The European Union in Turbulent Times: Geopolitical Context, Internal Fragilities and Different Visions of Europe
本文基于2024年欧盟年度评论，分析了地缘政治动荡、内部政治碎片化及不同欧洲愿景对欧盟制度连续性与政策议程的影响，适合关注欧盟治理与危机的学者。
Following the 2024 European elections, the European Union (EU) has pursued a strategy of institutional continuity to address growing geopolitical instability and intensifying domestic contestation, especially from populist and radical-right forces. By doing this, the EU prioritised leadership stability, preserved its pro-European parliamentary majority and reaffirmed its core policy agenda (Baldini et al., 2024). However, beneath this surface of continuity, cracks in the political and normative foundations of European integration have widened. Across the continent, mainstream parties continue to lose ground to an increasingly diverse array of challengers who question the EU's trajectory and, more specifically, its compatibility with national interests. Although no major political force currently advocates EU withdrawal, the commitment to further integration has become notably more fragile. In keeping with the tradition of the Annual Review (AR) of the EU of the Journal of Common Market Studies, this editorial reflects on the geopolitical, institutional and electoral developments shaping the Union in 2024 and the first half of 2025. The increasingly complex and overlapping nature of contemporary crises complicates the distinction between retrospective analysis and forward-looking reflection. Much of what has unfolded cannot be understood as a series of isolated events. Instead, these developments represent the intensification of structural transformations that have been reshaping the EU for over a decade (Fabbrini, 2019; Schimmelfennig, 2024). Whilst presenting the main developments and dynamics that have characterised the EU during 2024, this editorial introduces additional topics and issues to be explored in detail in the next AR. The 2024-focused AR maintains almost unchanged the structure inaugurated in the previous issue. It opens with the keynote lecture by Malešević (2025), held by the author on 5 June 2025 at the London School of Economics and Political Science, which challenges the dominant view that Europe is unlikely to face renewed interstate war or resurgent nationalism. The author contends that such presentist interpretations overlook the longue durée dynamics of nationalism and organised violence. Drawing on comparative historical sociology, Malešević shows that nationalism and warfare remain deeply embedded in Europe's structural and societal conditions. His contribution convincingly situates the recent return of interstate conflict and the renewed salience of nationalism within broader historical continuities. This general overview provides the toile de fond for the more specific analyses of EU institutions (Part 1), EU policies (Part 2) and electoral developments in the member states and beyond (Part 3). The new ‘Quo Vadis Europa?’ section intermediates the transition to these parts, presenting some reflections on the New Intergovernmentalism (NI) understanding of the European integration process. Hodson and Puetter (2025) contend that 10 years on, NI's conceptualisation of post-Maastricht integration without supranationalism – the integration paradox – still resonates. They argue that, faced with crises, EU institutions have become more like a government but have continued to embrace integration without supranationalisation and full-scale parliamentarisation, with the heads of state or governments sitting in the European Council (EUCO) still dominating EU decision-making. By doing so, the EU has overcome policy challenges. Still, it has stored up even greater political problems, as shown by the further erosion of trust in the EU and governing elites, and the rise of challenger governments that openly defy the Union's policies and values (Hodson and Puetter, 2025). Based on the empirical analysis of the crises of the post-2009 period – sovereign debt crisis, pandemic crisis, energy and security crisis – the contribution by Fabbrini (2025) confirms the integration paradox since these crises, which called for finding common solutions, led to an increase in EU integration, but not to the EU supranationalisation. They were decided by national governments and led to policy solutions that strengthened intergovernmental governance, with negative implications regarding EU effectiveness and legitimacy (Fabbrini, 2025). Offering further theoretical refinement to NI, Genschel and Jachtenfuchs (2025) focus on the modes of integration – rule-making or capacity-building – and they claim that whilst integration by rule-making tends to be with supranationalism, integration by capacity-building tends to be without supranationalism because it raises problems for the member states of functional, distributive and political control that the constitutive attributes of integration without supranationalism (intergovernmental co-ordination, consensus and deliberation and de novo bodies) help to address (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs, 2025). This is extremely telling in the light of the recent call by experts (Draghi, 2024; Letta, 2024; Niinistö, 2024) for more EU capacity-building in defence, research, industrial policy and infrastructure to stand in the current challenging geopolitical and geoeconomic environment (see the ‘Critical Debate’ section of this AR). As another small innovation, this year, Part 1 on EU institutions includes a renamed ‘Critical Debate’ section, in which different authors draw on the Draghi and Letta Reports as both texts and pretexts for a more fine-tuned reflection on EU strategies in times of uncertainty, shaped by domestic political developments and international realignments. Whereas the previous AR featured a dynamic dialogue with the author of an important book, this year's debate is structured around four distinct analytical perspectives, offering a nuanced understanding of the challenges, opportunities and principal obstacles shaping the EU agenda. Finally, as in the past year, the Chronology compiled by Pareschi (2025b) provides readers with a precise, subtle and succinct overview of the year's most significant events classified according to the levels – international, EU and member states – at which they occurred. This edition of the AR achieves an almost perfect gender