European Union’s “Aircraft Carriers”? : Are the Overseas Countries And Territories (OCTs) and Outermost Regions (ORs) Willing to Promote EU's Global Geopolitical Interests?

Three current European Union (EU) member states (Denmark, France, and the Netherlands) have Overseas Countries and Territories (OCTs), which are technically outside the Union. These 13 OCTs (Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, French Polynesia, French Southern and Antarctic Lands, Greenland, New Caledonia, Saba, Saint-Barthelemy, Saint Eustatius, Sint Maarten, Saint Pierre et Miquelon, Wallis and Futuna) are the closest non-members of the EU, while being part of EU member states. Three EU member states (France, Portugal, and Spain) have 9 Outermost Regions (ORs), which are technically part of the EU territory: French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte, Reunion Island and Saint-Martin, Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands. Within the framework of research on external governance (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig 2009), this chapter explores the question: Does the EU use the ORs and the OCTs to promote its geopolitical influence in the Atlantic, Caribbean, Indian and the Pacific regions? It hypothesizes that the EU uses its influence in the ORs and the OCTs to promote its goals in these regions, when there is alignment with the foreign policy and geopolitical interests of France, Spain, and Portugal for the ORs and Denmark, France, the Netherlands for the OCTs. This chapter expands the very limited research done on the OCTs and the ORs (Kochenov 2011; Adler-Nissen and Gad 2012; Freeman 2019) within EU literature. There is an “information deficit” about the EU-ORs/OCTs subject. ORs and OCTs seem to be almost an “afterthought” for EU bureaucrats and scholars alike. If they are discussed at all, these places are most of the time included in discussions about sovereignty (Adler-Nissen and Gad 2012), or judicial aspects (Kochenov 2011). Discourse analysis is employed to analyze data from EU treaties, EU policy documents which impact ORs and OCTs, and OCTs/ORs documents regarding geopolitical issues.