By Floris Cooijmans
In 2019, new president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen (VDL), made headlines by proclaiming that her Commission will be a “geopolitical’’ one. She proposed that the EU should boost its role on the world stage. Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat said in an interview: ‘’Europe must learn quickly to speak the language of power’’. This new push for the EU to exert its power came at a time when Trump was still in charge of the US. His erratic foreign policy and open criticism of NATO likely played a role in triggering this geopolitical turning point.
What VDL means with ‘geopolitical’ is never made clear. In international relations the term is used to signify the influence of geographical features on politics, but in the media the term has become almost synonymous with ‘high politics’ which includes all matters which are vital or a threat to states such as warfare or international trade.
Taking this broader definition, one can see that the EU has not just recently ‘become geopolitical - it has been that from the very beginning.
The oldest predecessor of the EU, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was founded in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and aimed to make war between its member states, most importantly Germany and France "not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible". The prevention of war between the great powers of Europe, which had been fighting sporadically for centuries, was an aim which is geopolitical in the purest sense.
But these European unification plans did not come from nowhere. Throughout modern history, there have been discussions about the brotherhood of European nations in some form or another. ‘’A war between Europeans is a civil war.’’ is an often-cited quote attributed to the French writer Victor Hugo which illustrates that the idea of European unification is much older than its realisation through the ECSC/EC/EU.
Particularly in the Interbellum period there were many public debates on European unification, and in 1923 the Paneuropean Union was founded by Coudenhove-Kalergi whose aim was the creation of a unified European state. These discussions about the future geopolitical framework of Europe were taking place during a time several European countries still had expansive colonial empires. These had to be somehow incorporated in European integration. To solve this the concept of ‘Eurafrica’ was created. In the book by the same name, the post-colonial scholars Hansen and Jonsson dissect that Africa was at the heart of early European integration.
Other than other continents which had already decolonised, such as South America, Africa was not seen as suitable for independence. European economies relied on the exploitation of African resources. Furthermore, this view was also informed by racist ideologies, which supposed that ‘the black man is not fit to govern himself’, and it was up to the Europeans to keep order in Africa. Indepence of the last major European colonies made the European powers worried about their position in the world; without their empires, they would merely be relatively small European nation states, with much less influence and power in world affairs.
Concerns of this kind by national governments seeped into European institutions as well. To give an example: Algeria, France’s largest African colony was an incorporated part of the European Economic Community (EEC), the institution which came after the ECSC and would later become the EU. For the other colonial possessions still under European control at the time Article 131 of the Treaty of Rome, which founded the EEC, outlines that they will have a ‘special relationship’ with the Community, which would ensure their subjugation and continued colonial exploitation.
But one does not need to look so far into the history of the EU to find proof of its geopolitical nature. One of the longest held foreign policies of the EU is that of enlargement. When countries align themselves enough with European standards when it comes to, amongst other, economy and rule of law they are permitted entry into the EU, and reap the benefits which come with that, such as access to the Common Market and subsidies from Brussels. The EU has become such a big economic player that virtually all countries in Europe are either actively seeking membership or have a special agreement with the EU which gives them access to the almost 450 millions consumers which are part of the Common Market.
Enlargement is also inherently tied to geography, which puts the ‘geo’ in geopolitics; Morocco’s application to join the EC was a priori rejected as it is not considered a ‘’European country’’. Russia also justified its repeated invasion of Ukraine by seeing EU enlargement as the bloc ‘encroaching’ on it.
Enlargement also helps the geopolitical role of the EU in world affairs, as with the addition of every country, the population, size of the GDP and landmass the EU represents increases, and with it, its diplomatic clout. It is hard to imagine the EU being invited to summits like the G7 if they represented only a fraction of the member states they have now. They are only invited because they are seen as an important geopolitical player.
Furthermore, there are other areas which might not be top of mind when thinking about ‘geopolitics’ but have a major impact such as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) . For a long time the CAP was the largest EU expense in a bid to stave off food insecurity. Research has shown however, that this scheme has had a large global influence amongst others, on African agricultural markets. Another example is the ‘’Brussels effects’’, in which regulatory standards set by the EU are adopted as near universal standards, impacting business and regulation around the globe, once again strengthening the geopolitical position of the EU as the global standard setter.
Think tank reports and opinion pieces by foreign policy analysts often point to the common vaccine procurement scheme during the Covid-19 pandemic and the EU response to full-scale invasion of Ukraine as examples of how the EU is slowly waking up from its ‘geopolitical slumber’. This view, however, ignores that the EU has always been geopolitical.
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