Catalytic Power and the EU’s Geoeconomic Turn in the Global Energy Transition

Scholarly and policy debates on the geopolitical turn of the European Union (EU) and its growing reliance on geoeconomic instruments are rapidly expanding. This is particularly evident in the fields of energy and climate, where a range of internal and external challenges is pushing the EU to rethink its traditional market-oriented and liberal approach to navigate the global energy transition and address vulnerabilities along clean energy supply chains. However, existing research still struggles to conceptualize and empirically map these developments, especially given that the EU continues to differ from the traditional actors—namely nation-states—that typically deploy geoeconomic tools. While existing studies have documented the emergence of several EU defensive geoeconomic instruments—both inducement-based (e.g., the Green/Clean Deal Industrial Plan, the European Chips Act, and the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) and sanction-based (e.g., the FDI Screening Regulation, the Anti-Coercion Instrument, and the Foreign Subsidies Regulation)—as well as some offensive instruments grounded in sanctioning logics (e.g., the International Procurement Instrument), they tend to overlook offensive inducement-based tools. Yet these instruments already constitute an important, albeit understudied, component of the EU’s evolving statecraft toolkit. This paper leverages the notion of catalytic power to address this conceptual gap and to offer a novel perspective on the EU’s geoeconomic approach in the areas of energy and climate. I first discuss the advantages of the catalytic power framework compared to existing approaches, highlighting how it illuminates the institutionalization of the EU’s offensive inducement-based instruments aimed at co-opting other actors. I then apply this framework empirically to examine the emerging external dimension of the EU’s clean industrial policy, focusing on green initiatives linked to the Global Gateway Strategy and on the development and functioning of innovative tools such as the Trans-Mediterranean Energy and Clean Tech Cooperation Initiative and the Clean Trade and Investment Partnerships. The conclusion reflects on the potential and limits of this new layer of the EU’s international posture in the context of intensifying global rivalry between the United States and China.