Winds of change? Neoclassical realism,foreign policy change,and European responses to the Russia-Ukraine War

Abstract

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 brought about diplomatic condemnation across Europe and military support for Kyiv amid an uptick in European collective identity. Yet national responses differed significantly in terms of their contribution, their consistency, the degree of underlying contestation, their willingness to lead, and their choice of institutional frameworks. Explaining this variation requires an understanding of the interaction between systemic forces and a host of unit-level attributes, including military capabilities and geopolitical position, ideas and identities, and domestic politics. This introductory article examines each of these factors with a view to explaining the underlying variation in European responses, engaging with theoretical insights from Neoclassical Realism and Foreign Policy Analysis. Drawing on examples from the Special Section, we show how the divergent responses of several European countries – France, the United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, Estonia, and Sweden – can be explained by reference to these three categories.

Keywords

European security foreign policy change geopolitics identity neoclassical realism party politics Ukraine War

Introduction

On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, seeking to topple the Kyiv government and shocking the international community. The invasion was felt especially hard in Europe, which was not only threatened by Vladimir Putin regime’s actions, but also unaccustomed to war after many decades of peace on the continent. While the international community condemned Russia’s actions, within Europe and the ‘West’ more broadly, this condemnation was especially virulent, and sought actively to contain Russia’s aggression and support Ukraine in the conflict. The result has been a series of inter-related strategic and political shifts in Europe as countries have responded collectively to the war. In the first two years of the war, the European countries have allocated 150 billion Euros in military, financial, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine (Institute for the Study of War, 2024) and increased their spending on defence. Politically, the securitisation of Russia’s actions contributed to the initial emergence of a broad consensus among parties in Europe. European states have worked alongside the United States and NATO and through the European Union (EU) – as well as via bilateral and mini-lateral formats of cooperation – to support Ukraine and push back against Russian actions.

Behind these common actions, however, there is considerable variation within and between European countries as to their response, accounting for which is the purpose of this Introduction and the articles in the accompanying Special Section. Some countries have been more committed to the cause than others, with pockets of sympathy for Putin’s worldview among some leaders. Substantial variation exists in the resources committed, with some countries sending far more in the way of economic and military aid than others. Some countries have sought a leading role, setting the agenda and defining the response of the collective West, while others have taken more of a back seat. Many countries have emphasised the need to contain Russia while others have promoted greater dialogue with the Kremlin. The extent of dissonance between the responses and pre-existing national identities and strategic cultures is another area of considerable divergence, with some neutral and civilian countries undertaking a considerable shift in adapting to the new strategic environment by joining military alliances. Variation is also observable with regard to consistency of the responses, with some countries maintaining a more or less similar position over the months, and other countries varying their support in response to a range of internal and external changes. At the level of domestic politics, the degree of contestation varies across states, with support for Ukraine more politicised in some quarters than in others, in different ways, and for different reasons. And countries differ on the structures they wish to see European efforts channelled through; specifically, on what the relative contribution of NATO and EU frameworks should be, and which mini-lateral and bilateral formats matter most.

We argue that accounting for variation in European responses is significant both for its own sake and for broader debates in European security and IR theory. Empirically, it can help us to explain the positions taken by key actors and to understand the impact of various political and ideational factors on support for Ukraine. While existing studies analyse the reactions to Russian aggression by individual countries, a comprehensive overview of the responses of several key countries is still lacking. By looking across different cases at the sources of individual countries’ commitments and leadership credentials, we should be able to make informed judgements about the principal sources of these. This Special Section addresses this gap, allowing for wider conclusions to be drawn about the overall Western response to the war and the broader unfolding of European foreign and security policy. On the conceptual level, explaining variation in European responses allows us to theorise the nexus between internal politics and strategic decisions and to understand the underlying mechanisms linking national attributes to state responses to strategic threats.

The Introduction – and the articles in the Special Section – draw on a combination of theoretical insights from Neoclassical Realism and Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA). Despite their divergent disciplinary origins, both approaches have been crafted to understand the impact of unit-level factors and how these influence responses to broader instances of strategic change. Moreover, neither approach is significantly incompatible ontologically with the other, and both approaches have increasingly come to focus on similar factors in recent years. Thus, the Introduction engages with both approaches, based on the incorporation of three distinct components which can explain much of the variation in European responses: (1) geopolitical and geo-economic factors, (2) ideas and identities, and (3) ideology and party politics. We show how the interaction between each of these factors can help us to account for much of the variation between countries’ responses while also contributing to our understanding of the broader dynamics shaping national responses to strategic shocks.

The article proceeds as follows. We first chart the broader response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, showing how the international community and European/‘Western’ states responded to the conflict. The article then sets out the outcomes that the Special Section examines – divergence in national responses – conceptualised through six dimensions in which the responses of the European states have differed from one another. The next section introduces Neoclassical Realism and FPA as traditions of international thought that can gain purchase over questions of divergent national responses, spelling out the contents of each approach and discussing the relationship between the two perspectives. The article then moves on to examine the three distinct explanatory categories which inform the Special Section, focusing on (1) geopolitical and geo-economic factors, (2) ideas and identities, and (3) ideology and party politics. For each, we highlight the relevant theoretical mechanisms and expectations for our national cases and offer illustrative examples of where these factors have shaped national responses, drawing on the contributions to the Special Section. In the final section, we offer some reflections on the implications of our study and set out the remainder of the Special Section, introducing each of the contributions in turn.

The implications of the Russia-Ukraine War for Europe and the west

The Russian invasion of Ukraine motivated a strong response on behalf of European states seeking to push back against the Putin regime’s aggressive actions. Russia’s invasion brought to an end the decades-long absence of inter-state and major-power war on the European continent, acting as a reminder both of the dangers of complacency and the return of geopolitics after the post-Cold War interregnum. As a result, the onset of conflict has engendered greater collective solidarity among the often-fractious European states and reaffirmed a shared European identity. It has also contributed to a greater sense of perspective in intra-European struggles, leading to an improvement in relations between many EU member states and the Polish and British governments, both of which emerged as early leaders in the collective response (Martill, this Special Section; Sus, this Special Section). The conflict has also acted as a critical juncture within the policy environment, making possible changes in the orientations of major European players that would have been unthinkable in previous years. Framed as the ‘Zeitenwende’ (watershed), Germany has committed to a more active role as a defence player (Blumenau, 2022; Bunde, 2022), jettisoning its long-held ‘civilian’ identity (Maull, 1991 (1990); Tewes, 1997). Neutral and formerly non-NATO members Sweden and Finland reversed course rapidly following the invasion and joined the alliance (Pesu and Iso-Markku, 2022) while the Danish government used the opportunity to overturn its long-standing opt-out from the defence aspects of European integration (Bilquin, 2022; Schaart, 2022).

