The EU in the new geopolitical context: past and future challenges

Snowfall in Brussels. Photo: Alexandros Michailidis / Shutterstock

Long before Trump’s second presidency and the war in Ukraine, the world’s geopolitical and geo-economical turn was already taking shape. Russia was signalling its intentions in Europe even before its invasions of Georgia and Crimea. This was also a period of big Russian construction investments, which aimed to connect with trade partners in Asia and the Middle East and strengthen energy infrastructure around the world through the Nord Stream projects. No major legal consequences took place. China took another approach by significantly investing in the Maritime Silk Road (MSR) to increase trade route options. The aim was to bypass trade choke points, and to take leadership in port infrastructure. Beijing has managed successfully to achieve this goal. China was also determined to become a global innovative powerhouse by 2020, to invest in R&D, and to secure its global capital investments through foreign-policy capital projects, including in Central and Eastern Europe through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This also meant cyber infiltration of big-tech social media, including the Chinese-owned app TikToK. The country has subsequently been testing how far it can go in this battle for geopolitical control. It is not a surprise that nowadays this data is (mis)used in voter manipulation, which has been evident in the cases of Georgia, Moldova, Romania, and most probably the French and German elections.

In other parts of the world, a different geo-economic strategy was also taking place. In 2013, the non-governmental environmental organization Greenpeace alerted us to the dangers of Arctic oil drilling by the Russian authorities. The group also protested particularly against Gazprom’s operations. This however fell off the radar of the media and the mechanisms of international law. After Arctic shipping increased 37 per cent over the past decade, the US, Russia and China turned their eyes to the new northern shipping routes that pass alongside Greenland. Moreover, under his new presidency, Trump has expressed his interest in buying Greenland. This is an attempt to get access to untapped mineral resources such as iron ore, lead, gold, rare earth elements, uranium and oil.

The quest for resources however does not stop there. The Western Balkans also have critical raw materials, such as lithium in Serbia. These are essential for the EU’s green transition. The recent massive protests in Serbia have become a citizen’s revolt in favour of the country’s democratic credentials against environmental damage, corruption and the government’s economic interests. This, however, does not cause a lot of trouble for the governmental executives. They see the situation as leverage for negotiating with the EU, particularly regarding their accession process. They will make clear Chinese or Russian offers, which could prove more attractive than European values or objectives. This once again confirms the major risks connected to the lack of the functionality of the rule of law and international law in general.

With all these alerts, European governments have however failed to recognize these signals accordingly and take significant steps to reduce this strong appetite for a new shift in geopolitics and geo-economics. Mario Draghi’s recent report recognized that the EU must catch up with international competitors. After all, it was only in 2024 when the French President Macron also admitted that the “EU is mortal and it can die.” This once again raised the question of why is the EU always surprised? Many answers can be found in the EU’s institutional design, its slow bureaucratic apparatus, and the failure of traditional party politics to adapt to the new globalized context. But not all of them. Some of them are related to ignorance, which in this new context is not a bliss. Nowadays, EU member states from different regions are receiving wake-up calls, especially from Poland, Finland, Sweden and the Baltic states. These countries are saying that the EU must resist total reliance on the United States’ leadership in NATO and that European countries need to rapidly build up their military capabilities.

To achieve this, the EU will have to strengthen the collective capacities that exist between the governments and societies in its east and west. It will also have to cooperate jointly concerning common threats and identify how to build a new strategy for confronting rising geopolitical and geo-economic challenges in the future. It will also mean that decision-makers will have to revisit some of the EU’s past choices concerning the “united in cultural diversity” model it has promoted since the early 1990s. Back then, the EU had a clearer vision of what sort of Europe it wanted citizens to live in. This somewhat got lost in translation over the years. If such cooperation takes place in practice, then maybe there will be a chance for addressing the shortcomings of the EU’s institutional design and the weakness of its decision-making processes. The negative part of this story is that this is only the beginning of many challenges for the EU, as well as the bloc’s citizens. The positive part of the story is that all of these international actors are somewhat vulnerable to economic and political dependencies. In a very complicated way, they are all dependent on each other in this global economy. This means that political will really can have the final word. However, in order for political will to start having an effect and for the EU to reinvent its place in the new context, the rule of law and particularly international law will have to start functioning. Moreover, political leaders will have to start acknowledging the collective voices of the many, rather than the few.

Emilija Tudzarovska is Assistant Professor in European Politics at Charles University, Prague and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences. She has previously worked for the British Embassy in Skopje and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. She is also an expert member of the Global Initiative Network against corruption, headquartered in Geneva.

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EU, Europe, geopolitics, multipolar world