Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

The Russian Federation, with its plans to regain influence over former Soviet bloc countries, currently constitutes the main military danger for the EU and NATO. Because the war is so close to the EU’s borders, European allies have every reason to increase army financing instead of fuelling a transatlantic disagreement about burden sharing. This article deals with the question of whether the high strategic threat posed by Russia has increased military spending among European allies and decreased free-riding practices after 2014. To analyse this problem, we applied Spearman’s Rank Correlation test and then made a comparative analysis of 21 countries that are both EU and NATO members. Our results confirmed that European allies did not react in the same way to the Russian threat. We proved that strategic factors played a key role in the majority of Eastern European members of NATO, but not across Western European allies.

As a result of the conducted study, there has been solved an important scientific problem of development of theoretical and methodological foundations of building international competitiveness in the conditions of globalization of innovation activity and creation of organizational and economic tools for support of national innovation system safety in global scientific and technological space. It has been established that innovation activity in Poland is characterized by structural deformation, institutional incompleteness, inconsistency and imbalance of technological, economic, social and value aspects, as a result of which innovation processes in the country have not gained sufficient scale and are not a significant factor of GDP growth. Problems of development of national innovation systems in Poland are caused, first of all, by an unsatisfactory state of financing of the scientific sphere, as a result of which the country has lost the system capable to effectively concentrate resources on priority strategic directions of innovation development. Based on a comparative economic and mathematical analysis of the impact of variables that determine the degree of inclusion of the country in global value chains, as well as diagnostics of the competitive environment of some countries, it has been stated that, except for IT, today Poland has no competitive advantages and preconditions for inclusion in global value chains. Considering the importance of the human development index, the Chinese model of innovation development is most acceptable for the country. Considering that in addition to the financial component, one of the main reasons for slowing down innovation activity in Poland is the lack of effective links between government, business and science, there has been justified the need to develop a government innovation policy based on a combination of direct and indirect methods of innovation support. There has been stressed the importance of building a common information and scientific space with Europe, which is possible in the conditions of creation of an open national innovation system.

The articles analyses the penetration of social media through personal use into daily life and the relation of this phenomenon to national security. A survey of Lithuanian higher-school students aged 18-29 was conducted according to quantitative research methodology. Young people actively use social networks for various purposes (personal, learning, work, recreation). Statistically, each individual, aged 18-29, has personal profiles on four social networking sites, yet most often does not adequately evaluate and link the use of social networks with possible national security threats and risk factors. Less than two-thirds of young people have heard something of possible threats and risk factors; however, the impact of social media on national security is not considered significant. Thus, it seems that young people lack information about real threats presented by social networks to both personal data storage and national security.

Postmodernity as a concept of contemporary society together with technological progress and globalization caused changes in orientation of values as well as the transformation of individual and collective identity. Thus, increased vulnerability, both of individuals and society, caused the character of threats to national security. The aim of the article is to analyze the contemporary threats to national security as a phenomenon of a postmodern society, emphasizing the crisis of values as well as of the identity. Postmodern threats forced to revise traditional point of view on the concept of national security and demands to be based on comprehensive approach on the issues of security and defense. This article is an attempt to make an analysis on the topic of national security in an interdisciplinary context. After analyzing the actual threats to the security of the Republic of Lithuania, it was determined that the interaction of many of these threats with the crisis of values is evident. This allows to confirm the importance of further discussions and scientific research on the issues of values and identity in context of national security in postmodern society.

This article aims to find how government expenditure for the sectors of defense, public order and safety influence the economic situation and national security in Lithuania. The problem how government expenditure for public safety relates to statistics of national security and economic situation in the country is analyzed in the article. The fundamental aspects of the structure of public expenditure and relationship between major defense, public order and economic indicators are analyzed in the article. Analysis is made using self-made figures and counted coefficients that show the strength of the relation of the analyzed factors. Resulting conclusions give an answer how government expenditure affects economic situation and safety of the country.