{"title":"‘Europe and the Rest’ in Official EU Discourse: Legitimising ‘Geopolitical Europe’ Through the ‘Jungle’ Analogy and Beyond","authors":"Münevver Cebeci","doi":"10.1111/jcms.13770","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13770","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article critically assesses how the European Union (EU) constructs the identities of ‘EU-Europe’ and ‘the rest of the world’ to legitimise the formation of a ‘geopolitical Europe’. It draws on poststructuralist and postcolonial perspectives within the spirit of scholarly allyship, deconstructing texts produced by key EU officials – Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel and Josep Borrell – between 2019 and 2023. The article manifests how civilisational binaries are employed to justify the EU's transition from normative power to power politics. It problematises the ‘EU versus the rest of the world’ framing and, particularly, Borrell's ‘garden–jungle’ analogy, exposing their neocolonial underpinnings. Through an intertextual second reading, it shows how depicting the EU as a peaceful and civilised ‘garden’ and the rest of the world as a conflictual and disorderly ‘jungle’ reinforces civilisational hierarchies. The article argues that these binaries not only legitimise the EU's increasingly securitised foreign policy but also reproduce colonial-era tropes of the <i>mission civilisatrice</i>, perpetuating a Eurocentric worldview.</p>","PeriodicalId":51369,"journal":{"name":"Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies","volume":"63 5","pages":"1438-1459"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jcms.13770","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144897218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Contested Alliances: A Contrapuntal Reading of European (Global) Gender Agendas","authors":"Nora Fisher-Onar, David Gazsi, Sarah Wolff","doi":"10.1111/jcms.13773","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13773","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In and beyond Europe, pro-gender and anti-gender causes are gaining momentum. This article asks the following: <i>How do (anti-)gender agendas emerge within the European Union (EU), and how are they projected beyond the Union's borders?</i> These questions are addressed via a contrapuntal approach, which, we argue, can help to foster multi-directional learning in (gender) policy debates. Analytically, the method entails listening to plural voices in – and across – macro, meso and micro levels of analysis. Normatively, the method supports engagement of lesser heard voices. Applying the approach at the EU scale and vis-à-vis two case studies (Hungary and the Netherlands), we identify several, counter-intuitive patterns with implications for gender-based mobilisation: namely, that emphasis on inclusion in EU gender equality promotion, paradoxically, can lead to exclusion of a wider range of gender perspectives and that anti-gender mobilisation entails forms of co-option as well as exclusion.</p>","PeriodicalId":51369,"journal":{"name":"Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies","volume":"63 5","pages":"1528-1551"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144897623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decentring European Foreign Policy Analysis: Towards a Paradigmatic Shift","authors":"Stephan Keukeleire, Sharon Lecocq","doi":"10.1111/jcms.13766","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13766","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The article argues that considering Eurocentrism as a meta-paradigm helps scholars to be conscious about assumptions, simplifications and distortions that undermine scholars' abilities to analyse European foreign policy. The article integrates several conceptualisations of decentring that originate from both postcolonial and more mainstream scholarship. It explains how analytical limitations and simplifications can be overcome through various interrelated stages of a decentring approach, whilst avoiding recentring or merely ‘decentring by addition’. The article concludes by arguing for a widening of ‘allyship in diversity’ – not only amongst but also beyond critical approaches – by reaching out to more mainstream scholarship in order to increase the prospect of a paradigm shift in the analysis of European foreign policy.</p>","PeriodicalId":51369,"journal":{"name":"Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies","volume":"63 5","pages":"1481-1508"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144897492","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"EUropean Identity Construction After the Russian Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine: Dialogic (Re)construction of Self and Others","authors":"Kateryna Pishchikova","doi":"10.1111/jcms.13760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13760","url":null,"abstract":"<p>By conducting Bakhtinian dialogic discourse analysis, this article shows how the EU (re)constructs its sense of the Self vis-à-vis two constitutive Others – Russia and Ukraine – since the Russian full-scale invasion in February 2022. It argues that the EU has been able to renew its Self-image as a ‘peace project’ and a ‘normative power’, whilst also embracing more fully the idea of a ‘geopolitical’ EU. Its relations with Ukraine continue to be characterised by the ‘politics of ambiguity’, whereby Ukraine is kept in a liminal state despite its new role of a ‘frontier’ that contributes to EU security. The EU may be said to be facing a dilemma between solidarity and inclusion versus securitisation and re-bordering. In terms of identity construction, this denotes a tension between a Self that depends on securitised binaries and a Self that transcends this dialectic via a dialogic celebration of alterity.