ABSTRACT
The geopolitical imagination of the EU as a ‘better’ global actor has long been put forward in its lead discourses (see Chapter 2) and, to some extent, also in expectations on its role as a geopolitical actor (see Chapter 7). In these debates and expectations, the alleged superiority of the European model results from a supposedly more civilian or normative orientation to international politics as opposed to military power, and the history of (West)European recovery after the World Wars during the second half of the twentieth century. This recovery has gone hand in hand with the process of regional integration, first in Western Europe and after the end of the Cold War also in Eastern Europe; and thereby with the creation of a complex system of regulated spaces of interaction (see Chapter 3). In many ways, the regional integration processes are thereby credited – whether justified or not – with delivering peace and relative prosperity to a continent historically prone to internal war. For Europeans, the regional integration process, fed by civilian and normative power ideas, thus appeared indeed often as a ‘better’ geopolitical model.
