Temporally Layered Emotional Politics: Understanding the European Union’s Exceptional Foreign Policy Reaction to Russia’s 2022 Invasion of Ukraine

Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine confronted the European Union (EU) with one of its gravest foreign-policy crises in decades. Recent scholarship has highlighted emotions as drivers of the EU’s response through at least three dynamics: emotional collective memory; norms regulating the (in)appropriate expression of emotions in certain contexts; and the personal feelings felt by diplomats and decision-makers. However, these emotional dynamics’ influences on action tendencies have mostly been studied separately, while their interaction remains both empirically and theoretically underdeveloped. We argue that the EU’s reaction to Russia’s aggression—including enlargement and the common security and defense policy—should be analyzed precisely through the interplay between these emotional dynamics, together with temporal, time horizons. In particular, that the EU’s foreign policy decisions reflect the interaction between: long-term emotional collective memories about World War II and post-war soviet occupation; the mid-term development of emotion norms of solidarity towards Ukraine together with anger towards Russia; and short-term interpersonal guilt-shame towards Baltic countries and Poland for not taking the Russian threat seriously enough, together with anxiety due to the USA’s disengagement from Europe’s security system. Indicatively, while EU and national officials quickly converged towards normatively displaying emotions like solidarity and calling for enlargement to Ukraine, other emotions like anger tended to fade away over time, which affected unity in decision making. However, revamped interpersonal anxiety due to American disengagement brought new elite cohesion around defense and security commitments. Methodologically, we draw on 22 interviews with EU officials and national delegation diplomats to EU, complemented with the analysis of EU-level speeches, statements and documents. Overall, the article theorizes EU crisis governance as temporally layered emotional politics whose interactions ultimately shape EU-level decision making.