Keywords

Introduction

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has been seen by many Western commentators as marking an abrupt shift in the foundations of European order, with implications for the nature of world order more generally (for reviews of the debates see Lehne 2023; Lo 2023). A brutal reassertion of geopolitical realities is one of the key elements in this shift, implying also a new primacy for the use of ‘hard power’ and military means. Alongside this has gone a new focus on geo-economic processes, focused on the weaponisation of energy supplies and a renewed salience for economic sanctions. The other side of the coin is a subversion or rejection of the notion of a rules-based international order, and an attack on central institutions associated with it. There has been a tendency for commentators to argue that everything has changed, and that international politics is now practised in a new (or for some, very old) world of power politics. This raises important questions about the place in such a world of the European Union: a highly institutionalised ‘community of law’ which has been seen both as representing and as depending upon rule-based political and economic processes (see also the discussion of war and the study of the EU by Jörgenson, in this volume). To what extent and in what ways can the EU be seen as a central player in the new European order, and how can it play an effective role in the restoration of some kind of stability?

In addressing this question, this chapter interrogates the changing nature of European order, and the EU’s role within it, in light of the war against Ukraine. It begins by exploring the ideas put forward by EU policy-makers 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. It 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. It 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—drawing upon work by Smith (1996) 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. By doing so, the chapter links to a number of conceptual arguments examined by Oriol Costa in this volume, relating to the role of International Relations theory. Finally, it focuses on the current ‘omni-crisis’ in Europe and on the EU’s role in it and assesses the extent to which concepts of boundaries assist the study of EU policy and its impact.

The EU, Europe and the World: A Garden Meets a Jungle?

In reflecting on the EU’s role in the establishment and maintenance of European and world order, policy-makers have in many instances drawn upon notions of EU exceptionalism. This kind of thinking has its roots in the perception that the EU is a sui generis international actor, and that external action should in principle reflect the exceptional nature of the EU’s internal make-up and policy-making processes. It also reflects in more or less direct ways the fact that the EU has been an incomplete international actor, without the capacity to wield ‘hard power’ but with significant reserves of ‘soft’ and ‘normative’ power (see Knodt and Wiesner, in this volume, and Wiesner, in this volume). The argument that the EU is and should be a ‘force for good’ in the world arena has deep roots and is not simply a reflection of the Union’s weakness.

One striking representation of this orientation can be found in the pronouncements of the EU’s foreign policy leadership. Most strikingly, Josep Borrell, the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy appointed in 2019, has compared the Union to a ‘garden’ surrounded by uncultivated ground—or more tellingly, by a ‘jungle’. In a now notorious speech at the opening of the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges (Borrell, 2022), he argued as follows:

Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build […] The rest of the world is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden […] A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall can never be high enough in order to protect the garden…

What Borrell was implying relates very strongly to the argument in this chapter. First, he stated explicitly that the EU is internally well-ordered and regulated. Second, he portrayed the external world as the opposite—a source of disorder and unpredictability, which could pose a threat to the EU internal order as well as more broadly to the quest for European and world order. Third, he presented the EU internal order as the basis on which action towards the outside world can be constructed—and the generation of order in the outside world as a key part of EU diplomacy. In addition, Borrell was implying a key role for what might be described as boundary maintenance: in other words, the need to consolidate and manage the boundary between the EU order and external disorder. This taps into a theme on which I and others have worked for at least thirty years, since the end of the Cold War: the construction and reconstruction of European order, and the role of the EU in creating, maintaining and adjusting the order in the face of a changing (and often disorderly) continent (see, e.g., Carlsnaes and Smith 1994; Keohane et al. 1993; Smith 1996, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2014; Christiansen et al. 2000; Niblett and Wallace 2001; Elgström and Smith 2000; Lavenex 2004; Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier 2005; Carlsnaes et al. 2004; Duke 2018; Biscop 2019).