In terms of the collective effort, European countries have offered strong diplomatic support for the Kyiv government, denouncing Putin’s actions, framing them as a threat to global peace and security, and pledging active support. On many occasions, national leaders have travelled to Kyiv to visit Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in person and highlight the extent of their support and remind their respective publics of what is at stake (Brighi and Giusti, 2023; The Chancellery of the Prime Minister, 2022). Since Ukraine is not a member of NATO, European countries have been keen to avoid direct confrontation with Russia, a stance that was communicated clearly prior to Russia’s invasion. Rather, the European states have sought to support Ukraine’s own efforts to repel their Russian invaders. Collectively, European countries have disbursed over 150 billion Euros in military, economic, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine during the first two years of the war (Institute for the Study of War, 2024), alongside the efforts of other major donors like the United States (69 billion Euros), Canada (5.77 billion Euros), and Japan (7.52 billion Euros) (Statista, 2024). Alongside these direct transfers of funds and equipment, European countries have committed to increased defence spending aimed at shoring up their own position in a demonstrably more dangerous environment and funding continued and future assistance to Ukraine. Among the EU27 countries that recorded the highest increases in defence expenditure in 2022 were Sweden (+ 30.1%), Luxembourg (+ 27.1%), Lithuania (+ 27.6%), and Spain (+ 19.3%). Consequently, in 2024, 18 European NATO allies will spend 2% of GDP on defence, a sixfold increase from 2014. At the same time, the countries of NATO’s Eastern flank have already in 2023 exceeded the 2% threshold, led by Poland, which allocated 3.9% of its GDP to defence (Runkel, 2023).

NATO, as the primary defence organisation on the European continent and bringing to bear the power of the US nuclear deterrence, was one of the major channels through which the European/Western coordinated their response to the war (Floyd and Webber, 2024). With the war in Ukraine, NATO has continued its post-2014 shift from ‘out of area’ operations to a renewed emphasis on territorial defence (Polyakova et al., 2023). And yet, at the same time, there are clear limits to the extent of NATO’s formal involvement in the conflict, given Ukraine is not a member of the alliance. The invasion of Ukraine has also placed Europe higher up in Washington’s assessment of global challenges (Mälksoo, 2024), although the US commitment to European security is now more than ever a partisan question (Galston, 2023). At the same time, the EU has also become a more central actor as a result of the conflict (Fiott, 2023; Michaels and Sus, 2024) and has started to make a better use of the its legislative and financial mechanisms as a platform for coordinating the activities of member states (Laffan, 2023; Thomson et al., 2023). The EU has transformed its European Peace Facility (EPF), an off-budget instrument, into a mechanism used to reimburse member states for the military aid they sent to Kyiv, established a Brussels-based coordinating cell to disburse help, set up a military mission to train Ukrainian soldiers, and enacted several rounds of sanctions on those close to the Putin regime (Bilquin, 2022; European Council, 2024). The Union has also paved the way for Ukraine’s future accession and worked to assist member states to transition away from a dependence on Russian gas (European Commission, 2022). Furthermore, the emerging division-of-labour between NATO and the EU within the broader Western effort (Hoeffler et al. 2024) has brought about increased coordination aimed at enhancing the defence capabilities of European countries and providing greater assistance to Ukraine (Sus, 2024).

Broader political changes have also occasioned changes in domestic politics. The outbreak of war saw high levels of public opposition to the actions of the Russian government as well as an increase in support for governments and the EU to undertake further efforts to ensure the security of their citizens (Fernández et al., 2023; Steiner et al., 2023; Thomson et al., 2023). Not only did the salience of foreign and security policy drastically increase after the conflict, but overall levels of support for militarism rose among citizens (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2023). As Russia became increasingly securitised, this was reflected in the rapid de-politicisation of relations with Moscow, with almost all parties publicly opposing the invasion. Some of the populist radical right (PRR) parties sympathetic to Putin’s interests sought in the new climate either to shift discussion away from foreign policy issues or to row-back from their earlier positions, recognising that they were less popular in the prevailing climate (Ivaldi, 2023). Intra-party divisions emerged as a result within PRR parties, but also within leftist parties, where some constituencies of opinion hoped to defend Ukraine against perceived Russian imperialism while others saw the conflict as a product of United States/European imperialism aimed at Russia (Holesch and Zagórski, 2023; Wondreys et al. 2024). While the overall positions of parties shifted in a common direction, the increasing significance of the EU as a forum for strategic discussions was a trend opposed by many Eurosceptic and PRR parties, politicising the framework of the European response more so than the contents (Henke and Maher, 2021).

Variation in national responses

All European countries have had to adapt to the new world brought about by the invasion of Ukraine in one way or another. Behind the collective European façade, however, there is considerable variation in how individual states have responded to Russia’s war. To provide a comprehensive picture of the variation between states, we identify six dimensions on which national responses in Europe have varied: (1) Commitment, (2) Contribution, (3) Convergence, (4) Contestation, (5) Consistency and (6) Institutional Choice.

First, states vary in terms of their commitment to the task of containing Russian aggression. Some states have tried to place themselves in leadership roles, with France, Poland, the United Kingdom and Estonia in particular seeking to galvanise the broader European effort (see Martill, this Special Section; Sus, this Special Section; Weber, this Special Section). At the same time, post-invasion dynamics have facilitated leadership of small countries, with Estonia’s initiative on joint procurement of ammunition (see Raik and Arjakas, this Special Section) and the Czechia-led coalition on a quick purchase of ammunition providing illustrative examples (Melkozerova, 2024). Other countries – including those which have made substantial contributions, such as Germany – have been keener to take a back seat in defining the response (see Bunde, this Special Section). And some countries have been highly sceptical of some of the assumptions underpinning the broader collective effort. For example, the Orbán government in Hungary has deviated from the European mainstream, arguing for a cease-fire and peace talks (Körömi, 2024) partly out of a fear of a total Russian defeat (Hofreiter et al., 2024),a position shared by the incumbent Slovak Prime Minister, Robert Fico (Visegrad Insight, 2024).

