Why the EU is a geopolitical power : wartime enlargement, integration, and reform
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1350-1763; 1466-4429
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Journal of European public policy, 2025, Vol. 32, No. 12, pp. 2862-2885
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ANGHEL, Veronica, Why the EU is a geopolitical power : wartime enlargement, integration, and reform, Journal of European public policy, 2025, Vol. 32, No. 12, pp. 2862-2885 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/93820
Abstract
The European Union is undergoing strategic redefinition through wartime conditions and shifting global orders, seeking to position itself as a geopolitical power. Enlargement and deeper integration are increasingly framed as instruments to achieve EU geopolitical goals. Since 2019, EU leaders have embraced the language of power and strategy, a shift accelerated by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Yet it remains unclear how the EU – an actor without a unified national interest or classic statehood – can operationalise a geopolitical agenda grounded in traditionally state-centric logics. How is the EU achieving power-maximising goals beyond its borders? Building on the contributions to this special issue, this article argues that neither realist nor critical geopolitics sufficiently capture the EU’s hybrid geopolitical practice. Instead, it advances a framework of relational geopolitics to explain how the EU simultaneously pursues deterrence – a classic geopolitical move – and constructs a broader ‘security crisis space’ grounded in spatial complexity, local agency, and the co-production of order – a strategy best described through the filter of relationality. Enlargement is central to this approach, functioning both as a tool of influence and as a mechanism for reshaping the EU’s strategic identity under wartime conditions.
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Published online: 22 September 2025