Introduction: The EU’s Geopolitics—Where Ambition Exceeds Ability

The book deals with the urgent need of the European Union’s (EU) positioning in the world in the wake of the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 and the following war in Gaza, a quickly worsening climate crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, a bellicose Russia, and an ever more assertive China. After 60 years of intensive navel gazing that focused more on institutional design than world politics, the EU is forced to defend its liberal democratic values that have come under attack from inside and outside the European integration project. Inside, the electoral success of parties that are clearly opposing central achievements of integration pose a significant challenge to the deepening of this very integration—a deepening made necessary by the various unprecedented crises and stronger geopolitical rivalry in recent years. Outside, the Russian war of aggression has opened up a chapter of a book most commentators thought long closed: the discussion of direct confrontation between Russia and NATO. It seems as if Europe faces multiple dilemmas at the same time: a mixture of crises that trigger nationalist responses in addition to ever more pleas for more cooperation and even the end of unanimity in key policy areas of the Union.