Second, states vary in their level of contribution. In terms of invested military and financial resources and capabilities to help Ukraine, some countries have taken on a greater share of the burden than others. Apart from the Baltic States and Poland, which have devoted the largest percentage of their budget, compared to other countries, to helping Ukraine, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, for example, have committed far more in terms of military aid to Ukraine than countries like Italy, Spain and France (Trebesch et al., 2023). Malta, Austria, and Cyprus have not provided any military equipment to Ukraine and have instead focused on providing humanitarian aid (Tschomba, 2023). The variation in country contributions is also due to the varying numbers of migrants and refugees from Ukraine who have been received by European countries, with Ukraine’s neighbours and Germany being the main destination countries and thus bearing the greatest economic and social burden (International Organisation for Migration, 2024).

Third, variation arises when it comes to the level of convergence between the country’s response to the conflict and its existing national attributes, whether these are characterised in terms of state identity, culture, capabilities, or preferences. For some states like France and – especially – the United Kingdom, their responses to the war accord reasonably well with the way they see the world and their emphasis on power projection in a dangerous world (Martill, this Special Section; Weber, this Special Section). For other states like Germany and Sweden, the level of convergence between their respective civilian and neutral roles and their response to the war is much lower. The latter has given up its tradition of neutrality and applied to join NATO (Aggestam and Hyde-Price, this Special Section). The former has abandoned its traditionally close ties with Moscow by ending long-lasting dependence on Russian energy sources and by shifting its security policy to be formulated against Russia instead of Russia (Bunde, this Special Section).

Fourth, there is discernible variation in the degree of societal contestation underpinning national responses. For example, the UK’s response has been the subject of a broad domestic consensus and has thus remained relatively stable over time (Toye, 2013), whereas in the Netherlands – and in the United States – the government’s policy has been more contested, raising the prospect of a shift in support in the near future (Galston, 2023; Nijhuis et al., 2023). This is particularly evident also in Poland, where farmers have been continuously protesting against the opening of the EU market to Ukrainian agricultural exports (Konończuk, 2023). Whereas the Polish society unceasingly favours supporting Ukraine with military aid, its support for Kyiv’s EU membership has seen a downturn, with 67% of Poles in favour and 33% against (CBOS, 2022, 2023a). At the same time, almost 90% of Poles strongly support Ukraine’s NATO membership, suggesting it is the competition in the internal market they fear most (CBOS, 2023b).

Fifth, national responses have varied in their level of consistency. Whereas countries such as the United Kingdom, Poland, and the Baltic states have been consistent in their approach to Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion, others, such as France, have changed their position over time. The previously reluctant approach of Paris towards Ukraine’s membership in both NATO and the EU has shifted in the course of 2023, with French President Emmanuel Macron aspiring to be one of the most vocal supporters of Ukraine’s accession (Cadier and Quencez, 2023; Rose, 2023; Weber, this Special Section). A shift in the opposite direction has occurred in Slovakia, where the right-wing and pro-Russian Fico became Prime Minister in September of 2023, advocating the end of Slovak support for Ukraine (IISS, 2023).

Finally, European states exhibit variation in institutional choice when it comes to their preferred frameworks to respond to the war. The United Kingdom, for example, has prioritised NATO after having left the EU after Brexit (Martill and Sus, 2021), while the remaining neutral countries – Austria and Ireland – have no relationship with NATO and acted mostly via the EU’s civilian instruments (Ukrinform, 2024). France has sought to promote European structures as alternatives to Atlanticist ones, as manifested in the French push for the further integration of the EU defence industry to decrease economic dependence on the United States (Weber, this Special Section). In turn, many Central and East European states have placed their faith in the Atlantic alliance, lobbing for further strengthening of NATO’s Eastern flank (Lanoszka, 2023). Yet, they also have made extensive use of EU instruments such as the EPF and have been, particularly Poland, active in running the EU training mission for Ukrainian soldiers (Brzozowski, 2022). Other countries, such as Germany, have tried to make use of both the EU and NATO, with the unprecedented decision of the German government to put a brigade in Lithuania marking the first German troops’ permanent foreign deployment since WWII (Larson, 2023).

As the brief discussion here shows, European countries vary widely across these six aspects. Our multidimensional approach allows for a more nuanced view of the empirical variation that can highlight some of the complexities, since some states exhibit very different combinations of these attributes. It also allows us to tailor our concepts and theories to those dimensions that are most puzzling in any given national context.

Neoclassical realism and foreign policy analysis

Having demonstrated considerable variation across national European responses to the Russia-Ukraine War and conceptualised this variation through six dimensions, our next step is to consider how we might account for this divergence. In this article – and in the rest of the Special Section – we draw on the perspectives of Neoclassical Realism and FPA in order to identify those factors which can account for variation in national responses to the war in Ukraine. At the core of these respective approaches is the contention that unit-level factors, including ideational and political factors, are crucial to explaining divergent strategic outcomes. Neoclassical Realism emerged in the mid-1990s amid a wave of interest in domestic and ideational factors following the end of the Cold War. The period of US hegemony which followed and the ensuing increase in the number of democratic actors in the system increased the degrees of freedom for many actors while ensuring that more states were subject to contestation over foreign policy issues. Scholars sought to account for these changes by simultaneously relaxing realism’s adherence to structuralism and the distribution of power (without obviating it) and by theorising the role domestic factors played in shaping strategic decisions (e.g. Dyson, 2008; Wivel, 2005). For neoclassical realists, changes in the distribution of power set the stage for alterations in strategy and alliance politics, but the precise outcome of changes is shaped by domestic processes and reflects dominant ideas and traditions (e.g. Meibauer, 2020; Ripsman et al., 2016).

