Reordering the European energy hegemony: war, markets and ideology

Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine disrupted the traditional gas relationship between Europe and Russia and triggered a crisis for EU energy security and climate ambitions. Understanding how the European energy hegemony is being reordered is key for assessing the EU's future capacity to act as a cohesive geopolitical and climate leader. Using a qualitative, interpretive political economy approach grounded in Gramscian theory to analyse some of the most affected member state, we identify four distinct trajectories of hegemonic adaptation to the immediate aftermath of the crisis: Germany's contested ideological restructuring as its traditional leadership weakened; Poland's pre-emptive counter-hegemonic rise; Hungary's resistant alignment with Russia; and Latvia's rapid ideological break from Russian energy despite structural vulnerability. The findings demonstrate that energy transitions within the EU are determined not only by material interests but by domestic political struggles over legitimacy and regional leadership. Using Gramscian theory the article provides a novel account of how hegemonic reordering unfolds unevenly inside the EU and argues that the resulting fragmentation introduces challenges for decarbonisation and for Europe's wider geopolitical coherence as the war continues to reshape the continent's energy order.