The European Union’s geopolitical turn has transformed trade, investment, industrial, energy, technology and security policies. Yet research has concentrated mainly on EU institutions, policy instruments and relations among states. This Workshop investigates what lies beneath these macro-level developments: the preferences, perceptions and mobilization of citizens, parties, firms and organized interests. It examines how geopolitical considerations enter domestic politics, how micro- and meso-level actors shape EU action, and how EU policies feed back into societal preferences, party competition and interest-group strategies. While centred on Europe, it welcomes comparisons that clarify what is distinctive about the EU.
Scholarship increasingly characterizes the EU as a geopolitical or geoeconomic actor. Existing research has mapped new instruments of economic security and strategic autonomy and explained their institutional development and external deployment. Far less is known about their domestic political foundations. This omission matters because the durability and effectiveness of geopolitical policies depend on citizens’ acceptance of their costs, parties’ representation and framing of geopolitical choices, firms’ adaptation, and the mobilization of organized interests. The Workshop addresses this gap through the concept of geopoliticization: the process through which geopolitical considerations gain importance relative to other economic and political considerations in actors’ preferences and strategies. This approach avoids treating geopolitics as an exclusively state-level phenomenon and enables analysis of bottom-up, top-down and interactive causal pathways linking domestic actors to EU policy. It also confronts observational equivalence: measures justified through security, sovereignty or resilience may instead reflect protectionism, distributive conflict, differences in Global Value Chain integration across economic sectors, or conventional partisan and interest-group politics. By connecting research on EU geopolitics with the domestic politics of European integration and international political economy, the Workshop will explain whose preferences geopolitical policies reflect, how supportive and opposing coalitions form, and when Europe’s geopolitical turn becomes politically sustainable. Selective comparison with other political systems will help identify which domestic foundations are distinctive to the EU’s multilevel order and which reflect more general responses to geopolitical competition.
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1: How do geopolitical considerations shape actor preferences on EU external economic policies?
2: How do political parties handle distributive consequences of strategic autonomy and economic security?
3: How do firms and organized interests adapt to, support, resist the EU’s geopolitical initiatives?
4: Through which pathways are micro- and meso-level preferences connected to policy outcomes in the EU and elsewhere?
5: Can research distinguish geopoliticization from politicization and distributive or partisan conflict?
1: Public opinion on strategic autonomy, economic security, external dependence and the costs of resilience.
2: Party competition, ideology and the framing of geopolitical choices in Europe.
3: Firm preferences and adaptation to geopolitical risk, sanctions, de-risking and supply-chain reconfiguration
4: Business, trade unions, civil-society organizations and advocacy coalitions in geopolitical policymaking.
5: Domestic coalitions for or against EU trade, investment, industrial, defence, energy & technology policies.
6: Bottom-up, top-down and interactive links between societal actors, national governments and EU institutions
7: Distributional conflict, policy feedback and the political sustainability of Europe’s geopolitical turn
8: Comparative analyses identifying what is distinctive about the EU & addressing observational equivalence
