The Return of the Repressed: The Colonial History of the EU's Geopolitical Turn

Peo Hansen

Journal of Common Market Studies, 2025, vol. 63, issue 5, 1420-1437

Abstract: This article examines the EU's current geopolitical turn: the push to have the EU embrace power politics and develop a ‘strategic autonomy’, both vis‐à‐vis global powers and its own ‘neighbourhood’. This turn is significant since it marks a shift away from what is said to be the post‐cold war EU's liberal approach to world affairs. By openly embracing ‘hard power’, Brussels is also severing the continuity between the present rhetoric and its founding narrative about the EU as an anti‐geopolitical peace project. In the first part, I argue that whilst the geopolitical turn has introduced a different rhetoric, this should not confuse analysts into believing that the post‐cold war EU was short of a geopolitical agenda. In the second part, I discuss the EU's current geopolitical turn in the context of the colonial policy it pursued in the 1950s, when large parts of colonial Africa were annexed to the European Economic Community (EEC). Here, I argue that the obliviousness that impedes the knowledge of the EU's colonial origins helps explain why the geopolitical turn today is seen as novel and poles apart from the EU's approach to geopolitics in the 1950s. What appears to be a break with the past, then, is in fact a reunion with the past, in the sense that the current EU leaders' open embrace of geopolitics follows in the footsteps of the EU founders. In the conclusion, I relate this to a theoretical discussion concerning the EU's quest for ‘strategic autonomy’, which, arguably, constitutes the most defining aspect of the geopolitical turn.

Date: 2025
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