From the 1990s to the 2020s: Key Junctures in the (Re)Ordering of Europe

The preceding discussion uncovers a key analytical dimension of the study of European order in the post-Cold War world, if that order is conceptualised as an amalgam of material power, institutional arrangements and reigning ideas (Cox 1983; see also Smith 1994) Although there has been much attention to the ways in which the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks an abrupt shift in the nature of European order, it is in fact the latest stage in a process that began in 1989—a long-term shift in the material foundations, the implicit and explicit rules and the key institutional and normative manifestations of that order. This having been stated, it is important to trace the genealogy of current (re)ordering by drawing attention to the several key junctures by which the post-Cold War period can be characterised. Each of these junctures has implications for (dis)order, and for the capacity of the EU to generate or contribute to the ordering of Europe; none of them is discrete from the others, since these junctures have led to successive overlays in the ordering of post-Cold War Europe. Each of them in turn has exposed the interaction between the internal EU order and broader European order, and the significance of boundary drawing and boundary maintenance in the establishment and maintenance of order. These are given added significance by the emergence of what Giovanni Grevi (2009) identified as an ‘interpolar’ world, in which the growth of several poles of power and influence goes alongside the persistence of high levels of economic, environmental and cultural interdependence. Whilst the central concern of this chapter is with European order, this broader context must not be neglected or forgotten.

The first key juncture was the period 1990–2004. For the EU, this was a period in which consolidation of the post-Maastricht internal order overlapped with the extension of that order through a process of large-scale enlargement. This manifestation of the close linkage between internal order and the EU’s engagement with broader European order was not untroubled, since the process of enlargement was in many respects in tension with the need to develop and deepen the foundations established at Maastricht, not only in politics and security but also in political economy. The parallel challenges of economic and monetary union, security and defence policy and turbulence in wider Europe placed heavy demands on the Union’s adjustment capacity. At the same time, the outbreak of conflict in former Yugoslavia drew in not only the EU but also the USA and Russia, the former Cold War adversaries, whilst the enlargement of NATO created a dynamic which was to shape future lines of tension and then open conflict in Europe. This was a period of strong challenges for the EU, but also one during which there were opportunities for a new self-assertion.

From 2005 onwards, a second layer of events and forces contributed to the increasingly complex relationship between the EU and European order. The enlargements of 2004 and 2007 created a new balance within the EU itself, between the fifteen pre-existing member states and the twelve new members, predominantly from eastern Europe, affecting institutional arrangements and the development of EU policies across the board. Although the new members had been implicated in EU policy-making through structured dialogues and other devices before formal accession, their presence as member states gave new point to EU policies towards Russia in particular, but also (due to the accession of Cyprus and Malta) towards the eastern Mediterranean. A key EU response to this newly-configured set of relationships was to establish a framework, through the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), that attempted to order the contacts between insiders and outsiders and stabilise the Union’s ‘near abroad’ (Weber et al. 2007). But at the same time, the expansion of the EU’s membership along with the evolution of the CFSP and the CSDP created a new security and defence perimeter in two increasingly turbulent regions—the eastern and southern neighbourhoods (Smith 2006). The first indications of this new set of challenges were to be found in the Caucasus, with the EU’s diplomatic engagement in the conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008. At the same time as these challenges of external order demanded attention, the internal order of the Union came under question, with the continuing tensions around the Constitutional Treaty and the eventual implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, and the pressures created by the global financial crisis from 2008 to 2009.

The net result of these internal and external turbulences was increasing contestation both of the internal EU order and of the broader European order. In both contexts, the EU’s role was open to question, from member states as well as outsiders. The new phase of EU engagement that effectively began in 2008–2009 was characterised on the one hand by the consolidation of the EU’s system of diplomacy, given new form and impetus by the Lisbon Treaty, and a growing recognition of the EU as a consequential diplomatic actor. The establishment of the European External Action Service (EEAS) and the office of the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, who was also a Vice-President of the European Commission (HRVP), created new possibilities for the Union both at the level of diplomatic strategy and in the day to day practice of diplomacy (Smith et al. 2016). This new diplomatic capacity did not translate directly into an increase in the ‘hard power’ capacity of the Union, but did encourage discussion of the ways in which new forms of security and defence cooperation could be initiated. The continuing economic crisis and the need to address growing internal contestation arising from the development of new nationalisms in a number of EU member states dictated a strong emphasis on the internal EU order, but increasingly this could not be divorced from the broader question of order in the ‘neighbourhood’, particularly in the case of the ‘Arab Spring’ after 2011 and the ‘colour revolutions’ in central and eastern Europe. It was apparent that whilst the emphasis was on ‘soft power’ and diplomacy, the EU had a role in such conflicts; but it was also evident that as soon as they moved into the use of violence and ‘hard power’, the EU became marginalised. Whilst this led some to demand the ‘hardening’ of EU security and defence policy as a matter of urgency, the barriers to such a development, both from within member states and within the Brussels institutions, remained formidable.