</p>","PeriodicalId":51369,"journal":{"name":"Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies","volume":"63 5","pages":"1571-1593"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144897232","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Geopolitics, (In)security and Resilience. A Feminist Critique of the EU's Engagement in Armenia After the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War","authors":"Laura Luciani","doi":"10.1111/jcms.13761","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13761","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article interrogates the EU's ‘geopolitical turn’ by examining its external engagement in Armenia after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and in the shadow of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Drawing on feminist approaches to geopolitics and post-socialist coloniality, it asks whose security is served by a ‘geopolitical’ EU in Armenia and how this is received by differently situated populations on the ground. Through fieldwork conducted in Armenia's Syunik province and beyond, the article unravels dominant notions of security, resilience and geopolitics in the EU's external action by showing how these are enacted and rewritten across multiple scales. The article finds that the EU's security and resilience-building engagement in Syunik serves to reproduce its own ‘geopolitical’ identity whilst simultaneously co-producing insecurities in and around Armenia. It foregrounds everyday practices, embodied experiences and intimate spaces as key sites where hegemonic security paradigms and neo-imperial rivalries are made and contested from the bottom-up.</p>","PeriodicalId":51369,"journal":{"name":"Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies","volume":"63 5","pages":"1594-1614"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jcms.13761","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144897177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Global Queer Agonism: Normative Theory of the European Union in Times of Dissensus Over LGBT Equality","authors":"Malte Breiding","doi":"10.1111/jcms.13758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13758","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In times of heightened dissensus over the liberal democratic order, normative theories of the EU need to adapt to be able to capture how the promotion and enforcement of values go hand in hand with their contestation. Research on global LGBT politics has shown that the promotion and enforcement of LGBT equality make possible and shape the anti-LGBT dissent it seeks to combat. Understood as a paradox of sexual integration, this article introduces a normative approach called Global Queer Agonism that utilises agonistic political theory and queer theory in assessments of the legitimacy of the EU's efforts to promote and enforce LGBT equality. Structured by two agonistic concepts, consensus and remainders, and supplemented by the theories of homonationalism, homocolonialism, homocapitalism and the concept of homonormativity, Global Queer Agonism puts into practice a theoretical allyship between agonism and queer theory in the normative assessment of the EU's global role.</p>","PeriodicalId":51369,"journal":{"name":"Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies","volume":"63 5","pages":"1460-1480"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jcms.13758","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144897795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards Allyship in Diversity? Critical Perspectives on the European Union's Global Role","authors":"Dimitris Bouris, Nora Fisher-Onar, Daniela Verena Huber","doi":"10.1111/jcms.13763","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13763","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This special issue (SI) foregrounds critical perspectives in studying the EU's global role, acknowledging their historical marginalisation within scholarship dominated by mainstream approaches. The project is theoretical with significant normative and practical implications, that is, for activism and policy-making. Our primary goal is to bring critical approaches into conversation, exploring their intersections, complementarities, but also creative tensions. A further goal is to consider prospects and challenges when it comes to engaging mainstream approaches. Towards these ends, in this introduction, we propose a novel prism onto international relations (IR) and its intersection with EU studies – an intervention picked up in rich, trans/inter-disciplinary perspective by the contributors to this SI. This prism is <i>allyship</i> which we theorise as a co-constitutive, multi-directional, relational and ever-unfolding transformative journey. Normatively and practically, our proposal of allyship is motivated by the challenge of persistent exclusion and violence towards diversity, and the growing backlash faced by all critical approaches to international affairs. At the same time, we probe possibilities for listening better across traditions, critical and mainstream alike, rather than succumbing to the roars of our respective echo chambers. Our perhaps modest but timely goal is to ‘fail better’ when it comes to understanding the multitude of ways that global politics, and the EU's role therein, can be read, studied and pursued.