Keywords

The Russian attack on Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and the ensuing war has challenged a number of established narratives and convictions, not only for the global order, but also for the European Union (EU) and its Member States (Knodt and Wiesner 2023b; Chaban et al. 2019; Miskimmon et al. 2017). The new era (`Zeitenwende’) that German Chancellor Scholz claimed for the EU means the facing of a new reality. There is war in Europe—for the first time since World War II, excluding the Balkan War in the 1990s. Thus, the war has questioned the idea of living in peace without much need to fund a military, which had been largely common wisdom since World War II, as Western Europe had, over decades, been protected by US and NATO nuclear arms forces. Today, the EU has to face that both the ideas of ‘building peace without weapons’ and ‘change through trade’ have failed. The war will change the European Union and its position in the global order. Finding responses to this new setting is difficult.

As the war forces everyone to acknowledge, the world order now is a multipolar one—politically, geographically, economically, ideologically and legally. For the EU, this means that it has to position itself in a setting in which the United States, China, Europe, Russia and various developing powers fill different positions and alliances. China is currently cooperating with Russia. Chinese investment strategies, such as the Silk Road Initiative, aim at gaining not only economic, but also (geo)political power and influence around the world and also in the EU itself. What is more, the Western countries also have to face opposition to their Russian policy, as is underlined by the UN General Assembly vote on the resolution that condemned the Russian invasion in 2022, in which a number of influential states, such as India and South Africa, abstained. Last but not least, there is an upcoming presidential election in the United States. Should Donald Trump or a falcon Republican be re-elected, the West and its allies would be weakened. In short, the EU has to become a geopolitical player in this changing and challenging international environment, even if this has not necessarily been its goal. For decades, the EU used only to be a ‘normative power’ and its geopolitical initiatives being based on peaceful interventions, democracy promotion, and ‘change through trade’ (see the chapters by Smith, Wiesner and Zarembo, in this volume). Hence, the EU had been an economic but not a political or military world power, existing in a useful symbiosis with NATO.

All in all, the EU needs to deal with manifold internal and external challenges. Internally, it needs to ensure its unity and its capacity to act, despite internal conflicts of interests and rule-of-law issues with Member States such as Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. These conflicts influence the EU’s inner cohesion, which is especially problematic when unanimous decisions are required. With regard to the EU’s policies and the external dimension, it needs to tackle a lack of energy supplies and the need to become more sustainable at a time when the war challenges the worldwide energy supply. Applications from Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova (in addition to the accession requests of Western Balkan states) require a new approach to enlargement. This is especially true as the EU wants to offer a European future for these countries at a time when it is doubtful whether it can bear more fragile or incomplete democracies as members. The accession procedure once more requires the EU to play out its normative power, but its authority is not uncontested. Both European values and the Western view of the war are contested around the globe, as is reflected in the varying perceptions of the war, and of the positions that Europe and the Western countries have in it. These developments also raise a number of challenges for EU Studies and International Relations, both on the theoretical and conceptual level as well as on the level of analysis.

The volume brings together chapters discussing the manifold consequences the war bears for the European Union and EU Studies. It covers three broad themes and is structured as follows:

  1. 1.

    Theories, Approaches and Concepts in EU Studies and IR: How do the changes and challenges brought about by the war against Ukraine affect EU Studies? How have they been received in IR? Which consequences should be drawn regarding theories, approaches and concepts of, and in, EU studies, and in IR? The question of how to theorise the changes in International Relations is discussed in the following chapter by Costa and Martinez Blanc. The next chapter by Jørgensen discusses how they should be theorised in EU Studies.

  2. 2.

    The EU as a Polity and Its Policies: The war and the EU’s reorientation does affect the EU, both externally and internally. The question of how the war affects the EU as a polity in general is taken up by Smith. It is discussed further with regard to the various new challenges and, in particular, the conflict of democracy versus autocracy, which touches the core of the EU’s liberal values, in the chapter by Wiesner. In their chapter, Müller and Slominski analyse the EU’s capacity to act in the new setting and examine how its effective foreign policy is impacted via the necessity of unanimity and a coupling with the rule-of-law conflict. The nexus of energy security and sustainability and its governance, as well as the legitimacy problems which emergency governance brings, is discussed in the chapter by Knodt, Ringel and Bruch.

