GEOPOLITICAL TURN OF THE EUROPEAN UNION: THE CONCEPTUAL REVOLUTION OR CONTINUATION OF THE TRADITION?

Abstract

The article focuses on the recent geopolitical turn in the EU policy. Conceptually it presupposes the introduction of two notions into the official discourse of Brussels – strategic sovereignty and strategic autonomy. This move caused ambivalent response: traditionally the EU denied geopolitical thinking, sovereignty and balance of power. Moreover, the very identity of the project was based on explicit opposition to those notions. The purpose of the article is to show that there is no contradiction between these two poles. Through the prism of critical geopolitics, the author studies the key EU foreign policy texts and reveals that the normative universalism of Brussels has always been expressed through a certain vision of political geography, namely, the spatially-temporal symbolic mapping. It contains three components. First, the metaphor of a «path» or a «way» that structures reality by placing phenomena and events one after another. Secondly, the model, which turns this path into an ideological vector. The EU presents itself as a model in the official discourse. Thirdly, the European Union places different countries and entire regions along this normative route. Geopolitical concepts of strategic sovereignty and autonomy do not contradict this pattern, but rather continue it at a new stage.