91 Michael Merlingen/Manuel Mireanu/Elena B. Stavrevska The Current State of European Security Introduction The purpose of this contribution is to map the current security configuration in Europe, trace changes, predict likely scenarios, and discuss what the OSCE can do to affect which scenario will be realized. To this end, we loosely draw on regional security complex theory (RSCT). Our principal argument is that the basic structure of the European security order is gradually being trans- formed into a bipolar, conflictual order. This process is reversible, and the OSCE may play a small part in bringing about such a change. A regional security complex (RSC) comprises a set of actors whose se- curity problems are so interconnected that they cannot be considered or re- solved apart from one another. 1 RSCT rests on three basic ideas. One is bor- rowed from geopolitics, the second from the new security agenda, and the third from the linguistic turn in the social sciences. To begin with geopolitics, the argument is that security interdependencies often exist in regional clus- ters. This is so “because many threats travel more easily over short distances than over long ones”. 2 Global powers often penetrate RSCs, either reinfor- cing or dampening regional security dynamics. Second, RSCT reflects the new security agenda that emerged at the end of the 1980s. Diplomats and academics stretched the concept of security to include non-military issues (environmental, economic, etc.) and non-state referent objects (e.g. human beings, collective identity). The CSCE/OSCE was a key policy entrepreneur in these efforts to deepen and widen the traditional state-centric and military security agenda. Finally, RSCT is informed by the linguistic turn in security studies. Unlike the two previous borrowings, this is not about the substance of international security but about epistemology. Policy analysts cannot treat threats as objective conditions. Threats are intersubjective social facts rather than brute material facts. Unlike brute facts (such as mountains), social facts (such as money) are facts by (discursive) agreement only. 3 Through dis- courses of danger or securitizations, an intersubjective understanding is con- structed within a political community to treat something as a security prob- lem. 4 RSCT argues that security dynamics are primarily shaped by domestic vulnerabilities (economic, political, societal, etc.) and the material and social 1 Cf. Barry Buzan/Ole Waever, Regions and Powers: The Structure of International Secur- ity, Cambridge 2003, p. 44. 2 Ibid., p. 45. 3 Cf. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, New York 1995. 4 Cf. Buzan/Waever, cited above (Note 1) p. 491.