  3. 3.

    Ukraine: EU Accession, Narratives and Perceptions. The questions of whether and when Ukraine can access the EU is another core issue raised by the war. The perspectives of Ukraine’s EU accession are taken up first in the chapter by Gawrich and Wydra who discuss how much the EU can, de facto, work as normative power in Ukraine in face of contestation of the EU’s accession conditionalities. Zarembo follows up on this in her chapter, highlighting how the perception of the EU in Ukraine has changed and discussing the extent to which the EU is still perceived as a ‘normative power’. The book’s final chapter by Chaban and Zhabotynska closes the circle by returning to the changing world order, studying how Ukraine and the war are perceived in the world and which narratives are created in this respect.

The topics covered in this book also raise a number of broader questions that concern the EU and its future in a very general way. First, the changes brought about by the war, and the new settings in the world, emphasise all the more that the EU lacks a joint narrative and overall political goal. In a new world order, the EU should be more positioned in this respect. What, then, are elements of the EU’s overarching narrative? How should the EU approach defining and enacting it? Is it the task of EU Studies to contribute to this debate? Second, the debate on the EU’s new narrative and reorientation entails a number of concrete, more policy-oriented questions, regarding (Geo)politics, Policy and External Relations: how should the EU position itself in the new world order, why, and with which means and goals? How should the world outside Europe be taken into account? Will the EU emerge stronger in terms of foreign policy as a result of the new era? What is the effect of the war of aggression on the interconnectedness of the EU’s internal and external positions? What effect does the war of aggression against Ukraine have on the institutional constitution of the EU? Can the EU gain the capacity to act through its emergency legislation? Finally, what effect have the war of aggression and the applications for membership submitted since then had on the EU’s enlargement policy?

Theorising the EU in the New Setting

The first two chapters tackle the question of how to grasp the new developments analytically, conceptually and theoretically in IR and EU Studies. The Russian aggression against Ukraine, which began on 24 February 2022, represented a culmination of the changed realities in which the EU must assert itself both internally and externally. From that date on, the new realities were no longer deniable. Which consequences should be drawn regarding theories, approaches and concepts of, and in, EU studies, and in IR?

As the chapters by Knud-Erik Jørgensen, Oriol Costa and Carme Martinez Blanc indicate, there is some theory-related work in International Relations, but EU Studies so far have been reluctant to theorise the war. This would mean that the `Zeitenwende’ has been taking place thus far only in EU practice, but not in EU Studies—and hence that there is a research gap. Both chapters also underline that the war against Ukraine can, on the one hand, be seen in strongly normative and moral terms, and on the other hand, from a more analytical perspective. This indicates that theories in IR and EU Studies also represent certain worldviews.

In their contribution, Oriol Costa and Carme Martínez Blanc ask whether theories in International Relations will return to their roots. In the wake of the end of the Cold War, grand theoretical debates had faded from scholarly debates, and a more eclectic attitude had taken hold of the discipline—a celebration of mid-level theories that hybridised themes and variables from different theoretical traditions, to shed light on specific phenomena. When the Cold War ended and the Liberal International Order had seemingly won the historical systems’ competition between East and West, it also seemed that the contradictions between different theories had lost both their importance and explanatory value. The chapter asks whether Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which has done so much to dismantle the last remains of the post-Cold War environment, is fostering a return of grand theoretical approaches in IR, and to what extent European scholars differ from other Western colleagues in this regard. More specifically, Costa and Martinez Blanc strive to understand whether authors consistently realign themselves along paradigmatic fault lines, and what patterns of collision and coalition emerge between grand theories.

