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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been promoting the concept of a "geopolitical Commission" since her appointment in late 2019. Since then, successive crises--the Covid-19 pandemic, the ever-worsening climate crisis, and the war in Ukraine--have tested the Commission's intention to turn the concept into practice. This is particularly evident in the field of energy politics following Russia's attack on Ukraine. When the war started, Russia was the EU's largest energy supplier. The EU's desire to end its energy dependency on Russia called for "geopolitical actorness," notably swift political and diplomatic initiatives to find alternative suppliers considering the rapidly changing geopolitical circumstances. To what extent and how did this occur? Did the Commission achieve its goal of becoming a geopolitical actor in the field of energy politics? What does geopolitical actorness imply for the EU's energy policy and low-carbon transition? The article addresses these questions through an analysis of policy documents published by the von der Leyen Commission between 2019-2023, including the communications on the European Green Deal and Critical Raw Materials Resilience, the EU Hydrogen Strategy, the Global Gateway, the REPowerEU Plan, the External Energy Strategy, the Solar Energy Strategy, and the Green Deal Industrial Plan. The article argues that EU policy priorities progressively shifted from a focus on broad multilateral cooperation and open strategic autonomy to more narrowly defined strategic partnerships with "like-minded" Western and neighbouring countries. The 2022 war in Ukraine was a strong catalyst for this shift. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) has been facing an energy crisis since the autumn of 2021, which has been exacerbated by Russia's attack on Ukraine, geopolitical tensions, and the climate crisis. The war in Ukraine has changed European perceptions of energy trade with Moscow. In May 2022, the EU announced the REPowerEU plan, which aims at reducing imports of Russian energy by diversifying trade partners, increasing energy efficiency, and accelerating the energy transition. This article analyses the main developments in EU climate and energy policy since 2021, with a focus on the REPowerEU plan. The main elements of the plan are investigated, including a preliminary assessment. The article argues that the war in Ukraine has led to an acceleration of policies to implement the energy transition in the EU. However, numerous challenges and contradictions exist, such as the EU's quest of new and more polluting fossil fuel supplies in the short-run, which could lead to new forms of carbon lock-in. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2014 and 2021, the EU's relationship with Russia oscillated between the ever more elusive quest for a mutually acceptable geopolitical balance and increasing conflict. The conflict focused primarily on the future of Ukraine. Three new books analyse essential parts of this conundrum: the changing nature of the EU's power in the context of the Ukraine conflict, the long-standing EU-Russia business and energy relationship, and the self-image and external perceptions of EU foreign policy towards Ukraine. While written before the 2022 war, the books remain highly relevant because they dissect an ongoing process of changing EU actorness in its Eastern neighbourhood. In order to analyse the path to the 2022 war and its aftermath, future research must expand on this scholarship by enlarging the spectrum of theoretical approaches while navigating the new constraints that the war and the ensuing tense policy debates have put on empirical work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the creation of the EU, there have been instances in which a restricted number of member states has handled an issue of international security on behalf of the Union. This article argues that, while controversial, these 'lead groups' have been a valuable practice. They have been effective in generating intra-EU consensus on specific issues and spurring the EU into action, thereby enabling a European response in the context of conflict management and complex international negotiations. Lead groups are sub-optimal arrangements compensating for the in-built institutional shortcomings of unanimity-based decision-making in EU foreign policy. As such, they do not bring integration further. They have nonetheless shown significant potential in giving initiative and content to EU foreign policy. This is shown through the analysis of two case studies, the Anglo-Franco-German trio involved in Iran's nuclear issue and the Franco-German duo brokering a truce between Russia and Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Europe, commemorations of the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War have reiterated the existence of different national narratives of the historical event. These narratives can be grouped into four distinct memory discourses. Each discourse is dominant in a particular European country or region: Russia, post-communist East-Central Europe, Germany and the Western European countries that fought against the Third Reich. On 8–9 May 2015, the four narratives found expression in distinct European commemorative locations: Moscow, Gdansk, Berlin and London/Paris. The paper argues that, while the four narratives have existed for several decades, the Russian narrative has recently been reformulated with a more nationalistic rhetoric and used as a conceptual framework to explain and interpret the crisis in Ukraine. Simultaneously, East-Central European narratives have been radicalised too, while nationalist discourses and highly controversial historical figures have been subsumed in a new post-Maidan official narrative in Ukraine. This further politicised the memory of the Second World War, leading to dissonance between the Russian and the German and Western European narratives and, most notably, to a radical discursive clash between the Russian and the East-Central European memory discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]