Delivering her annual State of the Union address in Strasbourg, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for a “counter-hybrid playbook” and “Europe’s own Article 4” as part of the new European Security Strategy. According to the President, Europe has entered an evolving hybrid-threat environment that requires urgent European preparedness. While the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) already have tools to respond to non-conventional threats, she argued their systems were built for a different world.[1] This issue brief compares existing European mechanisms for addressing security threats and investigates the institutional gaps that Europe’s own Article 4 is intended to fill.
