To address the deepening climate crisis, climate activism is employing a wider variety of tactics and aiming at a broader set of goals. In response, the movement faces stronger repression and civic backlash against climate action.

The EU has vowed to be more receptive of its partners’ needs and concerns. To ensure the “listening to others” mantra does not become a performative quick fix, the union must clarify how this commitment fits with its desire to exert geopolitical power.

The tussle between democracy and authoritarianism has drastically altered Europe’s geopolitical landscape

The EU’s fragmented approaches to the crises of climate change, conflict, and democracy fall short by not addressing the mutually reinforcing links between them. Brussels needs an integrated strategy to tackle the emerging three-way nexus and mitigate the vulnerabilities it creates.

In response to great-power rivalry and the weaponization of interdependence, the EU has adopted a geopolitical approach to economic statecraft. To build resilience and maintain its international credibility, the union will have to balance its pursuit of economic security with broader foreign policy goals.

A discussion of the defense of democracy in the EU in 2024.

The EU’s focus on security has caused it to shift from a proactive to a defensive democracy support strategy. As a new institutional cycle begins, the union risks downgrading its global democracy promotion efforts too much and relinquishing one of its distinctive geopolitical advantages.

If, for many years, the EU dangerously neglected the need for hard, defensive power it now risks moving to other extreme – giving hard power such pride of place that it detracts from the more consequential trends that will redefine the world order.

The 2020-2024 Action Plan on Human Rights and Democracy has been instrumental in advancing EU democracy support through a broad range of commitments. Yet, the rapid evolution of challenges to democracy has outpaced the Action Plan’s capacity to adapt. 

After more than a decade of democratic regression, three major crises have acted to reshape global politics in recent years: climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic and its economic legacy, and geopolitical conflict.