balance. Both senior and junior scholars were involved in enhancing international academic co-operation on joint research topics. We also strived to broaden the global outreach of AR by attracting authors from around the world and enhancing AR's elements of multi-disciplinarity, a task we will further pursue in the future edition. The geopolitical context in which the EU has operated between 2024 and the first half of 2025 has been mainly characterised by divergences with the new US administration, the continuation of the Russian war in Ukraine and the Israeli war in Gaza. All these developments have made it more challenging for the EU to maintain or reach a consensus among its member states on the Union's external role, hence constraining its ability to act as a credible and autonomous global actor. We argue that President Donald Trump's return to the White House (see Ahmed, 2025) in January 2025 has had crucial interlinked effects on the EU. First, it has challenged not only the main pillars of the Transatlantic relationship, with significant consequences on EU policies, defence, the relationship with NATO and trade but also introduced a different understanding of the shared values on which it has been historically based, with the risk of growing fragmentation among EU member states (Samson, 2025). At the 2025 Munich Security Conference, US officials' concerns about democratic backsliding in parts of the EU, citing threats to judicial independence and media pluralism, revealed policy divergences and more profound questions about shared political values. Second, with President Trump's retreat from the United States's long history of investing in securing European peace and the alignment with a foreign-policy paradigm that focuses on American interests first (Schmitt, 2025), there is, for the first time, a crucial opportunity for the EU to advance towards achieving its long-standing, if often rhetorical, goal of strategic autonomy. This new context, in which the US support could no longer be taken for granted, drove an additional sense of urgency in EU defence, favouring critical developments at the EU and NATO levels (see Howorth, 2025). First, at the EU level, even though defence has been at the top of the EU agenda since the March 2022 Versailles Declaration, events and decisions have significantly accelerated. The President of the EUCO, Antonio Costa, convened the Heads of State and Government (HOSGs) on 3 February 2025, for an informal EU leaders' retreat devoted, for the first time, exclusively to defence1 (EuroComment, 2025a/1-post, p. 1, see also Costa, 2025). One month later, in the framework of the special EUCO of 6 March 2025, the HOSGs stressed ‘that Europe must become … more responsible for its own defence and better equipped to act and deal autonomously with immediate and future challenges’ (EUCO, 2025a). They also endorsed the so-called ‘ReArm Europe’ plan, introduced by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen 2 days before, to mobilise €800bn in new defence spending by 2030 through different tools (von der Leyen, 2025). Finally, on 19 March 2025, the Commission and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (HR) Kaja Kallas presented the White Paper on the Future of European Defence-Readiness 2030, providing the conceptual framework for the ReArm Europe plan (Commission and HR, 2025). Second, in the latest NATO summit in June 2025, in The Hague, President Trump's weak commitment to Article 5 and the possibility of a partial withdrawal of US forces from Europe has led the 32 NATO members, of which 23 are also EU members,2 to pledge to spend 5%3 of their GDP on defence by 2035 and provide ‘annual plans showing a credible, incremental path’ to do so (NATO, 2025). Overall, these developments have led European countries to a historical shift towards a massive increase in spending to defend their territory, which might lead ‘Venus’ to start her metamorphosis into ‘Mars’ (EuroComment, 2025c/4-post, p. 6). However, whilst Europe's leaders have reached this new consensus on a generational shift in European rearmament, they and EU institutions must explain and convince EU citizens that this paradigmatic change in defence expenditure is worthwhile. On trade, the divergence between President Trump and the EU reflects a deep ideological rift: whereas the EU has long positioned itself as a champion of global trade liberalisation, promoting multilateralism and open markets, President Trump has redefined the Republican Party's stance on trade by anchoring it in economic nationalism and protectionism4 (Mutz, 2017). His unilateral imposition, since 2025, of on and and a of an on EU led the Commission into of during which it had to a complex towards to open 2025). On 2025, in a in President Trump and President von der Leyen reached a political on and trade according to which most EU to the US face a which the President Trump had to on the from 1 2025. 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All in the of the EU is reshaping its policy institutional legitimacy and normative The rise of structural challenges to democratic governance, even as new of integration and continue to The EU's ability to and commitment to its core values will on its to these whilst democratic from The in this AR and the EU at a critical shaped by intensifying geopolitical and Across member political parties and EU for the Union's on national integration, or geopolitical and over the EU's strategic and normative by and national control and challenging and a and the United through renewed commitment to without institutional The EU to a geopolitical at the institutional level, integration in defence, security and economic policy whilst promoting core democratic values the between and and and strategic The EU's trajectory will on its to these political and its in a and global such the Union from a of towards a of and, more towards in to of countries and its and external the strategic interests of the Union and 2025). Whilst some member states for strategic and integration, what they as institutional further this through and 2025). At is not the EU's policy but the of the Union over policy and broader over European and common values. The challenges to the Union's values are by the rise of leaders member states and international a shared and renewed political the EU from to a and its and external (Fabbrini, 2024).