Forty Years of the Stockholm Document and the Geoeconomic Security Dilemma

Forty years ago, the Stockholm Document turned the political promise of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act into a more practical system of confidence-building. Amid the Cold War, Europe’s East and West did not disarm, abandon deterrence or begin to trust one another. Instead, they agreed that military competition could be made safer through prior notification, observation, information exchange and verification. The lesson was modest but durable: adversaries do not need trust to reduce uncertainty.

Once governments began to regard dependence as a national security risk, the organising principle changed. Efficiency gave way to resilience; “just in time” increasingly became “just in case”.

The problem is that one country’s resilience can look like another country’s preparation for decoupling. The second country then localises production, restricts exports or builds alternative networks, confirming the first country’s original fears. Each step may be rational in isolation; collectively they create a geoeconomic security dilemma in which everyone pays more to insure against everyone else.