Knud-Eric Jørgensen examines the potential impact of the war against Ukraine on EU Studies. Although the war is the most destructive war in Europe since the end of the World War II, Jørgensen argues that it is unlikely to have a major impact on the field of research, as, in general, EU Studies are uncomfortable with war. All the wars that influenced European Politics in the last decades—the Cold War, the Vietnam war, colonial wars in general and the Algerian war in particular (which was led by the European Community Member State France), as well as the Falklands War (which was led by European Community Member State Great Britain), and the wars in Yugoslavia, are largely absent from reflections on the dynamics of European integration. Jørgensen outlines four reasons why it is unlikely that the war in Ukraine will lead to a change of era in EU Studies: (i) Even during the wars in Yugoslavia there was not much reflection about EU Studies and war and (ii) academic path-dependencies are too strong. EU Studies focus traditionally on Economics and Law which themselves tend never to consider the role of war; (iii) EU Studies are predominantly characterised by a liberal worldview which has not much in common with the worldview of the so-called Cold War Liberals; iv) War Studies and EU Studies do not match well.

Impact of the War on the EU as a Polity and its Policies

In his introduction to a special issue on the impact of the war against Ukraine on the EU, Mitchell A. Orenstein argues that the shock of the war ushered in a new era of rapid and efficient European cooperation in the EU and of the development of a geopolitical Europe (Orenstein 2023). This thesis is backed by a perspective that strongly emphasises the external dimension of the EU, focuses on the joint action of the first months of the war and tends to leave aside the link between external and internal dimensions. Moreover, the geopolitical focus obscures the nuances of internal changes (Knodt and Wiesner 2023b). In contrast to such a perspective, the contributions to this book focus both on the external and on the many internal challenges that the war poses for the EU, and the ways in which internal challenges are linked to external ones.

Michael Smith in his chapter interrogates the changing nature of European order, and the EU’s role within it. He begins by exploring the idea put forward by Josep Borrell—that the EU is a ‘garden’ of peace and order, and that the world outside is often a ‘jungle’ that needs to be subjected to the EU’s civilising influences. He goes on to assess a number of key junctures in the search for European order since the end of the Cold War, and the extent to which these have led to any form of new order and stability. Smith then argues that one of the EU’s key roles in the (re)ordering of Europe has been the construction and maintenance of boundaries—geopolitical, transactional, legal/institutional and cultural—and evaluates the extent to which those boundaries have either contributed to the ‘ordering’ of Europe in the recent periods of change, conflict and crisis or created new challenges for EU policy-making. Finally, Smith focuses on the current ‘omni-crisis’ in Europe and on the EU’s role(s) in it and assesses the extent to which concepts of boundaries assist the study of EU policy and its impact.

Claudia Wiesner discusses the linkages of the EU’s internal and external challenges. Externally, the EU and its Member States are having to position themselves in a changing world order that is most probably no longer liberal, but at least multipolar. The EU has to face new political realities not only in political and economic, but also in ideational terms. In the context of the new global setting and the challenges it brings for the EU, the war is often discussed as a conflict between an autocratic regime and the liberal democracies of Europe and the EU, to which Ukraine aspires. However, liberal democracy is under threat within the EU itself, not just from outside. Authoritarian tendencies and right-wing populist parties are on the rise in several EU states; there is visible democratic deconsolidation, i.e., citizens are losing trust in representative democracy, and democratic backsliding is taking place. Moreover, the weakly developed democracies of Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova are seeking to become EU members at a time when the EU already faces rule-of-law issues with Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. This means that defending the EU’s values and liberal democracy is a challenge not only externally, but also internally. The war only exacerbates these multiple tensions.

The discussion in the chapter by Wiesner turns to the broader question of what the rule-of-law conflicts mean for the EU and its capacity to act. These conflicts are a symptom and a culmination of ideational conflicts and interest dynamics within the EU. They touch crucially upon the question of which EU values are being defended in the war, and ultimately on the question of how important democracy and the rule-of-law are, and whether they can be weighed against other interests, namely economic and (geo)political ones.

