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.

State security is a key issue both for the state as an entity and for its inhabitants. The economic security of the state is a particularly important component which can manifest itself on many different levels. The most important of them is financial security. This aspect of security is relevant as in modern economies money is the key value. Therefore, the financial security of the state is a component of economic security, but at the same time its key determinant. The level of financial security, which in the simplest terms is an ability to raise funds when needed, is influenced by a number of factors, the most important of which are the stability of the financial sector, the size of public debt, as well as the size and structure of the country’s foreign exchange reserves. This paper attempts to analyze individual factors that affect the condition of financial security of the state. In the next part, a structural analysis of the most important aspects of the state’s financial security was performed. The research showed that the state of Poland’s financial security could now be assessed quite highly, but the effectiveness of all the measures taken by the government and the central bank to date would be verified in the near future through the development of the situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was argued that the development of an effective strategy for the protection of the industrial organization and ensuring its proper implementation should be based on the methodological basis of the theory of security. The fundamental changes in the process of formation of a security strategy are determined by the fact that the process specified is objectively developing and gradually becoming more complicated. At the present stage, the security strategy is formalized into a certain organized system, which should include the existing structural subdivisions of the business entity and create conditions for the protection of the priority areas of its operations. The main objective of formation of a strategy for the protection of entrepreneurship is the early distinguishing and isolation of external and internal dangers and threats, overcoming existing imbalances in the process of formation of the innovative basis for further development, creation of a safe environment for the existence of a business entity and, ultimately, achieving the stated goals of a particular industrial organization. All this allows us to formulate an appropriate strategy for its economic security.

The article analyses conceptions of both, the economic security and financial security of the state, in respect to a recent increase of attention given to assuring the state’s economic security while emphasizing mostly the financial factor. Therefore, a thorough analysis on the two conceptions, as well as, on their interrelation, based on scientific literature, revealed that state’s financial security and stability can reflect the economic security of the state only to some extent. The performed scientific practical research verified the hypothesis, which emerged during theoretical research, that financial security and stability cannot fully ensure the economic stability of the state.

Our paper is dealing with the issues of economic security and international relations in the European Union (EU) at the uncertain times of rethinking European security and sustainability in the face of Brexit and other challenges facing Europe.