FPA has a far lengthier pedigree in international studies, with its origins in the behavioural turn of the 1960s and efforts to apply insights from social psychology to foreign policy decision-making. In many ways FPA provided the antidote to state-centric realism, focused as it was on the ‘ground’ of IR, including both the actors who undertook foreign policy decisions and the contextual environment these individuals found themselves in (Hudson 2005). Indeed, FPA approaches are often explicitly contrasted with the realist ‘baseline’ to highlight the paucity of the latter approach and the value-add of agent-centric approaches, as with Graham Allison’s well-known account of the Cuban missile crisis (Allison, 1971). Yet from the 1990s onwards both IR and FPA scholars found themselves increasingly studying the same phenomena, as IR ‘found’ domestic politics and sought to incorporate these factors into its explanatory frameworks (Kaarbo, 2015). The end of the Cold War also brought about an increased emphasis on foreign policy change as a sub-field of FPA, motivated by a desire to understand the various adjustments to national foreign and security policies made in light of changing structural conditions (e.g. Hermann, 1990; Volgy and Schwarz, 1991). As similarly epochal changes are brought in train by the emergence of a more diffuse international order, calls have once again abounded for the comparative advantage of FPA research and a focus on foreign policy change (Aran et al., 2021; Chryssogelos and Martill, 2021).

We argue that a combination of factors drawn from Neoclassical Realism and FPA approaches can help us to understand the variation in national responses to the Russia-Ukraine in Europe. We are not the first to emphasise the utility of drawing from both approaches. Indeed, early statements of Neoclassical Realism were intended as a means of bridging the gap between realist theory and the study of foreign policy (Rose, 1998; Rosecrance and Stein, 1993), while mentions of the role of domestic politics in foreign and security policy often acknowledge both perspectives. In the study of European foreign and security policy, there are now substantial bodies of research undertaken both from a Neoclassical Realist perspective (e.g. Cladi and Locatelli, 2021; Costalli, 2009; Dyson, 2013; Götz, 2019; Hyde-Price, 2013; Turpin, 2019) and from an FPA perspective (Aggestam and Hedling, 2020; Hofmann, 2013; Kaarbo, 1996; Martill, 2019; Oppermann, 2019), such that both approaches are widely established and commonly cross-referenced.

There are two similarities in particular which are often noted between the two approaches. First, both Neoclassical Realism and FPA are interested in explaining the same kinds of outcomes and have been designed in part to account for patterns of variation which other perspectives – notably realism – have struggled to explain. Without shying away from efforts to explain macro-political dynamics, Neoclassical Realist and FPA scholarship have always been interested in accounting theoretically for variation occurring within the bounds of broader dynamics. Moreover, the approaches are both open to the idea that such variation is systematic, rather than a random or ad hoc deviation from a systematic structural baseline. Thus, precisely because the ontological starting point of both approaches – variation in unit-level responses to structural change – is so similar, the approaches represent a logical place to begin. Second, Neoclassical Realism and FPA both take seriously the need to incorporate domestic factors into their explanations in order to account for variation which cannot be explained by structural change alone. This has led to the elucidation of various categories of domestic explanatory variables which have helped to broaden the factors thought relevant in understanding security policy and helped to spell out how these mechanisms work to influence outcomes. This is helpful for our purposes not only because of the prima facie case for domestic and external factors both shaping national responses, but also because times of epochal change such as we are witnessing in the European security order can exacerbate the impact of national factors. Thus, both approaches take seriously the interaction between external and domestic factors which are at play in national responses to the Russia-Ukraine War.

And there are two reasons why we suggest it is helpful to keep both approaches in our sights, rather than to opt for one or the other. One is that the different approaches foreground different kinds of domestic factors, such that there is additive value in considering concepts and mechanisms derived by both approaches. For example, Neoclassical Realism has had more to say about the link between state capacities and different kinds of resources, while FPA has done more to theorise diverse institutional configurations and the impact of the policy process itself. Drawing on both approaches therefore not only provides a more substantial repository of potential explanations with which to explain variance, but can also help to fill-in the mutual blind-spots of each perspective. Another reason is that the distinct perspectives can help to adjust for ontological biases in the respective approaches, since each emphasises distinct aspects of national responses to external threats. Neoclassical Realism takes structural factors more seriously and thereby helps to inform FPA approaches which often treat such factors as largely endogenous, despite calls to help integrate agentic and structural approaches more within the field (e.g. Kaarbo, 2015; Thies and Breuning, 2012). FPA’s comparative advantage lies in its detailed theorisation of a host of unit-level variables linked to domestic political and bureaucratic processes, which have been somewhat underspecified in Neoclassical Realist research to-date (Hyde-Price, 2013). FPA approaches can also contribute to a relative relaxation of some of the structuralist assumptions of Neoclassical Realism, showing how structural change matters because of how it is interpreted by political actors (Thies and Breuning, 2012).

But the approaches are not the same, and direct combinations of the two have the potential to gloss over ontological differences, since both approaches incorporate domestic factors in different ways (e.g. Kaarbo, 2015; Rathbun, 2008). Thus, we do not advocate efforts to blend the two perspectives, nor do we propose a hierarchy or division-of-labour between the two. Nor, indeed, do we propose any kind of direct ‘test’ between the two approaches. Rather, our intention in this Introduction is to highlight the similarities of the two perspectives which the contributors to this Special Section draw upon in their respective articles and to emphasise the value of considering both alongside one another. Our aim here is simply to spell out the background assumptions of the analytical perspectives deployed by our contributors in order to understand the specific responses of individual European countries. Because the topic is broad and encompasses a range of different facets of foreign and security policy, as well as a number of different actors, we place a premium on analytical eclecticism in accounting for foreign policy outcomes (e.g. Sil and Katzenstein, 2010). Hence, the value of drawing upon these two closely related analytical frameworks is that they can supply a broader repository of factors and speak to distinct facets of the processes under study. To limit the analysis to a more restrictive set of phenomena would be, in this case, to underfit the theoretical model and neglect important sources of a priori variation.

In the sections that follow, we distil three distinct categories of explanatory factors which recur in Neoclassical Realist and FPA work on variation in national foreign and security politics, focusing in turn on (1) geopolitics and geo-economics, (2) ideas and identities, and (3) ideology and party politics. For each of these categories we aim to briefly showcase the cutting-edge research that lies behind our expectations before connecting these to the empirical evidence.

Our claim is not that these categories are wholly independent from one another, nor that some are in any way causally prior to others; rather, we aim to summarise the specific mechanisms identified by these bodies of scholarship which are subsequently deployed in the individual contributions to the Special Section. We leave it to our contributors themselves to show precisely which configuration of these factors best explains the specific outcomes in the respective country cases.

