The European Union and critical legal cartography : old geopolitics, worn geopoetry and the return of geopower

Abstract

The European Union (EU) arose, in purpose, to undo the legacy of European geopolitics. Over decades, the EU has attempted to disrupt, or ambitiously transform, how its constituent communities “imagine” the space and boundaries of the Union’s geography. Yet, some 30 years since the Maastricht Treaty, old geopolitics manifests a distinct inertia over the mental maps of EU policy-makers and EU legal scholarship generally. For instance, should one query the EU’s cartography, it is likely an old geopolitical grammar conditions how policy-makers and scholars “map” and see the Union’s boundaries: 27 members, spanning 4,233,255 km2, and comprising a population of 447 million. Obscured is how the EU has generated a transnational and performative geography, with novel boundaries of rule that operate differently in quality and scale. In a nutshell, cartographic perceptions in EU policy-making and scholarship have rarely ventured beyond the terms of statist geography, or the worn geopoetry of “shared” or “pooled” sovereignty between Member States. This state of cartographic perception is curious, since the EU has been a geo-institutional project created to disrupt the traditional mentality of geopolitics and, further still, expand horizons of imagined social spaces, boundaries, and belonging(s).