A comparative study of memory and emotion in the EU and NATO enlargement decisions after the war in Ukraine

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU granted candidacy status to Ukraine and Moldova, and NATO decided to expand to Finland and Sweden. Both enlargement decisions have triggered various responses among the Allies in NATO (for example Turkey, a NATO ally but not an EU member) and EU member states (the Netherlands and Austria) for different reasons. Nonetheless, in the face of membership requests, both organizations managed to adopt a united position in a very short period of time. How did these two organizations ensure internal unity concerning the decision to enlarge? Which emotions and whose emotions drove the decision to enlarge? What has been the role of memory and (selective) remembrance in the adoption of these decisions? What has been the interaction between these memories and the emotional politics that led to these enlargement decisions? By shedding light on both the processes of emotional obligation construction and the institutional protagonists’ strategies to promote a dominant narrative about who belongs in Europe, the paper brings a political psychology perspective to the enlargement processes of international institutions. While this question has been extensively studied mainly by rationalist and constructivist accounts, the role of emotions in the explanation of international institutions’ decisions to accept new members has been largely neglected (for an exception see Terzi, 2021). This paper presents a comparative study of the EU and NATO’s simultaneous decisions regarding their enlargements after the start of the war in Ukraine. Drawing on the emotions literature in IR, and sociology of emotions (Stets and Turner, 2005; Frijda, 2007), we focus on the ‘politics of emotional obligation’ which established the shared normative stance among the members of these institutions concerning the enlargement decision. The paper firstly analyses the historicity of emotions, in particular the referral to history, and what is being commemorated in these decisions. Secondly, building on our earlier work on norms and emotions in European Foreign Policy (Terzi, Gürkan & Palm 2021), we study the obligation by the member states to experience – feel – certain appropriate emotions in certain situations faced by the community. While doing this, we not only look at what the ‘feeling rules’ for member states are, but also at how these feeling rules are being created and used by institutional mechanisms towards reaching decisions based on a consensus to enlarge. The data for the article come from the comparative qualitative content analysis alongside an emotion discourse analysis based on all the official statements, declarations and the official decisions adopted by both the EU and NATO.