The contradictions inherent in this position, and their implications for EU effectiveness in ‘ordering’ Europe, became even more apparent in the next period, whose beginning was marked by the crisis over Ukraine in 2013–2014. Both the eastern and the southern ‘neighbourhoods’ were in crisis, whilst the Union was challenged as before by economic turbulence and the growing salience of nationalist movements, especially in Hungary and Poland. Whilst the ‘hardening’ of EU security and defence policy gained momentum, especially in areas related to defence industrial policy and (after the exit of the UK) the development of Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), the contradiction between growing diplomatic presence and qualified material power remained. Diplomacy (and the EU’s role as a ‘market power’) could construct new forms of association agreements and partnerships with countries bordering the EU, the collision between such processes and the growing predominance of geopolitics was sharpened by events in the Ukraine in particular. The negotiation of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement with Ukraine plunged the EU into the domestic turmoil created by Russian intervention and the reaction of EuroMaidan revolutionary forces. Russian intervention in turn confronted the Union with a compelling need for the restoration of stability, but at the same time with a sharp demonstration of the limits of diplomacy without ‘hard power’ (Haukkala 2015, 2016; Averre 2016). Alongside this set of contradictions went others, arising from the EU’s engagement with its southern neighbourhood, of which the most intransigent was the spill-over of regional conflict into mass movements of refugees. This created a direct and at times unmanageable linkage between the internal order of the EU and the ‘security perimeter’ along which new conflicts and crises were erupting, especially in Libya, Syria and more broadly in the ‘greater Middle East’, creating conditions in which the EU would be confronted by an even more compelling set of crises and tensions after 2020.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, it was not a sudden, spontaneous or unexpected challenge to European order, or to the EU’s role in establishing and maintaining that order. It was the culmination of a process that had been established in the 1990s, had intensified in the first decade of the new century and had exploded in the middle of its second decade. Shifts in material power, pressures on governing institutions and challenges to received ideas about the nature of European order had created a conjuncture in which the EU and its member states would be tested as never before; the response both from the Union and from its member states was uncertain and often faltering, infused as it was with contradictions in national and European political processes, and with the resurgence of geopolitics more generally (Cliffe 2022; Rachman 2022). Whilst the EU had published its Global Strategy (European Union 2016) as a marker for a new and more assertive approach to external action, and was developing a Strategic Compass (European Union 2022) as a means of operationalising its key strategic commitments, it was far from clear that the Union had the capacity to assert itself in the midst of an ‘omni-crisis’ (see for a range of views Boone 2022 [Boone was the French minister of state for Europe], Chassany 2022; Whitney 2022). The often-stated aim of ‘strategic autonomy’, coupled with a commitment to a ‘comprehensive approach’ and ‘joined-up policy-making’, was presented with what seemed to be a potentially existential set of challenges. In order to assess both the nature of these challenges and the EU’s responses, and to relate these to the pursuit of European order, we can focus on a key element in both EU policy-making and European order: the nature and importance of boundaries.

The Nature and Importance of Boundaries

In exploring the implications of boundaries, it is important to have a sense of history. It is now thirty years since the initial post-Cold War period, in which as noted earlier there were major demands on the EU’s capacity to contribute to European order but also significant opportunities to extend the EU’s influence (Smith 2000). In 1996, I identified four types of boundaries, the development and interaction of which shaped the EU’s capacity and willingness to order its European environment: geopolitical, transactional, institutional/legal and cultural (Smith 1996). The geopolitical boundary was intimately linked to the EU’s search for stability and security in a turbulent continent and created the need to define and consolidate the EU’s position and role in relation to major partners or rivals. In this respect, the securing of the EU’s geopolitical status could be seen as a key contribution to the continued evolution of the internal EU order, as well as a stabilising factor in the broader European setting. As noted earlier, this assumption has been tested in a variety of ways during the last thirty years, from the break-up of former Yugoslavia through the crises and tensions of the eastern and southern ‘neighbourhoods’ to the explicit threats posed by the resurgence of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. As the EU itself has expanded, there has also been evidence of a form of geopolitics within the EU itself, with the emergence of internal contestation among the new constellation of member states. The tensions created by the growth of ‘illiberal democracy’ in Hungary, by the internal contestation centred on the rule of law in Poland and by the differential impact of energy security concerns in the broader EU membership were linked at least in part to the geopolitical ‘pull’ of Russia and the varying desires on the part of members of the Union to counter it.

