External power projection, internal power centralisation

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

Join Peo Hansen as he explores the historical and geopolitical dynamics shaping European unity.

The EU’s recent geopolitical turn is not an unpresented development. Rather, it is yet another episode in a long series of efforts, dating to the interwar period, to have a synergistic geopolitics of European unity compensate for the decline suffered by Europe’s great powers. According to this logic, ‘Europe’ can only project power externally by centralising power internally, requiring a unified voice on the global stage.

As Peo Hansen will argue, this approach positions the ‘small state’ – with its pursuit of self-determination – as a significant obstacle both internally and externally. This, in turn, perpetuates a ‘fatal logic’, preventing ‘Europe’ from exiting its long and bloody twentieth century. The lecture will examine the incompatibilities between small states and a geopolitics of European unity, tracing their roots to the interwar and postwar periods, when sovereignty for smaller European and non-European nations began reshaping global dynamics.