These Times are Different: The EU’s Temporal Coping with a Changing World

European integration is entering a period of major disruption and change. The re-election of Donald Trump and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have challenged EU foreign policy and long-standing assumptions about Europe as a normative power and a global frontrunner. Amid rising populism, unilateralism, and military conflicts, this paper asks: how does the EU cope with fundamental change? How do member states and EU representatives make sense of disruptive events through their narratives of Europe to sustain biographical continuity and guide political action? Drawing on insights from social psychology and the temporal turn in International Relations, the paper develops a theory of “temporal coping.” Its core assumption is simple: disruptive events must be “timed” to make sense and translate into policies. Depending on whether actors situate these events in the past, present, or future, they experience “their times” as progress, emergency, or acceleration. The resulting temporalities, in turn, shape the discursive repertoire of available political actions, ranging from preservation and restoration to transformation. The paper empirically illustrates this novel framework by analyzing the EU’s temporal coping with Russia’s war in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s (re-)election. Because both disruptions recur over time (Russia’s annexation of Crimea and full-scale invasion, and Trump’s first and second terms), it is possible to trace shifts in the EU’s foreign policy temporal discourse and to examine how these events are discursively woven together to make sense of “our times.” Preliminary findings indicate a shift from framing Russia’s aggression and US unilateralism as a concluded past or a short-term disruption of the present status quo toward future-oriented interpretations that treat both as signs of “a new geopolitical age.” These evolving temporal frames coincide with varied EU responses, ranging from short-term symbolic actions and routine sanctions to unprecedented emergency measures and long-term reforms. Building on this analysis, the paper argues that the concept of acceleration offers a more fitting temporal lens for understanding current dynamics in EU integration than the still-dominant frameworks of path dependency, crisis, or critical junctures. What makes these times different is not merely the disruption of an existing order but a widespread sense that what is at stake is not a return to an old normal but the emergence of a new one. Acceleration creates a distinct temporal playing field in which political actors must navigate dynamics such as temporal shaming and temporal peer pressure. These dynamics are likely to shape the EU’s present and future foreign policy. Understanding how the EU times – and thus copes with – disruption is therefore more important than ever, at a moment when Europe once again finds itself in a rapidly changing world.