Geopolitics and geo-economics

The assertion that geopolitics is a key factor in explaining foreign and security policy has been prevalent among scholars associated with theories of Classical and Neoclassical Realism, albeit with varying intensity (Browning, 2018; Criekemans, 2021; Flint, 2021; Nitoiu and Sus, 2019). In its most basic understanding, the importance of geopolitics draws on the assumption that geography is the most powerful explanatory factor behind foreign policy as it is the most permanent factor (Spykman, 1938). Yet, scholars have not limited their understanding of geopolitics to territorial location but have rather perceived it as a broader category, including associated factors such as military capability and economic power as well as the balance of power between actors in international relations (Riddervold and Rosén, 2018; Rosato, 2011; Schweller, 2004). The perception of a country’s economic power as an aspect of geopolitics arose from the fact that economic power determines what national resources can be allocated to foreign policy, either enabling or diminishing it. For the sake of this Special Section, we follow this broad understanding of geopolitics, which includes the implications of geographical location, military capabilities, and economic power of a respective country.

Scholars have acknowledged that geopolitics and the resulting relative material power complement the ideational emphasis of social constructivist approaches to states’ behaviour in international politics, as elite perceptions of the external environment are shaped not just by power political imperatives but also by the historically rooted, geographically and economically shaped foreign and security policies (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993). This has led to the consideration of systemic factors as an important determinant of state behaviour in IR (Criekemans, 2021; Grygiel, 2006; Nitoiu and Sus, 2019; Owens, 1999) while also recognising the domestic factors as an essential transmission belt that shapes precise policy outcomes (Rose, 1998). Although liberal, constructivist and institutionalist theories, which were well suited to explain, for example, advances in European integration in the post-Cold War era, challenged the importance of geopolitical factors, international events, such as the rise of new powers, regional conflicts, and security challenges, served as a reminder of the importance of systemic factors. By looking at the interplay between systemic factors such as geographical location, military and economic capabilities, and states’ international behaviour, they have demonstrated that geopolitical theorising can contribute to a better understanding of the underlying parameters of national and foreign policies (Buzan and Hansen, 2009; Lantis and Howlett, 2010).

The shock of Russia’s attack on Ukraine and the return of traditional warfare to the European continent has cemented the explanatory power of geopolitics, identifying the relevance of various systemic factors as explanatory tools. As geopolitics can explain the relationship between politics and material power, as well as between territory, location, and the external environment, it helps to understand some of the European/Western reactions to the Russian war. For example, the foreign and security policies of the Baltic states and Poland have been shaped by their geographic location next to a threatening nuclear power, with the invasion – coupled with Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling – exacerbating pre-existing threats (Sukin and Lanoszka, 2022). The physical proximity of Russia and the high exposure to the ongoing conflict has led the countries on NATO’s eastern flank to consider Ukraine’s fight as, in a sense, a fight on their behalf, assuming that a defeat of Ukraine would encourage Russia to expand its designs on European territory and that an attack on their own countries is not out of the question (Duda, 2023). This perception accounts for these countries’ strong involvement in supporting Ukraine, the high degree of public consensus underpinning this, and the unlikely leadership roles these states have taken in the European response (Sus, this Special Section).

For Western Europe other elements of geopolitics mattered more. In the case of France, it was not the country’s geographic proximity to Russia but the imperative to balance rising Russian relative power that explains the country’s response to the war. After initially seeking to negotiate with Putin in the hope that the Russian President would be persuaded to withdraw its troops from Ukraine (Reuters, 2022), Paris quickly realised there was no alternative to a strong critical stance towards Moscow. French support for Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the EU was aimed at counterbalancing Russia’s imperialist policy by increasing the stability and security of Russia’s neighbourhood (Weber, this Special Section). At the same time, it also arose out of fear of abrogating the leadership role in EU security and defence policy in favour of the increasingly important countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Sus, this Special Section).

Economic power and military capabilities also help to account for variation in responses, and explain why countries like the United Kingdom quickly became regional leaders. London, as one of the economically and militarily strongest powers on the European continent, has been providing Kyiv with major humanitarian, financial, and military aid, placing itself at the forefront of the collective Western response (Martill, this Special Section). Britain’s highly developed military capabilities allow London to supply Ukraine with modern weapons that are of great combat importance, such as tanks, air defence systems, and long-range precision strike missiles (Mills, 2023). The United Kingdom was the first European country to decide to supply Kyiv with this type of missile, demonstrating a contrast to the German government’s decision not to supply Kyiv with Taurus missiles of similar range (Sabbagh and Connolly, 2024). In addition, the United Kingdom was the first G7 country to sign a security cooperation agreement with Ukraine, fulfilling a promise made to Ukraine after the NATO 2023 Summit in July (Prime Minister’s Office, 2024).

Ideas and identities

The so-called ‘constructivist turn’ in IR in the 1990s spurred increasing interest in the role ideational factors play in security policy, both in terms of how threats are identified/framed/constructed and also in how ideational factors shape responses to perceived threats. The core claim, spelled out in earlier constructivist research (e.g. Wendt, 1987), was that social action cannot be understood outside of its meaning, which is always a matter of interpretation, whether collectively or individually. Constructivist research thus came to focus on the role of various ideational and communicative factors in world politics, including – but not limited to – norms, identities, ideologies, roles, discourses, narratives, memories, analogies, communicative rationalities, etc. The reason constructivism matters for our purposes here is that the ‘turn’ influenced not only self-declared constructivist scholars but also shaped in profound ways pre-existing sub-fields in the discipline (Checkel, 1998). As a result, neoclassical realist research and FPA scholarship have increasingly sought to incorporate ideational phenomena into their theoretical frameworks, albeit without jettisoning the commitment to explanation which characterises more interpretivist alternatives (e.g. Houghton, 2007).

