Description
There has been a proliferation of studies of the EU’s ‘geoeconomic turn’. These more or less take for granted that the EU’s trade policy orientation has fundamentally shifted under the von der Leyen Commission Presidency, from an emphasis on multilateralism and open markets to greater unilateralism and selective protectionism. This paper argues not that there has not been such a shift, but rather that we should understand it as fundamentally performative – in two senses. First, writing about the phenomenon within the academy and amongst European think tanks has done a lot to bring the referent object into effect: theory is constitutive of the perceived reality. Second, and while not claiming that geopolitical concerns are irrelevant in EU foreign economic policymaking, the paper homes in on two of the EU’s new unilateral trade policy instruments (the investment screening mechanism and the anti-coercion instrument) to argue that being seen to act in a ‘geoeconomic way’ for an external (trade policy rivals) and internal audience (Member States/the European Parliament) is secondary to the actual practice of geoeconomics. The instruments themselves are broadly dissuasive and defensive, with some reluctance within the European Commission to put them into effect. What is new about the ‘geoeconomic turn’ is not so much the focus on geopolitical concerns, which was there before, but the desire to brand these measures explicitly as such. The paper concludes with a call for EU Studies to more critically interrogate the (self-)narration of European integration.
