An Earthquake in the making? How Geopoliticization is shaking trade politics in the European Parliament

The Geopoliticization of trade has been defined as the growing embeddedness of foreign security in trade policy. This change in framing should result in two inter-related evolutions: first, there should be an increase in the overall salience of trade policy and second, most actors’ trade policy positions should change. However, the manner in which this affects the EP remains dubious for several reasons. First, what is considered a matter of national security would differ depending on the nationality of the MEPs. Second, Geopoliticization might simply be used to defend the EP political groups’ pre-existing trade policy. As such, this paper assesses the following research question: "How and why has the use of Geopoliticization changed the positioning of EP political groups on trade policy?". It argues that Geopoliticization results in the polarization of policy positions expressed by EP political groups on trade along the pro-anti EU axis. To understand the impact of Geopoliticization on EP parties’ positioning on trade, this article uses computational text analysis. This method allows for a large number of documents to be analysed, ranging from political manifestos to EP amendments. In this way, the paper aims to analyse the longitudinal shift in the framing of trade in the European Parliament to better understand to what extent it has become more geopoliticized and why.