Hungary uses this strategic tension in its hostage-taking politics, as Patrick Müller and Peter Slominski argue in their chapter. The EU has always been characterised by negotiation strategies, such as issue linkages and package deals. The strategy of linking negotiation items that often are even factually unrelated is used to achieve compromises and bargaining successes in cases where interests are opposing. Most often, these tie-in deals are achieved by linking internal EU policies. The war of aggression against Ukraine, however, opened up possibilities for linking foreign and domestic policies that constituted a coupling of its own kind. Müller and Slominski show how the Hungarian veto threats in the negotiations on sanctions against Russia can be interpreted as political hostage-taking of foreign policy decisions. The authors analyse how Hungary, by linking the rule-of-law conflict to other EU policies or to Sweden’s and Finland’s NATO accession process, is trying to obtain concessions from the EU regarding the Article 7 TEU procedure and the disbursement of EU money from the Corona Reconstruction Fund, respectively. This hostage-taking is particularly special for two reasons. Firstly, it links the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) to the fundamental values of the EU as laid down in Article 2 of the Lisbon Treaty on European Union and given special protection by Article 7. The particular explosiveness currently lies in the fact that Hungary is using its veto in the case of sanctions against an authoritarian Russia, which attacks liberal values, to mitigate or avert EU action against its illiberal tendencies. Secondly, this hostage-taking is also special because it also involves NATO across the EU.

The chapter by Müller and Slominski adds a new aspect to the literature on ‘overlapping institutions’: the export and import of principles, norms and regulations from one organisation to another (Knodt and Jachtenfuchs 2002). Authors such as Weiler and Gehring have seen converging norms emerging in the international system through mutual influence and exports, as well as imports (Gehring 2002; Weiler 2000). In contrast, the Hungarian hostage-taking shows that by linking European foreign policy in the war against Ukraine with internal conflicts, divergences are deepened. It is not a strengthening of the convergence of norms and values within the EU, but exactly the contrary. If this instrumental and strategic usage of veto positions held by EU Member States in foreign policy would become standard practice, both the decision-making capacity of central foreign policy institutions, as well as the EU’s ability to enforce EU norms and values, would be weakened. Not least for this reason, Müller and Slominski point out that an extension of EU majority decisions into the area of CFSP—which has been repeatedly called for—would be necessary. An increase of majority decisions in CFSP would simplify foreign policy decision-making and also prevent the instrumentalisation of veto positions within the CFSP for the assertion of interests in other EU policy areas by individual Member States (Knodt and Wiesner 2023b).

The war also has implications for EU policy-making and policy objectives. As the chapter by Michèle Knodt, Marc Ringel and Nils Bruch highlights, crisis governance since the beginning of the war has led to intergovernmental-executive dominance, as it had in previous crises. The chapter provides a preliminary assessment of the EU reactions to the war over the first eighteen months but also discusses the long-term transformative effect on EU energy policy. In contrast to many of the publications on the impact of the war that are now appearing, which focus too much on the fundamental institutional changes, the authors show that the institutional changes are much more fine-grained. Orenstein, for example, assumes, and implicitly criticises, the lack of a shift in competence as a reaction to the war. This concentration on competence-gains at the European level obscures the detailed institutional dynamics caused by the war of aggression. Thus, in the process, the European Council was able to expand its position within the EU system through its guideline function, as were both the Council and the European Commission through the increased use of emergency Article 122 TFEU. On the one hand, this brought the EU the ability to act, but on the other hand it was bought with legitimacy deficits. The basis of the emergency measures on Art. 122 TFEU provides for the Council being a decision-maker but not having parliamentary participation. The use of Article 122 TFEU has both direct and indirect effects. Directly, such emergency legislation affects the input and throughput legitimacy of the EU due to its sole adoption by the Council of the European Union without any involvement of the European Parliament. As an indirect effect of the use of the emergency article in the Lisbon Treaty, the Council is given more room for manoeuver in the ordinary legislative procedure. By anticipating regulations through emergency measures, the Council can expand its scope for action in the ordinary legislative procedure. It is precisely through the use of the emergency article that the deficits of European energy policy, which do not allow the EU to intervene in national energy sovereignty, can be remedied to some extent. Regulations can, thus, achieve a hardening of the otherwise soft governance of energy policy. Furthermore, Knodt, Ringel and Bruch show that in a first reaction, the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has brought EU energy security to the forefront of the agenda, leading to a potential shift away from its climate objectives.

