Solidarity and the EU in the context of hybrid threats

Professor Natalia Chaban (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)

Professor Šarūnas Liekis (Vytauto Didžiojo University, Lithuania)

Aistė Žemaitytė and Dr Linas Kontrimas (Vytauto Didžiojo University, Lithuania)

with Professor Patrick Müller (University of Vienna/DA Vienna), Professor Michèle Knodt (TU Darmstadt, Germany) and Professor Alister Miskimmon (Queen's University Belfast, UK)

The pilot project studied media frames and narratives in Lithuania in the coverage of the Lithuania Brigade of 5000 Bundeswehr personnel to be deployed in Lithuania. This is in response to the deteriorating security in Europe and growing military and hybrid threats to the Baltic state from Russia specifically. In   his book Baltic: The Future of Europe, Moody (2025, p. 8) argues that despite being “quiet literally at the heart of Europe”, for a long time the Baltic states found themselves “faded away to the periphery of the West’s wider imagination”. Yet, with the focus of geopolitics “shifting steadily eastwards”, “the Baltic sea is becoming a nexus of a wider great game played out across Eurasia” (Moody 2025, p. 8). The project contributes to this revised vision.

According to the Director General of Council of the Baltic Sea States Gustav Lindström (2026), the Baltic Sea region faces a “changed geopolitical context” with the security domain becoming increasingly complex. Our case study – Lithuania – is positioned in this “very tectonic place” (Moody 2025, p.8), that attracts heightened attention from scholars of IR, conflict and EU studies. In this context, the deployment of the 5000 German troops to Lithuania in 2025 invites a close consideration of solidarity in the context of the return of geopolitics to the Baltic Sea Region (Lindström 2026) and security threat to the eastern region of the EU’s and NATO’s eastern flank defence strategy. The project asks what are the reverberations of it for Lithuania, at times when, arguably, “the balance of power in Europe is shifting to the north and the east and how the continent is being reconfigured around the Baltic” (Moody 2025, p. 10)?

Chaban, N, Š. Liekis, A. Žemaitytė, L. Kontrimas, with P. Müller, M. Knodt and A. Miskimmon (2026) Solidarity and the EU in the context of hybrid threats: Narrative intersections (the case of Germany’s first permanent foreign deployment to Lithuania), paper at the ECPR Workshop, University of Innsbruck, Austria, April 2026.