The second type of boundary identified in my 1996 article was transactional: in other words, the boundary constructed by the intensification of economic development within the EU and its linkages with economic processes in the broader European order. The combination of the EU’s internal regulatory structures with its external economic defences including the customs union and the common external tariff has been a potent source of influence for the Union not only within Europe but also on the broader global stage, enabling it to shape not only specific partnerships and agreements but also to contribute to the development of the rules-based international order. In the European context, and that of the post-Cold War period, the capacity of the EU to erect transactional boundaries between itself and its ‘near abroad’ has been a constant source of challenge. One part of the challenge, identified at a very early stage, was the demand of post-Soviet countries in central and eastern Europe to be included within the EU economy, first by association and then by accession. The tensions this created between the EU’s pursuit of its single market programme and the major shift in overall patterns of trade in Europe precipitated by the collapse of the Soviet bloc was particularly evident in the 1990s, but as noted above there were continuing tensions and ambiguities throughout the first two decades of the twenty-first century. One of the most obvious of these was the tension between the desire to counter the geopolitical influence of Putin’s Russia and the increasing dependence of key EU member states on supplies of oil and particularly gas from Russian sources. This raised in a very direct form the question of boundaries: to what extent could the EU construct and defend a transactional boundary between itself and other major European powers in a period where the politicisation of economic activity was becoming a predominant feature of European and world order?

Both the geopolitical and the transactional boundaries associated with the EU are strongly related to the third type of boundary: institutional and legal. Successive treaties have contributed to the (self)image of the Union as a ‘community of law’, and the increasing density and scope of the EU’s institutional frameworks have created a clear legal separation between the EU and the outside world. This sense of separation and thus of the need to defend the Union’s institutional essence has persisted despite the pressures of globalisation and of geopolitical challenges. As a result, the ‘investment’ in institutional and legal frameworks that characterise the Union has become something to be defended, but also a source of influence, especially on those outsiders who wish to be inside the boundary. A variety of partial modifications of this boundary has emerged—for example, relating to association arrangements with countries such as Norway and Iceland—but the investment has in general been jealously safeguarded, not least in negotiations about accession or (in the case of Brexit) de-accession. Notable among the ‘defensive’ arrangements in relation to the broader European order, as noted earlier, has been the development of the European Neighbourhood Policy and its successors, the eastern and southern partnerships. At least initially, the key characteristic of these partnerships was that they did not constitute a conveyor-belt to accession; rather, they were designed precisely to address the consequences of the expanding EU membership and the associated ‘defence perimeter’, with the aim of stabilising the ‘near abroad’. In the terms used by Josep Borell and quoted earlier, they were a way of maintaining the ‘garden’ of the EU’s internal order. They did entail institutional interventions in a number of the partner countries, with the aim of encouraging ‘resilience’ among the EU’s near neighbours, but this was largely in order to create conditions in which the Union would not be confronted with short-term demands for more ambitious forms of association and even accession.

Alongside the geopolitical, transactional and institutional/legal boundaries, the EU has also nurtured what can be described as a cultural boundary: one that is inherent in the distinction between the ‘garden’ and the ‘jungle’ made by Josep Borell and the normative differences that underpin it. In addition to being a ‘community of law’, the Union has a powerful self-image as a community of values. On the one hand, this has given rise to a view of the EU as a ‘normative power’, extending the application of its values to its external action through its diplomatic activities. On the other hand, as noted earlier, it has contributed to a form of ‘EUropean exceptionalism’, in which the Union is presented as a unique kind of international actor. But there is another face to the idea of a cultural boundary: one that emphasises the need for outsiders to adjust their cultural assumptions and values in their dealings with the Union, especially if they are pursuing accession. The process of accession demonstrates most clearly the ways in which political, judicial and other aspects of national cultures require adjustment, and recent internal conflicts over the rule of law, involving Hungary and Poland, illustrate the fact that this adjustment does not end at the moment of accession. It is at this point that one becomes aware of the ways in which the geopolitical, transactional, institutional/legal and cultural boundaries erected by the EU can and do come into conflict: what is desirable from a geopolitical perspective might not be so from the others; and what seems natural from a cultural perspective might not sit comfortably with geopolitical, transactional or institutional/legal perspectives. As noted in the chapters by Müller and Slominski and by Zarembo in this volume, these contradictions can have important implications for negotiation and for perceptions in the wake of the war in Ukraine, as well as in the context of the EU’s internal policy processes.