Ukraine: EU Accession and Perceptions

The internal and strategic conflicts in the EU reappear in the enlargement debate, as was said above. The tension between the need for efficient policies and democratic principles and values has been intensified by the war against Ukraine. The rule-of-law conflicts can be seen as a symptom and culmination of ideational conflicts and interest dynamics within the EU. The strategic and political tension raised by the new accession candidates can be seen as opposing the EU’s (geo)political interests and its values as expressed by the Copenhagen criteria. While its geographical, economic and strategic interests incite the EU to push for speedy accession of its Eastern neighbours, the need to ensure the candidate countries´ conformity to the rule-of-law criteria, as expressed by the Copenhagen Criteria, speaks against this. The challenges of enlargement hence need to be discussed against the backdrop of the interplay between foreign and domestic policy in the EU. There are many more facets to this interplay than simply translating domestic values into foreign policy action. Rather, there is a close link between foreign policy challenges and domestic policy reforms.

Thus, the EU’s enlargement policy is not only driven by extra-political, geopolitical and geostrategic considerations but has set in motion an internal debate on the reformation of the accession procedure that goes far beyond the acceptance of Ukraine and Republic of Moldova as new accession candidates in June 2022. The current discussions will be particularly important for the states in the Western Balkans as well as Turkey, which remain at different stages in their efforts to join the EU. As much as the Member States were willing to strengthen both countries by granting them candidate status, there are also fears of constitutional problems caused by a rapid accession (Wunsch and Olszewska 2022). For this reason, and fearing Russia’s reaction to a membership perspective, the EU had for years supported the states of the Eastern Partnership (Ukraine, Republic of Moldova, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan) in their development and in some cases linked them more closely to the Union through association agreements, but rejected an accession perspective. However, the conditionality instruments used in the Eastern Partnership have proved less effective in promoting democracy in the countries than has accession conditionality in comparable cases (Knodt and Wiesner 2023b; Freyburg et al. 2009; Kotzian et al. 2011). The Russian war against Ukraine has now changed the EU’s geostrategic calculations. This has put the question of the accession of Eastern Partnership countries and the reform of the accession procedure on the agenda.

In their chapter, Doris Wydra and Andrea Gawrich discuss how Russia’s attack on Ukraine in February 2022 not only brought war back to the European continent, but also brought new urgency to the European Union to allow new members find economic and strategic protection within its confines. While no accession procedure has been successfully concluded since 2013, the list of candidates is growing. In June 2022, the European Council decided to grant the status of candidate country to both Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova and has promised the same to Georgia, once it fulfils further conditions as specified by the Commission. While this was greeted with great enthusiasm, in particular in Ukraine—which now expects a swift accession in reward for the enormous price it has had to pay for its European choice—the question remains as to how the EU can live up to this promise while still upholding the standards which countries have to fulfil in order to qualify for membership. This chapter asks which dynamics have evolved in this early accession process under the conditions of war, where the EU strives to defend the rule-of-law and democracy internally and externally simultaneously (in particular because of past experiences of how vulnerable democratic achievements are to recession), while at the same time trying to prove its geopolitical capacities by providing credible accession perspectives. The literature on EU conditionality provides helpful insights into factors conducive to the transformation of a candidate country under EU conditions (e.g., clarity, tangibility of rewards, and absence of veto-players). In this light, Ukraine seems an ideal candidate for successful transformation. The current emphasis of the goal of a ‘geopolitical’ EU and its linkages to enlargement underlines the credibility of the promise. A renewed enlargement methodology will both contribute to clarity and increase (tangible) rewards along the way. Additionally, an active Ukrainian civil society is putting pressure on political elites to continue on their European path. The close linkage of EU accession with reconstruction plans for Ukraine also makes successful EU integration an effective remedy for domestic challenges. However, in order to comprehensively understand ‘membership politics’ and the politicisation of EU conditions, it is essential to address the contextual interpretation of the norms posed by the EU as part of its accession conditionality. To study this, Gawrich and Wydra combine the concept of conditionality with approaches to norm contestation from International Relations (IR) Research. This induces a shift of perspective from a unidirectional norm-giver/norm-taker perspective, closely assigned to conditionality approaches, towards a focus on the web of interactions between actors on both the EU and the Ukrainian side as they engage with, interpret and enact norms based on their social context. As illustrated by the reform of the Ukrainian judiciary (and here in particular the Constitutional Court of Ukraine) this has resulted in a ‘sovereignty argument’ being put forward to challenge the ‘West’s right to evaluate’. Furthermore, the contestation of time frames is of high salience, not only because Ukraine demands a ‘fast track accession’ against the will of some EU Member States, but also because it raises the stakes as to how ‘sufficient progress’ for gaining promised rewards is assessed.

