A geopolitical enlargement in a contested context

border dynamics in the European Union’s repositioning towards the East

Abstract

This article analyses the current enlargement of the European Union to the East, looking at border dynamics, and how their construction and deconstruction contributes to collective imaginaries of security and insecurity in a new geopolitical framework. The article argues the current enlargement brings processes of borderisation, with material and symbolic aspects fundamental to the Union’s credibility. The geopolitical change that the war in Ukraine implies led to a readjustment of European Union policies also in a geopolitical sense, with the European Union presenting itself as a locus of resistance in the face of the ‘violent-other’, in a double dynamic of containing violence and the fundamental violation of the border regime in Europe by Russia, as well as re-reading its past as the significant 'other', materialised in the world wars, where it does not want to return.