The European Union’s Geopolitical Quest for Northern Space

Ministers of Foreign Affairs from several Arctic and non-Arctic states discussed international cooperation in the Arctic during the EU-Arctic Forum in Umeå, Sweden on 3 October 2019. Photo: European Union

Ever since 2008, the European Union and its various institutions have issued 10 distinct Arctic policy statements with the aim to create a coherent and integrated EU Arctic Policy. Three communications by the European Commission, three related conclusions by the Council of the European Union and four resolutions by the European Parliament.

The developed Arctic policy toolkit rests on a broad foundation, continuously highlighting the various elements on why the EU should be engaged in the Arctic, on what it can offer and how it would cooperate within the existing Arctic regime. The policy aims at boosting the EU’s profile in the region and to reconcile external/foreign, cross-border and internal issues, including fisheries, research, climate change, maritime transportation, and regional development, all eventually bound together under one geographical label (‘the Arctic’)

In a recent article for Geopolitics, we analysed the EU’s Arctic endeavour from a criticial geopolitics’ perspective, questioning the EU’s geopolitical quest for northern space. Interested in reading the article after having checked out the abstract below?

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Over the last decade(s), the European Union (EU) has established itself as geopolitical actor seeking to actively engage in the spatial ordering of its neighbourhoods. In order to better understand the existing geopolitical nature of the EU, this article addresses the question of the EU’s decade-long endeavour to construct legitimacy in its Northern Neighbourhood; an area often neglected in discussions about the EU’s geopolitical role. By examining its Arctic involvement between 2008 and 2018, this article enquires into the EU’s broader role as an international actor with an evolving geopolitical identity. Over the last decades, the EU has exhibited geopolitical ambitions alongside its own conceptualisation of world order, rule of law and good governance. This article establishes a clearer picture on how the EU as an amalgamation of its various institutions has tried to impose these geopolitical ambitions on a neighbouring region that itself experiences a manifold change in the early twentieth-first century. It gets to the conceptual bottom of what exactly fashioned the European Union with geopolitical agency in the Arctic region – internally and externally. It eventually scrutinises the EU’s quest of northern space.