This discussion again links back to the broader context of EU research dealing with the internal–external relationship. Ian Manners’ concept of Normative Power Europe (NPE) (Manners 2002) was conceived in the early 2000s in the context of the EU’s ‘big bang’ enlargement after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In order to be accepted into the EU, the candidate countries of the 2000s (many of which belonged to Europe’s ‘communist camp’ during the Cold War) transformed and adapted to the NPE’s characteristic set of norms and values: democracy, human rights, rule-of-law, peace, freedom, social solidarity, good governance, anti-discrimination and sustainable governance. This canon of norms is not accidental, as Manners underlines. For him, these particular normative values are the result of common historical events (two devastating and degrading world wars in Europe), a common political space (the creation of a supranational EU) and a common legal foundation driven by elites (the treaty-based EU). NPE has proven to be a popular and long-lasting analytical tool that has explanatory power for understanding the EU’s capacity to act in a changing, globalised and multipolar world, but it has also been heavily criticised and complemented by concepts such as ‘Market Power Europe’ by Chad Damro (Diez 2013). Empirically, this work has contributed significantly to our understanding of European external democracy promotion, the EU’s enlargement and neighbourhood policy, as well as the EU’s role in international regimes and multilateral institutions (Lavenex and Schimmelfennig 2009; Jorgensen 2009). The concept of normative power is the conceptual focus of the chapter by Kateryna Zarembo. She analyses interviews with representatives of Ukrainian civil society in order to find the extent to which the EU is still seen as a normative power in Ukraine currently.

Despite this emphasis of ‘normative power’, the work on democracy promotion in particular showed that the promotion of European values has always found its limits when strong economic or military interests of the EU and its Member States were at stake (Knodt and Wiesner 2023b, Knodt et al. 2018). Gradually, the asynchronous development of the EU’s traditional commitment to liberal values and the new reality of its international environment became visible (Smith 2011). In particular, the crisis of liberal ideas in global politics was diagnosed and the EU’s handling of the return of geopolitics and realist power politics in its international environment was criticised (Niblett 2017; Mead 2014; Mearsheimer 2014). More recently, this development has been widely discussed under the term ‘contestation’ (Biedenkopf et al. 2021; Petri et al. 2020; Costa 2019; Joansson- Noguès 2020). Contestation of EU norms is discussed both in the chapters by Gawrich and Wydra and by Katharina Zarembo. As said above, Zarembo discusses whether the EU is still perceived in Ukraine as a working normative power. While the EU seems to possess considerable normative power, i.e., the power to define what is normal and to set certain standards in various domains, the Russian aggression in the Crimea and in Ukraine’s East in 2014, as well as the full-scale invasion of 2022, challenged the way the EU is perceived in Ukraine. Based on interviews with Ukrainian policy-makers and think tankers, Zarembo embraces the constructivist worldview and deconstructs the ‘normative power’ concept from a diachronic perspective, tracing its evolution from before the Revolution of the Dignity (also named the Euromaidan) to the present. It becomes apparent that the EU’s normative power is questioned at least by parts of the Ukrainian civil society.