Various factors have been shown to influence states’ foreign and security policies. Identity, for example, has long been established as a crucial factor determining how threats are perceived and responded to, with how states see themselves influencing their external behaviour (e.g. Neumann, 1996; Wendt, 1994). Identity is closely linked to ontological security – how secure actors are in themselves – as another facet of social life with implications for security policy, since it is assumed actors will aim to minimise any disconnect between their actions and how they see themselves (Browning, 2018; Browning and Joenniemi, 2017; Mitzen, 2006). There is also a distinctly temporal basis to identity construction, which cannot be understood without reference to (national) histories. Research on memory and framing shows that identities are a product of how states – or groupings of states – interpret past events and narrate their past actions (Hofmann and Mérand, 2020; Mälksoo, 2015). History does not matter objectively, but rather as a resource through which actors can construct meaning to help orient their perception of contemporary events. Research on narratives and foreign policy shows that story-telling helps frame current events (e.g. Homolar and Turner, 2024; Subotić, 2016; Turner, 2022), while work on analogies has examined how the select invocation of ostensibly congruent prior events can lead to divergent diagnoses of certain issues (Khong, 1992, 2022).

Research on strategic culture has posited that the decisions taken by actors in the security and defence fields relate less to changes in structural conditions than they do to the dominant culture within politico-military circles (e.g. Irondelle et al., 2015; Mi, 2023). Specifically, while some actors have become attenuated to the use of force, overseas deployments and active strategic thinking, others are less inclined to think in these terms, owing to the ways in which previous actions and significant historical events have become routinised over the years (Cornish and Edwards, 2001; Giegerich and Terhalle, 2021; Meyer, 2005; Rynning, 2003). Recent and related research has come to focus extensively on practices and how these develop over time and become routinised (e.g. Adler and Pouliot, 2011; Adler-Nissen, 2016; McCourt, 2016; Schindler and Wille, 2015). Practices and routines can shape the ways that states respond to external shocks in important ways, and while they can themselves be subject to change over time, the costliness of developing new practices also affords them a degree of relative continuity (Schindler and Wille, 2015). Finally, FPA research has also shown that the roles states play in the international system can shape their actions in crucial ways. Whether states cast themselves into leadership roles, brokerage roles, or peacemaker roles – or whether they are cast into them by other actors – all these imply specific performances on the international stage and condition behaviour accordingly (Brummer and Thies, 2015; Cantir and Kaarbo, 2012; McCourt, 2011; Tewes, 1998).

In the context of European responses to Putin’s war, a focus on ideational factors such as culture and identity suggests that national positions will be influenced – if not entirely determined – by the dominant cultural and ideational dispositions associated with the country in question. This may be nationally-bound, as with the status of neutral countries or the roles of middle/residual ‘powers’, but it may also be something associated with entire regions, as with Central and Eastern Europe’s association with Russia’s Cold War imperialism. Cultural baggage does not necessarily produce stasis – in each instance countries have changed their foreign and security policies in order to respond to the onset of the war. Rather, identities and culture shape responses and provide the underlying frames of meaning within which any change must resonate. Where change is thoroughgoing and involves a move away from dominant norms – as in the German case – it can be all the more painful to undertake (Bunde, this Special Section).

The United Kingdom offers a good example of congruence between actions and pre-existing norms and identities. Britain’s leadership role in the European response stemmed from a combination of its strategic culture, its hawkish position on Russia, and its unwavering support for NATO and transatlantic designs on Europe’s security and defence architecture (Martill, this Special Section). Yet the UK’s response was also shaped by more recent developments, not least Britain’s desire for a leading global role post-Brexit (Oppermann et al., 2020; Rogers, 2024), which may partly explain the Johnson government’s keenness to articulate a robust response to the war. Moreover, in spite of the Euroscepticism which has dominated core sections of the UK body-politic in the post-Brexit years, the upturn in intra-European solidarity occasioned by the Russia-Ukraine War has also fostered a greater desire to work alongside European and EU allies, as least at the elite level (Martill, 2023a).

Germany provides the clearest example of a shift away from dominant norms, the Russian invasion having undermined the dominant German perception of the strategic milieu in Europe and shattered assumptions about the virtues of economic interdependence. The Zeitenwende marks a deliberate shift away from Germany’s civilian power identity (Maull, 1990; Tewes, 1997) and its prior status as a ‘reluctant’ hegemon (Bulmer and Paterson, 2019) and has seen many taboos overcome in the process (Bunde, this Special Section). Yet the Zeitenwende has proven difficult to implement in practice owing, arguably, to the lack of a strategic culture or practices in the defence domain conducive to a more militarised stance (Scicluna and Auer, 2023; Von Marshall, 2022). Moreover, the rhetoric of the shift in Germany has been shaped by political elites to fit with pre-existing ‘civilian’ tropes (Schoeller, 2023).

Another example of a significant shift in strategic orientation triggered by the Russian invasion is offered by Sweden that ended its long-standing tradition of neutrality and join NATO. The decision to join the Alliance was the result of an ongoing post-1990 gradual shift in Swedish security policy, yet it was the full-scale Russian invasion that provided a ‘tipping point’, pushing the country over the edge (Aggestam and Hyde-Price, this Special Section).

France, too, has undergone substantial shifts in its approach, not least in articulating a more active strategy of containment in place of a previous emphasis on diplomatic solutions and a further rapprochement with NATO (Weber, this Special Section). Yet there are clear undercurrents of quintessentially French aspects of grand strategy in Paris’s response also, not least the effort to maintain channels of communication with the Putin regime and the emphasis on a European solution, both of which echo Gaullist views on NATO (Hofmann, 2017; Pannier, 2017) and on détente (Chryssogelos and Martill, 2021). French proposals for a European Political Community may have marked a new development, but also reflect existing French preferences for a multi-speed and more strategic Europe (Ewers-Peters and Baciu, 2022). Unlike in Germany, however, change has been less painful in the French case because multiple different traditions coexisted in French security policy in the years before the invasion, making adaptation less costly (Cadier and Quencez, 2023).

Poland and the Baltic states, while differing considerably in regard to party dynamics, offer instructive examples of congruence between reactions to the war and strategic cultures and pre-existing norms. The decisive responses in the region stem from the perception of Russia as the biggest threat to European security, based on historical experience of the Soviet occupation and a belief that the underlying and long-term motive of Putin’s imperialism is to conquer territories (Chancellery of the President of Poland, 2022; Mälksoo, 2006). Due to this shared historical experience of Russia as an aggressor, a vast majority of Poles even perceive the war as ‘their war’ (Duda, 2023; Konończuk, 2023). The situation seems to be similar in Estonia (Raik and Arjakas, this Special Section). The hawkish position on Russia relies on a cross-party and cross-societal consensus (Siddi, 2018), offering legitimacy to increase defence spending and providing Ukraine with military, financial, and humanitarian aid on an unprecedented scale (Raik and Arjakas, this Special Section).

