes, but every theme has faces attached to it. Understanding the European security landscape in 2025–2026 means understanding who actually holds power, who is losing it, and who is waiting in the wings.

Viktor Orbán

Viktor Orbán has governed Hungary since 2010 with a political mastery that his critics spent years underestimating. He rewrote the constitution, packed the courts, restructured the media landscape, and turned Hungary into what political scientists now routinely describe as a “competitive authoritarian” state. He also, until very recently, looked politically invulnerable. That image is cracking. His unauthorized trips to Moscow and Beijing during Hungary’s EU Council Presidency in the second half of 2024 damaged his standing in Brussels irreparably. The EU withholds over €20 billion in cohesion and recovery funds from Hungary over rule-of-law violations — money Hungarian citizens are not receiving because of Orbán’s political choices. And now there is Péter Magyar.

Péter Magyar

Péter Magyar is the kind of political figure who shouldn’t exist by the rules of Orbán’s system. A former Fidesz insider, he went public in early 2024 with explosive allegations about corruption and judicial manipulation at the heart of the Hungarian government. He then founded the TISZA (Respect and Freedom) party and proceeded to mobilize hundreds of thousands of Budapestians in street protests. In the June 2024 European Parliament elections, TISZA won 29.6% of the Hungarian vote — within five percentage points of Fidesz’s 44.8% — in a party that was less than six months old. The Hungarian parliamentary elections scheduled for Spring 2026 are now, for the first time in over a decade, a genuine contest.

Emmanuel Macron

Emmanuel Macron is politically weakened at home after calling and losing a snap legislative election in 2024, but he remains arguably the most consequential single actor in European strategic architecture. The EPC is his creation. His push for European strategic autonomy — the idea that Europe should develop the capacity to act militarily and diplomatically without depending entirely on the United States — remains the most serious challenge to Washington’s assumption of permanent European dependence. Whether that vision survives his domestic political difficulties is one of the open questions PRIO’s week implicitly poses.

Ursula von der Leyen

Ursula von der Leyen, reappointed Commission President in 2024, is navigating a mandate that is simultaneously more ambitious and more contested than her first. Her Commission must manage Ukraine accession negotiations, enforce the Green Deal against growing political resistance, hold the line on rule-of-law conditionality against Orbán’s Hungary and others, and now — critically — align competition policy with industrial security goals. She is attempting to do all of this while the transatlantic relationship remains structurally uncertain. As EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has made plain, Brussels is increasingly conditioning its external relationships on geopolitical alignment — a shift that von der Leyen must translate into coherent policy across 27 member states.

Why Both Brussels Technocrats and Anti-EU Populists Are Getting the European Security Story Wrong

Here is the uncomfortable truth that PRIO’s European Security Week implicitly surfaces: the two dominant narratives about European security are both inadequate, and both are being deployed as substitutes for the harder thinking Europe actually needs.

The Brussels technocratic narrative runs something like this: the EU is a peace project, enlargement is the answer, institutions matter, and the rule of law will ultimately prevail. It’s not wrong, exactly. It’s just radically incomplete. The EU’s institutional framework was not designed for the speed and ambiguity of a continent at war. The accession process for Ukraine could take until 2030 or beyond — years during which Ukraine needs concrete security guarantees that the EU’s treaty architecture cannot currently provide. The rule-of-law conditionality framework took years to even nominally apply to Hungary and Poland, and Orbán spent those years systematically dismantling judicial independence. Institutional confidence without institutional speed is a comfort, not a strategy.

The anti-EU populist narrative — Orbán’s narrative, and the narrative of the far-right parties that made significant gains in the June 2024 European Parliament elections — is simpler and more obviously wrong: sovereignty over solidarity, national interest over collective security, and a strange strategic sympathy for Moscow that conveniently ignores what Russian expansionism actually means for the small and medium-sized nations of Eastern Europe. Orbán’s unauthorized Moscow visit during the EU Council Presidency was not a diplomatic masterstroke. It was a demonstration of bad faith to every ally Hungary has.

What neither narrative adequately addresses:

1. The NATO-EU integration gap — over two-thirds of NATO members are EU members, yet military planning, defense procurement, and intelligence sharing still operate through parallel rather than integrated structures
2. The Arctic blind spot — Iceland’s EU debate, which PRIO’s week highlights through the “Reykjavik redux” framing, is partly driven by shifting Arctic security dynamics that neither the EU’s southern-focused migration politics nor NATO’s eastern-focused deterrence posture fully captures
3. The economic security deficit — Europe’s dependency on Chinese supply chains for critical minerals, and its only partially resolved dependency on Russian energy, represent security vulnerabilities that competition law and trade policy alone cannot fix. The EU-US trade deal framework may eventually help on the transatlantic side, but the structural dependencies run deeper than any single bilateral agreement

PRIO exists precisely to name these gaps. A security week that stops short of uncomfortable conclusions would be a missed opportunity.

Four Concrete Scenarios That Will Define Whether PRIO’s European Security Week Marks a Turning Point or a Footnote

Think tanks convene. The real question is always what happens after the conversations end. Here are the four scenarios — concrete, time-bounded, and consequential — that will determine whether the fault lines PRIO has identified in its inaugural European Security Week narrow or widen.

• Scenario 1 — Magyar wins Hungary (Spring 2026): TISZA defeats Fidesz outright or denies it a supermajority. Hungary’s €20 billion in frozen EU funds begins to flow. Brussels gains a constructive partner in Budapest for the first time in fifteen years. EU internal politics shifts meaningfully, with the far-right bloc in the European Parliament losing its most institutionally embedded member government. This is not guaranteed. But it is, for the first time, genuinely plausible.

• Scenario 2 — Iceland calls a referendum (by 2027): Political momentum in Reykjavik reaches the threshold required for a formal referendum on reopening EU accession talks. The fishing industry’s opposition is the decisive variable. If a coalition government manages to reframe the question as one of Arctic security rather than fisheries policy, public support — currently around 40% in favor of EU membership — could shift enough to make a referendum viable. Nordic EU integration dynamics would never be the same.

• Scenario 3 — EPC acquires a light institutional structure: Under pressure from Ukraine’s extended accession timeline and the need for more structured engagement with non-EU security partners, EPC members agree to establish a minimal permanent secretariat — not a new institution, but a coordination mechanism. This would represent the EPC’s evolution from diplomatic forum to genuine governance architecture, and would raise immediate questions about its relationship to both the EU and NATO.

• Scenario 4 — EU competition reform stalls, investment exits: Ribera’s DG COMP fails to issue the clear guidance that businesses and member states are demanding. A series of high-profile merger blocks in the defense and technology sectors accelerates capital flight to US and UK markets. The European Champions agenda becomes a talking point rather than a reality, and the gap between European and American industrial scale — already significant — widens further.

For ongoing coverage of how these dynamics intersect with EU political news, the stakes could not be clearer: the decisions made in the next eighteen months — in Budapest, Reykjavik, Brussels, and Oslo — will determine whether Europe’s institutional improvisation proves adequate to its geopolitical moment.

PRIO has spent 66 years studying the conditions under which peace holds and breaks down. The inaugural European Security Week is, at its core, a warning wrapped in an agenda. The continent has the architecture. It has the resources. What remains uncertain — urgently, uncomfortably uncertain — is whether it has the political will to use either before the next crisis makes the choice for it.

About The Author

Sophie Gesture

Political writer and analyst focused on global affairs, public policy, and emerging political trends.

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