Abstract
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 posed a significant challenge to European foreign policy. The war forced the EU to react and resulted according to some in a geopolitical shift in EU foreign policy. Several institutions and high-ranking officials, including the President of the European Commission and the High Representative for Foreign Policy, argued that the EU should become a geopolitical actor that knows how to execute hard power. This paper explores one element of the supposed geopolitical turn in EU foreign policy. It analyzes the EU’s signaling (strategic communication) to Russia, the USA and NATO and aims to answer the question to what extent the signaling actually represents a geopolitical turn depending on the audience it is talking to.
Panel: European Transformations in the Organization of Security