Ideology and party politics

Neither geopolitical context nor national characteristics are necessarily viewed in the same way by different political actors. While early research in IR tended to downplay the role of domestic political factors in shaping foreign and security priorities, in the past several decades, a wealth of scholarship has emerged to chart the complex ways domestic and international politics inter-relate (e.g. Caporaso, 1997; Putnam, 1988). Specifically, political parties have become more central in recent years both to the discipline and arguably to the conduct of foreign policy itself (Hofmann and Martill, 2021; Joly and Dandoy, 2018; Otjes et al., 2023; Raunio and Wagner, 2020). This is a response to several changes in recent decades to the nature of international politics itself, including the demise of the constraining strictures of the Cold War balance of power (Hofmann and Martill, 2021), the increasing internationalisation of ‘domestic’ issues under high levels of interdependence (Chryssogelos, 2020; Zürn, 2014), developments in European integration (Costa, 2019; Hofmann, 2013; Hooghe and Marks, 2009), the parliamentarisation of foreign and security policy (Mello and Peters, 2018; Neal, 2021), and the recent rise of populist actors seeking increasingly to politicise foreign and trade policies (Destradi et al., 2022; Friedrichs, 2022; Verbeek and Zaslove, 2015).

One reason that parties often embody distinct positions on foreign policy issues is their role as the carriers of distinct ideologies. Since ideology mediates the ways in which actors apprehend the international system, diagnose its faults and identify threats, it is unsurprising that responses to crises differ across the ideological spectrum (Rathbun, 2004). In this vein, it has been demonstrated that ideology can determine how states interpret the national interest (Martill, 2023b), how threatening they find external actors (Gries, 2014), which states they prefer to ally with (Haas, 2003), how willing they are to intervene in conflicts (Haesebrouck and Mello, 2020), which institutional frameworks they prefer (Hofmann, 2013; Rathbun, 2011) and how much defence spending they are willing to incur. But left and right can map onto security issues in complex ways. While the centre and centre-right are most likely to support intervention (Haesebrouck and Mello, 2020), the left is more likely to seek to respond to humanitarian concerns, and the right to emphasise the need to follow the ‘national interest’ (Fonck et al., 2019; Rathbun, 2004). Moreover, different factions on both the right and the left can exhibit very different preferences on strategic questions (e.g. Martill, 2023a; Rathbun, 2004), while left and right can often come to the same position for very different reasons (Martill, 2019). And while leftist governments are less ideologically disposed to high levels of defence spending, their predisposition to statist economic models allows them to countenance higher levels of spending in practice (Gaddis, 1992).

But not all partisan dynamics are ideological in nature. Parties face different kinds of incentives, not all related to the instantiation of their members’ beliefs, including vote- and office-seeking behaviours (Hofmann and Martill, 2021). Whether parties are in government or opposition matter, with governing parties having a far greater incentive to follow the dictates of the national interest, given they can be held accountable on this basis. Opposition parties may be more ‘free’ to chart their favoured position but are equally incentivised to adopt positions which either differ from – or embarrass – those of governing parties (e.g. Humayun, 2024). Executive-legislative relations and the power of legislative actors matter here, since they determine how much influence opposition and back-bench legislators will have over foreign and security policy (Wagner et al., 2017). Electoral cycles are also significant, since they provide temporal constraints and opportunities around which foreign policy successes or failures are – where possible – negotiated (e.g. Smith, 1996). Finally, parties represent constituencies whose interests may themselves not be best described as ‘ideological’, including the interests of specific firms or lobbies or of regions more generally, with implications for foreign policy (Trubowitz, 1998). And sometimes successful policies can be those diametrically opposed to perceived ideological leanings, as with the ability of right-wing parties to act more credibly as peacemakers or the desire of leftist parties to look ‘tough’ on security matters (e.g. Cukierman and Tommasi, 1998).

The implications for our understanding of European responses to the Russia-Ukraine War are important. Because policy-seeking and office-seeking dynamics impact on how states respond to strategic threats – and because structural or national factors are mediated through party systems – any explanation of responses also requires consideration of partisan dynamics. This does not mean overlaps between partisan affiliation and foreign policy behaviour are always obvious. Self-evident and consistent ‘left’ and ‘right’ positions on the conflict are not easy to come by. Yet partisan factors make themselves known in many ways nonetheless. Indeed, one of the principal contributions of recent scholarship on political parties has been to move beyond questioning whether parties matter, but to ask how they matter, and when they matter. By probing the complexities of the domestic/international nexus, studies of partisanship can not only help explain how political parties contribute to the construction of a messy and complex reality, but also establish scope conditions for when these factors are likely to matter most.

In some ways, European responses to the Russia-Ukraine War show the limits of partisanship, with the perceived threat from Russia contributing to profound de-politicising and securitising dynamics in the early months of the conflict. Public opinion polls showed significant underlying support for a strong response to the Russian invasion (Thomson et al., 2023), helping to establish a cross-party consensus in many countries, including the United Kingdom (Martill, 2023a), Poland (Sus, this Special Section) and Czechia (Kaniok and Hloušek, 2024). Even in neutral Finland there was no party opposed to the country’s decision to join NATO, although as a confidence motion, the governing Left Alliance was bound to support accession (Arter, 2024). In Sweden, while Finland’s bid for accession forced the government’s hand, NATO membership was the subject of broad consensus at the elite level (Brommesson et al., 2024). Even PRR parties, which had broadly sympathised prior to the invasion with Russia’s framing of the conflict as a legitimate security concern (Ostermann and Stahl, 2022: 10–12), sought to downplay their distance from other parties on the issue. In France, Marine Le Pen downplayed her party’s prior support for Putin and shifted the discourse towards socio-economic issues instead (Ivaldi, 2023), while no PRR parties in Latvia or Estonia adopted pro-Russian positions (Timofeev, 2022). These findings align with previous studies showing that temporal – and not partisan – dynamics are often responsible for shaping European party positions towards Russia (Onderco, 2019).

