This paper examines the concepts of cyber politics and cyber-enabled hybrid warfare. It pays specific attention to the vulnerabilities of modern Western societies from a strategic-political perspective. The paper concludes that instead of cyber politics as such, a new kind of politics is needed – hybrid politics. Hybrid politics will be presented as a potentially winning concept for European security.

Key Points

• Issues related to cyberspace and its uses have risen to the highest levels of international politics, creating an area and discipline known as cyber politics.
• Protecting critical infrastructure and services from cyber threats is a complicated matter.
• The cyber domain is a central part of modern hybrid warfare, and malicious cyber-technical and cyber-psychological threats have both increased.
• Hybrid politics is a useful concept to describe both the importance of a holistic approach and the nature of high politics in the modern security reality.
• Hybrid politics is constantly changing the modern political process.
• The European Union (EU) should primarily understand hybrid politics as a potentially “winning concept” and take active steps to implement and sustain this understanding.