Beyond Neutrality
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15203/4177.vol53.2024Abstract
If Austria wants to be perceived as a serious partner and co-owner of the European integration project, it must actively contribute to European security. Security policy is the responsibility to protect population, territory and institutions in the light of respective conditions and challenges. In view of the Russian war of aggression, Austria should urgently take a closer look at its current and strategic security policy options. Without blindfolds, within the framework of neutrality, but also beyond it. Neutrality is a false protective shield. Wishful thinking cannot provide protection. Neutrality does not help against violent aggressors who respect neutrality just as little as they respect international law, basic political rules and the fundamental prohibition of violence. Even an active neutrality policy or military neutrality is not a mandate for petrifaction but rather requires ongoing adaptation to the respective security policy circumstances and challenges. In democracies, sustainable security policy requires public awareness and debate. Establishing acomprehensive overview, soberly weigh up advantages and disadvantages, recognize the outdated and leave it behind - this is the essence of the self-determined citizen, and this is what freedom thrives on. In the long run, you only have what you are willing to defend.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Ursula Plassnik
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
The OZP is the authorized quarterly publication of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Politikwissenschaft (ÖGPW, Austrian Political Science Association)
The author of an article (in case of multiple authors: the corresponding author, responsible for releasing this material on behalf of any and all co-authors) accepted to be published in the OZP hereby acknowledges the following Copyright Notice:
- The author retains the copyright to the article.
- It is the responsibility of the author, not of the OZP, to obtain permission to use any previously published and/or copyrighted material.
- Publication of a submitted text is dependent on positive results from the peer reviewing. In such a case, the OZP editors have the right to publish the text.
- In case of publication, the article will be assigned a DOI (digital object identifier) number.
- The author agrees to abide by an open access Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY nc) license. The license permits any user to download, print out, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article in any non-commercial way, so long as appropriate credit is given to the author and source of the work.
- The license ensures that the author’s article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive. In order to facilitate distribution, the author agrees that the article, once published, will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the OZP.
- In addition, the author is encouraged to self-archive the article, once published, with reference to the place of the first publication.
- After the contribution appears in the OZP, it is still possible to publish it elsewhere with reference to the place of the first publication.
- The finished article, if published, will include a correspondence address (both postal and email) of the author.
- If written under the auspices of a grant from one or more funding agencies, such as FWF (Austrian Science Fund), ERC (European Research Council), and Horizon 2020 (EU Framework Programme), an article accepted for publication has to be deposited in an Open Access archive. The OZP’s archiving policy is compliant with these provisions. (In case the article derives on funding from a different source, the author is responsible to check compliance of provisions.)
