Professor Donnacha ? Beach?in:

To the question of whether we are in a more unstable period, the answer is "Yes". The Cold War had a certain rigidity to it. There was an understanding that the Iron Curtain was a permanent feature of the European security landscape. This meant that when the uprising happened in Hungary or the Prague Spring occurred in 1968 and Soviet troops were pushed in to suppress these democratically inspired uprisings, there was nothing the West was going to do. That was quite clear.

At the same time, Russia's intentions were to legitimise its landgrab after the Second World War and it achieved that, in a way, with the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. There were certain rules that were respected. Russia was a conservative power within Europe in terms of land and territory. It was trying to conserve the status quo and gets its achievements after the Second World War recognised.

Now it is a revisionist power. It does not have international borders, as other states do, but rather blurred margins. It has given itself a right to intervene on behalf of, for example, Russian citizens who have found themselves, in the Kremlin's view, on the wrong side of the border after the collapse of the Soviet Union. From a Kremlin perspective, the collapse of the Soviet Union was not one event but instead is almost like an ongoing process, and there have been some rectifications the Kremlin has tried to put in place. Sometimes we talk about a new cold war, but it is important to emphasise that Russia is not the Soviet Union in terms of capabilities. We often forget that. The Russian economy is smaller than that of Italy and its population is substantially less than that of Nigeria. Its willingness to use force against its neighbours is what gives it that prowess. That willingness, to return to the Deputy's question, makes the current security environment more unstable.