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Geostrategies, geopolitics and ontological security in the eastern neighbourhood : the European Union and the 'New Cold War'
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Browning, Christopher S. (2018) Geostrategies, geopolitics and ontological security in the eastern neighbourhood : the European Union and the 'New Cold War'. Political Geography, 62 . pp. 106-115. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.10.009
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.10.009
Abstract
Recent years have seen the EU criticised for its naïve idealism, in particular in its failure to counter Russia’s increasingly assertive manoeuvres. While Russia is presented as an inherently geopolitical actor, the EU’s emphasis on a normative post-geopolitical agenda is depicted as a losing strategy. The EU, it is argued, must become ‘more geopolitical’ in what is presented as an emerging ‘new Cold War’. However, post-geopolitical depictions of the EU are problematic, but derive from an overly narrow conflation of geopolitics with modernist geopolitical practices. In contrast, the paper argues that the EU’s actions are no less impregnated with geopolitical visions aimed at ordering and organising the space beyond its borders, but also argues that the EU’s geopolitical visions – and the geostrategies adopted to implement them – are also underpinned by a need to preserve and protect the Union’s sense of ontological security. This connection between its geopolitical visions, geostrategies and sense of ontological security is important, as it means challenges to the former can generate considerable anxieties in regard to the latter; anxieties that need a response. The paper argues that the return of traditional geopolitical language can be understood in these terms, calming emerging anxieties by reaffirming a sense of order and stability in terms of an historically known set of coordinates. Although seductive, this move of (mis)recognising contemporary events in terms of historical analogy is also potentially problematic.
Introduction
Recently it has become common to depict the European Union (EU) as plagued by crisis, wracked by an apparent inability to respond effectively to a number of considerable challenges of both an internal and external nature. Internally the EU is plagued by economic woes, rising populism and a sense of democratic deficit that combined have weakened solidarity within the EU and fostered a certain amount of anti-EU sentiment. Externally the biggest challenge has come from a revanchist Russia emboldened enough to in 2014 annex Crimea and invade eastern Ukraine, in doing so precipitating a security crisis to which the EU struggled to respond (Toal 2017: 19; Youngs 2017: 5, 11). These challenges have material, organisational and political elements, but they are also profoundly ontological. They are ontological because according to EU self-narratives it should not be like this. The EU is
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Politics and International Studies | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Political Geography | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Elsevier Science Inc. | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 0962-6298 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | January 2018 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 62 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 106-115 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.polgeo.2017.10.009 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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