What is a “geopolitical Commission”? The European Commission’s expanding role in international security affairs

This paper investigates the emergence of the European Commission (hereafter, the Commission) as a central actor in the European Union’s (EU) international security policy through the use of its traditional economic powers. International security has long been considered as “high politics” and, as such, falling within the remit of EU member states’ national policies and intergovernmental cooperation. Supranational institutions such as the Commission were thus granted only limited formal powers in this area. However, in a global context marked not only by renewed great-power competition but also by the increasingly intertwined relation between economic and security policies, many of the Commission’s traditional single-market-related policies, such as trade, investment, competition, technology or finance, are now becoming de facto more strategic and security-related, which has encouraged the Commission to assert its role as a “geopolitical” actor. This development could constitute a crucial evolution that has the potential to reshape the EU’s external action in the years to come. More specifically, I examine the origins, meaning and operationalisation of the concept of the “geopolitical Commission,” which President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen has promoted since 2019. Beyond the rhetoric, this principle has been used to designate the stronger coordination of the external aspects of the work of the Commission. It is also the symptom of a larger trend that predates the new college of commissioners, namely the growing role of strategic considerations in the Commission’s policy initiatives, in particular though the objective of strengthening the EU’s “strategic autonomy”. This paper relies on 12 confidential interviews with representatives of the Commission’s cabinets, Secretariat-General and services, as well as officials from the European External Action Service and member states’ diplomats.