Geostrategies, geopolitics and ontological security in the Eastern neighbourhood: The European Union and the ‘new Cold War’

Abstract

Recent years have seen the EU criticised for its naïve idealism, in particular in its failure to counter Russia's increasingly assertive manoeuvres. While Russia is presented as an inherently geopolitical actor, the EU's emphasis on a normative post-geopolitical agenda is depicted as a losing strategy. The EU, it is argued, must become ‘more geopolitical’ in what is presented as an emerging ‘new Cold War’. However, post-geopolitical depictions of the EU are problematic, but derive from an overly narrow conflation of geopolitics with modernist geopolitical practices. In contrast, the article argues that the EU's actions are no less impregnated with geopolitical visions aimed at ordering and organising the space beyond its borders, but also argues that the EU's geopolitical visions – and the geostrategies adopted to implement them – are also underpinned by a need to preserve and protect the Union's sense of ontological security. This connection between its geopolitical visions, geostrategies and sense of ontological security is important, as it means challenges to the former can generate considerable anxieties in regard to the latter; anxieties that need a response. The article argues that the return of traditional geopolitical language can be understood in these terms, calming emerging anxieties by reaffirming a sense of order and stability in terms of an historically known set of coordinates. Although seductive, this move of (mis)recognising contemporary events in terms of historical analogy is also potentially problematic.