This finding links a recurrent theme throughout most of the book’s chapters, i.e., the question of the EU’s new narrative. The war raises the perception of an opposition of ‘the West’, a sensed opponent to democracy and European/Western values. The war against Ukraine can be interpreted as a war against Western values. But what is ‘the West’? And who are the ‘others’? Russia? China? The chapters underline that Ukraine and its defence is broadly perceived as a symbol of Western values, both inside Ukraine and in large parts of the EU and the liberal Western democracies (Zarembo, Chaban and Zhabotynska). There are, however, some relativisations to this. First, there is some contestation of the EU’s overseeing of accession conditionalities in Ukraine. They are seen as symptoms of EU dominance by parts of the Ukrainian civil society and hence contested (Gawrich and Wydra, Zarembo). That rule-of-law conditions are seen as a sign of EU dominance is a narrative that links back to Hungarian narratives of contestation of the EU’s rule-of-law procedures against Hungary. Here, sovereignty is portrayed as opposing the rule-of-law, because rule-of-law claims are portrayed as being claims of EU dominance. Hence, the related conflicts between Hungary and the EU are painted as being conflicts over dominance and hegemony in Hungary. This means that while the defence of Ukraine is taken as a symbol of the defence of Western values, at least in Europe (Chaban and Zhabotynska, Zarembo), the EU and its values no longer represent a clear orientation marker in, and for, Ukraine itself (Gawrich and Wydra, Zarembo). This discussion underlines that the ‘Western values’ of liberal democracy, which are at stake in the war, are contested in many respects, firstly with regard to accession, but—as discussed in the chapters by Müller and Slominski and Wiesner—secondly also inside the EU itself. The ideational conflict dimension of democracy versus autocracy directly influences EU policy-making.

The perceptions of Ukraine and the war against Ukraine show clear signs of being split, both inside the EU and in the wider world. The multipolar world is thus reflected in the ways which Ukraine, and the war against Ukraine, is perceived. Contributing to the debate of how narratives organise and serve information to exert influence beyond national borders, Natalia Chaban and Svitlana Zhabotynska explore the changing global narratives on Ukraine. They address two perspectives of the new realities the EU faces at this time of war in Ukraine. First, they take account of the fact that the Russian attack on Ukraine and the ensuing war have challenged established narratives and convictions in the global order as well as in the European Union and its Member States and try to tackle the narratives and perceptions this challenge brings with it. Second, they aim at grasping the reality of the multipolar world and the increasing competition of norms and values. They interpret this competition as a battle of narratives and aim at providing an insight into it, comparing the narratives of Ukraine circulating in the EU and wider Europe vis-à-vis self-narratives of Ukraine elsewhere in the world. They engage with commentators who argue about Ukraine in the West vis-à-vis non-Western world, but also examine how Western narratives on Ukraine/war against Ukraine are also divided. Empirically, they study media narratives of projection (framing Ukraine in 2022–2023 in selected countries of Europe, in the global south, and in China), narratives of reception (results of representative public surveys in these locations), and the concept of ‘antagonistic narrative strategies’, and also dissect pro-Russian narratives directed towards diverse receivers around the world. In sum, the chapter shows that the EU/Western view on the war is not dominant in the world, thus highlighting the challenges for the EU from an ideational perspective.

From Old to New Challenges

The challenges the war brought for the EU add to others that were apparent before February 2022. The war can be seen as a kind of cumulative point of several developments. The global context had already been characterised by realignments of power, growing divisions and challenges to the liberal world order (Costa and Barbè 2023). The political and economic weight of Western countries had been shrinking compared to the growing political and economic power of countries like China. Moreover, the EU was already facing an increasingly volatile neighbourhood to the south, a shared neighbourhood with an assertive Russia to the east, and increasingly complicated relations with the UK and the United States to the west. Unlike today’s new situation, EU foreign policy had been based on the premise that transnational challenges could best be addressed through multilateral cooperation and the strengthening of a rules-based, liberal world order, shifting the focus of international relations from zero-sum to win–win situations.

A change in thinking first became evident with the new 2019 Commission. The newly elected Commission President Ursula von der Leyen spoke of establishing a ‘geopolitical commission’ (EUReporter 2019) and High Representative and Commission Vice-President Josep Borrell insisted at his pre-election hearing that the EU must learn the language of power (European Parliament 2019). With the beginning of the war, analysts heralded the end of a view that saw international economic relations as being essentially cooperative win–win partnerships. The EU was called upon to take account of the new balance of power (Knodt and Wiesner 2023b; Lehne 2020). However, as Costa and Barbé argue, the EU is still far from being a geopolitical Europe, at least in its efforts to achieve strategic autonomy, which they argue is necessary for the EU in precisely those policy fields in which it has no coherent preferences, few competences and underdeveloped capabilities (Costa and Barbé 2023). The argument points out that the EU still lacks a clear external strategy, although it did react to the war at first with astonishing strength and cohesion. The EU defence strategy, adopted one month after the start of the invasion, on 21 March 2022, and the ‘Strategic Compass on Security and Defence’, which sets out clear security and defence policy goals for the next five to ten years, are not sufficient. Since then, the discussion on strategic autonomy and the strategic sovereignty of the EU, which was driven forward in particular by Macron, has not yet produced any more concrete results.

