Threats and Awakening

The 2024 ACELG conference offers a multi-disciplinary reflection upon the nature of the security threats that Europe faces and the meanings and merits of Europe’s ‘geopolitical awakening’. It wishes to better understand what the awakening entails, how it is reflected in various sub-fields of EU law and policy, what the costs of it are, and what must change in the EU if we deem the said awakening desirable. The conference also welcomes the questioning of the notions of threats and awakening as useful frames to understand the current state of EU affairs.

EU Law was designed for problems internal to the EU

The motivation for the conference is rooted in the observation that the study of EU law has in the last decades been predominantly inward-looking. Even though European integration, as the post-war project aimed at maintaining peace in Europe, has always had a distinctive geopolitical pedigree, questions about Europe’s geopolitics, its role in the world, its security in the face of external/global threats, have stayed at the periphery of the study of EU law. EU Law was produced for and around problems largely internal to the EU – most notably to deal with nationalist impulses of various form and their legal manifestations as obstacles to free movement. As much as it may be a trite expression, European integration has been indeed a peace project – unconcerned by the possibility of war and more generally unwilling to make geopolitical rivalry a driver of its action. In this context, a sentiment about the self-sufficiency of the EU also prevailed in popular debates and the everyday experience of EU citizens. All this, to be sure, in sharp contrast with Europe’s well documented dependencies - military on the US, energy on Russia.

Europe’s ‘geopolitical awakening’

No matter what its faults and merits, the above self-conception of the EU was shattered by the brutal Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. The war is reversing the relationship between core and periphery in the concerns that animate the EU and its law. Considerations about security, external threats, and Europe’s power become central to the study of the EU and its law. The shifts above are in line with what Luuk van Middelaar has called Europe’s ‘geopolitical awakening’, by observing traces of it, even before the war in Ukraine, in the Union’s posture during the pandemics and its dealing with growing Chinese assertiveness.

The said ‘awakening’ is visible in many fields of EU law and policy, as they are in the process of re-articulating their concerns, goals, instruments, and language for what may emerge as a new historical phase in which Europe puts security vis a vis external threats at the center of its agenda. ‘European sovereignty’, ‘security’, ‘resilience’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘power’ gain space in the policy language of Europe, which may anticipate more profound shifts and ruptures. Traces of ‘awakening’ are also visible in European societies. European citizens, albeit not without swaths of reluctance, start to understand their destinies to be tied to those of the Ukrainians. In the Baltics and Poland, but possibly more broadly, active involvement of Europeans in the war may not be seen any longer as a pure theoretical possibility.

There are, to be sure, wide empirical and normative disagreements about the scope of Europe’s geopolitical awakening, about what it means, whether it is sufficient, or desirable at all. Many object that the EU’s engagement with questions of security and geopolitics is still too hesitant – Europe has either no structures or not the political will or language required to truly awaken. Others question the novelty of the threats the EU faces: in Europe’s periphery, in the western Balkans, for example, war has been for a long time a very tangible reality; and for some within Europe, questions of survival have been everyday concerns, irrespective of geopolitics. Others still warn against the dangers of framing most policy issues as issues of security.