The European Union (EU) occupies a distinctive position in the contemporary global order. Although it lacks many of the conventional attributes of state power, its capacity to shape political agendas, norms, practices, identities, and spatial imaginaries extends well beyond its territorial borders. The concept of smart power offers a productive framework for understanding this multidimensional capacity, as it draws attention to the strategic combination of hard and soft forms of power. Yet, the EU’s power is not exercised only through institutional strategies, economic instruments, diplomacy, or regulatory influence. It is also produced, negotiated, and represented through space, place, culture, identity, and geographical imaginaries.
This panel explores the political and cultural geographies of EU smart power, asking how the European Union produces, projects, and spatially organizes its influence in an increasingly contested geopolitical environment. It approaches smart power not simply as a combination of policy instruments, but as a spatial and cultural process through which particular visions of Europe, its borders, its role in the world, and its relations with internal and external others are constructed.
The panel brings together perspectives from political geography, cultural geography, geopolitics, international relations, and European studies to examine the multiple geographies through which EU power is articulated. Contributions may address the spatiality of EU external action, border and migration policies, enlargement and neighbourhood relations, energy and digital infrastructures, European strategic autonomy, cultural diplomacy, public diplomacy, identity-building, cartographic representations, or the construction of European geopolitical imaginaries.
Particular attention is given to the question of how smart power can be mapped: geographically, institutionally, culturally, digitally, and symbolically. Who are the intended audiences of EU power? Through which spaces and networks does influence circulate? How are European values and identities translated into instruments of external influence? And where are the limits of EU smart power in a world increasingly characterized by geopolitical competition and contested meanings of Europe?