The EU’s geoeconomic turn

Organised by

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• EGPP: European Governance and Politics Programme

Heightened geopolitical tensions and the growing securitisation of economic exchange over the past decade have prompted many countries to adopt new geoeconomic tools. Long resistant to this geoeconomic turn, the European Union (EU) has since 2017 created a panoply of innovative policy tools that blend trade and investment with essential security concerns. This paper examines why and how the EU has been able to implement the doctrinal and policy changes necessary to put economic tools at the service of geopolitics. After introducing a typology of defensive and offensive geoeconomic tools deployed by advanced industrial economies, we present the novel geoeconomic toolkit quickly assembled by the EU. This development is explained by the confluence of external factors that triggered European leaders’ beliefs in the necessity of change and internal factors that made such change institutionally and politically possible. This trend was reinforced by the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.