Assessing external pressures: European integration in the geopolitical age

The relations and interactions of the European Union (EU) with its outside world have been a recurring feature of scholarly and public debate. This is even more pertinent in today’s geopolitical age which is marked by multiple economic, political, social and cultural fissures. Adopting an ‘inside-out’ lens, most studies look at how the EU projects its power abroad. By contrast, this special issue takes an explicit ‘outside-in’ perspective, assessing how EU-internal policymaking and the Union’s institutional development are affected and shaped by external actors and pressures. This introduction explains and contextualises our outside-in perspective, both conceptually and theoretically, by developing specific expectations and mechanisms for externally driven European integration. The individual articles of the special issue put this framework to test, analysing different external pressures and their distinct but varying impact on the EU. The internal development of the EU, we claim, is systematically influenced by constellations of external interdependence and external politicisation. The introduction concludes by summarising and categorising the main findings from the individual contributions and by suggesting avenues for future research.