European Union as a Geopolitical Actor: Aspirations towards an Empire or Fall into Insignificance

Abstract

This essay interrogates the European Union’s contested status as a geopolitical actor, tracing the tension between its founding self-conception as a “normative power” and its increasingly evident geopolitical actorness across internal and external domains. It examines three interlocking questions: first, the extent to which EU foreign policy and its professed values remain entangled with the imperial and colonial legacies of a minority of member states, producing a normative cleavage between Western and Central/Eastern Europe; second, whether soft power should be understood as an instrument of values or as a value in itself; and third, how the war in Ukraine has cast the EU in the role of “global conscience” while exposing the limits of that role as a substitute for effective foreign policy. Drawing on the geopolitical typology developed by Walters (2004) and Browning and Joenniemi (2008), the Westphalian, Imperial, and Neo-Medieval models, the essay argues that while the EU’s normative rhetoric remains Westphalian in aspiration, its actual practice increasingly conforms to the Imperial model of a core radiating diminishing influence toward its peripheries, leaving the polycentric Neo-Medieval alternative largely undesirable.