Embedded geopoliticization: The EU's global trade strategy in an age of challenged multilateralism

This article develops the concept of “embedded geopoliticization” to capture the European Union’s (EU) evolving trade strategy amid the deepening crisis of the World Trade Organization (WTO). While the EU has long defined itself as a champion of rules-based, multilateral trade governance, it has simultaneously undergone a pronounced geopolitical and geoeconomic turn. We argue that these two forces - support for multilateralism and the drive toward geopoliticization - are not inherently in tension but increasingly intertwined. To assess the empirical plausibility of this conceptualization, we employ a mixed-methods strategy. First, a text-as-data analysis of over 15 years of EU trade-related communications (2010–2025) traces how the EU discursively positions itself vis-à-vis the WTO and alternative cooperation formats. The empirical strategy uses large language models, with human-in-the-loop validation, to classify EU's communication regarding its stance towards institutionalized cooperation on trade as well as overall framing of trade as a policy issue. Second, we qualitatively assess key policy documents, official statements, and more than 40 elite interviews with WTO officials and diplomats to analyze the EU’s changing strategy. Our findings show that the EU’s trade strategy reflects predominantly a logic of geopoliticization embedded within multilateralism. Even its most “WTO-adverse” actions are framed as replicating multilateral principles in alternative institutional contexts. This embedded geopoliticization defines a distinctive, hybrid strategy in an era of challenged multilateralism and protectionist pressures. Methodologically, the paper illustrates how text-as-data techniques complement qualitative research in assessing the empirical plausibility of a novel concept.