ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I have addressed aspects of the discursive construction of European integration and the EU’s identity and role in the world. In this chapter, I argue that these discourses, and more generally EU (international) agency, are inherently spatial. I situate European geopolitical discourse in wider debates on the spatiality of the political and the political nature of space, arguing that space is always socially produced and politically instrumentalised. Academic work in geography’s subdisciplines of political geography and geopolitics has always centrally focused on the relations between space and the exercise of political power. Also critical geopolitics takes an interest in these relations, focusing on their social construction. Simultaneously, through its geographic interest in space, critical geopolitics was also part of a wider spatial turn in the social sciences and thus brought attention to spatial configurations to political science and international relations. Concerned with political spaces and the spatiality of the (geo)political, geographers (and others) have long explored the reciprocal influence between spatial configurations and political power (Harvey 1969, 1973; Lefebvre 1974; Raffestin 1977; see also Dell’Agnese 2008). Critical geopolitics was thus a decisive factor in bringing together the approaches of thinking (geo) politics both discursively and spatially.
