ABSTRACT

The political and academic discourses of the European Union (EU) can be understood as a form of an empire are, first, controversial and, second, encounter widely indignant disapproval by those who like the EU as well as by orthodox EU scholarship. This chapter adopts a historical-sociological approach and argues that West European societies have played a central, and exceptionally privileged, part in the history of global capitalism. It first presents the analytical tools of critical geopolitics to understand how geopolitical identities may eventually be translated into EU's enlargement policies, especially towards Central and Eastern European countries and Turkey. The chapter then continues to analyse the effect of these competing and/or converging geopolitical identifications on the formation of Europe's geopolitical discourses. It then examines how this imagination has been translated into policies of inclusion and exclusion within European Union enlargement schemes.