Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, protracted instability in the Western Balkans, and intensifying great-power rivalry have made the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood and Western Balkans a key test for its geopolitical credibility. Enlargement, neighbourhood policies, the Eastern Partnership, and EU defence instruments face pressures from democratic backsliding, economic divergence, energy insecurity, and malign foreign influence. Citizens’ and elites’ perceptions in these nine countries often diverge from EU narratives, creating gaps in trust and perceived effectiveness.
GEO-POWER-EU addresses this by empowering the EU to manage security threats in these regions and strengthen its strategic actorness. It pursues six objectives: adapting enlargement policy; reassessing the Eastern Partnership; mapping other geopolitical actors’ influence; developing strategic foresight; examining EU military deterrence capacity; and formulating an integrated strategy. These align with EU priorities on democracy, resilience, and strategic autonomy.
The pathway to impact progresses from diagnosis (WP1’s state-of-the-art and conceptual triad of coherence, capacity, context) to mixed-methods empirics: 100+ elite interviews, 9,000+ public opinion survey respondents, focus groups, interdependence/exposure indices, and case studies on corrosive capital/disinformation. Findings on economic convergence, brain drain, energy transition, and security feed into foresight exercises, serious gaming, and co-creation workshops, yielding evidence-based reforms for enlargement/EaP, defence cooperation, and influence countering.
On scale, GEO-POWER-EU links societal attitudes, policy instruments, and security dynamics across nine countries, creating public datasets (surveys, indices, cases) as long-term resources. Its actionable strategy can foster differentiated, credible EU engagement, enhancing regional stability and security if adopted by EU institutions.
Social sciences and humanities (SSH) are integral to GEO-POWER-EU’s ambitions. Political science and European studies shape conceptual frameworks and methods like elite interviews and surveys. Sociology/social psychology analyze trust and disinformation vulnerability. History/area studies contextualize geopolitical competition. SSH guides case studies, discourse/media analysis, sentiment analysis, and co-creation facilitation, linking evidence to nuanced power/norm interpretations for policy-relevant outcomes.
