Protean power Europe in the southern neighbourhood? EU in the face of migration and political crises

Abstract The European Union (EU) has recently faced consecutive, sudden and unexpected challenges of a large magnitude, such as the migration crisis, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine. Through an analysis of two key, sudden and unexpected relatively recent crises in the EU’s immediate southern neighbourhood—namely the 2015 migration crisis and the 2016 failed coup attempt in Turkey—this paper sheds light on whether the EU has generated protean power in response to key emergencies in its wider neighbourhood, and if so, how. Our analysis shows that when high uncertainty pertains to domestic governance of third countries in the neighbourhood, i.e. the military coup in Turkey, where the overall perceived risks are relatively low, the EU employs no form of protean power or resorts to limited forms of control power. In contrast, we see that protean power is generated in the more specific policy field of migration, where we observe radical uncertainty combined with high perceived risks to the EU. We also propose that control and protean power need to be seen as different, yet increasingly intertwined modes of governing unexpected emergencies by the EU.