Much of the debate on the EU’s role in a changing world in the last few years had remained focused on questions of EU external strategy (Tocci 2016; Howorth 2010; Biscop and Coelmont 2010). Only slowly did the interplay of the external and internal dimensions of the EU’s role in the world become visible (Knodt and Wiesner 2023b).Footnote 1 The EU ‘Global Strategy’ considers the simultaneous emergence of major challenges inside and outside the EU to be a threat to the European project (EU High Representative 2016). The main challenges facing European societies in today’s interconnected world—including security, migration, environmental challenges, climate change, a stable energy supply and the stability of financial markets—are closely related to, and interact with, international developments. This is also true for severe internal conflicts and challenges that test the core achievements and values of the European integration process, such as austerity, Brexit, growing nationalism, populism, new protectionism and rule-of-law conflicts. Accordingly, the chapters in this volume indicate that the junction of external and internal factors is decisive in order to fully understand and analyse the new realities the EU is facing. This concerns the junction of the EU’s internal and external policies, as well as the EU’s values, and the way it defends or exports them, and concerns, moreover, external challenges to the EU’s inner constitution.

In addition, the war hit at a time when the EU was already internally strained by a number of critical developments. The financial crisis was more or less directly followed by the pandemic. This ‘poly- ‘(Zeitlin et al. 2019) or even ‘permacrisis’ (Zuleeg et al. 2021) has already changed the institutional structure of the EU (Wiesner 2021). An emergency mode of decision-making has been developing (see Knodt, Ringel and Bruch). These tendencies affect the legitimacy of the EU’s decision-making, even if, at times, they might enable quick decision-making. It is therefore no surprise that the war of aggression against Ukraine and the associated turn of events have opened up a discussion of institutional reforms within the EU, although a fundamental transformation of EU institutions has not yet been tackled. The revision of the treaties, which was supposed to be heralded by the conference on the future of Europe, was by no means accelerated by the war of aggression against Ukraine (Knodt and Wiesner 2023b). The discussion in this volume has underlined that adapting its institutional structure to these new realities is a challenge for the EU.

All in all, the chapters of the book underline a necessity for reorientation, not only for the EU, but also for EU Studies. EU Studies need to take war into account as a reality, and to conceptualise and analyse the EU as a geopolitical power. The orientations, values and means of this European reorientation also need to be rethought. The chapters have shown that the ‘normative power’ concept is of only limited validity in the current situation. Furthermore, a narrative in which Ukraine appears as the site of the defence of European values against the rest of the world is too simple in many respects. One key finding of the contributions in this book is that both the EU’s values and the EU’s perceptions are contested both externally and internally—and that the internal and external facets of contestation are linked. In sum, EU Studies would do well to open up and broaden its analytical perspectives and research foci. The chapters in this book highlight paths to proceed further along this direction.

As regards the EU and its Member States, they face a number of challenges. Externally, they have to deal with the new conditions and the changing global environment. This entails defining goals and means of becoming a geopolitical actor and developing comprehensive strategies for a decidedly multipolar world order that enable the enactment of new goals, powers and means—knowing that a multi-ideology world order is coming. The EU will, moreover, have to fix conditions and limits to enlargement while taking on responsibility in the region(s) that neighbour the EU, especially the East, while defending democratic values and institutions in its area of influence. With regard to the war, the EU needs to be involved with shaping the post-war order. The EU will also have to deal with external challenges to its domestic policies and politics, such as disinformation attacks. Internally, the EU is in need of more efficient policy-making instruments and approaches to tackle the new challenges. These challenges are, on the one hand, policy-oriented when it comes to dealing with energy transition and climate change. On the other hand, some concern institutional changes, especially at the low-threshold level out of range of a major reform and beyond the area of CFSP, e.g., in energy policy. In sum, the EU faces a need to reorient and adapt to challenges, both externally and internally, and to weave the two together concisely.