This monograph analyzes the EU’s geopolitical encounters with key neighbors and global actors, examining adaptations across security, defense, diplomatic, market, trade and investment realms. It explores the EU’s response to threats posed by waning Western hegemony and how it protects its liberal zone amid contestations in a post-liberal order.
Employing a geopolitical framework, the book examines the EU’s geopolitical actorness and code through its historical development, integration and enlargement, analyzing EU recalibration amidst imperial and adversarial codes from aspiring and great powers. By examining EU relations with Turkey, Russia, China and the United States, it explores how the EU refines its geopolitical code to address challenges from major players. The book assesses the EU’s foreign policy adaptation to changing circumstances, protecting vital interests while securing its global position and providing a case study of applied geopolitics. The main battlefields explored include territory demarcation, ordering preferences, geopolitical space-making and power projection, capturing contestations to the EU liberal order. The empirical discussion evolves in three cycles: internal EU geopolitics, regional Eurasian geopolitics (Russia and Turkey), and contestations with the United States and China, tracing geopolitical conundrums in the post-liberal order.
This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and advanced students of geopolitics, strategic studies, foreign policy, international relations, EU studies and diplomacy.