We discuss the geoeconomics of the Single Market in financial services in the European Union (EU). We examine three case studies that concern the EU and other major jurisdictions and that range from incipient geoeconomic use to outward weaponisation of the Single Market in finance. These cases are (1) the post-2008 crisis transatlantic tug of war, whereby the EU leveraged its Single Market vis-à-vis the United States, seeking to set the rules for global finance; (2) the Brexit negotiations, when the EU acted as a bloc against the United Kingdom and successfully safeguarded the integrity of the Single Market; and (3) the fulsome war in Ukraine, during which the EU ‘weaponised’ its Single Market through the adoption of financial sanctions against Russia. We argue that a combination of external and internal factors accounts for this pattern: the evolution of the international economic and political system, in particular, the increasing challenges to the liberal international order, and intra-EU developments, namely, the EU's ability to deploy its Single Market geoeconomically.
This article explores the struggle for ‘digital sovereignty’ in the European Union (EU). A seeming contradiction – the internet, after all, spans the globe – digital sovereignty is portrayed as the winning geoeconomic formula to keep the EU secure, competitive and democratic in the digital future. Approaching digital sovereignty as a discursive claim and analysing it through a case study of the European cloud project Gaia-X, we show that there is no singular understanding of digital sovereignty in the EU. Instead, we identify six different conceptions across the domains of security, economy and rights. This article outlines three scenarios for how the digital sovereignty agenda may develop and thus shape the EU's digital policy and its relations with the rest of the world: constitutional tolerance (where the conceptions co-exist), hegemony (where one conception dominates) or collapse (where the agenda falls apart due to inbuilt conceptual contradictions).
The European Union's (EU's) ‘geoeconomic turn’ denotes the growing integration of international security considerations into EU economic policies. This article introduces the concept of ‘geoeconomic power Europe’ to show how this development has the potential to renew debates on the nature of EU power. Most existing conceptualisations of EU power – whether characterised as civilian, normative, market based, regulatory or liberal – tend to focus on the EU's endogenous characteristics. However, the added value of the concept of geoeconomic power is that it redirects attention to the ‘co-constitution’ loop between global power competition and the evolution of EU power. In this article, I present an analytical framework that highlights the drivers of EU geoeconomic power and distinguishes between systemic pressures, the intra-EU policy process and the impact on EU power. I conclude that the concept of geoeconomic power Europe can help to bridge theories of international security and economic interdependence, particularly neorealism and neofunctionalism.