The European Commission’s Geoeconomic Expert Groups: Crafting New Spaces for Geoeconomic Policymaking?

One of the most consequential outcomes of Ursula von der Leyen’s first mandate as Commission President has been the EU’s “geoeconomic turn”. Its implications in terms of the EU’s geoeconomic policy toolbox, discursive shifts, (geo)political drivers, and rebalancing and redirection of the process of European integration have been widely studied. Significantly less research has focused on the internal transformations of the EU state apparatus and the policymaking procedures which the geoeconomic turn engendered. Therefore, this paper examines the role and functioning of three newly developed “geoeconomic” expert groups which have been set up by the European Commission in recent years, but have been overlooked so far. Using expert interviews and the analysis of expert groups’ documents this paper focuses on three expert groups – on outbound investment, on restrictive measures and extra-territoriality, and the Global Gateway Business Advisory Group. We argue that by crafting these new geoeconomic expert groups, the European Commission gave itself the needed space for geoeconomic policymaking. Indeed, for the technocratically-driven and neoliberally oriented European Commission, the need to become more geoeconomic required a new level of information exchange as well as coordination with Member States and corporate actors in both devising, fine-tuning, legitimating, and implementing policies from the geoeconomic toolbox. The establishment of these expert groups shows how the European Commission is increasingly reliant and encroaching on the EU member states’ policy terrain and, therefore, needs both their expertise and advance buy-in through the creation of new policymaking frameworks. On the corporate side too, the expert groups feed into the Commission increasing reliance on businesses, not just for concrete knowledge and material input, but also for an image of inclusivity (“stakeholders on board”). We conclude by reflecting on what this change in policymaking implies for the EC’s democratic legitimacy and lobbying processes inside the EU.