An exploration of the ways in which the EU has constructed, maintained and modified a series of boundaries between itself and the broader European order thus provokes a number of important questions. Some of these relate to the ways in which the boundaries have been erected, maintained and modified: were these processes the result of conscious collective action by the EU and its member states, or were they an artefact of certain conditions in the broader European order that made such boundaries (and boundary policies) feasible? It is clear that over the period since 1990, there have been substantial modifications to each of the boundaries, but also that there has been a persistent commitment by the EU and most if not all of its member states to their perpetuation. Another set of questions relates to the ways in which the boundaries intersect and interact: are these intersections and interactions positive and the boundaries thus mutually reinforcing, or are they negative, in which case the boundaries can be self-defeating? Most intersections and interactions are likely to be mixed, giving rise to further ambiguities about the EU’s capacity and commitment to maintain one or more of the boundaries.

From this set of evaluations arises another set of important questions about the EU, boundaries and European order. First, what are the scope conditions for a continued and substantial EU role in European order, in the face of turbulence and challenge? In other words, are there limits to the EU’s effectiveness in managing boundaries and adjusting them to change? Second, and related, what is the shifting balance between a ‘politics of exclusion’ and a ‘politics of inclusion’ in the face of challenges to the European order? It might be argued that the EU’s capacity to construct, manage and adjust the boundaries between the EU order and the broader European order has been fluid and variable: at each of the key junctures set out earlier in the chapter, the Union has been faced with a specific set of intersections and interactions between the four types of boundary, and a specific set of opportunities and constraints affecting its capacity to manage and adjust them. It may be that in the early post-Cold War years, the space for effective EU action was greater than it was in the period 2008–2014, for example, and that the opening and closing of the international and European opportunity structures affects both the salience and the meaning of the boundaries between the EU and its near neighbours. The next part of the chapter assesses the extent to which the ‘omni-crisis’ of 2018 onwards, and particularly the war on Ukraine, have challenged and potentially subverted the EU’s capacity to contribute to European order through the construction and maintenance of boundaries.

The EU and the Boundaries of Order in a Changing and Challenging World

From at least 2018 onwards, the EU has been confronted with the implications of a series of linked and often mutually reinforcing crises (Smith 2023a, 2023b). Within the EU order, there have been further tensions and often open conflicts over the rule of law, striking at one of the key foundations of the Union. In the outside world, the Union has been confronted with continuing conflicts in its southern and eastern neighbourhoods, which in 2022 gave rise to the most extensive use of military force on the European continent since the end of World War II. As already noted, one of the consequences of this and of the resulting flows of refugees has been an intense linkage between local, national, EU-level and broader European-level security challenges. At the same time, the incidence of global pandemic and environmental crises has further challenged the capacity of the Union to order its broader global environment, as well as creating challenges in the EU’s political economy. In this way, the successive layers of European order and disorder have come together to constitute a ‘poly-crisis’ or an ‘omni-crisis’, as noted by many commentators (e.g., Smith 2023a, 2023b). In the context of this chapter, the implications of this crisis can be explored through its impact on the boundaries established and maintained by the Union, and the capacity of the EU to maintain or adjust them.

