CYIL vol. 10 (2019)

BIRUTĖ PRANEVIČIENĖ – VIOLETA VASILIAUSKIENĖ CYIL 10 ȍ2019Ȏ Speaking about NATO position regarding the threats to energy security, the 2018 Brussels Summit Declaration states: “… it is essential to ensure that the members of the Alliance are not vulnerable to political or coercive manipulation of energy, which constitutes a potential threat.” 34 The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats (hereinafter – Hybrid CoE) stresses in its analysis that the resiliency of energy infrastructure is critical to NATO states. 35 In the theories of energy security there are four ‘As’ mentioned as the facets of energy security – availability, affordability, accessibility and acceptability. As Cherp & Jewell notice, “two of the four As – availability and affordability – prominently featured already in the classic energy security studies [...] and still remain at heart of the International Energy Agency’s mainstream definition of energy security “as the uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price.” 36 They mention that the other two As – accessibility and acceptability – were upheld by the World Energy Council in its Millennium Declaration and mentioned and connected to energy security in 2007. These authors criticize the use of those four factors and instead suggest that the questions posed by the general security theories should be used to theorize the concepts of energy security, that is, the specifications of security should answer at least the following questions: 1) security for whom? 2) security for which values? 3) from what threats? Regarding the question “Security for whom?” we need to note that asking this question means pointing to the ‘referent object’ of security. 37 In classic energy security studies time, it was usually the oil-importing industrial nations. But now this notion is important not only to the limited number of countries of the world, but nations of all levels of development, that “extract, import, export and use a variety of energy sources and carriers.” 38 Thus the A’s, for example, affordability in this case would mean a lot of different things for different actors: for oil exporting countries it would mean sufficiently high prices to keep up their economy, to developing countries – it would mean affordable price for energy sources, and if we take the end users – the persons using the energy, the question would be answered differently. In the paragraphs above we summarized the opinions of various actors on what the security of energy means to them. In the case of hybrid threats to energy security, we usually mean the security of the state which is threatened by deliberate actions of other states, thus the referent object of security in this case would be a particular state. Speaking about the second question “Security for which values?” , Cherp & Jewell specify this question for the energy security context and reformulate it as: “which energy security systems to protect?”. They introduce the term (or concept) ‘vital energy systems’, which are “those energy systems (energy resources, technologies and uses linked together by 34 NATO Brussels Summit Declaration, op. cit. 22. 35 “Because many NATO allies depend on Russian gas and oil, the resiliency of energy infrastructure plays an especially critical role in the common security of NATOmember nations.Therefore, identifying stable and reliable energy supplies, diversifying transport routes, establishing suppliers and energy resources, and understanding the interdependencies within energy networks are vitally important to increasing resilience against hybrid threats.” VERNER Duane, GRIGAS Agnia, PETIT Frederic. Assessing Energy Dependency in the Age of Hybrid Threats. The European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats. January 2019. https://www.hybridcoe.fi/ publications/assessing-energy-dependency-in-the-age-of-hybrid-threats/ [accessed 31 May 2019]. 36 CHERP Aleh, JEWELL Jessica. The concept of energy security: Beyond the four As. Energy Policy . 75 (2014), p. 416. 37 Ibid, p. 417. 38 Ibid.

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