European Union in a new global era: defending the international order

This article explores how the European Union (EU) has responded to the shifting international order in the 2010s and 2020s, using strategic narratives as a conceptual framework. Historically, the EU has had two dominant strategic narratives: European integration as a peace project, during the Cold War, and the EU as a force for good in the 1990s and 2000s. The 2016 EU Global Strategy, the 2022 Strategic Compass and the ‘geopolitical European Commission’ were attempts to provide new strategic narratives, but failed the core test of identifying clear strategic goals and means by which these goals might be achieved. Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine and the second Trump administration have acted as clarifying moments, leading the EU to implement new policies in support of the principles of state sovereignty and open rules-based trade and in opposition to a world shaped by the crude exercise of power by great powers. As a strategic narrative, this approach may be described as ‘the EU as defender of international order’. In a world of an aggressive Russia, an unreliable and hostile America and an increasingly powerful China, the argument that the EU needs to defend core elements of the existing international order is compelling.