The events of 2018 and beyond, and especially those of 2022–2023, have posed a major challenge to the geopolitical boundary surrounding the EU. The widespread resurgence of geopolitics, associated with the new multipolarity of the global order, is not simply a European phenomenon, but it is in Europe that some of its most direct effects have been felt. In 2019, the newly installed President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, asserted that the new Commission would be ‘geopolitical’ rather than purely functional, and this reflected a widespread perception that such an orientation was inevitable in the newly fragmenting world. As noted earlier, this statement of intent was associated with key elements of the Global Strategy, and especially the quest for ‘strategic autonomy’. Such strategic autonomy would reinforce the EU’s capacity to draw a geopolitical boundary around its internal order and enable it in principle to make its geopolitical presence felt in Europe and beyond. The Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022 subjected this proposition to a direct and violent test; whilst the Union was able to innovate in a number of ways to support Ukraine, for example, by financing the provision of weaponry via member states, and was able to maintain broad diplomatic unity for at least the first year of the conflict, it was apparent that many of the key ‘hard power’ decisions were being made elsewhere—by the USA, by NATO, by individual member states and by those outside the ambit of the EU itself (e.g., the UK). Did this mean that the ability of the EU to construct, maintain and adjust a geopolitical boundary in times of crisis was found wanting? There were those who argued that the EU was following an established path, in which as violence escalated and ‘hard power’ predominated, the Union was effectively marginalised (e.g., Streeck 2022, who also argued that renewed subordination to the USA would follow). In this context, the capacity to offer a membership perspective to Ukraine and others such as Moldova who were threatened by the spill-over of conflict remained a potent weapon, but not one that could affect the day-to-day geopolitics of the conflict. In the same way, the proposal by President Macron of France for a European Political Community not limited to EU member states provided an avenue for geopolitical debate, and a form of dialogue with potential candidates for accession, but it could actually act as a channel for demands for rapid accession not only to the EU but also to NATO; how might this affect the EU’s ability to construct and maintain its geopolitical boundary (Mallet and Fleming 2022, Lynch et al. 2023)?

There were further and linked challenges in respect of the transactional boundary. Most obviously, the dependence of key EU member states, especially Germany, on supplies of gas from Russia constituted a potentially disabling challenge to the EU’s ability to manage transactions that penetrated the boundary. Whilst the Union could impose successive rounds of economic and diplomatic sanctions on Russia, in concert with the USA and other key actors, the differential vulnerability of its member states to Russian retaliation became a preoccupation for EU and national policy-makers. By mid-2023, it was apparent that in effect the transactional boundary had been ‘hardened’ through measures taken by member states and sponsored by the Commission that had drastically reduced their dependence on Russian gas supplies. There had been substantial costs to this process, particularly in terms of macro-economic effects on inflation and consumption across the Union, but the boundary had been sustained if not strengthened. The linked challenge of migration and refugees arising from the Ukraine conflict gave rise to further innovations, in which coordination between those member states most immediately affected and those more distant from the conflict was enhanced despite the inevitable contestation accompanying the dispersal of refugees across the Union (a process linked to what might be seen as the internal geopolitics of the Union, as noted earlier). In short, it appears that at least in the first year of the conflict, the EU’s capacity to construct, maintain and adjust its transactional boundary had been enhanced, along with its ability to use the boundary as a form of geopolitical defence or weapon. As with the geopolitical boundary, the evolution of the conflict into a long-term attritional process would pose further tests, but the immediate evidence attests to the Union’s capacity to innovate and bear significant costs in the cause of upholding its transactional boundary.

The institutional and legal boundary between the EU and the wider European order also came under strain as a result of the ‘omni-crisis’, and particularly the attack on Ukraine. The internal order of the EU as a ‘community of law’ had been under strain for a decade, and the effect of geopolitical challenge in the Union’s immediate neighbourhood had significant centrifugal effects. The close association between Russia and Hungary in particular underlined the potential for contestation and potential defection in key areas of EU policy, whilst the demands of Ukraine, Moldova and others to be acknowledged as candidates for membership in a situation of actual or potential conflict subjected the institutions to the kind of strain they did not experience in the 1990s. The clash between a membership perspective and geopolitical risk is not new to the EU: the Balkan wars of the 1990s had created similar pressures, but in a context where a more deliberative and procedural approach could in the main be adopted. In 2022, the capacity to award candidate status to countries under open attack posed a new set of challenges. The decision to cross this line and to offer the prospect of accession to Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia constituted a major step in the potential EU contribution to stabilising the conflict, but the element of risk—political, diplomatic and economic—persisted (see the chapter by Gawrich and Wydra in this volume).

