The Geopoliticisation of the EU’s Polity: Exploring Institutional Power Shifts

The aspiration of the EU to pursue a geopolitical agenda has raised both interest and scepticism within the academic and policy community. The ability to adopt and implement an ambitious geopolitical agenda largely depends on the institutional machinery that is to shape, decide and implement such policies. In the EU, this process is complicated due to the division of competencies between the national and European levels as well as the different modes of decision-making in various areas of EU external action. Instrumentalising the EU’s economic, industrial, environmental, digital, or budgetary policies to support foreign policy objectives may thus require adaptation of — or at least adaptive pressures to- the existing polity. While existing scholarship has focused on studying the impact of geopoliticisation on the political discourse and the policies emerging in the EU, its transformative impact on the EU’s institutions has only been cursorily addressed. In this paper, we advocate for the development of a comprehensive research agenda that seeks to understand the institutional impacts of geopoliticization on the European Union’s structures. To do so, we provide a conceptual framework tracing how power shifts in the EU’s institutions. We distinguish between geopoliticization’s inter-and intra-institutional effects as well as the horizontal and vertical shifts of power it initiates. We support this framework through an exploration into the decision-making and implementation of a series of geopolitical instruments.