ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the geopolitical imagination of the European Union (EU) and its impact on the enlargement policies. It examines the theoretical framework and analytical tools provided by critical geopolitics, which provide a useful approach for investigating the power of naming in the imagined geography of Europe. The geographical language used to portray the terrain of international conflict as requiring military intervention, after almost twenty years, critical geopolitics is still relevant to address culture that produces imperial attempts at domination in distant places. In order to explain the link between geopolitical imaginations and enlargement policies of the EU, it is first necessary to explore how geopolitical imaginations are formed. In order to understand how EU enlargement policies are made and justified, it is necessary first to understand how Europe is imagined or constructed through the discourses of the European political elites as well as the EU institutions.