The interaction of the geopolitical, transactional and institutional/legal boundaries in the EU’s response to the attack on Ukraine seems clear. In the case of the cultural boundary, there is further significant evidence. The invasion of Ukraine and the indiscriminate use of military force in the course of the conflict cemented a perception that on the one hand, Ukraine shared ‘western’ values of democracy and human rights, and on the other hand, Russia did not. The conflict was painted by many policy-makers in primary colours, and in terms of a shared cultural heritage. But as already noted, there were areas of contestation within the EU that eroded this image of ‘western’ solidarity. These areas of contestation linked with a set of challenges to the rule-based or liberal international order that had been evident for at least a decade, not least through the rise of ‘illiberal democracy’ in Hungary and elsewhere, but also through the policies of the Trump Administration in the USA. In these circumstances, it was sometimes difficult to see how ‘western values’ and the values of the EU as frequently expressed reflected the reality even within the Union. When this was combined with the temptation by some EU member states to engage in bilateral diplomacy or other contacts with Russia, it seems clear that the geopolitics and geo-economics of the conflict might predominate over the cultural solidarity that would sustain an effective boundary between the EU and the broader European order.

Conclusions

This chapter has argued for the importance of a longer term perspective on the ways in which the EU has related to the broader European order, and for the importance of a focus on boundaries as a part of such a perspective. The capacity of the EU to construct, maintain and adjust the boundaries between its own internal order and broader European order is a key element in analysis of the EU as a European ‘power’ and as a shaper of the continent. This capacity has been subjected to an extraordinary test as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine—a test that has thrown into sharp relief the ways in which boundary-creation and maintenance express the strengths and the limitations of the EU, but which also occurred in a broader context of contestation and politicisation. At the same time, as noted at many points in this chapter, the changing context of global order shapes and responds to the attempts by the EU to establish, maintain and adapt the boundaries that at least in part define its international status.

What are the key conclusions to be drawn from this exploration? The first is that it is important to understand the ways in which successive layers of order and disorder have been laid down in Europe since the end of the Cold War. Only if this is understood can we hope to achieve a realistic assessment of the ways in which the ‘omni-crisis’ of 2018 and after was rooted in the rise of a post-Cold War order and then its degeneration in the period after 2008. A second conclusion is that a focus on boundaries enables us to understand important ways in which the EU has entered into this process of the establishment and degeneration of order. It is not a complete explanation of what has taken place in the past three decades, but it provides us with an important set of questions to ask about the ways in which the EU has constructed boundaries between its internal order and the broader European order. There have been times at which the EU has been able to take a leading role in defining and shaping the constituents of European order, by contributing to the interplay of power, institutions and ideas, but there have also been times at which this role has been contested and constrained, both within and around the Union. A third conclusion is that the co-existence and interaction of different types of boundaries between the EU and the broader European order provides us with a means of understanding this fluctuation of role and thus the impact of the EU on European order. In terms of the ‘omni-crisis’, it seems clear that each of the types of boundaries identified here has had influence, that there have been major fluctuations in the prominence of different types, and that the intersection and interaction of boundaries has contributed to their positive or negative impact on European order.

At the time of writing, it appears that the conflict in Ukraine may be entering a long-term attritional phase. If that happens, it will constitute a standing challenge to the EU’s construction, maintenance and adjustment of boundaries between its internal order and broader European order. Should the EU put (even) more emphasis on its geopolitical boundaries and thus perhaps contribute to a sharper division of Europe itself? Should it recognise the fact that its transactional boundary is over the longer term likely to become more porous and ‘leaky’? Should it use its institutional boundary to re-shape European order, most obviously by admitting Ukraine, Moldova and other east European candidates? Should it continue to assert a strong boundary between ‘European’ values and those of outsiders? In the broader context of an ‘interpolar’ world (Grevi 2009) characterised by emerging multipolarity but also by continuing interdependence, how do the boundary-constructing and maintaining activities of the EU shape its capacities as a contributor to world order and global conflict management? In a way these are still the questions I asked in 1996, about the capacity of the EU to construct and maintain boundaries in a turbulent Europe, and about its ability to manage the ‘politics of inclusion’ and the ‘politics of exclusion’ in a way that enhances European order within a turbulent world.