Anthropocene Geopolitics and Foreign Policy: Exploring the Link in the EU Case

Abstract

Scholarly literature has recently developed the notions of Anthropocene geopolitics and planetary security. How these relate to and whether they inform states’ foreign policy, however, remains a largely underdeveloped issue. This article goes some way toward addressing this gap both theoretically and empirically. Theoretically, it unpacks how traditional and Anthropocene geopolitics diverge in their approach toward the security repercussions of climate change and teases out the emanating foreign policy implications. These revolve around different levels of climate ambition, divergent approaches to fossil energy geopolitics, and differing weighting of planetary security versus mainstream geopolitical threats. Against this theoretical background, this article empirically zooms in on the EU case to explore which geopolitical mindset guides EU’s pursuit of climate change concerns and their incorporation in the EU foreign policy design. The analysis finds that, despite its comprehensive foreign climate policy initiatives, the EU remains fixed to a traditional geopolitical mindset and a foreign policy that underappreciates planetary security threats. This article subsequently operationalizes a foreign policy design informed by the Anthropocene geopolitics approach and sketches what it would entail.

The Climate Crisis, Renewable Energy, and the Changing Landscape of Global Energy Politics

“…Michael Albert  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8334-9544 Note 1. Filippos Proedrou's work on "Anthropocene Geopolitics" provides a useful complement to this agenda, which explores the potential for more radical foreign policy strategies in the EU and elsewhere that would be compatible with the 1.5°C target (Proedrou, 2020). But it is more a form of "climate political realism" that foregrounds initiatives among powerful actors, rather than a critical emancipatory approach that centers struggles for climate justice from below.…”

“…However, in the past couple of years, an increasing number of scholars have turned their attention to the Renewable Energy (RE) transition and the question of how it will transform international relations (Van de Graaf & Sovacool, 2020;Hafner & Tagliapietra, 2020;Yergin, 2020). While a rich literature on global climate politics exists, it focuses primarily on issues like multilateral climate governance, the political economy of carbon markets, the climate-conflict nexus, migration politics, and reworking the ontological horizons of IR (Burke et al, 2016;Dalby, 2018;Lakitsch, 2021;Newell & Paterson, 2010;Nicholson & Jinnah, 2016;Proedrou, 2020). Yet the RE transition itself raises a different set of questions about the future of world politics that have only begun to be systematically investigated by scholars in the field of IR and beyond.…”