Yet behind this broad consensus, partisan dynamics can be found in many places. Sympathy for Russia’s interests continues to exist on the ideological fringes of left and radical right parties, producing internal debates within these parties, including between the Russophile and Atlanticist elements of the AfD in Germany (Greene, 2023; Ostermann and Stahl, 2022) and between Le Pen and Éric Zemmour in France (Ivaldi, 2023). The radical right in opposition has increasingly sought to politicise support for Ukraine as the conflict has dragged on. Among those parties broadly supportive of containing Russia, partisan divergence is also evident both within and between parties. In the United Kingdom the Conservatives and Labour diverge on whether a formal security agreement should be negotiated with the EU (Martill, 2023a) while in Sweden the Green Party and the Left Party have both argued that NATO accession will make the country more vulnerable and remove its freedom of manoeuvre (Michalski et al., 2024). In Germany, while the Zeitenwende has broad cross-party support, the parties disagree on what it requires and how far Germany should depart from its civilian role (Mello, 2024). Poland’s strong support for Ukraine helped the ‘pariah’ PIS government to overshadow its conflict with EU institutions over the rule of law (Kuisz and Wigura, 2022) while Warsaw has sought to use its growing influence in NATO to be included in the nuclear programme (Sus and Kulesa, in press).

Overview of the special section

The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has undermined the strategic status quo in Europe, triggering seismic politico-strategic shifts within European countries. By drawing on a combination of insights from Neoclassical Realism and FPA, we have explored the variation in six European countries’ responses to war: France, the United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, Estonia, and Sweden. To explain the national responses, each study has looked at various aspects of three broad explanatory categories conceptualised in this Introduction: (1) geopolitical and geo-economic considerations, (2) ideas and identities, and (3) ideologies and party politics. To assess which categories might have a significant impact on national responses, the authors used inductive reasoning, starting from empirical observations that formed the national response. By focusing on a narrow range of factors in the existing literature, we are able to explain patterns of variation across a range of countries, which is helpful for understanding the long-term dynamics behind the Western response to the Russian aggression All contributions featured in the Special Section rely on qualitative research designs, utilising variations of process tracing and congruence analysis (Beach and Pedersen, 2016). To this end, the authors have systematically examined relevant primary and secondary sources to understand the causes of national reactions, complementing them in many cases with interview data from experts and policy-makers.

In the brief section below, we summarise the key insights from each of the contributions to the Special Section.

Analysing the French response to the war, Gesine Weber (this Special Section) argues it is wrong to see in Paris actions a continuation of pre-existing national security postures, arguing that a more subtle Zeitenwende à la française can instead be identified, albeit one imbued with existing national characteristics. French security policy, they argue, has undergone significant shifts, manifest in changing positions on EU enlargement and NATO membership for Ukraine. While geopolitical factors explain the disruption of existing priorities, the domestic context – marked as it is by a proactive strategic culture – has created a permissive environment within which adaptation to these new realities has taken place.

The British response Benjamin Martill this Special Section, shows greater levels of continuity in some respects, owing to London’s instinctive hawkishness towards Russia, the strength of the UK’s material and relative power capabilities, and Britain’s long-standing Atlanticist credentials, all of which augured for a strong leadership role. Yet as Martill (this Special Section) shows, the nature of Britain’s engagement has been shaped by a combination of partisan politics and institutional complexity, with Britain’s departure from the EU foreign and security policy structures undermining the UK’s ability to coordinate across the emerging EU/NATO division-of-labour. The result has been the United Kingdom engaging from the outside in ad hoc and informal ways with EU actors.

The robust response of Poland to Russia’s aggression, examined by Monika Sus (this Special Section), can be best explained by the interplay between systemic factors and the existence of a strong cross-party and societal consensus over the perception of Russia as an existential threat. What makes the Polish case interesting is that while being a crucial part of the collective Western response to the war, the country was simultaneously slipping into democratic backsliding. Yet, as Sus (this Special Section) shows, the leadership vacuum left by major EU actors – France and Germany – combined with Poland’s perception about its growing geopolitical importance for the United States, created favourable conditions for Polish leadership in the crisis.

In Germany, as the study by Tobias Bunde (this Special Section) shows, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has destabilised widely shared beliefs about European security that were deeply ingrained in German identity and strategic culture. The failure of Berlin’s Russia policy facilitated executive decisions previously considered out of reach, such as the end of energy dependency on Russia, and shaped the elite worldview regarding the nature of international relations and the utility of military force. This dynamic has not only produced tensions in the fragile consensus underlying Germany’s post-2022 foreign policy but has also undermined Germany’s credibility as it has struggled to live up to its newfound role. Despite offering considerable military, financial, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine, Berlin is still perceived as a laggard in the collective Western response (Bunde, this Special Section).

Geopolitical considerations based on the historical experience of Russian imperialism and concern regarding the country’s proximity to Russia have shaped Estonia’s response to the invasion, which has shown how significant a role small states can play in shaping the nature of the broader international response. Russia’s invasion, as Kristi Raik and Merili Arjakas (this Special Section) show, has reinforced Estonia’s long-held strategic posture, while the increase in the Russian threat and the initial leadership vacuum within the EU have created parallel opportunities for Estonia to shape the collective response and enhance its reputation abroad. Tallinn has been one of the staunchest supporters of Ukraine, has sought to co-opt EU and NATO partners into taking a more forthright stance against Russian aggression, and has set the agenda on key policies including efforts to promote the joint procurement of ammunition (Raik and Arjakas, this Special Section).

Finally, Lisbeth Aggestam and Adrian Hyde-Price, (this Special Section) examine the Swedish response to the war and, in particular, the country’s application for NATO membership, a move which ended two-hundred years of non-alignment and neutrality. The application was triggered by the shock of the Russian invasion, yet at the same time represented the culmination of a long and incremental shift in Swedish security policy away from neutrality. By analysing both the systemic factors and domestic conditions that shaped this major decision, Aggestam and Hyde-Price (this Special Section) show how the combination of existing developments and the shock of the Russian invasion contributed to far-reaching recalibrations of Sweden’s identity and strategic culture.

Overall, the dynamics behind individual national responses reveal that despite the broadly symmetric threat, each of the examined countries has responded very differently to Russia’s invasion, influenced by the interaction of geopolitical considerations, dominant identities, and domestic politics. The following articles in this Special Section discuss in detail how these dynamics influenced the respective country cases.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the Editors of BJPIR for helpful comments, as well as the participants of two author workshops organised in preparation for this Special Section.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 962533.

ORCID iDs

Benjamin Martill

Monika Sus

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