</p>","PeriodicalId":51369,"journal":{"name":"Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies","volume":"63 5","pages":"1393-1419"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jcms.13763","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144897794","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aid as Pacification: The Encroachment of Counterterrorism Clauses into the Aid Regime of the European Union in the Occupied Palestinian Territories","authors":"Mariam Salameh-Puvogel","doi":"10.1111/jcms.13762","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13762","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The article engages the European Union's (EU) implementation of counterterrorism clauses as part of its development aid regulations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). The point of departure for the research is the shift in the EU's policy for aid regulations in the OPT in 2019, when the EU began to gradually implement counterterrorism clauses in its grant contracts, a measure that sparked widespread protests amongst Palestinian non-governmental organisations (NGOs), who critiqued the clauses as an explicit attempt to further pacify civil society. Situated within the realms of postcolonial theory and critical security studies, the article draws on semi-structured interviews with staff and representatives of Palestinian NGOs in the OPT in order to unpack perspectives of civil society actors who interpret the policy as an illegitimate interference with their political self-determination, in particular the internationally recognised right to resist colonial subjugation. The conceptual framework of pacification – as an inconspicuous, diffuse form of violence within liberal governance aimed at suppressing resistance to the prevailing order – aligns closely with both perspectives on the ground and postcolonial thought. As such, the article elucidates tensions between an expanding European counterterrorism regime, increasingly permeating the sphere of development aid, and perspectives of Palestinian civil society actors who discern these policies as deeply rooted in colonial paradigms. Whilst exploring these tensions, the intricate relationship between postcolonial research and allyship lingers as an underlying notion. This premise assumes heightened relevance within the contemporary academic landscape in Europe, wherein scholarly investigations, which refuse simplistic vilifications of Palestinian resistance and instead seek a deeper engagement with local perspectives, are increasingly marginalised.</p>","PeriodicalId":51369,"journal":{"name":"Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies","volume":"63 5","pages":"1615-1637"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jcms.13762","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144897332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards a Critical Democracy Promotion Agenda? Liminal Allyship in EU–Tunisian Relations","authors":"Larbi Sadiki, Layla Saleh","doi":"10.1111/jcms.13756","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13756","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article reflects on the EU's thought and practice of democracy promotion in its Southern neighbourhood through a critical approach to allyship. This approach centres the demos', or Arab publics', yearnings for emancipation and their aspirations to dignified lives. The article proposes the notion of ‘liminal allyship’, neither taken for granted nor stable, but shaped by inequalities of power and resources within (post)colonial settings such as Tunisia. (Mis)matches between values and practices impact allyship even vis-à-vis a shared, declared goal like democratisation. To illustrate the argument empirically, the article will draw on interviews with Tunisian civil society activists and primary data from online and social media. The exploratory case study gauges Tunisian assessments of EU democracy promotion in times of a ‘democratic degeneration’ in Tunisia and of a geopolitical crisis between Europe and the Arab world triggered by the war in Gaza. Findings point to a possible turning point in this relationship of ‘liminal allyship’, which faces scepticism that is unprecedented since Tunisian democratisation took off in 2011.</p>","PeriodicalId":51369,"journal":{"name":"Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies","volume":"63 5","pages":"1552-1570"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144897304","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Return of the Repressed: The Colonial History of the EU's Geopolitical Turn","authors":"Peo Hansen","doi":"10.1111/jcms.13757","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13757","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the EU's current geopolitical turn: the push to have the EU embrace power politics and develop a ‘strategic autonomy’, both vis-à-vis global powers and its own ‘neighbourhood’. This turn is significant since it marks a shift away from what is said to be the post-cold war EU's liberal approach to world affairs. By openly embracing ‘hard power’, Brussels is also severing the continuity between the present rhetoric and its founding narrative about the EU as an anti-geopolitical peace project. In the first part, I argue that whilst the geopolitical turn has introduced a different rhetoric, this should not confuse analysts into believing that the post-cold war EU was short of a geopolitical agenda. In the second part, I discuss the EU's current geopolitical turn in the context of the colonial policy it pursued in the 1950s, when large parts of colonial Africa were annexed to the European Economic Community (EEC). Here, I argue that the obliviousness that impedes the knowledge of the EU's colonial origins helps explain why the geopolitical turn today is seen as novel and poles apart from the EU's approach to geopolitics in the 1950s. What appears to be a break with the past, then, is in fact a reunion with the past, in the sense that the current EU leaders' open embrace of geopolitics follows in the footsteps of the EU founders. In the conclusion, I relate this to a theoretical discussion concerning the EU's quest for ‘strategic autonomy’, which, arguably, constitutes the most defining aspect of the geopolitical turn.</p>","PeriodicalId":51369,"journal":{"name":"Jcms-Journal of Common Market Studies","volume":"63 5","pages":"1420-1437"},"PeriodicalIF":3.3,"publicationDate":"2025-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/jcms.13757","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144897348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}